THE DIVE
Director: Maximilian Erlenwein
Writer: Maximilian Erlenwein, Joachim Hedén
Cast: Sophie Lowe, Louisa Krause
Cert: 15
Running time: 91mins
Year: 2023
What’s the story: Sisters Drew (Lowe) and May (Krause) going scuba diving off a remote, deserted beach. When May is trapped deep underwater falling a rockslide, Drew must use her courage and ingenuity to rescue her before the air run outs.
What’s the verdict: A survival horror story that plays as an inverse of last year’s Fall (or like those myriad shark movies, minus the shark and with the sea itself the villain). Screenwriter Hedén co-adapts his 2020 film Breaking Surface, which he also directed, here handing the reins over to Maximilian Erlenwein.
Seemingly shot for real underwater, Hedén’s script piles obstacle upon obstacle on the slim shoulders of Lowe’s Drew as she battles to rescue the trapped May. Erlenwein’s taut direction knows when to move in for claustrophobic close-ups and when it go wide to convey the blackness of the ocean or the remoteness of the barren beach location.
Character backstory about past trauma bubbles beneath the surface, but The Dive works best a characters-under-pressure nailbiter. The film rolls a double six with Lowe and Krause, who deliver note perfect turns. Particularly Lowe, who runs a full gamut of emotion (and at one point runs a hell of a distance in one unbroken take). As she moves between panic, anger, frustration, and moments of desperate inspiration she holds both the screen and audience attention.
MONOLITH (2023)
Director: Matt Vesely
Writer: Lucy Campbell
Cast: Lily Sullivan
Cert: 15 (TBC)
Running time: 94mins
Year: 2023
What’s the story: A disgraced journalist (Sullivan) makes a living hosting “click-bait” podcast Beyond Believable. When she uncovers a worldwide phenomenon involving people receiving mysterious black bricks, she believes a sensational scoop has dropped into her lap.
What’s the verdict: Evil Dead Rise star Lily Sullivan proves more than capable of carrying a movie single-handedly in this quietly unsettling chiller. Billed as “The Interviewer” she is the unnamed host of a paranormal podcast, a last resort option after sloppy journalism saw her fired from a prestigious broadsheet, and the probably-guilty target of her investigation exonerated. Like Ethan Hawke in Sinister, she is looking for a way back to the big leagues, and think she has discovered it when a mysterious email leads her into an investigation of strange black bricks appearing in people’s possession the world over. When the podcast goes viral, theories abound as to the bricks’ origin, and also the dangers they pose. But, will The Interviewer heed the warnings as the peril looms closer?
As with Tom Hardy in Locke or Ryan Reynolds in Buried, Sullivan is provided plenty of voices with which to interact, but is left alone to fill the screen. Like those other two actors she clearly relishes the opportunity and delivers a superlative, nuanced performance. Initially personable and likeable, she shifts as Monolith reveals more about her character. A habit of re-editing interviews speaks to someone so sure of the truth she’ll make the evidence fit the narrative.
Writer Campbell and director Vesely use the current podcast boom as a metaphor for how urban myth can become reality. Through this technology unchecked stories are released into the wild like a virus, no matter the effect on objective truth, and ultimately reality.
Making The Interviewer’s gradual descent into paranoia even more stark is Vesely’s controlled style. Within the hard-angled glass prison of the large family home (mum and dad are away on vacay), Vesely’s detached camera glides through the corridors or cooly records the woman chasing her story. Soundwaves on her editing software themselves become strangely unsettling as the information unearthed grows more ominous. Like Bruce McDonald’s underrated, similarly-themed Pontypool, the cumulative effect of this is an unnerving atmosphere of panic as the film reaches a well-executed climax.
SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL
Director: Yuval Adler
Writer: Luke Paradise
Cast: Joel Kinnaman, Nicolas Cage
Cert: 15
Running time: 90mins
Year: 2023
What’s the story: At the hospital where his wife is giving birth, a man (Kinnaman) finds himself trapped in his car, held at gunpoint by a deranged looking maybe-hitman (Cage). Forced to drive to an unknown location, the man tries to discover what the gunman wants.
What’s the verdict: Like Monolith, here is another film with a limited cast and nameless characters. Although Kinnaman and Cage’s characters do have names, but whether they can be believed is debatable. A pick n’ mix of past movies including Cohen and Tate, A History of Violence, Locke, and Pulp Fiction, Sympathy for the Devil should be a chore. But, Luke Paradise’s script delivers plenty of quirky, meaty dialogue for the co-leads to chew on, and finds diverting ways to separate then reunite them over the course of one bad night.
Kinnaman is good as the bespectacled family man suddenly at the mercy of a particularly sulphurous villain. Not that the film is subtle about allusions, with Old Nic sporting a goatee and scarlet jacket, relishing the large flame from his lighter. Although he often lets himself off the leash as the vicious Passenger, Cage (who also acts as producer) creates one of his more interesting characters from Paradise’s script. His moments of exasperation, grief, and impotence are arresting amidst all the mayhem the film quickly creates.
