Captain Nemo And The Underwater City

Nemonomicon

Captain Nemo And 
The Underwater City
UK 1969 
Directed by James Hill
MGM Blu Ray Zone B (German)

Warning: Some spoilers just below the surface.

There’s a place I know where we can go, it’s such a lot to see,
It’s the fun food, the fun food factory.
Theme song from The Fun Food Factory

Okay... I assume I saw Captain Nemo And The Underwater City on television when I was a kid but there’s not much I remember about it, apart from the music. I wanted to give this one a watch while I was catching up and revisiting stories adapted and inspired by Jules Verne and, in the case of this one, ‘inspired by’ is a polite way of calling this one out in terms of having anything to do with the original source. 

I mean, you’ve got a white actor playing Captain Nemo, Hollywood veteran Robert Ryan and, he has a big submarine called Nautilus. And that’s about it in terms of this film having anything to do with Jules Verne, it’s sad to say. Although it would have been an entertaining, fun romp back in the day and, if you can divorce yourself from the perception of how a modern sci-fi action film should play, you may still have a good time with it now.

While, indeed, Nemo saves a bunch of people from drowning when their ship sinks at the start... unlike the original, he did not cause that sinking himself, he just comes to their dubious rescue and there’s no mention of the original character’s intent on destroying ocean vessels in this. Instead, although those rescued are still his prisoners, he takes them to his big undersea city where they can live a good life, if they so desire. The various rescued even have a small child and his kitten with them so, yeah, we’re definitely in a very different world than that created by Verne.

The main survivors are played by Chuck Connors, Bill Fraser (of Bootsie and Snudge fame), Kenneth Connor (who you’ve probably seen in the odd Carry On film from time to time), Allan Cuthbertson (who is set up as the human villain of the piece but dies already, half way through the movie) and also... Nanette Newman. Now I’ve not seen her in much stuff, it has to be said but I remember her as the host of a really annoying children’s TV programme in the mid 1970s called The Fun Food Factory. It’s a TV show that the IMDB barely registers the existence of, dating it as 1976 but listing it as having zero episodes and... perhaps it’s best this show and its annoying title song has officially vanished from the those seeking the stats.. although at least one episode can be found on YouTube (watch it at your peril is what I say). But I used to tune into it on occasion because I liked Nanette Newman and so it’s nice seeing her in a movie such as this. She has a good presence as the mother of the aforementioned sprog and it’s strongly hinted she will be Nemo’s romantic interest after the story of this one, such as it is, has played out. Alas, although she has good presence in the film, she doesn’t really have much to do and could have done with a better written part, to be honest. 

The other big female role in this, playing one of the community living under the sea and also acting as a love interest for Chuck Connors’ character, is the lovely Luciana Paluzzi... who was, of course, the sultry, sexy SPECTRE assassin who tried to kill James Bond before later taking a shot in the back she intended for him in Thunderball (reviewed here). She has a bit more to do here but... yeah, the film is not really big on building decent characters, I would say. 

Now this was made on a shoestring budget but, even so, the scope of the sets and the design of the production is mostly rather good (there’s even some beautiful Bavaesque lighting at one point). However, the fact that everything is made out of gold in the film is a bit of a problem because, although everything is painted with some kind of gold paint to make it seem expensive, the effect is to just make everything look a bit like it’s made out of cheap plastic. Which is a shame because the shot compositions and colours are pretty good. 

Apart from Captain Nemo’s diving suit, that is. 

This is black with big, glittery patterns on it and looks nothing less like a 1930s - 50s American western, decorative cowboy outfit. In the scenes where Ryan wears this stuff, he does look quite ridiculous, it’s sad to say. And, as it happens, the underwater farm sequence where Nemo is showing his ‘guests’ around the parts of the ocean which provide them all with food, looks more than competent but, honestly, slows the film down in pace and is a bit dull. 

One very good thing, though, is the score by Walter Stott (who later became Angela Morley and is billed like that on the FSM CD release from a few decades ago). That being said... an I’m not suggesting anything underhanded here... but the main theme sounds quite like the love theme that Jerry Goldsmith wrote for the 1984 movie Supergirl and the resemblance is so striking that I wonder if parts of this score turned up on the temp track for that movie, when Jerry was given the job (I guess I’ll never know, now). 

