The Bride!

The Bride!

Writer & Director ~ Maggie Gyllenhaal

2025, USA-France

Stars ~ Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Annette Bening

There are title cards and then further explanation via long opening monologue by Mary Shelly, explaining that her spirit has designs on reclaiming her seminal text for the ladies and weirdly indicative of the overkill to come. It's where an exclamation to the name and swearing on the poster is seen as anarchic. One could argue that as a portayal of reckless, irresponsible, egotistical masculinity, ‘Frankenstein’ already has a feminist core, but there’s always room for more elaboration. After all, James Wale’s ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ hardly features the epoymous muse at all, so Gyllenhall sets out to rectify that. It could be seen that Lanthimos’ ‘Poor Things’ did this in its way, with its its exploration of nature and nurture and Bella Baxter’s determination to discover for herself the outside and what she might be, but coming against patriarchal restrictions. Some felt Emma Stone’s performance overpraised and overacted, but it felt of a piece as a tribute to the herky-jerky Ella Lanchester’s 1935 Bride and the steampunky aesthetic. The cookieness never got in the way of agenda.

Jesse Buckly is a fine actor, but here she is simply dialled to Look At Me!! Ida is set as contrarian and incessant rather than nuanced, and she Never. Shuts. Up. Often, any point slips away because there’s no space to digest. My preference is for Annette Benning and Penélope Cruz, who both have more interesting, rounded characters with feminist points to be made. Frank’s design is good, less Del Toro Slabs-of-Meat and more Karloff-but-not-green, although his rendidition of the monster is more straight lost soul, less charismatic than the rest of the film: Ida is more an art project with a declarative design that moves into The Joker territory of mimicry and violent anarchy (expect splattered faces next Halloween). Ida is often simply annoying and conceited, giving away hiding places by launching into Kathreen Hepburn impersonations. As much irritating as defiant. If any part of her behaviour is down to brain damage from resurrection, this isn’t a plot point. The premise is that these two revenants are outsiders, scorned and unaccepted by society, but they spend a lot of time going to parties and bustling past audiences to their seats in the cinema and becoming anti-heroes.

It is 1930s Chicago but this is the kind of filmmaking where anachronisms don’t particularly matter, in the spirit of throwing jellybeans of pop culture in the air to see what lands. Fever Ray makes a nightclub appearance: doesn’t make any sense but at least she’s good. Then there’s even a dance number for ‘Putting on the Ritz’ which might make you slap your forehead – I mean: really? – before our couple go off to live out Bonnie and Clyde fantasies, by which genre-leap any message has long since lost to freebasing references. It’s a mess with a few hints of brilliance that never come to fruition. And then it ends with ‘The Monster Mash’, which seems to be a last-minute attempt to add “tackiness” to counter whatever was good and seriousness about whatever this was trying to be.

Die My Love

Die My Love

Director ~ Lynne Ramsay

Writers ~ Enda Walsh, Lynne Ramsay, Alice Birch

2025 ~ United Kingdom, Canada, United States

Stars ~ Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek

The title, packaging and trailer may mislead into expecting a noirish thriller, but it is not that. One of those films that equates mental illness with rebelliousness and romanticism. This means Jennifer Lawrence is always acting-up, crawling around on all fours like she’s auditioning for sexy ‘Cats’, or poking her tongue out at a mounted deer head and incapable of chewing gum or writing in a journal without it being in the most annoying manner. This is a character who can’t pass a piano alone without pressing a key, whose every social scene in public will be an embarrassment. It doesn’t help that a lot of the context is set at aggravating, to convey depression and assaulted senses, with a dog’s default as Constant Barking or Whining and the song choices leaning towards the twee, although the John Pine needledrop hits the mark.

Sissy Spacek serves as both unhinged by grief and then the sage of feminist empathy, although the inconsistency does fit with her belief that women experience phases of temporary madness. Pattinson must rage against the pretences, but he has no hope: the first images we see of the love of his life is her flopping to herself in an empty room and prowling with a knife on all fours from afar with passionate intent, so she is already coded as acting for herself. We don’t really get a sense of what’s at stake, just that she’s not right: we aren’t informed where we’ve come from and the temporal play doesn’t truly assist us with a starting point.

There is nothing to object to with Ramsay’s direction, dreamy and fragmented, slightly oblique, but it is arguably ill-fitting garb to the subject matter. Surely life experience relegates romanticising suffering to teenage inexperience. Reducing Jennifer Lawrence’s performance to constantly pointing to itself and mental illness to the vision of a forest fire offers no insight or help: we can fathom where this is going. These things are not romantic or poetic. 

FrightFest '24 ~ day 5

The Dead Thing

Director: Elric Kane.

With: Blu Hunt, Ben Smith-Petersen, John Karna, Katherine Hughes.

USA 2024. 94 mins.

 

It’s true that many didn’t think this gelled and just bored, but from the languid pace I found an interesting ghost story about the modern malaise of urban hook-up culture. Blu Hunt gives an assured turn as a woman who turns to fleeting sexual encounters to alleviate her dislocation and depression, leading to lust-motivated hauntings. Putting all-encompassing desire at the forefront of motivation gives this its quirk and the atmosphere is of a dreamy urban ambience.

 

 

A Desert

Director: Joshua Erkman.

With: David Yow. Kai Lennox, Sarah Lind, Zacary Ray Sherman.

USA 2024. 100 mins.

 

A solid, sunbaked thriller. A photographer goes on a road trip, bearing a mid-life crisis, and discovers – like so many horrors – that Some People Just Want To Fuck You Up. Even if that’s predictable, there are full-blooded performances, grittiness, beautiful cinematography, and enough inventiveness to make this memorable. A film that will surely earn itself cult status.

