Newbie ATIC agent Alana Toro (Zoe Cunningham), who answers to the hologram direction of command chief Agent Polo (James Cosmo), is assigned her first solo mission, the final step of her training. As part of the feuding taking place between rival planets Atopia and Cho-Hacha, a terrorist group, the Marai Haria, have been attacking various targets. They have hijacked a freight ship for reasons unknown; it's Alana's mission to infiltrate the group and stop them.
And it's at this point that I have to mention the budget again, for despite the grand introduction and the opening graphics which suggest spectacle is just around the corner, Alana actually rocks up in The Forge, a dimly lit bar on a space station, where it's supposed that the terrorist group are hanging out. And here she stays for the next 80 odd minutes. For Alana has a tool at her disposal; the ability to reset the mission if she fails, enabling her to learn details about the characters she encounters with successive repeats. And if you're now thinking of movies like Source Code, Edge of Tomorrow/Live Die Repeat or even Groundhog Day, well stop now; one of the first problems with Voidance (that title! Sheesh) is that there's no clarity about what's going on, and where in those other films the 'repeat' element was a chance to learn more and have some fun along the way, both of these qualities are much missing in Dean's film.
Admittedly towards the end things tighten up a bit, by which time we've been subject to waves of histrionic full orchestra score trying and failing to convince us that something interesting is happening, and some of the flattest acting outside of the local village hall drama society; senses have been accordingly dulled. Reader, this is a slog; poorly paced, lacking in tension and, in Cunningham's Alana Toro, a mono emotional lead character that, in her wig, at times looks like Dave Hill in his 1970's Slade heyday.
There's no denying the care invested in his saturated images, the 16mm film stock used betraying all the glitches and pops associated with such an analogue medium, and small casts of actors giving committed, understated performances more associated with 1970s 'realist' TV plays.
And yet, for me, there's 'something' that doesn't work about his films. Rose of Nevada is his most ambitious yet, in terms of storyline. The title refers to a fishing vessel, lost at sea thirty years previously and now mysteriously returned to the harbour of a remote Cornish fishing village (almost the same location and community documented in Jenkin's 2019 debut feature Bait).
This news is of particular concern to one of the missing men's wives (Rosalind Eleazar), who sees its re-appearance as ominous (to compound this, the words "Get off the boat now" are scratched into the vessel's woodwork). The community's economy is not good and times are hard, so it makes sense to re-use the 'Rose of Nevada' with a new crew, comprising Nick (George MacKay) and the lairy Liam (Callum Turner). The pair's first trawl is a success, the boat laden with fish. But on return the village seems to have regained a feeling of prosperity; the local pub is unusually packed, and stranger still the widow of the lost fisherman greets Liam as if they are man and wife. For the pair have returned to 1993; the vessel is not lost at sea, and Liam and Nick are welcomed back to a world that existed before they were born.
Much of the film from here on in is concerned with the young men's responses to the situation in which they find themselves, with Jenkin failing to resist some of the oft used time travel flags (a newspaper dated 1993, smoking allowed inside pubs etc). Liam is accepting, possibly relishing the stability of a new life, whereas Nick is more contemplative and, ultimately, frightened by their time imprisonment.
As well as location (and some cast members) Jenkin here returns to the theme of Cornwall as a forgotten county, blighted by the slow collapse of the fishing industry and the rise of second-homeism; due to the time travel nature of the admittedly slender plot (which also acts as a mirror to the filmmaking process), Rose of Nevada rather rams these points home. It's an intriguing piece, but it's slightness and 'trapped in amber' mis en scene didn't really work for me.
In the days leading up to the 21st birthday of Clarissa (Jasmine Kheen) several of her friends wind up dead, victims of a killer who, after texting them to warn of their impending doom and then despatching them, extracts one of their teeth.
The police are initially baffled until the pieces start to be put together; a chattering teeth toy left at the scene of each crime is traced to a toymaker whose adopted son, Alden, was committed to an asylum, suffering with a rare oral disease.
You guessed it: Alden, played by Owen Llewelyn (last seen - by me at any rate - in 2022's As a Prelude to Fear), is the R.I.P Man, so named because he wears a dental plate embossed with those letters until he's completed filling his toothless gob with the teeth of his victims. At this point, I wondered whether Langlands was inspired by the eponymous creature of Louisa Warren's 'Tooth Fairy' franchise, whose lank haired monster is equally handy with the pliers (or in this case a drill).
Made for around £20,000 and filmed on the mean streets of, er, Sussex (Brighton and Worthing feature heavily), Langlands's follow up to his 2024 movie The Cellar suffers from leaden pacing, patchy performances and a police department who divide up the cliches evenly between them. It spends too long with the drama lite activities of a group of Clarissa's friends, not even stopping to give us a red herring or two; we know who the killer is pretty much from the first scene.
