psychodrama

Simon Ross’s capable debut can be hung in a gallery of films featuring unnerving paintings, from The Picture of Dorian Gray to Ghostbusters 2 and In the Mouth of Madness. Wife turned carer Sofia (Natalia Córdova-Buckley) stumbles across an uncanny canvas in the attic of the mansion to which she has brought her catatonic husband Alex (Ryan Kwanten); it is supposedly a self-portrait of his great-grandfather, but she is startled to find that it is a spitting image of Alex. While this gothic chestnut, and the psychodrama that…

Nathan Stewart-Jarrett and George MacKay bring alpha performances to this psychodrama of sexual danger from first-time feature directors Sam H Freeman and Ng Choon Ping, developed from an earlier award-winning short film. Jules, played by Stewart-Jarrett, is a drag artist with an enthusiastic club following and supportive flatmates: protective, plain-speaking Alicia (Asha Reid) and Toby (John McCrea), who has alcohol issues and is not-so-secretly messed up by his unrequited feelings for Jules.Preparing for a show one…

There are some intriguing ingredients in the mix for this weird, contrived supernatural psychodrama from French director Léa Mysius; some strong performances too, and a genuinely stunning final image. For good or ill, I can imagine M Night Shyamalan wanting to remake it for Hollywood. But somehow it doesn’t all come together, delivering neither the stab of actual fear nor the satisfaction of real, plausible psychological insight.The setting is Isère near the French Alps. The always excellent Adèle Exarchopoulos carries…

Film-maker Mark Jenkin originally intended to brand his superbly haunting follow-up to Bait (2019) as “a lost Cornish folk horror” film. He was persuaded to drop most of those descriptions: Enys Men isn’t lost (although it does feel like a recently unearthed magical relic from another era); it isn’t really horror (despite that ultra-creepy trailer); and the word “folk” is oddly misleading. That left “a Cornish film” – a simple phrase that perfectly encapsulates the myriad mysteries soaked into the dreamy, tactile…