Category: Martyn Conterio
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Film Review: Sundown
★★★★☆ After the large-scale brutality of political horror film New Order, Mexican provocateur Michel Franco returns with a low-key study in deceptive behaviour and enigmatic motives. Tim Roth headlines as a man attempting to escape his past and present, while on holiday with loved ones at a resort in Acapulco.
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Film Review: The Sadness
★★★☆☆ The Sadness is a nasty and thoroughly unpleasant survival horror film set in the Taiwanese capital of Taipei, directed by Canadian first-timer Rob Jabbaz. Warning: this movie is not for the faint-hearted and requires a strong tolerance for depictions of brutality and sexual violence on screen.
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Film Review: Earwig
★★★★☆ Lucile Hadžihalilović doesn’t make many films, Earwig being her third in almost twenty years. Yet in just three works (her previous being 2004’s Innocence and 2015’s Evolution), she has established herself as a filmmaker of uncompromising vision, the weird stories she tells focused on childhood, with strong elements of body horror.
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#LFF 2021: Inexorable review
★★★★☆ Fabrice Du Welz’s sixth film Inexorable continues to explore his fascination with troubled souls. Here, it’s a young woman on a mission to destroy an author and his upper-class wife, for reasons which are kept tantalisingly opaque.
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#LFF 2021: The Medium review
★★★★☆ From celebrated South Korean filmmaker Na Hong-Jin, The Medium is an occult shocker set in an isolated village in northern Thailand. A tropical (and therefore suitably febrile) take on the demonic possession and found-footage sub-genres, its creepy theatrics build to a freaky climax.
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Film Review: Rose Plays Julie
★★★★★ In Rose Plays Julie, the latest from dynamic duo Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, a child of adoption studying veterinary medicine decides to seek out her biological mother and father. Her journey of discovery and resolution in holding her parents to account makes for haunting viewing. With their regular collaborator Aidan Gillen, Molloy and…
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Film Review: Prisoners of the Ghostland
★★★☆☆ Sion Sono’s debut film in the English language is an East-meets-West genre medley centred on the hero monomyth, and crucially the samurai movie’s influence on both the modern western and post-apocalyptic actioner. Meanwhile, Nicolas Cage gets to do his thing, and that’s always welcome. Prisoners of the Ghostland is an oddball movie that leaves…
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FrightFest 2021: Evie review
★★☆☆☆ Emmerdale actor Dominic Brunt moonlights as a horror filmmaker. Evie, his fourth time on bullhorn duties, co-directed with Jamie Lundy, is based on the Celtic and Norse myth of the selkie, a derivative of the better-known mermaid. For Brunt, Evie is both a step up and a step back. Its gloomy beach-set scenes are atmospheric and rugged.…