Other things of note is that Paluzzi plays something which is both similar and not at all like a theremin in one scene and, another note, a couple of people who ‘leave’ the city at the end of the picture should surely have decompression sickness when they reach the ocean’s surface. They come up way too quick. And the last note I have on this from when I was watching the movie is that Chuck Connors’ hair here is one of the most scary things you’ll see in this tale. I’m assuming it was a wig but, whatever it is, you certainly wouldn’t miss him and his aggressive locks walking down the street. 

And that’s me done here... Captain Nemo And The Underwater City is a pleasant film with not too much going for it to make it stand out in its own right and certainly nothing to do with the source material. If you like Nemo and The Nautilus then you might give it a look but, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this to anyone. Incidentally, I had to pick this one up on a German Blu Ray disc because the film is not available in the UK or US, alas. It’s completely English friendly and has the original UK language track on it but, if you are hard of hearing, know that it doesn’t have a subtitle track on it. 

Anora

 

A Choice Between Two Indefinite Articles

Anora
USA 2024
Directed by Sean Baker
Universal

I’ve been wanting to see Anora since the end of last year. Alas, it played for one week in limited showings at my local cinema and trying to get to somewhere else to see it during the pre-Christmas rush proved impossible for me. But I knew enough from the advertising that it might well have been one of my favourite films last year, enough to give it a mention in my intro to my New Year’s Day list. And the reason for that is, primarily, because I really trust writer/director Sean Baker... even though I’ve not seen any of his prior films (a couple of them deal with subject matter I’m not comfortable with... my problem specific to me).

So why trust Sean Baker so much... and did the film live up to my expectations?

Well, back when we were in lockdown during the pandemic, I was watching a lot of those brilliant Criterion Closet videos to pass the time after work and one of them was Sean Baker and I liked his style. But the clincher was when, as America was just locking down, he flew up to the Severin Films HQ and recorded their equivalent version of the CC, the Severin Cellar. At the time, I think he was the first person to do both the Criterion and Severin movie grabs (I think there’s been one other guy since). And in the Severin one he not only did me a solid by forewarning me ( to allow me to save some cash a couple of years in advance) that Severin were working on their big Black Emanuelle box set (reviews coming to this blog at some point) but, honestly, you could see how much the guy loved film in any kind of genre and budget (as it should be) and I just have a huge amount of respect for him (not sure about his singing voice but I’ll get back to that). These can be found on YouTube here and here.

Two other things which endear me to him and this film in particular is that... firstly, the Blu Ray release in a month or two is bypassing the main distributor and going straight to Criterion... the first time a film has done that in a long while, I think. Even the great Wes Anderson generally has to go through a distributor version first before ending up with the definitive edition on Criterion. Secondly... man, the cover of the Blu Ray they are putting out is a wonderful nod to a shot of the late, great Soledad Miranda for one of her poster shots for Jess Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos (reviewed here) so, well, you’ve got to love this guy.

So, yeah, Anora.

Mikey Madison (who I hated as one of Manson’s psychopaths in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood... which means she did her job well) plays the terminally cute sex worker Ani (which she prefers over her real name Anora), who works in a strip club and, because she can speak Russian, gets hooked up with a young client, Ivan, played by Mark Eydelshteyn, who is the son of a ‘beyond rich’ Russian family who are amazingly famous for reasons we, the audience, never find out. And, after an extended ‘escort vacation’ the two get hitched in Las Vegas, marrying Anora into Ivan's family. Which doesn’t go down well with said family who send some heavies in to make the two annul the marriage pronto but, Ivan does a runner and then Anora has to work with these goons to find Ivan, primarily because she wants to stay married.

And it’s brilliant, as is one of the heavies, Igor, played by Yura Borisov, who had my sympathies right from the start because of Anora’s ‘fighting for survival’ abuse of his character... which is feeding into the wonderful conclusion to the film. Which I won’t spoil but I will touch upon in a little while.

Firstly, the film is shot wonderfully with a rich colour palette leaning into reds and blues which, honestly, just looks like eye candy all the way through. There’s lots of nudity, of course, and the film starts strongly in the strip club in which Anora works, panning down a column of lap-dancers giving shows before getting to Anora and her dance... and with the credits superimposed against her brightly lit face and body, I can’t help but think that Baker intended this sequence to be exactly as I interpreted it. Which is as a kind of ‘live and unplugged’ variant of a James Bond opening title sequence. It looks fantastic and puts us into a kind of ‘adult fantasy’ environment straight away.

