NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM 2025 #2: Reviews of Borley Rectory: The Awakening (UK 2025), Rumpelstiltskin (UK 2025), Manor of Darkness (UK 2025), Snake Creek (UK 2025), Boarhog (UK 2025) and Mundane (UK 2020)

Borley Rectory: The Awakening (UK 2025: Dir Steven M. Smith) This is Smith's third film based around events at Borley Rectory, reputedly 'the most haunted house in England'. His first, 2019's The Haunting of Borley Rectory, was set in 1944 and his second, The Ghosts of Borley Rectory filmed two years later, located the action in 1937.

For his third Borley opus Smith goes back further; initially to 1888 and then, for the majority of the movie, 12 years later. For this is a prequel to the oft told Rectory story of the nun's ghost, which so interested ghost hunter Harry Price when he investigated the haunting many years later.

The Rev Harry Bull (Julian Glover, yes that Julian Glover) lies dying in Borley Rectory. While he reassures his family that there are no ghosts at the Rectory he gifts his son Henry (Corneille Dion Williams) a box which will, he confides mysteriously, keep the family safe.

Twelve years later Henry is now rector, residing at Borley with his mother Constance (Patsy Kensit, yes that...ok I'll stop doing that now) and his four sisters. Constance is stricken with visions of a nun being attacked by a priest and takes to her bed, where she's attended by a nurse (former alt comedian Helen Lederer) and is visited by the ghost of her mother (Vicki 'Allo'Allo, Virgin Witch Michelle). Uncle Somerset (Smith regular Mark Wingett) arrives to provide support; a concerned Henry, fearing supernatural shenanigans and rapidly questioning his faith, summons the Reverend Shaw (Simon Philips) for a second opinion and a solution to the haunting.

BR: TA is co-produced by genre stalwart Louisa Warren, and it's possible that her presence has tempered some of Smith's rough round the edges approach to filmmaking; some care has been expended on this one, including an impressive location (Ingatestone Hall in Essex), a very The Woman in Black feel (all period costumes and candlelight) and some good performances. There are even some impressive jump scares although the spooks are perhaps a little more regularly visible that I'd have liked. I've not been a fan of most of Smith's previous movies, but BR: TA is classy and occasionally scary.

A version of this review was first published on the Bloody Flicks site.

Rumpelstiltskin (UK 2025: Dir Andy Edwards) Edwards is yet another UK contributor to the Twisted Child Universe (TCU) which has, in recent years, seen a plethora of to be honest rather average movies providing a horror twist on popular children's stories.

As one of those stories 'Rumpelstiltskin' is a shoo in for a horror film director; the original story by The Brothers Grimm is already pretty grotesque, and I can do no better than borrow the (AI generated) IMDb plot description to sum it up: "Miller lies about daughter's gold-spinning ability. Imp helps her impress King. She promises imp her future child for continued aid. When payment comes due, imp strikes deal with devil."

Edwards's movie is for the most part a reasonably faithful adaptation of the story with a number of more contemporary adornments. The tale's miller (Mark Cook) peddles his wayward daughter Evalina (Hannah Baxter-Eve) to the nasty king (Colin Malone), a chap prone to mounting the heads of his ex wives on poles. The miller's boast that his daughter can spin gold from straw ("I don't even know how to fucking spin", she concludes once isolated in the tower) comes to pass courtesy of an imp (Joss Carter) who pays her a visit and grants her wish in return for a kiss and, later, a gawk at her naked body.

Evalina's success at straw to gold wins her the hand of the king and, as queen, she gives birth; sadly she's promised her first born to Rumpelstiltskin as her side of the bargain, although had hoped to avoid pregnancy by consuming nettle tea. The imp's request for the infant can be voided if Evalina successfully guesses his name.

Edwards cloaks (pun intended) this low budget but modestly sumptuous yarn in various Game of Thrones stylings, with some dynastic squabbling and Rumpelstiltskin (whose makeup suggests an homage to the 1995 film of the same name) reporting directly to a figure named the Demon King of the Shadow Forest. Evalina is pleasantly feisty, and the script maintains a rather cheeky tone ("So she's a witch", concludes the king at one point, "I've married worse"). Rumpelstiltskin is, much like the director's previous TCU entry Cinderella's Revenge, a lot more fun that the drearier Mickey Mouse/Popeye end of the Universe, with some impressive photography and a wheezing, clunking dungeon synth score from the appropriately named 'Disgusting Cathedral' adding to the movie's quality.

Manor of Darkness (UK 2025: Dir Blake Ridder) There are two handy approaches for the 'fantastic' filmmaker looking to do something intriguing on a low budget. The first is the 'multiverse' concept, the second is the timeloop plot device; in Shanghai born Ridder's first released feature - also, staggeringly, the prolific director's 72nd film - he's gone for the second option.

Four disparate souls come together with crime on their minds. Brother and sister Chris (Louis James) and Laura (Kim Spearman) are at odds over the care of their mother; meanwhile Chris's girlfriend Lisa (Sarah Alexandra Marks), what with her tough upbringing and visions of herself covered in blood, has her own problems. Oh and there's Andy (Rui Shang), handy with a camera and trying to make some money for a custody battle, who the others have seen in pickpocket action.

