The Ringmaster (Denmark 2018: Dir Søren Juul Petersen)

Opening with a warning, parodying Edward Van Sloan's fourth wall breaking caution to the audience at the beginning of Frankenstein (1931), I found myself wondering whether to expect a film as shocking as the audience of nearly one hundred years ago found James Whale's breakthrough horror movie. And presumably that's the effect that Søren Juul Petersen wants to achieve here; nice try.

While the entire population of Denmark gets ready to stay home and tune into to a football match, one where the country have made it to the final, two girls of very different backgrounds staff a petrol station night shift. Agnes (Anne Bergfeld), whose father owns the station, is a diligent student hoping to sneak in the back and work on her college thesis, having been dropped off by doctor boyfriend Benjamin (Kristopher Fabricius), leaving Belinda (Karin Michelsen) to front up the counter, text her disinterested petty criminal boyfriend Kenny and deal with being thrown out of her mother's home for continuing to be support her bloke.

But the quiet shift is about to change for the worse; flash forward scenes showing the women being abused confirm this. A series of shady looking customers come into the station at intervals; they're not bad as such but they're clearly up to something; and Belinda thinks she sees a woman in the back seat of one of the cars entering the station, possibly drugged, her mouth sealed with duct tape.

The growing unease of Agnes and Belinda, clearly vulnerable in their remote outpost, takes up most of the first half of the film; it's handled well and Bergfeld and Michelsen, both making their feature film debuts, are appealing leads, with Agnes as the cool headed psychology student attempting to understand why people like Belinda are attracted to bad boys like Kenny.

The movie's second half sadly reverts to that rather tired old standby, t*rture porn. The setup is familiar; a 'Ringmaster' (sleazily played by Icelandic actor Damon Younger) streams a live show, 'Escapismus', to an internet audience, while a group of elites behind a two way mirror get their kicks viewing the action. After a first act, watching Benjamin get tortured and eventually killed, the Ringmaster turns his attention to Agnes and Belinda; will they have the strength to survive his ministrations?

Based on the novel 'Finale' by Steen Langstrup (and the title under which the film originally played festivals) The Ringmaster has a lot of very well done elements - it's crisply photographed and its fracturing of the narrative is intriguing - but honestly we've seen it all before, and basing a story around innocent women suffering at the hands of men is very much last decade's thing, even if the point is to show how much people can endure pain, and also what we as an audience are prepared to call 'entertainment.'

An opening narration disabuses the audience of any thoughts that Denmark is just a land of fairy tales and happy people in terms of what we're about to see, but to me it merely informed the fact that Danish filmmakers need to find less tiresome subjects for their movies, no matter how well their product may be put together.

The Ringmaster will be available on DVD & Digital Download from 30th November and may hit cinemas when they re-open.

Possessor (Canada/UK 2019: Dir Brandon Cronenberg)

A black woman, Holly (Gabrielle Graham), enters a bar and kills a man, brutally stabbing him multiple times, after which she says, seemingly to no one, "Pull me out" and turns a gun on herself. Unable to fire it, she is taken down by cops who storm the bar. In an austere medical facility a woman wakes up; she is Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough), a 'possessor' employed by a company to interface into other people's minds to carry out assassinations on behalf of rich clients who have paid handsomely for the service. But, as would be expected in such a risky undertaking, it is not without emotional and physical consequences; Vos has to be tested to ensure her own memory has remained intact (involving her naming objects from her past).

But the signs of Tasya's mental unravelling are clear; when she meets up with her husband Michael (Rossif Sutherland) and son Ira (Gage Graham-Arbuthnot), from whom she is separated, we see her rehearsing the words of greeting she'll use when she meets them, like trying on real life for size. Michael, not knowing of Vos's vocation, wants her to rejoin the family, but it already looks like it's too late; she's almost a dead woman walking.

Vos's boss Girder (Jennifer Jason-Leigh) presents her with her next project; the company's biggest yet. She is to 'possess' the mind of Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott), an ex drug dealer who has hooked up with money; his girlfriend Ava (Tuppence Middleton) is the daughter of John Parse (Sean Bean), CEO of a very powerful data mining company; John has grudgingly given Tate a shop floor level house surveillance job, which is as sleazy as it sounds. The client commissioning the work is John's stepson, Reid (Christopher Jacot), who wants to take over the company. Vos, as Tate, is to kill John, Ava and then himself, allowing Reid to assume control. But there's a bigger plan; the company Vos and Girder work for then want to 'buy' Reid, giving them access to that company's data resources.

Vos accepts the job. The interface is successful, but either Tate has a stronger mind than her other jobs, or Tasya is losing control. So while she moves to complete her mission a battle of wills commences, which could have fatal consequences for everyone involved.