Not a classic, but has potential for a cult following, if such things exist anymore. The closing moments strike an ambivalent tone and cast a different light on the film’s title.
CHEAT
Director: Kevin Ignatius, Nick Psinakis
Writer: Kevin Ignatius, Nick Psinakis
Cast: Corin Clay, Danielle Grotsky, Michael Thyer, Brady O’Donnell, April Clark
Cert: 15 (TBC)
Running time: 85mins
Year: 2023
What’s the story: Art student Maeve (Clay) moves to the small college town of Silvercreek, Pennsylvania. Maeve discovers Silvercreek has an unusually high suicide rate, something many locals believe is a town curse.
What’s the verdict: On the surface, Cheat seems another movie in the well-worn “curse” subgenre. An outsider, here Corin Clay’s Maeve, moves to a new town. She almost immediately stumbles into a recent tragic event, boarding for free in a home where the daughter previously killed herself. It seems Maeve has moved to the suicide capital of Pennsylvania, but she soon suspects something more mysterious and malevolent is at work.
Particularly when talking to the dead girl’s BFF Lydia (Grotsky) and local history nerd Ollie (O’Donnell), who fill her in on sightings of a young woman in white (Clark) prior to the seemingly self-inflicted deaths. Maeve, Lydia, Ollie, and the Maeve’s grieving landlord Charlie (Thyer) resolve to uncover the truth behind what is going on and free the town from its curse.
Cheat uses its limitations (a low-budget, stilted performances), plus the rural Pennsylvania setting, to create a vivid atmosphere of dread and melancholy. Where similar horror films settle for fright wigs and cheap jump scares, Ignatius and Psinakis’ movie patiently escalates suspense. So, when the shocks do arrive, they pack a wallop.
Even logic gaps in the script (character decisions can be baffling) and those off-kilter performances (including the Aussie Thyer’s incongruous accent) lend the film a dream-feel that works in its favour. One sex scene is so woozy, it is a surprise to discover not only did it happen, but the characters weren’t under any spell.
The explanation behind the rash of suicides more or less works, despite muddled handling of a twist revealing how the curse can be broken. Or a pre-credit sequence that removes any ambiguity about the ghostly goings-on. Cheat also cannot decide just how spectral or corporeal it needs its lead phantom to be, creating more logic holes. But it remains proof that horror films can work because of their limitations and shortcomings.
THE MOOR
Director: Chris Cronin
Writer: Paul Thomas
Cast: Sophia La Porta, David Edward-Robertson, Elizabeth Dormer-Philips, Mark Peachy, Bernard Hill
Cert: 15 (TBC)
Running time: 124mins
Year: 2023
What’s the story: Decades after her friend was abducted and murdered while with her, Claire (La Porta) remains racked with guilt. With the killer set for release, she is recruited by her friend’s dad Bill (Edward-Robertson) to find other bodies of missing children on the moors to keep the murderer behind bars.
What’s the verdict: Strong first feature from director Chris Cronin and writer Paul Thomas. Uniformly first-rate performances and a dank, creeping sense of evil mark the pair as filmmakers to watch. Set in West Yorkshire, The Moor takes care to create a believable community still traumatised by abductions in the mid-90s, personified by Edward Robertson’s shattered father. Taking to the treacherous peat moors to find undiscovered bodies, he becomes the bigger danger for those around him.
Opening as a sombre thriller, the film deftly shifts into supernatural territory when a desperate Bill calls on local “psychic dowser” Alex (Peachy) and Alex’s even more spiritually attuned daughter Eleanor (Dormer-Phillips) for help. From here Cronin and Thomas lead the film into folk horror territory, with the bleak landscapes, ominous standing stones, and psychic communion generating a dry-mouthed sense of dread.
The film arguably tips its hand with an epilogue that feels like a re-shot ending, delivering out-and-out horror rather than the hitherto atmosphere of uncanny. This aside, The Moor is an assured debut and a visually striking British chiller.
FAILURE!
Director: Alex Kahuam
Writer: Alex Kahuam
Cast: Ted Raimi, Noel Douglas Orput
Cert: 15 (TBC)
Running time: 87mins
Year: 2023
What’s the story: From his luxurious mansion, businessman James (Raimi) attempts to save his company, deal with his daughter’s upcoming wedding, and stay alive when various associates start showing up at his door.
What’s the verdict:We’ve now had a few films all done in one-take, with 2015’s Victoria still the most celebrated. Alex Kahuam’s Failure! is less ambitious in keeping the action locked down to a single location, but still impresses. Ted Raimi gives the performance of his career as the besuited businessman who over the course of an increasingly frantic 90-minutes discovers he will do anything to save his family’s company.