So the cinematography is wonderful and... so is the editing, actually (which, again, I think was also handled by Sean Baker). Madison’s performance is absolutely blisteringly funny at some points of this frenetic movie and the comedy of the extended ‘home invasion’ sequence has some high comedy where the heavies just don’t know what to do with a kicking, biting, screaming, abusive Anora so they can calculate their best move. And that editing and timing really come into their own here, as Baker sets up a shot where the camera is just trained on Madison’s mouth while the audience are waiting to see if she starts screaming the house down again. This is a marvellous example, I would say, of the art of cinema where the performance and the editing are absolutely in synch with each other... so if nothing else, Baker is an incredible director. And the lead actress really is a force of nature.

Now the film has no musical score but it does have a heck of a lot of needle drop songs in it. Normally this would be a huge turn off for me but... even though I really didn’t think much of the majority of the songs... they fit the milieu of the characters nicely and, yeah, they didn’t frighten me away. Which is another good sign for this movie as far as I’m concerned.

What it also has is a magnificent ending between Anora and Igor which, is hard to pin down as a definitive conclusion but which acts, finally, as an emotional release for the central character. It’s a wonderful, almost ambiguous ending which, in my mind, pushes further the kind of 1970s, stylistic aesthetic which I feel the movie is kind of soaked in. It’s an ending which feels like its very important, while at the same time being completely open to interpretation as it seems to pitch different, almost contrasting emotional states and slip them into a blender together... good stuff.

And I think that’s me done, more or less, on Anora (which I shall be purchasing on Blu Ray as soon as Criterion get it out over here). It’s a hard recommendation from me and, frankly, it may well have pipped Hundreds Of Beavers (reviewed here) to the 2024 top spot if I’d seen it last year. And I’m glad to say the critical and audience response to this one has been ‘through the roof’ too. It is, I would say, very much a masterpiece of a movie and I can’t help but think that both director and stars alike are left feeling, in the singing voice of Baker in the Severin Cellar when talking about Emanuelle And The Last Cannibals (review coming to this blog at some point in the nearish future)... “so happy, like a clown.”

Heart Eyes

Romancing
The Tone

Heart Eyes
Directed by Josh Ruben
USA/New Zealand 2025
Paramount
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Some minor spoilers on details of violence.

Well now, if you’re a long time reader you might be wondering why I booked a ticket to see an American slasher movie like Heart Eyes, a sub-genre of thriller I really hate (although I absolutely adore Italian gialli, which of course gave them their start). Well, all I can say is this film was part of the Cineworld chain’s Secret Screaming screenings, previewing the movie six days before its release on Valentine’s Day in the UK. So, yeah, I almost walked out of the cinema when I realised it was this but, I didn’t and, I have to say, I really didn’t have a bad time with it although, given a lot of negative elements in the movie (and the fact that one of the writers wrote the absolutely awful It’s A Wonderful Knife, reviewed here) I’m really surprised that I didn’t hate this one. I was also surprised because I’d mistakenly assumed that the Secret Screaming branded screenings would all be horror films but, no, in this case just a thriller.

Okay, so Heart Eyes is set on Valentine’s Day, which is a day that a notorious killer with lighting up ‘heart eyes’ (when they’re in infrared mode) as part of the costume, is continuing the yearly tradition of picking a town in the US and killing random couples on their Valentine’s celebration (in the most brutal and goriest ways that can be had, of course). In this film the killer mistakenly fixates on a new, ‘almost couple’, jewellery marketing executive Ally (played by Olivia Holt) and her emergency ‘campaign fixer’ Jay (played by Mason Gooding). Carnage ensues which, over the course of the movie, brings them both together to cement an actual relationship between the two leads.

And if that sounds like a cliché then, yeah, it really is and one of the biggest weaknesses of the film is that it’s filled to the brim with similar clichés, I mean all over the shop. Which means there are zero surprises in store for absolutely anyone familiar with the tropes of this particular genre... and I can tell you that I personally am not that familiar with them and I was still rolling my eyes at what I’m sure the writers would call a clever manipulation of plot mechanics of these kinds of movies but, nah, that’s just an excuse to hit the same tired old beats all the other similar movies seem to bash you over the head with.