Chris hatches a plan for some easy money. Inside a country manor used by a gang of thieves to stash their loot, most of the booty has been recovered following a raid; but not all. And in a freak coincidence the owner of the house has invited Chris and his chums to film inside, providing the perfect opportunity to liberate the remaining swag. But a visit to the basement unveils a large box which, when opened, triggers a sequence of events which lock the group in a perpetual live/die/live cycle.

Quite why all this happens is rather baffling, and there's a point about two thirds through the movie where the repetition starts to grate. What Ridder fails to do is unpick the onion skin layers of the story so that the audience understands what's happening; it's just a confusing mess, not helped by some rather lacklustre performances and misplaced attempts at humour. I can't fault Ridder for trying something that's a little different to most haunted house movies, but overall this is a misfire.

Snake Creek (UK 2025: Dir Charlie Steeds) Charlie's back! Mr Steeds, Bristol's answer to Roger Corman, strikes again, this time choosing something more reptilian than his usual cluster of monsters and werewolves.

Unlike other British directors, who may base their movies in the US but never venture further than a youth hostel in deepest Hampshire, Steeds is the real deal, authentically locating some of his American themed features in the US of A; in this case Georgia.

Snake Creek has four ex schoolmates travelling to a location deep in the Chattahoochee woods for a little R&R time. Headed by the exuberant Patrick (Paul Ogletree), the quartet stock up at a local general store, run by rum old Woody (Scot Scurlock) who issues the usual warnings about taking care in the forest. These would seem to be worth heeding based on the pinned posters highlighting a missing local girl, Willow (Faith McCoy), who we’ve already seen alive, covered in leaves and surrounded by rotting corpses, deep in the forest.

And the source of all this concern? Gwendoline, a 29ft snake, who slithers around the forest looking for human meat, and who just so happens to have discovered the four campers, protected by Woody and his inbred cohort.

Filmed back to back with Southern Nightmare, a slice of gothic that features pretty much the same cast, Steeds is on a one man mission to being the spirit of grindhouse to a new generation of moviegoers. The problem here is that while Snake Creek looks the part (Steeds as cinematographer has a keen eye for the outdoors) and sounds great via Simone Cilio’s strident score, this is basically four grown men being menaced by a snake puppet, albeit one designed by LA based SFX talent Eric Yoder. One does rather wonder why Charlie went all that way to make something so, well, silly?

But then when you consider that director Tom Gormican has just completed a big budget snake movie (Anaconda) there’s clearly some mileage in the slinky reptile as an object of fright, so why shouldn’t Steeds give us his own lower budget version? Snake Creek is big on characterisation and rural detail, but somewhat lighter on scares; it’s still worth a look though.

A version of this review was first published on the Bloody Flicks site.

Boarhog (UK 2025: Dir Craig Quinn) There's something weird going down on the streets of Manchester. Well a version of Manchester named Sounder City, and a fictional district: Villemomble (which is also a real suburb of Paris, but we're definitely not there).

A series of disappearances in the area have got the local population a bit twitchy. At the local hospital, the vaguely despotic Dr Adam Brecknell (Reece Ryan) hides his real self behind a cloak of supportive respectability, seducing the staff and being emotionally (and physically) abusive to his girlfriend Laura (Beverley Rendelle).

The country appears to be in some form of hostility with Russia (although conspiracy theorist tags of 'World War III' are dismissed by the Government). Neverthless a decision has been made to return serving troops back to the UK. One of these is Benji (Quinn) whose PTSD is, bluntly, through the roof; as well as being incredibly antisocial he's also plagued with visions of snout nosed witches.

When Brecknell is caught on site by hospital manager Claire (Nicola Mayers), meting out violence to hospital worker Laura, he's dismissed on the spot. Jobless and angry, he's kidnapped by an odd trio who make him an offer he can't refuse; and before we know it, 'Boarhog' is born.

After a while it gets increasingly difficult to follow events (there's a curse in there somewhere and those witches are back), partly because the sound quality of the film is pretty patchy, and there's a regional mumblecore effect going on dialogue wise too. But it doesn't matter; Boarhog is endlessly inventive, cheap as chips with some very impressive practical FX and a revenge tragedy kill count. Quinn is a witty chap in interview, and there's obviously some intelligence at work here (the script is surprisingly good for this sort of thing). If you can get past the DIY approach there's a lot to like, and honestly I'd rather watch something like this than an empty $10m snoozefest any day.

 

Mundane (UK 2025: Dir Ignacio Maiso) More suburban tension, this time set outside London. Mundane (Astrid Olofsson) is a young woman whose blog on everyday life starts attracting attention. Oh she's also a cyborg, but she tries to keep that fact to herself. Her adoptive mother (Nicola Wright) wishes that Mundane wouldn't call her Kathy, and the cyborg's boyfriend James (David Stock) has left her because he wants children and she can't have any (although she has faked two pregnancies, which ostensibly looks cruel on her part). Mundane's father/inventor Thomas (Paul Dewdney), previously estranged from the cyborg, comes back into her life.

