NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM 2021 #24 - the final three: Reviews of Philia (UK 2021), Slammer (UK 2021) and Burns Night (UK 2021)

Philia (UK 2021: Dir Various) Welcome to the cinema of transgression as we meet a group of people who are clearly working through their own issues in a group therapy environment, tutored by a chap in a bow tie. He explains that the dictionary definition of 'Philia' is 'to love something that is connected to a sexual attraction to what is not normal'. Apparently it's the opposite of 'phobia'. So now you know.

What follows over the next 100 minutes is a series of short films that explore, in mostly abstract ways, a series of 'philias'. There's Mythophilia - the desire to have sex with a mythical beast; Astrophilia - an obsession with stars, planets and outer space; Dacryphilia & Hematolagnia - an obsession with tears and blood; Acarophilia - the love of scratching; Acousticophilia - arousal from music and sounds; Lactophilia - sexual pleasure from milk or sucking the female breast; Necrophilia - fairly self explanatory; and Pictophilia - deriving sexual pleasure from looking at pictures or watching porn.

Until the hour point most of the films only hint at something approaching narrative, and it's only with Lactophilia (featuring the ever-willing-to-go-there Martin Payne as a hammer wielding baby abductor) and the final Pictophilia that we're given a story. This is, I hope the filmmakers won't mind me commenting, unpleasant and soporific stuff. Made with the crudest of materials - during lockdown, natch - it's painfully slow and uneventful. But it is true to the spirit of experimental filmmaking and, to be frank, not everything has to be The Sound of Music, right?

Slammer (UK 2021: Dir Ted Byron Baybutt) Baybutt's debut feature was, according to the director, five years in the making, and filmed during the pandemic.

The sweeping story revolves around a scientist, Ann Waterman (Flora Montgomery), engaged in research for a company called Hansegret, aimed at the eradication of disease. At home she lives with, as she terms it, her 'agoraphobic architect' boyfriend John Howlett (James Atherton) in a rather fractious relationship, not helped by her grief over the recent death of her father, clearly quite a big noise in the same industry.

Ann's sudden disappearance triggers concern and the arrival of the police in the shape of Detective Russell (Josephine Melville) while John is comforted by Sophie (Victoria Emslie). 

But while Ann has departed the world as we know it, she's actually been incarcerated in a kind of future prison. Painfully, she's allowed to monitor everything that's happening on earth (including a growing closeness between John and Sophie) as unseen powers prepare her for the next phase of her life. Even stranger, a stiff backed politician named Mark (Samuel Clemens) is being lined up as next Prime Minister; but is he actually real?

Big pharma, cryptocurrency, conspiracy theories and political corruption all swim around in Slammer. The audience, meanwhile, is generally left clueless as to what is happening. I'm certainly up for a bit of oblique filmmaking, but the opaque nature of Slammer's narrative and the general lack of clarity and resolution - even in the last section which I feel the director hopes will explain things more than it actually does - makes the movie pretty hard work, although there's no denying Baybutt's ambition.

Maybe it was the length of time over which the film was developed, maybe it was the director being too close to the material for too long, but confusion only really works in a movie if you're going to give the audience the necessary keys to unlock the mystery within. Disappointing.

Burns Night (UK 2021: Dir Dean Hoff) The genesis of Burns Night stretches back over ten years, to two seasons of a web TV series, Caledonia, which in themselves were developed from a five book cycle of fantasy novels written by the Scottish born non-binary director, whose upbringing included a long spell drifting in America. 

And Scotland - specifically Glasgow - is the location for the whole Caledonia concept, involving Detective Inspector Leah Bishop, transferred to the city's Interpol office, and discovering that she's the only human in the building; her colleagues are all mythological creatures from Scottish folklore.

Burns Night is the adaptation of the third of these novels, which plunges us into a strange world of Leah, here played by Maria Jones. When Bishop's work partner Detective Inspector (and selkie) Dorian Grey (Alasdair Reavey) goes missing, she enlists the help of Robert Burns (Joshua Layden) to find him. And yes it's that Robert Burns, the famous (and dead) Scottish poet. Except he's now a vampire, turned centuries previously by the enigmatic Desdemona (Hoff); together they have 'lived' and hunted together down the years.

Burns Night also boasts a pair of lads who form part of the six mythical defenders of the city; a fluffy beast called Fludge who Leah finds under her bed and to whom she becomes attached; a laboratory whose staff includes a ghost lab assistant, Hazel (Nicole Donald); oh and Jesus (Neil MacKinnon). After about half an hour of this I really wished I'd read at least one of the source books to help me navigate the no budget bonkersness; it's not so much that it's hard to follow (actually it is) but that it's hard to hear, such is the really quite challenging sound quality. But what the film lacks in polish it makes up for in invention and genuine 'otherness'. Glasgow doesn't come out of Burns Night particularly glowingly, but I get the feeling that the cast would also see this as a celebration of the freaks that occupy the city's darker corners.

You can watch Burns Night for free here.