Fans of these kinds of entertainments will surely relish the bloody carnage which litters the film - the opening sequence alone has a big knife through an eyeball, a crossbow bolt through a face and a woman squashed in some kind of industrial press at a vineyard, her head exploding as her eyeball pops out - so there is something for slasher fiends to keep close to their heart.

But, yeah, the terrible story and use of hackneyed borrowings from other movies doesn’t help things, to be honest.

However, the film has a few saving graces which turn it around, in my opinion. Firstly the dialogue between the two main characters is pretty good and, since Holt and Gooding give such brilliant performances, it means you can totally be behind their characters all the way and they are not just cyphers. 

Secondly, the film is a slasher rom-com with the emphasis on romance, not the killings. I mean, yeah, sure, the violence inevitably ramps up as the film progresses but it’s more like a proper romantic movie with the (admittedly cliché) extended ‘meet cutes’ and where the characters and their attitudes to each other are properly explored at a leisurely pace, just punctuated with a grisly murder here and there. And even though it’s not an out and out comedy (there are some scenes like that though, such as when they’re at a drive-in watching His Girl Friday and two characters are sexing it up in the back of the vehicle while they’re hiding from the rampaging killer) there is a sharp sense of humour injected into the movie which shines through, even when everybody is playing it straight. So there’s that.

Ultimately, my expectations of this movie were as low as they can get and so I was pleasantly surprised that, with the dialogue and the wonderful central performances, Heart Eyes manages to rise above many in this genre and I actually did find myself enjoying a lot of it. It’s probably a nice, gory thriller to see on Valentine’s Day, if that’s your kind of thing but, the cynic in me can’t help but think that this film is now going to be milked through several, probably lesser, sequels over the next few years. Which I'll now feel obligated to see because I've seen this one.

Killing Eve Series 3

Eve It To Griever

Killing Eve Series 3
UK/USA BBC
Eight Episodes 13th April to 1 June 2020

Warning: Spoilers on this one.

It’s funny... I’ve heard a lot of complaints about the third series of Killing Eve. People seem to think it’s lost it’s edge or is deathly dull and even my mother, who avidly watched the first couple of series with my father and I, stopped joining us after episode two of this third season. I can kinda understand the drop off in attention in some ways... this series possibly doesn’t match people’s expectations of what this one might have been in terms of the somewhat hollow but still quite strong statement of Villanelle being rejected by Eve and shooting her in the back as an end of season cliffhanger last year.

That the title character would survive was never in doubt but while the simple resolution to this where Eve (Sandra Oh) and Villanelle (Jodie Comer) meet on a London bus as Eve passionately kisses and then head butts her it’s, alas, not par for the course for this particular series in terms of dramatic resolutions. Truth be told, that’s about the only time Eve and Villanelle share screen time together until the last episode... which is kind of a shame because, while both the first two series kept the sexual/killer tension between the two strong by keeping them apart for most of the running time, it’s almost like the writers couldn’t think of anything else to do except keep them apart even more this year and... rather than bringing the ‘distance relationship’ to life, it just kind of drains the show of any real punches this time around.

Not that it hasn’t got a lot going for it... I just think people were expecting something different to what they got.

This one starts off with an episode which, on the aftermath of Eve surviving her wounds, Kenny (Sean Delaney), who worked for his mother and Eve’s boss Carolyn (Fiona Shaw) in the last show and who has quit the bureau to take a job at as a trainee journalist at a magazine, befriends Eve and is her only contact with her old espionage life... which she does not want back. However, when Kenny takes a fatal dive off a roof at the end of the first episode, all the players come back as Eve and Carolyn try to find the killer who they assume is a member of the mysterious but deadly ‘Twelve’, who Villanelle works for. That being said, Carolyn is still under my suspicions as being the ultimate leader of The Twelve so we’ll see how that goes in the next series, I suspect.