Mundane's single friend appears to be Victoria (Daisy Porter) although this relationship appears to be tested when she admits that she has started going out with James; Mundane remains unphased.

A literary agent, Clare (Christina Ashford) is interested in marketing Mundane's blog, supported by Clare's wealthy manager Mark (Neil Ovenell), but is concerned when the cyborg outs herself online, having previously been happy to hide in plain sight. This disclosure triggers a succession of events that has consequences for all. 

'Consequences' is a pretty strong word to describe the impact of anything in Mundane, directed by Maiso at a snail's pace (I had previously reviewed his 2021 movie Them and didn't get on with that either). Mundane has that drained colour look and 'small head in big picture' framing adored by directors like Roy Andersson; it's beautifully photographed by Pierluigi Rossi, and Fernando Gimeno's score is straight out of a Wes Anderson movie. But despite its elegance and an appealing glacial performance by Olofsson in the title role, this is a rather empty film, initially intriguing but soon feeling like a short stretched to feature length.

A Desert (USA 2024: Dir Joshua Erkman)

I've spent quite a bit of time in the USA over the years, not only in the cities but also the country's less populated regions. One thing that anyone visiting the quieter bits of the place can't help but feel is the sense of isolation, and how easy it could be for a person to just get lost.

Joshua Erkman's debut feature A Desert may not be the first movie to exploit this anxiety, but as a mood piece about broken Americana and the people who live in it, it's kind of hard to beat.

Photographer Alex Clark (Kai Lennox), hoping to reclaim some of his glory days, sets out on a one person road trip to record the abandoned parts of his country; when we first meet him he's scoping out an empty, long closed cinema, whose blank screens will be important later in the film. Back home Alex's long suffering wife Sam (Sarah Lind) supports the couple financially and hopes that her husband has one more book of photographs in him.

But Alex perhaps forgets that, in and around those photogenic broken landscapes, people still live. Which he finds out after booking a motel and complaining to the grungy owner about a violent domestic happening in the next room. The noisy neighbour in question, the initially obsequious but quietly threatening Renny (Zachary Ray Sherman) takes one look at Alex's analogue equipment, whips out some moonshine and suggests that the photographer use he and his 'sister' Susie (Ashley B. Smith) as subject matter. This encounter doesn't end well.

Some days later a quietly distraught Sam, fed up with the local police's efforts to find her now missing husband, engages a dodgy private investigator, Harold (David Yow), to do what the cops can't. Harold ends up retracing Alex's steps, which includes a run in with Renny.

Erkman assembles all the elements you'll have seen before in any one of a number of American indie genre movies; psychopathic loner, grizzled private dick, local characters (Rob Zabrecky's motel owner is quietly effective in his few brief scenes) and a desert landscape breathtakingly beautiful in its emptiness. But the director has something more to say than just playing out the drama suggested by this setup. He's concerned with spectacle; how people view others and their surroundings and, importantly, the image, both moving and still. Yes, that does mean that Erkman strays into that territory staked as 'Lynchian' - the endless highway, the inscrutability of evil - but it's not shameless copying, despite the surreal, borderline supernatural goings on.

A Desert starts and ends with a camera; in between it's a drama about ruined buildings, already ruined people, and those headed in that direction. An enigmatic and impressive debut.

A Desert is on UK and Ireland digital platforms from 24 November

A Mother's Embrace aka Abraço de Mãe (Brazil 2024: Dir Cristian Ponce)

It's 1996. Ana (Marjorie Estiano) is a firefighter in Rio de Janeiro, returning to duty after a period in which she was given a leave of absence following the death of her mother, which affected her performance at work. To put it mildly.

Still clearly traumatised and experiencing fleeting visions of a mother from which she was estranged (following an abusive incident in her childhood, alluded to in the film's 1973 prologue), Ana is welcomed back into the ranks, but the fire service is too overwhelmed for a slow reintegration. 

The crisis facing the team isn't fire, but its elemental opposite; water. Successive rainy seasons in Rio de Janeiro have killed and displaced thousands. Ana and her fellow firefighters are summoned to a call at a nursing home on the outskirts of town, São Cristóvão, where Ana grew up. When they attend, they find an old, crumbling house full of residents in a poor state of health and hygiene, most almost catatonic. 

Outside a new storm begins to assert itself, necessitating the evacuation of the residents from the already leaking building. But none of the staff, headed up by the wheelchair bound Drika (Ângela Rabello) and younger manager Ulisses (Javier Drolas) seem in any hurry to leave. The team's attempts to rescue the old folk (and a small child, played Maria Volpe) results in their being trapped in the house, while Ana discovers the truth of what's happening, which links back to her mother.

Ponce's stylish and creepy feature, his first since 2020's History of the Occult, is an exercise in confusion and claustrophobia. Estiano's performance is the standout here; convincing in her trauma, her commitment to her job in the face of natural (and supernatural) danger consistent and believable.

