From its opening wide shot of the desert, writer/director Coralie Fargeat’s feature debut Revenge allows the ochre of the rocky landscape and the deep azure of the sky dominate. Orange-and-teal is the contrasting colour palette favoured by this millennium’s commercial film posters and even the films themselves – which is to say that Revenge appears…
Cold Hell first published by SciFiNow “Are you nuts? You’ve got lung cancer,” Özge Dogruol (Violetta Schurawlow) tells the elderly, coughing hospital patient who has just asked her for a cigarette “No, the cancer’s got me,” insists the old woman. “I doubt the bastard will outlive me. It’s all about how you look at it, you…
First published by EyeforFilm Our story starts in 1974, when film editor Meir Zarchi witnesses the aftermath of a brutal rape in a park and steps in to help the victim as best he can. Zarchi then decides to write a script as his artistic response to this horrifying experience and four years later, in…
First published by Little White Lies There are few horrors greater than the adolescent body, and so, since their invention in the sixties, teenagers have been a staple of the horror genre – and they rarely come more confused than Dawn (Jess Weixler). Even if she has pledged to retain her ‘purity’ till her wedding…
The Corpse of Anna Fritz first published (in a shorter version) by Sight & Sound as part of coverage of the Cult programme at the London Film Festival 2015 Like necrophiles, cinephiles dream that the object of their affection, though flat, cold and unresponsive, is somehow alive, and not merely a blank repository for their own projected…
American Mary first published by Little White Lies American Mary opens with fragmented images of a turkey. If this is a selfconscious expression of anxiety from writers/directors Jen and Sylvia Soska – whose amiably grindhouse-aping debut Dead Hooker In A Trunk might easily have been overlooked for plucking and stuffing – the twin sisters can put their worries to rest. For American Mary, though similarly transgressive in spirit, is miles ahead in…
Felt first published by Vérité “My life is a fuckin’ nightmare,” says Amy (the astonishing Amy Everson) in voice-over at the beginning of Jason Toad Road Banker’s Felt, as she sits at home, visibly upset, before donning a one-piece green lizard costume of her own making and venturing out into the street. “Every waking moment, every time I close my eyes,…
Julia first published by Grolsch FilmWorks “Like clockwork, Lady Snowblood,” says the Japanese bartender (Kumiko Konishi) to the quiet woman who has recently started frequenting her all-women’s drinking hole in New York’s Chinatown. “Born for revenge.” In a sense Julia Shames (Ashley C. Williams) – meek, shy, damaged – is nothing like Kaji Meiko’s vengeful…