Strawberry Mansion first published by SciFiNow As he stays in the home of elderly, eccentric ‘atmosphere creator’ Bella (Penny Fuller) to audit her dreams, Preble (Kentucker Audley) finds himself sharing a room with Bella’s pet Sugar Baby. This tiny tortoise spends most of his time in a pink-lit terrarium, eating strawberries. If the terrarium is…
The Harbinger first published by SciFiNow The Harbinger is a film of virus, infection and masks. It is set in the early wave of the pandemic when there was no vaccine and the Coronavirus was decimating New York City’s elderly and middle-aged populations. Monique ‘Mo’ Cartwright (Gabby Beans, excellent) and her brother Lyle (Myles Walker),…
Come True first published by VODzilla.co “So we really just show up and sleep?” asks Sarah (a dreamy performance from Julia Sarah Stone, Allure, 2017) in Come True, directed and co-written (with Daniel Weissenberger) by Anthony Scott Burns (Our House, 2018). Sarah has just signed up for a ‘sleep clinic’, where she will be paid…
Sleep (Schlaf) is at Fantasia “Don’t breathe, please,” says young adult Mona Engelhardt (Gro Swantje Kohlhof) to her single mother Marlene (Sandra Hüller, Toni Erdmann) at the beginning of Michael Venus’ feature debut Sleep (Schlaf), which he co-wrote with Thomas Friedrich. The reason for Mona’s plea is that they are playing Jenga together, and Mona…
The Slayer first published by Little White Lies, as the 39th instalment of my Cinema Psychotronicum column Although the hermetic, circular events of Alain Resnais’ Last Year In Marienbad (1961) took place in and around a baroque château lost in time, Adolfo Bioy Casares’ 1940 SF novel The Invention of Morel, which inspired Alain Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay…
Napping Princess first published by Sight & Sound, September 2017 Review: Somnolent final-year high schooler Kokone Morikawa (voiced by Mitsuki Takahata) leads a double life. In her waking hours she struggles to grasp an image of her mother Ikumi (who died in an accident when Kokone was a baby), to work out whether she should move…
First published by EyeforFilm “Once an idea has taken hold in the brain it is almost impossible to eradicate,” says Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio). He should know. After all, he is an ‘eradicator’ – an industrial spy whose work involves infiltrating people’s brains when they are in a vulnerable dream state and stealing their innermost…