There is a refreshing lack of clarity in what's happening, even when events are taking a distinctly Lovecraftian turn towards the end of the movie. It's best to revel in the nightmarish atmosphere of the thing (which reminded me of Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza's 2007 movie REC), particularly the crumbling, waterlogged nursing home set; locating the movie within the very real natural disasters of the Rio de Janiero floods adds a frisson of authenticity. A Mother's Embrace is very much its own film and its own world, and that can only be a good thing. Excellent stuff.

A Mother's Embrace is on UK and Ireland digital platforms from 10 November.

The Session Man (UK 2023/4: Dir Michael Treen)

The 'session man' of this documentary's title is - or rather was - Nicky Hopkins. Born in Sheffield in 1944, Hopkins was a keyboard child prodigy who went on to be a pivotal figure on the 1960s/70s UK music scene, albeit one that you're more likely to have heard than heard of.

Treen's debut feature length movie, planned back in 2021 and originally released to the festival circuit in 2023, traces Hopkins's career from his own band, 'The Savages', to his emergence on the 1960s music scene as the go to session pianist (the piano just starting to be used on the recordings of beat groups). It documents his almost Zelig like appearances with a large number of key 1970s bands, including 'The Who', 'The Kinks', and 'The Beatles', even sharing the stage with 'Jefferson Airplane' at Woodstock (it would have been with Jeff Beck, but apparently Mr Beck got the hump and flew home).

Hopkins, who died at the young age of 50 in 1994 (as a result of complications following a lifelong existence with Crohn's Disease) is therefore not present to offer his side of the story, beyond some archive interviews in which he appears modest and unassuming in conversation. Even rarer here are live performances; it's a distinct limitation to the enjoyment of Session Man, clearly a documentary of limited budget, that very little of the man's work is shown played by Hopkins himself. Indeed even his recorded work is sparse in the movie; we are left to experience Hopkins's mercurial talent via session musicians.

The musician's world is brought to life by a variety of interviews, some archive, some specifically for the documentary, including some insightful contributions from his second wife, Moira (other surviving family members aren't interviewed) ; as you'd expect from a group of talking heads who are mostly in their late 70s and 80s, recollection is not always great (ironically it's 'The Rolling Stones' 81 year old Keith Richards who offers the most impassioned support of Hopkins). Hopkins is made out to be a rather private man (possibly because of the paucity of biographical footage) who didn't know his true talent, which doesn't reconcile with his 1970s excesses, which saw him keeping up with the hard drinking and drugging Hollywood Vampires (to the point where he had to fill in for a 'refreshed' Harry Nilsson during the recording of one of his solo albums) and requiring a spell in rehab.

But it's the revelations of Hopkins's contributions to key bands and albums that is the film's biggest delight. If you've ever marvelled at the piano work on The Stones's 'She's a Rainbow' or 'Sympathy for the Devil', that's Nicky; what isn't disclosed is whether his work, which often transformed such songs from 'ok' to 'classic' status, was truly acknowledged at the time, or whether his status remained as 'session player'. Certainly there's no shortage of musicians queuing up to eulogise the late Hopkins in Treen's patchy but heartfelt documentary, but one can't help feel that if he was recognised as an essential talent back then he may still have been with us today.

The Session Man will be released to cinemas from 21 November.

Remember, Remember, the 5th of November etc etc.

So this morning I woke up and thought ‘Ah, another day of podcast writing, checking I have ingredients for dinner and…’ Hang on. It’s November 5th! How did this become just another day? The slow erosion of bonfire night, or fireworks night, or – more specifically – Guy Fawkes’ night, in the memory and public consciousness has entirely happened during my time on earth; actually more accurately the first fifty or so years of that span.

I can only write from personal experience – and I was a bit of an odd boy – but as a child this date was the second in the ‘holy trinity’ of autumn/winter excitement. First was 31st October – Halloween – and the third was of course 25th December. 5th November marked a sort of mid-point; a date I looked forward to for weeks. 

While the deregulation of the fireworks industry in the early 1980s (thank you, Mrs Thatch) really opened the field of choice for the firework hunter, back in the 1960s there were five firework companies all offering pretty much the same thing: Brock’s, Pain's, Wessex, Astra and Standard. Fireworks were sold individually or in different sized, affordable mixed boxes. You could gaze at the goods via glass fronted wooden display cabinets in most toy shops (although my own local shop, Holloway’s in Hounslow, chose not to stock them).

My parents didn’t have much money at the time, so we would only have been able to afford a small box of fireworks, which was fine. Once bought – sometime in advance of bonfire night – it would be stored under the sofa in the ‘best room’ of the house (ie the front room, only used for guests/parties and closed off at all other times to avoid having to heat it, via the creaky back boiler behind the main fireplace).

