Solis (UK 2018: Dir Carl Strathie)

Despite its Hollywood sheen and outer space setting, the sci-fi feature Solis was entirely filmed in a studio in Yorkshire, which is as much an advert for UK technology in movie production (Goldfinch Studios in Selby, if you're interested) as it is for Carl Strathie, who has achieved quite something for his first feature, in the 'quart out of a pint pot' low budget filmmaking stakes.

Taking its lead from the David Bowie song 'Space Oddity' by way of Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity, Solis stars lantern-jawed Steven Ogg as asteroid miner Troy Holloway, whose capsule gets caught up in an storm while on his way back from a job. Thrown off course and destined to collide with the sun, Holloway's only hope of survival is to effect repairs to his craft, receiving instructions from the disembodied voice of Commander Roberts (Alice Lowe), also trapped on board another ship, while his oxygen levels deplete at an alarming rate.

Beginning with a quote from a Longfellow poem "Look not mournfully into the past, it comes back not again..." Solis sets itself up as a pensive drama - themes of loss and remorse raise their heads from time to time - but for the most part this feels like a Boy's Own version of the Twelve Labours of Hercules (but on a spaceship), with Holloway facing a number of tests of endurance and tasks of increasing hardship.

David Stone Hamilton's rousing and heroic musical score does a very good job of convincing the audience they're seeing something more important than is actually taking place, but Solis is, when all's said and done, a single hander movie of one bloke in a lot of trouble and having to figure his way out of it, even if it's given the added frisson of having its ninety odd minutes portrayed in real time (Holloway's impending impact is calculated at roughly an hour and half after we first meet him, strapped in his capsule with a dead crew mate by his side).

Lowe, who was fantastic in both Sightseers and Prevenge, is sadly wasted as the voice of Commander Roberts; her rather flat Midlands accent isn't terribly dramatic, and although she's a great actress she's not really given a chance here. Steven Ogg, although no newcomer to the screen, plays lead for the first time and does well with what he has - was it me or was he channeling his inner George Clooney for this role? Sadly most of his acting is restricted to facial contortions and his obvious physicality, as evidenced via roles in TV's Westworld and The Walking Dead, isn't that much in evidence.

For a low budget film Solis looks great. The space capsule is pleasantly and authentically dowdy, and the shots of the silent out of control craft speeding through space to almost certain destruction are effectively rendered. But despite the high production values and the superb photography of Polish cinematographer Bart Sienkiewicz, Solis comes off as a slightly more upmarket version of the 2015 single astronaut in peril UK movie Capsule, which was similarly problematic in conveying drama and peril with such a limited setup.

Prevenge (UK 2016: Dir Alice Lowe)

Prevenge, Alice Lowe's directorial debut, is, and please forgive the pun, a real labour of love. Filmed while Lowe was actually pregnant, it develops from the actress's feelings - ones apparently shared by many expectant mums - that the baby growing inside her was somehow in charge of its host, leaving the nascent parent a mere puppet to its needs. In Prevenge Lowe, who also wrote and produced the film, takes this idea to extremes as lead character Ruth.

Ruth is heavily pregnant and seemingly homeless, living in a hotel room which is her base for the entire film. She is lost, both within herself and, possibly, geographically. Ruth is also a killer, as we see in the first scene where she savagely murders a sleazy pet shop owner - although Ruth seems oblivious to the salesman's creepy come on lines and his death appears random and unmotivated.

Ruth is directed to kill by her unborn child, who maintains a near constant monologue of chiding, cajoling and instruction from within the womb; what Lowe has described as 'the ventriloquist's puppet who whispers in her mother's ear.' Although as Prevenge unfolds, a different and more tragic story is revealed, and much of the film's complexity stems from trying to understand the true motivation for Ruth's anger and bloodlust.

Oh sorry. I forgot to mention that this is a comedy. As bone dry and caustic a one as you're likely to see all year, but a comedy nonetheless, although with few belly laughs (oh, there I go again) - Lowe admits that having written comedy for so long she kind of forgot she was writing a humorous script, and it certainly shows. Prevenge's characters emanate from the kind of 'comedy of embarrassment' archetypes popular with TV writers of tragi-humour these days. DJ Dan, for instance, an unjustifiably overconfident 1970s/80s mobile disco owner, who Ruth meets when she strolls into a sparsely populated basement disco, could have been created for a Edgar Wright movie or something from a Ricky Gervais TV series. And Jo Hartley's note perfect, professionally courteous but hideously condescending midwife could have strolled in from an episode of Green Wing.

Lowe, who made this film quickly, and almost spontaneously it seems, is as comfortable writing these characters as we are seeing them. There's an immediate shared understanding of what we're being shown - the downplayed performances, the flat, drab interiors (nearly all of the film is shot inside, in often very cramped locations) - that derive from 'modern' UK TV comedy, and maybe it's this that makes the intermittent but very credible violence easier to stomach. Happily (although that's perhaps not quite the right word) Lowe uses this is a basis for something far darker than anything you'd see on TV. She is able to indulge her cinematic obsessions freely; camera shots have a Kubrickian emptiness, the murder scenes are as callous and stylised as anything found in a Dario Argento flick, and Lowe's reality divorced performance reminded me of a home counties version of Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion (1965) or maybe Scarlett Johannsen's alien lost in Scotland in Jonathan Glazer's 2013 Under the Skin.There's also a literary subtext to Ruth's character; we see her identify with - and later facially re-enact - the dancing 'Furies' in the 1934 film Crime Without Passion which she watches on TV; the Furies of course being mythological goddesses of revenge who sprang from the blood of the castrated Uranus.

Despite the range of competent supports, this is Lowe's film, and not just behind the camera either. She gives herself all the best lines - her fellow players are little more than stooges setting up her payoff comments, delivered in her understated Coventry burr. And why shouldn't she? Lowe has the track record - 15 plus years as part of comedy writing teams, and previously impressive performances in anything from Dark Marenghi's Dark Place (2004) to Ben Wheatley's brilliant Sightseers (2012) which Lowe co-wrote.

Prevenge isn't perfect by any means - there are some pacing issues inherent in a piece devised and executed within a relatively short time span, and once the overall surprise of seeing a (real) heavily pregnant woman killing people has worn off, the movie becomes slightly repetitive. But the film is all about the performances and the unsettling mood; Ruth (short for ruthless?) is that rare thing, a killer with whom we can sympathise. Lowe perfectly captures the anxieties and fears of pregnancy, and of course turns them up to ten, while never resorting to a cross word. Ruth is a woman done to by the system - homeless, refused employment because of the bump in front of her, and treated icily by the authorities. Who wouldn't go a bit chicken oriental? Ruth's (and Lowe's) fear of the gore and horror of childbirth are inexorably wrapped up in the violence meted out to others. This is a film about creation and destruction - perhaps the first true account of pregnancy stripped of the bows and ribbons that cinema usually places on the 'condition.' Oh, and did I mention that it was a comedy?