I wasn't too enamoured with Brandon Cronenberg's feature debut, 2012's Antiviral, and on the surface his follow-up revisits the same near future territory of science deployed cynically into a narrative that fuses dream and waking states. But where that movie somewhat aped Brandon pere's similar obsessions, Possessor finds him truly branching out, making a humane and touching film, full of WTF moments and with an impressive visual palette which belies the movie's modest budget.

The film is elevated to greatness by two actors with a reputation for subsuming themselves into their roles, physically and emotionally. As Girder, Tasya's exhausted but ultimately benevolent boss, Jennifer Jason Leigh gives a subtle and care worn performance as a scientist whose whole life has been devoted to perfecting the process of 'possessing', and losing her moral compass along the way. But the real star here is Andrea Riseborough; as the ethereal Vos it's one of the standout performances of the year, her bland face a tabula rasa for other personalities. It's a difficult role to pull off; for much of the film she's in the body of Colin Tate (also a fine performance from Christopher Abbott) but Vos's non-personality - she's a cipher for the bodies she inhabits - and her desperate need to cling to her own identity are powerfully rendered.

The tussle between Vos's identity and those of the bodies she inhabits is apparent from the get go. When Girder asks her, when 'possessing' Holly, why she chose a knife to kill her victim rather than the pistol provided, Tasya responds that she thought the knife would be more in character. "But whose?" Girder responds. And it's at this point that the viewer realises that it's Vos who is the assassin, not those whose bodies she occupies.

Thematically Possessor is a game of two halves; the first plays almost like an entry in the 'Mission: Impossible' franchise, with Vos being given a role to play, a pre-planned endgame (the pick up zone, if you like) and the elaborate scientific preparations for her interfacing. We learn that the longer Vos occupies the body the greater the negative impact on her own body and mind, and after five days of occupation she will be irrevocably trapped. The second half, with the unravelling of the Tate mission, takes us into more abstract territory, and the identity crisis subplot positively reeks of the writings of Phillip K. Dick and, to an extent, the memory politics of the films of Christopher Nolan. There's also a moment in the film, when Ava's friend Reeta (Tiio Horn) comes onto Tate and Vos realises that they've been sleeping together (a fact that wasn't in the mission plan) which reminded me of Jennifer Garner finding out, as a child in a woman's body, that her adult self wasn't very nice in the 2004 age swap comedy 13 Going on 30.

The 'scuffed future' of the movie may be a familiar one - prosaic locations against shiny almost but not quite familiar technology - and the mission concept a sci fi/action movie staple; but Cronenberg is also happy to step outside the norms of this type of movie. At one point for example Vos, as Tate, travels across town to watch Michael and Ira, desperate to re-connect with them, and there's a realisation that although Vos has inserted herself into her host/victim with a mission to fulfil, these stories are playing out in the same city (Toronto) at the same time; it's quite the moment.

Ultra-violent, mind-messy and unflinchingly sad: in Possessor Brandon Cronenberg has made a sci fi movie for the 21st century that he can be truly proud of. See it.

Possessor is released on digital platforms on 27 November from Signature Entertainment.

Game of Death (France/Canada/USA 2017: Dir Sebastien Landry, Laurence Morais-Lagace)

Not to be confused with the 1978 Bruce Lee movie of the same name, Landry and Morais-Lagace's film joins a select group of flicks including 2000's Battle Royale, The Belko Experiment from 2016 and 2012's The Hunger Games, featuring stories where people are pitted against each other in a fight to the death.

Game of Death serves up a gaggle of young people hanging around the pool, drinking and kvetching with each other, as young people do; they all seem pretty disposable characters; of which more later. When pizza - and drug - delivery guy Tyler (Erniel Baez) turns up, the group turns on, and discover an octagon-shaped video board game from the 1980s called, appropriately, 'Game of Death.' In a sort of ouija board set-up, the players place their fingers on paddles arranged in a circle around the board, with a video screen in the middle giving instructions; handily there is a perfect match of people to paddles, so everyone gets to play. There is also a written guide to playing the game, which of course is only read after they've started. When the machine is turned on, each of the players gets a pinprick in their fingers; the blood from the prick enters into the machine, and the central screen shows the number 24.

Pretty soon the group realise, after reading said instructions, that they've entered into a devilish contract with the game; the number 24 relates to the amount of people they need to kill to stay alive. And to start things off one of their number, Matt (Thomas Vallieres) suffers the indignity of his head blowing up, Scanners style; if the group don't start killing others, this will start happening to them, one by one.