I would sneak into the front room pretty much nightly in the days leading up to 5th November, open the box and smell the gunpowder which stuffed each of the fireworks; sometimes there was a powdery residue in the box, and I wondered what mischief I could cause with that. There was always a roman candle, a jumping jack, a catherine wheel (which, when nailed to a fence post, hardly ever seemed to rotate), and a rocket. Touching these talismans was arguably as much, if not more fun than setting them off; there was always something a bit sad about the brief life of a firework, as if the potential of the thing was never matched by its momentary kinetic release. Rockets were slightly different. Fired from a milk bottle, half submerged in earth for stability (the bottle always smelled pretty disgusting the morning after) each one rose skyward to join its friends, as if being alone was not a natural state.

And then there was the now extinct practice of ‘penny for the guy’. My mother came from the poorer side of a rather well to do family in north London and always felt more connected to them than her own mother. I realised, some years after her death, that mum had retained some of the snobbery from that side of the family too, which rubbed off on me; this was probably why I looked on the ‘penny for the guy’ merchants as a bit common. Certainly I never undertook, or was asked to undertake, the custom of wheeling a badly made ‘guy’ to a street corner and begging for money. But in the late 1960s such groups were common. When did this die out?

I learned the origins of Guy Fawkes quite early. I attended a Church of England primary school, and on one particular November 5th, when we were all excited and raring to leave school for our respective back gardens (this would have been sometime towards the end of the 1960s) our headmaster called a kind of impromptu end of school assembly, giving us a very Protestant skewed account of evil Guy Fawkes and his treasonous acts, seeking to instill in us the reason we were celebrating and, arguably, warning of the perceived dangers of popery; how very 17th Century (although until relatively recently shops sold Guy Fawkes masks too, a tradition dating back  - in different forms - to the early 1600s). At the time this account seemed to conflict with the often jolly figure of Mr Fawkes found on the front of the fireworks boxes. But even then it cast a slight pall of gloom over bonfire night. How many of the households in Hounslow, all setting off fireworks at the same time in their back gardens, associated what they were doing with the slice of history imparted to us? Who knows.

Obviously we still have fireworks now; their use is no longer restricted to one day of the year (Diwali celebrations and bonfire night are often very close to each other date wise, not to mention the now firmly enshrined New Year's spectacle), and fireworks outlets can be found on high streets all year round. What’s missing, I suppose, is Guy himself. One look at the Wiki page for the event reminds the reader that for nearly four hundred years after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot the 5th November was one of the most important, and significant, dates in the UK calendar (enshrined in law to ensure its continued observance), only to be largely snuffed out as the 20th century drew to a close. Even the famous Lewes and Sussex bonfires, which take place on or around November 5 annually, have moved the focus of their fiery celebrations from religious martyrs to prominent unpopular political figures. 

As an adult, and owner of two vulnerable rescue cats, I confess to maintaining a slight dread at the cacophony experienced at this time of year; but only on their behalf. Inside, I’m still that child, excited, anticipating the first of the night’s showers of sparks. Now where’s my Guy Fawkes mask?

DEoL at the 2025 London Film Festival - Part 2

Part 2 - the last four films seen at this year's LFF:

Below the Clouds aka Sotto le nuvole (Italy 2025: Dir Gianfranco Rosi) This is my first encounter with the works of Rosi, an Italian documentary maker much revered in critical circles. 

Below the Clouds is the result of the director's near four year sojourn in and around Naples so, as you'd expect, it spreads out in a number of directions, rather like the contents of Vesuvius, which dominates the city's skyline and its history. 

Shot in spectacular black and white, the film is a meditation on the cultural impact of Vesuvius - it hasn't erupted since 1944 - in contrast to the lesser known but more active Campi Flegrei - or Phlegrean Fields - volcano. Its more famous relative is perhaps best known for the destruction of Pompeii in AD79, and visitors to the local museum are seen regarding the tragic victims, their bodies encased in and preserved by lava.

Tourists are led underground to see the antiquities grouped around the structure of the famous Amphitheatre, while others witness the results of the raiding of the tombs and palatial houses for profit. Japanese scientists visit the site to continue the painstaking process of digging through hitherto unexplored layers, fully expecting to uncover further important archeological finds.

Rosi interweaves this activity with the day to day life of the area. A ship imports massive amounts of grain from Ukraine, the mounds themselves resembling volcanoes. The vessel's crew, including a Syrian, are not happy to have to return to the war torn country after unloading. Despatches from a local emergency services department show familiar problems with bored youths setting off fires, domestic abuse and isolated voices expressing the very real fears about tremors experienced from Campi Flegrei; the locals generally don't seem too concerned with their area's history.

A huge cloak of sadness descends over this documentary (the title is taken from a quote by Cocteau; “Vesuvius makes all the clouds in the world”). Naples is shown as a shadow city, all night time train rides, empty cinemas and antiquities picked out by torchlight; we're far from the Italy of Rossellini or even Fellini here. Its near two hour running time, soporific pace and repetitive sequencing make Below the Clouds a far from an easy watch, but a beautiful and elegiac one.

