Cerebrum had its world première in the First Blood strand at FrightFest 2022 Writer/director Sébastien Blanc’s feature debut Cerebrum opens with a quote from Goethe (“Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes”) and with a creepy dream sequence about the ties that bind. For young William Blackwell (Tobi…
“This had better be fucking good,” says police officer Catrin (Annes Elwy) at the beginning of Ryan Andrew Hooper’s feature debut The Toll, as she steps into the portable cabin where the Toll Booth Man (Michael Smiley) conducts his business. The latter – a dry, taciturn anonym – has been leading an equally anonymous life,…
In Fabric opens with a montage. After a pair of scissors is seen cutting open a cardboard box to reveal a red dress within, a succession of disparate stills plays over the credits. Department store interiors. A rope-bound hand in a bed. A face at a window. Women carrying a coffin indoors. The imprint of…
First published by Sight & Sound, May 2017 Review: “I don’t do forgiveness,” Sophia (Catherine Walker) insists to Solomon (Steve Oram), in writer/director Liam Gavin’s astonishing feature debut A Dark Song. Three years after her seven-year-old son Jack was murdered, Sophia, inconsolable with grief, anger and loss, hopes to fill the gaping hole in her…
Review first published (in a different form) by Sight and Sound Steve Oram is an actor best known for gadding about the periphery of genre, whether as the serial-killing caravanner Chris in Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers (2012) – which he co-wrote – or as the grizzled copper in Ivan Kavanagh’s meta-cinematic ghost story The Canal (2014). Now Aaaaaaaah!, his feature debut as…
First published in Sight & Sound, February 2016 Review: At the dawn of cinema, when it was not yet possible to record synchronised sound, characters articulated their thoughts and feelings in silence, merely through facial expression, physical gesture or intertitle. Steve Oram’s feature debut Aaaaaaaah! is not, strictly speaking, a silent film. Nor does it, like…