Exhuma (Pamyo) first published by Sight and Sound, 18 March 2024 Exhuma (Pamyo, literally ‘digging’) opens on a plane travelling from Seoul to Los Angeles, signifying both the cross-cultural trip on which we are being taken, and perhaps the film’s status as writer/director Jang Jae-hyun’s ticket to Hollywood. Certainly Hollywood is a mecca for exorcism,…
Sleep (Jam) had its UK première at the Glasgow Film Festival Sleep (Jam) opens with snoring – a sound that signifies deep domestic dormancy, while also threatening to disrupt it. Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) awakens to find her husband Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun, in what would be his final film) not lying beside her in bed, but…
Zalava had its UK première at Glasgow Film Festival 2022 Taking place less than a year before Iran’s 1979 Revolution and named for a small village built into a steep mountainside in rural Kurdistan, Arsalan Amiri’s feature Zalava – which he co-wrote with Tahmineh Bahramalian and Ida Panahandeh – is a film of jars, of…
The Funeral Home (aka The Undertaker’s Home, aka La Funeraria) first published by Through the Trees At the heart of The Funeral Home (aka The Undertaker’s Home, aka La Funeraria) is a dysfunctional family. Bernardo (Luis Machín) runs an undertaking business from a building across the garden from his home, lives in the shadow of…
Luciferina first published by SciFiNow It begins – and ends – at the beginning. The latest film from writer/director Gonzalo Calzada, whose previous Resurrection (2015) has proven Argentina’s most watched horror, Luciferina opens with a CG representation of a spermatozoon fertilising an egg – and it (literally) climaxes with a ‘big bang’, and the cycle of…