Cover Up (USA 2025: Dir Mark Obenhaus, Laura Poitras) The rather sensationalist title for this penetrating documentary on American political journalist and author Seymour Hersch may be explained by the familiar Netflix logo which appears at the start.

Don't get me wrong; it's great that Obenhaus and Poitras's movie has been picked up for streaming, the more views the better, but I can't help feeling that the object of the documentary may have been less than pleased with the method of distribution.

Hersch, or Sy as he's known throughout, is an uncompromising writer whose refusal to back down has, over the years, made him a hated figure for Presidents, the CIA and just about anybody in power in the US involved in the suppression of truth.

A bright and gifted student whose talents were recognised at an early age, after a spell on crime reporting Sy's first major work was an expose of the 1969 My Lai massacre in Vietnam. A long forgotten atrocity in which up to 500 innocent men, women and children were murdered by American troops during the war, Hersch looked into the initial verdict on the atrocity, which sought to place the blame on one infantryman, and discovered a massive cover up by the U.S. army and the then government, who had initially tried to explain the killings as a move against the Viet Cong army. 

(l-r) Laure Bonville (BFI), Laura Poitras,
Sy Hersch and Mark Obenhaus at LFF

Although Sy won a Pulitzer Prize for the work, Cover Up shows that even now Hersch is haunted by the details of the massacre and the infinite capacity of humans to enact terrible things. In 2004 Hersch was also responsible for exposing the U.S. military's torture and abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad during the Iraq war. Photographs obtained, showing the extent of the brutality, shocked the world when published in the press. 

Cover Up shows, mainly through archive footage and some often tense face to face interviews with the documentary makers, the extent of Hersch's reach and his inability to take the path of least resistance. Uncomfortable with being front and centre - he'd rather other voices speak through his journalism - his surprise appearance at a Q&A following the LFF screening demonstrated his unshifting pessimism about world leaders and events. The documentary shows Sy, still working at 88, receiving intel on activity in Gaza and strongly protecting his sources in the course of his work. Cover Up cannot hope to cover the extent of Hersch's often messy career even over two hours, but makes the case that we should all be a bit more Sy in terms of how we receive information provided to us by Governments.

 

The Ice Tower aka La tour de glace(France, Germany, Italy 2025: Dir Lucile Hadzihalilovic) Hadzihalilovic's previous features have all been located in hermetically sealed worlds, set in unspecified time periods.

Her latest certainly ticks the first box, but is set in the early 1970s, although anyone hoping for period accuracy clearly hasn't seen any of her previous movies. Clara Pacini, in her first feature role, plays Jeanne, a young girl keen to escape the orphanage where she lives after the death of her mother.

Jeanne's wanderings see her missing the last bus home, escaping a lecherous man who gives her a lift, and finding another girl's discarded handbag, which contains identity documents. Seizing on this, Jeanne renames herself Bianca and, seeking shelter, steals into an abandoned facility that turns out to be a film studio.

The production in progress is an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, with the divaish Cristina (Marion Cotillard) in the central role. Bianca quickly becomes enamoured with the mercurial star, spying on her as she creeps around the studio; in turn Cristina notices Bianca and a friendship of sorts begins, until events quickly escalate.

Beneath the stunning wintry design lies a rather disturbing tale about age and vulnerability. The characters of Jeanne/Bianca and Cristina are kept consciously unfocused; in the former's case, the tragic death of her mother has clearly traumatised the young girl, who possibly sees in Cristina a substitute maternal figure. Cristina is a flawed soul, addicted to narcotics (administered by Max, a sinister doctor figure played by August Diehl) and as a result capricious and venal. The fairytale in which both characters feature - the 'Snow Queen' project acts as a film within a film - is also a springboard for some time shifts; as a result something which could be perceived as whimsical and peripheral is given a dark, disturbing heart, germane to all the best fairy tales. 

Two Prosecutors aka  Zwei Staatsanwälte (France, Germany, Netherlands, Latvia, Romania, Lithuania, Ukraine 2025: Dir Sergey Loznitsa) Ukrainian born Loznitsa has in the past oscillated between fact and semi fact in his short works, features and documentaries. His latest movie locates itself in truth, set in the Soviet Union of 1937 during Stalin’s Great Terror, and adapted from a novella by gulag survivor Georgy Demidov.

Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) is a young, principled investigator/prosecutor, his role to investigate potential miscarriages of justice. A letter from a prisoner, Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko) has found its way into Kornyev's hands; it shouldn't have, as an opening scene shows many such letters, written by other prisoners complaining about the trumped up circumstances of their incarcerations, being swept up and burned. This particular letter suggests authenticity in that it was written in the prisoner's own blood.

Kornyev travels to meet the prisoner and agrees to take the case. But this means dealing with the Kafkaesque nightmare of Stalinist Russia and the administrative legerdemain encountered in seeking justice.

Loznitsa's film is superb in its recreation of a world entirely constructed to obfuscate and wear down any opposition. No voices are raised but there's violence in the enforced indolence of the systems at work. At one point Kornyev, seeking approval for the investigation, is kept waiting for an excruciatingly long time; the camera stays on him while others in the waiting room are seen first. It is only the audience's knowledge that there is a case to answer that stops us willing the lawyer to drop his investigation, because the film carries such a weight of inevitability as to the end point of the whole thing.

