Do You Want To Play? world première at FrightFest, 30th August 2026 It is 1970, and little Ward Weaver (Trent Longo) is playing a terrifying game of hide-and-seek with his hulking father John (Lorin McCraley). As John turns violent, Ward stabs his father with a kitchen knife, and then dying John is seen to exhale…
A Useful Ghost (Pee chai dai ka) at Queer East Festival, 20 May 2026 A Useful Ghost (Pee chai dai ka) opens with dust motes in the air, and then with a sequence showing costumed models (and a goat) lined up in a tableau vivant as a sculptor sketches them, and transforms their images into…
Ivan has its world première at Panic Fest, 11 April 2026 Ivan opens intrusively. For the first perspective it offers is overtly intradiegetic, as someone secretly films with a home camera from their parked vehicle as another car pulls in front of a suburban home, and its female passenger, after kissing the driver, heads inside…
Forastera had its Estonian première at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2025 The opening image in Lucía Aleñar Iglesias’ feature debut Forastera is a high-angle medium close-up of Cata (the astonishing Zoe Stein) lying on a beach towel, and the ghostly shadow of a hand appearing over her face. It is an estival idyll momentarily…
Devil’s Prism had its world première in Short Film Block #3 at Panic Fest, 29 March 2025 Recently laid-off, Zuri (Jasmine Akakpo) has been scouting a large residential home for days to ensure that its owner is absent, and tonight has now brought two friends there to enter with her, grab as many valuables as…
Ghost Killer has its UK première at the Glasgow Film Festival, 1 Mar 2025 Kensuke Sonomura’s Ghost Killer opens with Kudo (Masanori Mimoto) taking on barehanded three assassins who are armed with knives, and efficiently killing them all without himself getting so much as a scratch. This tough gangland hitman, a ‘dog’ used to doing…
The Exorcist: Believer first published by Little White Lies, 6 October 2023 “Sometimes, to go forward,” root doctor Beehibe (Okwul Okpokwasili) tells sceptical Victor Fielding in The Exorcist: Believer, “you have to go back.” This is also the guiding principle behind the film itself, which is both a 50th-anniversary sequel to William Friedkin’s peerless possession…
Solvent had its world première on 26th September at Slash Film Festival 2024 Solvent opens with a text quote from Norman Maclean’s autobiographical novella A River Runs Through It (1976) about eternal waters in the darkness, running “over rocks from the basement of time” and haunting the author. Indeed this is a film about water…
William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) may be set mostly in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., in the (political) heart of America, but it opens in northern Iraq, where the priest Lankester Merrin (Max von Sydow) sees the statue of an ancient demonic evil being unearthed. Some four decades later, Scott Derrickson’s Deliver Us From Evil (2014), though…
Shelter first published by Sight & Sound, June 2010 Review: “Isn’t it possible that what you’re looking at is what you’re actually seeing?” With this line, delivered by open-minded but faithless psychiatrist Dr Harding (Jeffrey DeMunn) to his more doctrinaire psychiatrist daughter Dr Cara Jessup (Julianne Moore), Shelter (aka 6 Souls) sets out its reflexive stall….
The Dead and the Deadly (Ren xia ren) first published by Little White Lies, as entry 164 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column Wu Ma’s The Dead and the Deadly (Ren xia ren) opens abruptly. Having witnessed a man stealing into a woman’s home not a day after her husband has died, Brother Chu (Sammo Kam-bo…