Game of Death is, at face value, a pretty simple 'kill or be killed' movie, but look beneath the surface and there are some interesting things going on. Much like the aforementioned movies, it's a discourse on how quickly humans can tap into their basest survival instincts when faced with extinction (a running gag, a nature programme playing on various TVs showing the fate of the manatee, suggests that what we're seeing is just another species' fight for survival). The humans in this case show different levels of willingness to clock up the death numbers until they realise that the killing of others is the means of their own continued existence; and a scene towards the end of the movie, where some of the group enter a palliative care hospital to increase the kill count, feels like a humane conclusion to their plight, only to watch them execute both staff and patients alike, randomly.

The 'villain' within this bunch of the terminally unlikeable people is undoubtedly Tom (Sam Earle), a preppy looking guy dressed in white, who is the first to 'get' the rules of the game, forcing Tyler to drive his pizza delivery van over a pedestrian, only for Tom to finish off the victim himself. Later Tom and his friend Beth (Victoria Diamond) separate from the two other remaining survivors , Tyler and Ashley (Emelia Hellman), with both couples determined to remain alive at the expense of the others. The violence here is graphic and mostly achieved via practical effects, but the overall tone borders on the comic (one victim, a park ranger, is played for laughs); as the deaths increase, there's a growing feeling of participating in a live action video game; indeed an 8 bit animated interlude underlines both that feeling and indeed the way in which we're supposed to view the movie.

Game of Death is undoubtedly scrappy and tonally uneven, but at 73 minutes it knows not to outstay its welcome, and its audacious style and queasy gag violence makes it a strange viewing experience. I actually really liked it. Not quite sure why it's taken so long to get released though, in that it already played two UK film festivals in the last couple of years.

Game of Death is released on digital download from 26 November.

Blood Harvest (Canada 2020: Dir Thomas Robert Lee)

Blood Harvest sets its stall out by way of a pre credit crawl: in 1873 a group of families branched out from the Church of Ireland and set up shop in an isolated forest area in North America, eschewing all scientific progress. In 1956 an eclipse presaged a pestilence which spread throughout the community, killing both crops and livestock: only one homestead remained immune, owned by Agatha Earnshaw (Catherine A Dark Song Walker). Earnshaw has remained relatively prosperous, much to the annoyance of the local townsfolk, from whom she is several miles removed. And there's a reason for her continued isolation; she has a daughter, Audrey (Jessica Reynolds), who no-one knows about; Audrey is kept out of sight and hidden in a box loaded on to her wagon, when Agatha needs to go to town.

As the film opens, it's 1973 (and it's quite an M. Night Shyamalan touch to see a village dressed in the clothes of two centuries previously, knowing that elsewhere the Vietnam war rages and there's a crook in the White House); Audrey is 17, growing in independence and becoming tired of being kept out of sight, for example when a local man, Lochlan Bell (Tom Carey) comes to the farm to (unsuccessfully) barter for goods. Later, while guiding her cart through town, Agatha is confronted by angry villagers who have gathered for a funeral. Audrey, in her box, witnesses the confrontation and her mother being struck by one man, Colm Dwyer (Jared Abrahamson) who with his wife Bridget (Hannah Emily Anderson) have just buried their baby boy Liam. But worse is to come; when Audrey is briefly let out of the box she is seen by one of the villagers, Bernard Buckley (Don McKellar); although, in return for the donation of produce by Agatha, he promises not to tell, both women realise that the secret about Audrey will soon be public knowledge.

Audrey is incensed that Agatha wants no revenge against those who have slighted her, as she can draw on great powers; for Agatha is a witch, and the reason for her prosperity - as the villagers gradually starve - is entirely down to supernatural reasons. And so Audrey, who also has powers, possibly even stronger than her mother, takes it upon herself to wreak that revenge, slowly contaminating the villagers, turning them against each other, while all the time becoming more confident and subversive.

I'm guessing that the title Blood Harvest was forced on the film to make it more appealing to VODers scrolling through viewing choices; its original titles 'The Ballad of Audrey Earnshaw' and later 'The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw' are perhaps more descriptive of the slowburn lyrical nature of the movie. And Blood Harvest is a considered piece; while it has moments of violence, much is not shown and the audience has to work to join some of the narrative dots. The themes of an isolated religiously ostracised rural community trying to eke out a living surrounded by towering dense forests, and a whiff of witchcraft, both bring to mind Robert Eggers' 2015 film The Witch (although Lee's movie is far more upfront about the uncanny elements).

The sense of a once God fearing community feeling that the same God has abandoned them, and their lack of salvation once Audrey's revenge takes hold, is occasionally very painful to watch, particularly as the 'justice' is unrelenting and sometimes savagely drawn out. Splitting the film into four sections: Incantation; Descent; Fallout; and Spring encases the story in ritual, much as the village farmers have geared their lives, with ever diminishing returns, to the cycle of the seasons. I really liked this movie; full of passionate and impassioned performances, by turn quiet and nuanced and shocking and ugly.

Signature Entertainment presents Blood Harvest on DVD and Digital HD from Monday 16th November