ODYSSEY
Director: Gerard Johnson
Cast: Polly Maberly, Rebecca Calder, Tom Davis, Mikael Persbrandt, Peter Ferdinando
UK
If ever a film felt like a workday, this is it. Polly Maberly commits an excellent performance as an arrogant Estate Agent storming through her financial downfall and cognitive dissonance into dilemmas with the underworld, but belabours its point and takes too long. The filler is good but there are times when spotting locations for Londoners (Dublin Castle!) becomes the focus. It’s a fine character study of a reprehensible character and the unlikeable mob around her, until Mikael Persbrandt turns up to provide some gravelly control, but not much else is proven except the protagonist’s steamrolling ego until a crowd-pleaser massacre to finish up.
And the pentagram belongs to an0ther film.
MOTHER OF FLIES
Director: John Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser
Cast: John Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser, Lulu Adams
US, 2025
A young woman facing terminal cancer turns to folk horror for a cure. Or rather the film, being a horror, posits how close New Age healing is to witchcraft; and further to that, in the Q&A afterwards John Adams aligned magic to the science that treated his own and his wife’s cancer. Mostly, this is a triumph of fairy-tale visuals and atmosphere on a tiny budget. This is apparently the Adams’ family back yard. Houses made of trees (more than a treehouse), snakes and rocks imagery, a corpse reciting poetry… The dreamy aesthetic, judicious use of effects (helped some canny editing so that any weakness doesn’t register), a simple mission to outflank impending death and grief and a seamless blend of grunge rock and folk horror make this another fascinating minor gem from this filmmaking family.
BAMBOO REVENGE
Director: Edgar Marie
Cast: Audrey Pirault, Paul Deby, Constantin Vidal, Jimony Ekila.
France, 2025
Slick enough but confused revenge drama where the convolutions that allow for the title could surely have been resolved at the time (‘Moso’ on the title card). It never truly addresses the psychosis of revenge (see ‘Redux Redux’) and never truly comes to a tangible conclusion, just payback based on the wrong assumptions.
THE ROWS
Director: Seth Daly
Cast: Brindisi Dupree, Lara Pictet, Marcus Woods, Hans Heilmann
USA
With every moment belaboured to flatness, even with the score trying to insist on thrills sporadically. Beautifully shot with a deux ex dog and a Moon Man (?) to interject when things get impossible.
INFLUENCERS
Director: Kurtis David Harder
Cast: Cassandra Naud, Lisa Delamar, Georgina Campbell, Jonathan Whitesell, Veronica Long, Dylan Playfair.
USA, 2025
Polished sun-soaked sequel. “How did you get off the island?” is asked many, many times, to which the film answers, “Yeah, but we don’t care.” Rather, we get more shading to CW, who it seems has properly fallen in love, but she can’t give up her old ways and she has a boatload of psychotic past to cover up. With gorgeous locations – France; Thailand – cat-and-mouse games and a focus on social media and character manipulations, it all goes down smoothly. Cassandra Naud is great, Lisa Delamar beguiling, and a little moral murkiness is presented in an attempt for substance: Jonathan Whitesell is the influencer selling toxic masculinity but he doesn’t cheat and it seems like his girlfriend is actually the one in the driving seat. It romps home with a gleeful showdown that both does and doesn’t offer a conclusion, just leaves us with the excess of a serial killer slaughtering social media types that we don’t care for and irritate us anyway.
SUMMARY
The theme that struck me this year is that genre is really starting to get to grips with incorporating social media, AI, deep fakes and its manipulations, from ‘Cognaitive’ where it just wants to get online to save humanity from itself, to the deep fakes that spiral into blodbaths in ‘Approfraniacs’, to someone else taking over your public persona in ‘Influencers’. If horror is how we identify social fears, it’s getting scary out there, and it’s not the sentience of the digital world we should worry about but – as ever – the people using it.
My picks:
The ones where I really wasn’t expecting much but was pleasantly surprised were ‘Bone Lake’ and especially ‘Flush’. ‘A Serbian Documentary’ was excellent in its argument for a very difficult film, and there seemed to be many converts.
Approfreniacs
Flush
Crushed
Redux Redux
A Serbian Documentary
And for extra fun:
Bone Lake
Hold the Fort
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