Sleep aka Jam (South Korea 2023: Dir Jason Yu)

In Yu's clever and impeccably acted debut feature, successful actor Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun) and his heavily pregnant estate agent wife Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) live happily in their small apartment, eagerly awaiting their new bundle of joy.

Their life becomes disrupted when Hyun-su begins showing signs of sleep disturbance, deeply scratching his face during the night, the wounds resulting in him losing the acting role to which he aspired. Added to this their downstairs neighbour, somewhat bafflingly, complains about excess noise from the couple's flat.

Hyun-Su's symptoms get worse; Soo-jin wakes up one night to find her somnambulous husband eating raw meat, eggs and fish straight from the fridge, narrowly stopping him throwing himself out of the window. Even more horrifyingly, one morning she finds their cute little Pomeranian dog in the freezer.

While her husband seeks a medical solution for his condition, which is diagnosed as REM sleep behaviour disorder - and medicated accordingly - things don't seem to be improving. On the advice of her mother, and concerned about the potential safety of their now just born baby, Soo-jin consults a shaman, and from there a supernatural element creeps into proceedings; the battle for Hyun-Su's recovery - and indeed soul - has begun.

The genius of Sleep is its transformation from light comedy to domestic drama to, well, something a lot darker, achieved effortlessly and, for the most part, in the confines of the couple's modest apartment. Much of the credit for this is due to the perfect casting of Sun-kyun and Yu-mi; this is, essentially, a two hander requiring, by the end, a massive suspension of disbelief, which the pair effortlessly manage.

This is also a film which, in quite an extreme way, details the way in which cracks can appear in otherwise sound relationships. In other dramas the tensions here would arise from, perhaps, the change wrought by the arrival of a new baby. Sleep turns this on its head by those changes coming from an existing member of the household. Words contained on a plaque on the couple's wall remind them that, as a married couple, they are able to face problems together; but when the problem is outside of their control, watching their attempts to adhere to the message are both tragic and, on occasion, darkly humorous.

Yu's previous experience includes AD work on Bong Joon Ho's excellent 2017 movie Okja, and there's something of that director's humanity amid the fantastic - and of finding comedy in situations rather than dialogue - at work here. I look forward to seeing what he comes up with next.

Sleep is in UK cinemas from 12 July.

In A Violent Nature (Canada 2024: Dir Chris Nash)

The slasher genre continues to throw up examples of movies which show there's still life blood left in a format which has basically been following the same template for decades. The Terrifier franchise, the third instalment of which is due in cinemas this year, and the evergreen Scream movies - six entries in and counting - are living proof that there's still an audience - indeed a new generation - for masked killers.

But here comes Canadian Chris Nash with his debut feature, which has taken the genre in a rather different direction. On the surface the template remains unbroken; a group of young people in the woods, looking to party, get picked off one by one by a powerful, unstoppable human monster. 

But In a Violent Nature, from its obscure title to its whole mis en scene, turns the familiar on its head. The teen victims are in this case entirely background characters; IaVN front and centres its killer in a way that hasn't been attempted since Scott Glosserman's underrated 2006 movie Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon.

When we first meet the slasher in question, Johnny (Ry Barrett), he's rising from a woodland grave, his corpse previously kept in place by a locket which is draped over the struts of a fire tower, under which his body is contained. When the locket is purloined by one of the kids (and I'll let you watch the movie to find out why the piece of jewellery is important) Johnny is free to roam - and kill.

If you ever spent any time wondering what Jason Vorhees or Michael Myers did in the scenes when they weren't on screen in those seminal 1980s movies, IaVN kind of answers it, 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead' style (Tom Stoppard's 1966 play which foregrounds two minor characters in 'Hamlet'). We spend a lot of time, POV style, with the camera behind our killer as he trudges through the undergrowth, seeking out people to kill, a lonely furrow which is, amusingly, only sometimes purposeful. 

And those kills, when they come, are generally of the mind boggling, practical Terrifier type variety (in fact their extremity, bordering on the ludicrous, is possibly the only sour note in the whole thing). Far more effective, in my eyes, is a scene where Johnny disappears into a wide lake with one of the kids swimming, almost off camera, on the far side. There's an agonising delay while we wait for the inevitable; little is shown but the sheer oddness of the sequence makes it much more unsettling than the overt stuff.

Props also to the extended final girl section, almost an anticlimax, which ratchets up the tension, letting the viewer's mind do the work, and questioning our expectations about what we expect from a film like this.

IaVN has been reviewed as an arthouse horror movie, and while that's not an unfair comment, it shouldn't be dismissed by those naturally turned off by the concept of el*vated horror. Beautifully shot in academy ratio, containing the tension and the POV nature of the footage, the film eschews the traditional fright flick soundtrack usual for this sort of thing, letting nature and the sound of the woods provide the audio. Johnny's quest is slow, relentless and claustrophobic; the fact that the town authorities are aware of the threat, but powerless to do much about it, makes the film more powerful. Excellent stuff.

In a Violent Nature is released in UK cinemas on 12 July.