The banality of evil at work in the film recalled Jonathan Glazer's 2023 The Zone of Interest, and Loznitsa creates a similarly hermetically sealed world whose violence and oppression is present but barely glimpsed. It's a draining piece and won't be for everybody, but is a stunning, and impeccably styled exercise.

DEoL at the 2025 London Film Festival - Part 1

This year I had the opportunity to watch more than the usual small handful of films at the London Film Festival. Here's the first five films I saw: 

Romería (Spain, Germany 2025: Dir Carla Simón) Marina (Llúcia Garcia) is eighteen years old and planning to study cinema at university. However, she's unable to secure a grant because she cannot provide legal proof of her existence - her biological father's birth certificate lists no children, and both mum and dad are now dead.

The only people able to establish her identity - on paper anyway - are her natural grandparents, part of a network of family with whom Marina has not been in contact for some years. So she travels back to Vigo to reconnect and legally change her father's birth certificate.

Romería (which means 'pilgrimage') charts Marina's journey into the heart of a complicated extended family whose interconnections initially seem to freeze her out; she is known to them (all but her fairly awful grandmother comment how much Marina looks like her birth mother) but they remain distant and confusing to her. Only a cousin, Suso (Mitch Martin) appears interested. But this family are the key to Marina's gradual understanding of why her name has been kept off the records; for both her mother and father were drug addicts and dealers, the former contracting AIDS from a shared needle, bringing shame to the family.

Anyone expecting a traditional epiphanic moment when Marina uncovers the truth will be disappointed; throughout her romeria Marina looks bemused but not unamused, and her discovery of the truth actually brings her closer to the memory of her parents than expected (a nice touch is having Garcia and Martin play her biological parents in the movie's flashback scenes).

Hélène Louvart's camera remains impressive throughout, weaving between the characters, scouting the horizon and always returning to Marina's face as she observes others. Hers is a quest that is imbued with sadness but never hopelessness; Marina's extended family are messy and fractious, but her determination to get what she wants - a change on a piece of paper - never falters.

The Love that Remains aka Ástin sem eftir er (Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, France 2025: Dir Hlynur Pálmason) Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) is a struggling artist, her preferred medium a series of large canvases onto which geometric shapes are laid, with the works exposed to the elements to weather and degrade. The awkwardness of her art, and of the unequipped studio in which she forges her pieces, matches that of her personal life. For Anna is in the process of separating from her husband, Magnús (Sverrir Gudnason), a deep sea fisherman whose life is divided between his work, trapped on a boat with his rough and ready colleagues, and trying to salvage his relationship and manage the parenting of their three children, daughter Ída (Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir) and sons Grimur (Grímur Hlynsson) and Þorgils (Þorgils Hlynsson). 

The Love that Remains follows the family for a year, over which time their relationships and routines change, with Magnús slowly being eased out of the unit, seemingly not accepting that the marriage is over; in fact he seems to be more in lust than in love with his ex, seeing her at one point as a suspended upskirt image. 

As well as this extrication, Anna also experiences continued difficulty in selling her art, or even getting it accepted; one self absorbed gallery owner visits her, leads her on and then lets her down just before he flies home. 

The bleakness of both landscape and situation is leavened by the natural behaviour of the children, whose wisdom sometimes exceeds that of their parents. Puzzlingly there are also some surreal moments, possibly inspired by Anna's mindset, which inject an awkward humour into the proceedings; the plane occupied by the gallery owner for example, who has stolen a goose egg despite being told not to, crashes after flying into a flock of birds. Is this Anna's wishes ideated, or the goose's revenge? 

Pálmason's movie is sometimes willfully obscure, and its visual codes tricky to decipher. But it's a beautifully shot piece, and the performances are uniformly confident, if occasionally unedifying. The opening shot of the film, in which a roof is craned off the top of an empty building, parallels the metaphoric roof removed from Anna's house, allowing us a dispassionate look at what happens within.

Honey Bunch (Canada/UK 2025: Dir Dusty Mancinelli, Madeleine Sims-Fewer) Diana (Grace Glowicki) is being treated at a specialist clinic following a period in a coma as a result of a car accident. The aim of the treatment is both a physical recuperation and a programme to restore her memory, using a number of sensory, associative and dietary experiments. Her husband Homer (Ben Petrie) also lives in to provide support and a connection to her past life.

Day to day supervision of Diana's treatment is provided by head nurse Farah (Kate Dickie), a brusque but caring figure in thrall to the (still living but rarely glimpsed) clinic founder, Dr Frances Tréphine (Patricia Tulasne) and his dead wife Joan, whose portraits occupy the walls in every room.

But as Diana's recovery slowly progresses, she's plagued by horrific visions, and spies Homer, who often vanishes overnight, mysteriously conspiring with Farah. And it's Diana's growing feeling of paranoia, that all may not be what it seems in the clinic, and doubts about her husband's integrity, that drives the core of Mancinelli and Sims-Fewer's second feature.