Inescapably resembling a play in plot, what makes this a good movie is the restless, prowling camerawork and Vincent Gillioz’s urgent score, both of which complement the tempo of the performances. Black comedy runs through the film like a main circuit, but Kahuam can turn the tone serious, and does so more as the film reaches its conclusion. Noel Dogulas Orput also delivers a memorable turn as a kind of Jiminy Cricket, who may be supernatural, an indication of James’ increasingly harassed mental state, or a projection of his guilt.
FARANG
Director: Xavier Gens
Writer: Stéphane Cabel, Xavier Gens, Guillaume Lemans
Cast: Nassim Lyes, Loryn Nounay, Olivier Gourmet
Cert: 15 (TBC)
Running time: 99mins
Year: 2023
What’s the story: Day-release prisoner Samir (Lyes) is forced to flee France for Thailand when thugs from his past reappear. Five years later he has built a dream life with his wife Mia (Nounay) and her daughter. But, when he is betrayed by ex-pat French crime boss Narong (Lemans), Samir vows vengeance.
What’s the verdict: Dreary seen-it-all-before revenge actioner, offering nothing but a reasonably well-paced 99-minutes. But they are 99 hollow minutes. Director Xavier Gens has past form with genre cinema. 2007’s Frontier(s) was a gripping, gruelling survival horror, and 2011’s The Divide an unusual, bleak apocalypse chamber piece. A recent stint on TV series Gangs of London proved he knows his way around a crunchy action sequence.
The problem with Farang (aka Mayhem!) is Gens goes for heartfelt, something beyond his filmmaking ken. The high emotional register is ersatz, relying on lazy plot beats including a kidnapped stepdaughter days away from life in a brothel. The smackdown mayhem promised in the trailer is largely relegated to the final 30-minutes. But other than a close-quarters elevator fight scene, there is nothing to get excited about. Shame, as the buff and charismatic Lyes clearly has the action chops for something wilder.
Stereotypes abound, with Thailand presented as a land of ladyboys, child prostitution, drug dealers, and corruption. Keeping the film in France would have provided opportunity to comment on French attitudes to immigration (Sam’s day-release job is working construction with refugees). Maybe Gens and his two co-writers just fancied a holiday.
IT LIVES INSIDE
Director: Bishal Dutta
Writers: Bishal Dutta, Ashish Mehta
Cast: Megan Suri, Neeru Bajwa, Mohana Krishnan
Cert: 15
Running time: 99mins
Year: 2023
What’s the story: Indian-American teenager Samidha (Suri) struggles with her heritage and the desire to fit in. But, a bigger problem arises after an argument with her former BF Tamira (Krishnan) unleashes a murderous demon that threatens them all.
What’s the verdict: Bishal Dutta’s feature debut may focus on the Indian-American experience, but its chills owe everything to J-Horror or standard US poltergeist fare. A shame, as you are left with the impression there is a more interesting, less familiar horror story to be had from this premise. The bottled demon that creates havoc when unleashed is a nice metaphor for teen angst, but little is done with that idea other than Suri’s fresh-faced complexion becoming sunken and sallow as the film goes on.
Better are the smaller moments of tension between Samidha and her traditional mother (Bajwa), frustrated at her daughter’s unreliability and flippancy. Enjoyable in an undemanding way, with Suri an impressive lead, and Bajwa and Krishnan strong support, plus Vik Sahay as Samidha’s kind-hearted dad. The demon is nicely realised as a practical suit effect reminiscent of Rawhead Rex.
THE KNOCKING
Director: Joonas Pajunen, Max Seeck
Writer: Joonas Pajunen, Max Seeck
Cast: Pekka Strang, Inka Kallén, Saana Koivisto
Cert: 15
Running time: 87mins
Year: 2022
What’s the story: Years after a tragic event that saw their father dead and mother missing, three siblings return to their childhood home in the woods to sort out the estate. But, as secrets are revealed, is something malevolent about to make itself known?
What’s the verdict: Familiar yet engrossing Finnish eco-horror movie, bolstered by strong performances from the three leads. Writer-director duo Joonas Pajunen and Max Seeck go for a cabin-in-the-woods setting (albeit this cabin is a ramshackle house, but just as uninviting). The folk horror scares of modern sensibilities clashing with ancient rituals is a genre cornerstone, with recent examples being Unearth and Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth.
Literally unearthed past trauma creating present-day terror is another familiar trope, with Mark Jenkins’ Enys Men treading similar turf this year.
But, Pekka Strang as authoritative elder brother Mikko, Inka Kallén as quietly broken middle sister Maria, and Saana Koivisto as wilful youngest sibling Matilda bind the movie. The script adroitly teases out secrets and recriminations more dramatic than the “there’s something in the trees” shocks. A convincing argument can be made that the family drama is strong enough to have not needed the more traditional horror trappings.
Although Matti Eerikäinen’s gorgeous cinematography lends the woodland location a misty, dank, fairy tale feel, and the closing moments are pleasantly fiendish.
Rob Daniel
Twitter: rob_a_Daniel
Letterboxd: RobDan
Podcast: The Movie Robcast