 

Ladybug

Director Tim Cruz.

With: Anthony Del Negro, Zachary Roozen, Scout Taylor-Compton, Charlene Tilton.

USA 2024. 107 mins.

 

Second supernatural lover of this Frightfest day. A lead character that does exposition for himself (“Home sweet home!”) and a narrative that takes a little too long to where it’s going, which is nothing objectionable but nothing original. Its best gag is the potential porn potential of the handyman. ‘Goosebumps’ for gay hipster art lovers.

 

Cold Wallet

Director: Cutter Hodierne.

With: Raul Castillo, Josh Brener, Melonie Diaz, Tony Cavalero.

USA 2024. 84 mins.

 

A zeitgeisty small time crime thriller. When their crypto-currency dreams die, a home invasion heist tale kicks in when three Redditors decide to force the CEO to reimburse everyone. Big house, sudden small-time crooks, manipulative CEO. It doesn’t necessarily say a much about people driven to desperate measures, but it does keep in mind the scheming that takes advantage of the needy and hopeful. A minor, unsurprising but solidly made thriller.

 

The Substance

Director: Coralie Fargeat.

With: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid, Hugo Diego Garcia.

USA/France/UK 2024. 140 mins.

 

Broad of satire, unconvincing of detail, full of glorious excess, ‘The Substance’ is an EC Comic horror full of crowd-pleasing absurdity – an extended ‘Creepshow’ tale. If I went in perhaps expecting Cronenberg-lite, in fact the callbacks were to ‘Society’, ‘Basket Case’ and even ‘TerrorVision’, the early films of Stuart Gordon; those grungy, silly, outrageousness, flabbergasting films that were the Eighties output of Empire Pictures and Troma. Surely Cannes can’t be as familiar of this output as the FrightFest audience and had never quite seen something like ‘The Substance’, therefore giving it awards.

 

Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley look gorgeous and give it their all, and there is much amusement in the battle between youth and aging here, even if it never addresses the subjects of narcissism. The film’s call for kindness to yourself across the ages is a sincerely felt one, although the audience was baying with laughter at the inter-generational fight made flesh. Also, despite how much the film insists, they never feel like the same person, as “one”. It is as brilliant as it is stupid. The opening vignette that establishes Elizabeth Sparkle’s (Moore) waning fame is excellent, the constant unsubtlety less so (we get it: Dennis Quaid is gross). Internal logic and answering questions are not really in its interest (how could “Sue” (Qualley) possibly function as a huge star on magazine covers without history? Does she get an audition, accepted and film a show in a week? She taps a hollow wall and finds an empty room behind? Wait, who is behind “The Substance”, what is their agenda and what do they gain?).

 

But the comic book look, the art design, the practical effects are where ‘The Substance’ excels, pushing itself right to the end into a “fuck it” splatterfest until using out-there gore to return us to the beginning with an astute ending whose unsubtlety works. The FrightFest audience rightly treated the whole thing as a comedy with a little grit, stupidity and feminine anger, and for that it is a giddy body horror that wins by taking the lead of the body horror that came before.

 

____

 

And so, another very enjoyable FrightFest is over. I stayed in the main scree where there was lots of head trauma, sex-obsessed ghosts,

 

Favourite picks:

 ·         Stange Darling

• Dead Mail

·         Invader

 

Although the narrative shuffling of ‘Strange Darling’ would usually put me off just as gimmick, the style, the flare, the flirting and interaction of the leads, and intense sound-design all made it a total winner for me.

 

I gave ‘Dead Mail’ a chief place for being a most authentic period piece, for making its excesses prosaic and steeped in the ordinary, for making ordinary working people of the post office pro-active detectives.

 

‘Invader’, because stripped-down brutality accentuating ordinary life is the true stuff of horror for me. And uncompromising home invasion hits a nerve.

 

But it is ‘The Last Ashes’ and ‘A Desert’ that stick in my mind notable as runner-uppers.

 

If ‘The Substance’ was the Frightfest winner, I sadly couldn’t fully invest because it cared not for any subtlety or layers, however much I enjoyed its flare and outrageousness (I had similar issues with Fargeat’s ‘Revenge’). Although I thought  Tsigaridis’‘Two Witches’ showed promise, his ‘Traumatika’ fulfilled none of it. ‘Survive’ seemed to be the one to laugh at (without malice) but enjoyed. And in the enjoyable stakes, ‘The Invisible Raptor’ was far more solid and consistently funny than expected, and I had been waiting a long time to see ‘The Last Trip of the Demeter’, and thoroughly pleasing if unremarkable it was too.

 

The Hitcher’ proved it has always been a winner, and the screening of its new print at FrightFest was a great way to introduce it to a new converts.

 

I heard good things about ‘Protein’, ‘Derelict’ and ‘Charlotte’, so I will be looking out for them.

 

I barely ate the last two days and survived on snacks. By Day 5, I am just a film watching machine and can’t believe it’s coming to an end. I made fine new FrightFest pals and caught up and bumped in old ones between films. Ian Rattray caught me leaving ‘Member’s Only’ early for the night train and stopped for a chat. The most annoying audience was the cast, crew and friends of ‘Members Only’ (what I saw of it) and ‘Traumatika’ that cheered, laughed and clapped frequently at everything; the latter group seemed to laughing be *at* their own film, which was confusing. Seeing ‘Bookworm’ and ‘The Substance’ with a receptive FrightFace audience was thoroughly the best way to see them.