The directors mentioned in interview that they wanted to evoke the spirit of the 1970s British horror film, even going so far as to use vintage lenses to establish the correct look. The result gives Honey Bunch a slight Peter Strickland feel, creating a world at once both recognisable and off kilter; the muted colour scheme, deliberately slow pace and country house setting (although filmed in Canada) is perfect, providing even more power to the moments of shock and grotesquerie.

But lest this be written off simply as a well done pastiche, Honey Bunch has much more to offer. With no disrespect to their performances, it is perhaps the fact that Glowicki and Petrie are a real life couple that provides the depth of their onscreen relationship, the pieces of the narrative gradually falling into place as Diana struggles to understand what is happening to her. By the end of Honey Bunch Mancinelli and Sims-Fewer have pulled off an extraordinary feat; to bring forth from the bones of a mystery film a stunning portrayal of love and what it means to be in love. A truly special film.

Roofman (USA 2025: Dir Derek Cianfrance) Cianfrance scored heavily with a trio of movies back in the 2010s, namely that year's Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines (2012) and The Light Between Oceans (2016). His focus on blue collar lives resurfaces in Roofman, the true story of Jeffrey Manchester, a criminal genius (by others' assessments).

Channing Tatum plays Manchester who, when we first meet him, has established his modus operandum by breaking into remote stores via the roof (hence his moniker), in this case a McDonald's. All he needs is some money for his family, and his good guy credentials are quickly established by donating his own jacket to a coatless employee he's about to shut in the freezer while he makes his escape.

Despite being caught, the enterprising Manchester ingeniously busts out of prison and evades capture by entering and hiding in a Toys "R" Us outlet, his presence masked by creating a kind of dugout behind a bike rack. It's clear that the guy's intentions are ultimately to take some money, but it's also important to establish a home and and to integrate himself into the day to day running of the store, walking around the premises at night and even going so far as to hang his washed laundry in the aisles. He hooks up some CCTV and it's here that he sees shop worker Leigh Wainscott (Kirsten Dunst), a single mum with two daughters, for the first time. His subsequent double life relationship with her, and the sadness of his estrangement from his own biological family, make up the heart of the film, ably supported by Peter Dinklage as the horrendous store manager and Tony Revolori as Jeffrey's single male friend.

Tatum is the perfect blank canvas on which to build the Manchester character, his 'lovable hunk' persona perfect for creating the 'crim with a heart' figure. While, despite being based on a true story, this occasionally veers into mawkishness, Tatum is never less than affecting. His foil here, and the real star of the show, is Dunst. When she's on screen the camera can't tear itself away from her ever changing face, veering from happiness to a mask of pain in seconds; a churchgoing woman with two daughters who slowly accept Manchester - under a different name - into their lives. The scenes of the shopbreaker being unknowingly accepted by the parishioners is particularly affecting.

This might be a true life story by the numbers, right down to the the end credit photos of the real Manchester - and footage of an unbelieving Wainscott - but Cianfrance knows what he's doing here, creating an often funny, captivating story about a character who refuses categorisation but seems universally liked (even by his captors), while also saying something about the obvious distance between Manchester's emotional and creative intelligence.

The President's Cake aka Mamlaket al-qasab (Iraq/USA 2025: Dir Hasan Hadi) It's 1990, and Saddam Hussein is Iraqi president. He presides over a country economically on its knees; its citizens place the blame for this crisis directly on George Bush and the withdrawal of food and resources by the UN, so entrenched are they in the country's cult of Saddamism.

So it's seen as an honour rather than an outrage that Hussein demands that every class in every school bake a cake to mark his birthday, irrespective of the difficulties involved in assembling the ingredients because of scarcity. In one school, 9 year old Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) is picked by ballot to make the cake; failure is not an option. Lamia lives with her grandmother, Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat) in a riverside hut; she is confident to travel by water to school on her own, but is elsewhere a wide eyed child with only a basic understanding of her circumstances. It is assumed that Lamia's parents have perished in the conflict (there are signs of the struggle all around, although it's rarely explicit) and the weight of responsibility on the old woman's back forces her to make a decision which impacts directly on the little girl. 

On the one hand, and despite the challenging conditions in which Lamia lives, there is a certain innocence to her separation from Bibi, with only her pet rooster Hindi and off/on contact with schoolfriend Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem) accompanying her continued quest for cake ingredients. Her travels highlight the effects on a populace of a country where survival is dependent on trade, barter and favour.

The President's Cake is not without its humour - the military disciplined schoolteacher who fires off instructions to his pupils is like a character from Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali, a comparison that also applies to Lamia's exploits; Nayyef is a revelation as the little girl who is exposed to so much and almost grows up in front of us. That this is Hadi's debut feature is astounding; he manages to balance a deftness of storytelling with a light directorial touch which doesn't shy away from the more monstrous aspects of the regime, not least the newsreel which closes the film. A very very fine movie.