On the plus side it's well and consistently photographed, does not drown in an over emphatic soundtrack (and even uses a local band in a couple of club scenes) and in Llewelyn's Alden, gives us a creepy killer. Langlands is already making the sequel, fright fans.
A confusing prologue, explained not much later in the movie, has a dead man reanimated into a flesh eating zombie via a book of spells (and such a book now appears as a Champdog trademark in nearly every Warren movie).
Newly married Santana (a game Nicola Ditter) is heading off for a new life with disgraced surgeon husband...wait for it...Frank N. Stein (Geordie actor Wayne Dobson, all impressive ink and fight-in-a-car-park charm) and away from her deeply unimpressed family. But their bliss is short lived when Santana is hit by a car and killed. Luckily she gifted Frank a book of spells as a wedding present; yes, the same one we saw in the prologue. It contains the means to resurrect the dead; the only snag is that Frank needs new body parts. Roping in his old ex surgeon pal Dr Pret (Jack Darrell) Frank's obvious destination for the required limbs is Santana's family, headed by the god fearing Arthur (Graeme Muncer). Santana, newly re-assembled, although looking exactly the same, is magicked back into life and sets about munching on the rest of the cast.
Although this is arguably Warren's most successful feature to date (it doesn't have any, or much, of the mid movie slump from which the majority of her movies suffer), the director still can't resist bogging the whole thing down with some character drama which gets in the way of the action. To be honest the whole 'Frankenstein' angle is simply an audience hook, as the Bride's shtick isn't much different to Warren's other creature features. But it's fun while it lasts and Ditter gives us a very physical - and at times nuanced - performance.
Martin Kemp (yes, that Martin Kemp, and arguably the best actor in this) is troubled detective John Verney. Marriage in pieces, son getting mixed up with the wrong crowd and career facing an uncertain future - his boss, Parker (David Yip, of BBC drama The Chinese Detective fame, about which you may need to ask your parents) sees him as a couple of steps from the detective knacker's yard - Verney is down on his luck, and now has the added problem of thirty one unexplained dead or missing persons on his east London patch.
The culprit is a guy in a plague doctor outfit, with glowing green eyes and a "Repent or die!" catchphrase, as evidenced by the only person who has survived the attacks but who later mysteriously dies while in hospital. Teased for his inability to solve the crimes by an itinerant YouTuber, a desperate Verney thinks there might be a link between the killer/abductor and the Jack the Ripper murders. He consults an expert, Professor Altman (Peter James) and discovers a link to the Brethren of the Flame, a sect who flourished during the Pandemic and who deal out divine retribution to people who've been naughty. When Verney's son is also kidnapped things become personal; is this gang related, or is there something more supernatural going on?
'No-ish' is the spoilerish response; again, right up to the last ten minutes or so Doctor Plague, despite its title, risked being dropped from my 'Fantastic' films survey as it looked like it might remain a rather prosaic psycho on the loose police procedural. That it saves its spookiest moments for the last reel does not rescue the rest of the film from overall blandness. Kemp is very watchable, and Sothcott has made a career out of casting 'resting' UK TV thesp mates in his productions (not to mention his rather unusual looking wife Nerissa) but a capable bunch of actors can't save a dull script and an overall lack of pace.
'No-ish' is the spoilerish response; again, right up to the last ten minutes or so Doctor Plague, despite its title, risked being dropped from my 'Fantastic' films survey as it looked like it might remain a rather prosaic psycho on the loose police procedural. That it saves its spookiest moments for the last reel does not rescue the rest of the film from overall blandness. Kemp is very watchable, and Sothcott has made a career out of casting 'resting' UK TV thesp mates in his productions (not to mention his rather unusual looking wife Nerissa) but a capable bunch of actors can't save a dull script and an overall lack of pace.
In The Goodman's Croft, which manages to be funnier - and more action packed - than most of his projects, Kyle plays Chris Ward, an ex RAF Pastor whose travels to foreign climes have brought him face to face with the devil.
Now returned to Scotland, Ward is seeking 'The Goodman's Croft', an area of the Highlands historically reserved for Beelzebub. But his researches are fraught with menace, whether being Satanically stalked or distracted by the gruff Scorbie (a Kyle regular, his brother Andrew). And then there's the Parish Council, a group of disparate types presumably constituted to keep anyone away from the Croft. Meanwhile more secular powers worldwide are failing to hold together global peace; it comes to something when the search for the devil is less important than the prospect of World War III.
With such lofty and depressing themes at work, it's both surprising and refreshing that Kyle treats his subject so lightly; there's an amusing script here, some charming characterisation, and the extended gunplay seems to be a first for the director, who packs an awful lot into his 67 minutes. Scrappy as you like, it looks like The Goodman's Croft was made over two years (2024 and 2025) but only released this year.
You can watch all of Kyle's films via his Chaos Box YouTube channel.
