Along Came a Spider...

The Best Film of the Year is about arachnids?

Usually when I’m doing festival newsletters, I attempt to cover the general mood (even from afar) and to highlight reviews of a bunch of movies. But I really want to give a shoutout to the French creature-feature Vermin (Sébastien Vanícek, 2023), which, unlike a lot of films at big European fests, is pure genre fun. Behind that fun, however, is a lot of smarts and social commentary, making it perhaps the film of the Macron Era. That’s all beside the point of course, which is the real use of spiders as well as their terrifying CGI counterparts, all told with Alien-like horror/thriller rigour. Check the review (and the rest from Venice (and one from TIFF)) below:

Vermin Has Spiders The Size of Buicks

I have no qualms with spiders. I’m rarely scared of them. Unlike other insects, most notably flies, they’re pretty happy to be taken outside with just one scoop of a glass and a piece of paper. I’ve never seen a spider and screamed. I’ve certainly never referred to one as the “size of a Buick.” 

But after watching Vermin (Sébastien Vanícek, 2023), I’ve changed my mind. One of the creepiest, crawliest, downright nastiest creature-features I’ve ever witnessed, Vermin has turned me into an avid hater of those abysmal arachnids.

It starts with a well-known truth: if a movie starts with men in the Saharan desert uncovering something mysterious in a big hole, you know it’s going to escape and cause some serious damage. One of these unpleasant arthropods is captured and ends up in the hands of Ali (Samir Nait) who, alongside his dodgy jewellery business, runs a dodgy sideline in exotic creatures. Calling himself the original Ali Express, he has no idea how lethal his latest acquisition is. So when the charming Kaleb (Théo Christine), offers to take it off his hands, he gives him the beastly spinner for a mere 20 euros.  

Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema.

National Anthem. The Land of The LGBT. (TIFF!)

The American West has laid host to the multifarious dreams and aspirations of the nation over and over again, its vast plains, deserts and vistas a great canvas to paint your future upon. This is especially true in the grand New Mexico countryside, where riding a horse, hitching a ride in the back of a pick-up truck or finding your next job while riding an RV truck, can be your ticket to new and exciting experiences. Shot through with a true love of Western myth-making while giving it a progressive edge, Luke Gilford’s feature debut National Anthem (2023) — adapted from his own photography monograph covering the USA’s queer rodeo scene — is a marvellous, highly empathetic work that feels both quintessentially American and deeply inclusive. 

Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!

Paradise is Burning. Exquisite Teenage Yearning.

Bianca Delbravo marks an impactful, powerful acting debut with her performance as 16-year-old Laura, a girl torn between childhood and adulthood, between carefree vibes and crushing responsibility, the impending weight of the future and the irresistible pull of the present. Embodying her character with warmth, humour and tragedy, and transmuting complex experiences from page to screen, the Scandi actress is likely to go far. 

The same can be said for newcomer Dilvin Assad, playing her playful, silly, 12-year-old sister Mira, jealous of Laura’s leadership role and looking to carve out her own unique experiences. Or first-timer Safira Mossberg, playing the seven-year-old Steffi; filled with curiosity but also vulnerability and confusion. The strength of casting pushes Mika Gustafson’s Swedish debut Paradise is Burning along nicely, forming a family unit you can’t help but fall in love with. 

Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!

For Night Will Come. The Vampire Genre (Partially) Undone.

It must be hard to be an ethical vampire. Driven by an insatiable need for blood, you have to find an acceptable source, all the while avoiding the wary eye of judgemental neighbours. It’s probably easier to be a psychopath instead; ravishing, killing and feasting at will. As long as you know where to hide the bodies.  

But look, the aptly-named Feral family — recently relocated to a sleepy town in rural France — are trying. The matriarch, Laurence (Élodie Bouchez), is smart: she has a job as a nurse at a blood donation bank. In an early, exciting scene, reminiscent of a heist movie, she outlines her complex plan to declare certain donations invalid, before secretly hiding the blood pouches in her purse. Caught with elegant, flowing camera moves, it establishes For Night Will Come (Céline Rouzet, 2023) as a thinking man’s vampire film. At least for the first two-thirds…

Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!

The Dreamer. Bittersweet Truth Through Sculpture.

A long-lost French twin to John C. Reilly, Raphaël (Raphaël Thiéry) is certainly not a conventionally attractive man. He is overweight, his face is lined with crags and nooks and he only has one eye. Living alone with his mother Lucienne (Mireille Pitot) in an almost abandoned Italianate mansion, with high arches, endless rooms and a huge courtyard, the 58-year-old spices up his job as a caretaker by blowing up moles, playing the bagpipes and carrying on a loveless affair with his local postwoman (Marie-Christine Orry).

One gets the sense that there isn’t much more to Raphaël’s life than this. Certainly not any genuine romance. I have to admit that I was worried in the first act that I was merely watching a collection of quirks as opposed to a genuinely fleshed-out vision. I shouldn’t have worried. In the tender, slow, yet purposeful atmosphere created in Anaïs Tellenne’s excellent debut The Dreamer (2023), ideals, art and self-expression can be formed out of almost nothing. 

Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!

Behind The Mountains. Dull Magic Thriller-isms

A hodgepodge of home invasion tropes, a father-son bonding tale and an odd exploration of fantasy in an otherwise realistic world, Behind The Mountains’ (Mohamed Ben Attia, 2023) execution rarely meets its ambition. Telling the type of outcast story that begs for heart-rending, edge-of-year seat construction, its elevated thriller aesthetic rarely gripped or moved me. 

Attia shrouds his hero in mystery. Rafik (Majd Mastoura) is an otherwise normal-seeming man who, one day, simply loses it; destroying his workplace in a spasm of sudden, violent rage. We never learn the reason for his anger, but it already establishes him as an outsider in mainstream Tunisian society. After four years of prison, he is keen to reconnect with his son Yassine (Walid Bouchhioua), even though he seems unfit for fatherhood. In powerful, uncomfortable scenes, he effectively kidnaps and takes him to the mountains. He has to show him something. 

He can fly. 

Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!

The Outpost. A Frustrating Study in Folly.

The Amazon rainforest has a way of making fools out of explorers, whether it’s the heroes of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: Wrath of God (1972) or Fitzcarraldo (1982) or, of course, Herzog himself. The vastness of the landscape, its difficult landscape and people’s natural predilection for destruction and corruption can swallow its explorers whole, making a mockery of their dreams and ambitions. 

Yet, as The Outpost (Edoardo Morabito, 2023) shows, this isn’t the whole picture, with eco-warrior Scotsman Christopher Clark staking his claim as a somewhat successful visitor to the Amazon. He lives in Xixuaú, one of the most pristine and untouched areas in the region, where he helped grow the local economy by promoting sustainable tourism initiatives. Nonetheless, the region is still under the threat of deforestation — especially thanks to then-president Jair Bolsonaro — leading to Clark rallying for its designation as a protected nature reserve. He has a crazy plan to make it happen: organising a Pink Floyd concert right in his new hometown. 

What a cool idea for a film. Right? 

Read spoilers over at Journey Into Cinema!