Meanwhile, Villanelle has a new and deadly set of bosses but wants to quit her assasin’s life and do something else, preferably with Eve but neither of them are that sure of each other, obviously. Hence the brutal head butt on their first, brief meeting. And, it’s all a bit familiar but with less at stake, it seems to me. Eve has to reconcile with the fact that her husband just doesn’t want her around anymore, after the way events played out for him last series and, though he gets a pitchfork through his throat for his trouble (he survives, it seems)... as a last ditch attempt by Villanelle’s employers as a frame up job to make it look like Villanelle has killed him, in order to drive a wedge between them... the whole thing seems a little less dramatic as, I suspect, most of the audience has probably written off Eve’s husband as a source of interest at this point anyway.

That being said... the whole cast are stunning. Especially Sandra Oh, Jodie Comer, Fiona Shaw and Kim Bodnia (as Villanelle’s former director Konstantin, who’s having his own troubles this series). There’s even a staggeringly interesting ‘Eveless’ episode where Villanelle finds her lost mother and then, as one might expect, kills her. To be honest though, the whole series does feel a bit like padding. The producers were already making series four, I think, at the same time as this one so the whole thing feels like much more of a fine tuning of the main players in the cast (and the setting up of a ‘big boss’ danger character for Villanelle to have to contend with in the next series) so that a dramatic resolution to the show may, if they don’t go for series five, be a possibility. It’s not dull, in other words but, at the same time, it’s not packing the punch of the previous two. Also, the end of the very last shot this year is something which is really easy to see coming. I new exactly where the credits would start rolling as the sequence started and, frankly, that’s not much of a cliff hanger either, in all honesty.

So there you go... a short review for a short series. Back in the 1970s the first three series combined would have made up the episode count for just one series so I don’t when or why having such short numbers of episodes became the norm here. Doctor Who and Sherlock are guilty of such minimalism too. Who the heck is controlling these budgets? However, Killing Eve is, as far as I’m concerned, one of the jewels in the BBC crown and although this third series may be a little sluggish in terms of character resolution or the thrills and spills of previous seasons, I think it’s still an absolutely necessary watch for fans of Killing Eve and, hopefully, the writing will pay dividends in the fourth season when, presumably, things that have been planted this year come to fruition. So, you know, maybe give it a go.

Sunstone Volumes 1-5

The Long And Binding Road

Sunstone
Print Collections 1-5
Written and illustrated by Stjepan Šejić
Top Cow Publishing

I’ve only recently gotten into digital comics and they’re not really my best choice of reading materials when I much prefer the printed page to all this electronic gubbins. But price and scarcity trump that kinda consideration in the digital realm, I guess. That being said, I’ve noticed lately that the .cbr and .cbz files which can be downloaded from the internet (often for free, it seems to me) are nothing like, say, watching a comic or cartoon off of a DVD or Blu Ray, which tend to get a little pixilated, quite often. This file format is pretty good, when synced up to an iPad (or nearest equivalent tablet) at giving you something which is 100% the same, almost, as holding a comic in your hands... if not actually approximating the scent of a good old comic or giving you that feeling of paper rubbing against the fingers which is almost as much about the reading experience as anything else.

I do know comics a little, though. When I was either three or four, I started reading with comics such as Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and SHAZAM! (the original Captain Marvel) and it certainly a format that teaches you to read fast, I can tell you that. I was reading a lot of comics for the first 16 years of my life and then, back in July 1984, I read the serialised version of what was and still is, to me, the greatest single literary experience of my life. I never thought I’d say that about a comic but it’s true... within the pages of 2000AD, which I’d been buying and saving since its first issue, Alan Moore’s three book epic, The Ballad Of Halo Jones, first hit my brain and has never left it. Even with great works like the same writer’s Watchmen or Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns or Moore’s The Killing Joke... The Ballad Of Halo Jones has never been surpassed and it’s the standard I measure all comics against. It’s always been the greatest comic ever written and drawn and that’s still the case.

Sunstone is, therefore, not the greatest comic ever written and illustrated. At least to me. However... it is easily the second greatest comic ever written and I say that having read some really great masterpieces in my time. This comic is just about perfect... so it obviously makes it difficult to review, for sure.

Now, I think I may have heard of Sunstone before, a couple of years ago... or I may not have. It rang a bell but when I found a stash of the first six volumes of this book online I gave it a go and... well. What’s that you say.... there are six of these (so far) but you are only going to be talking about the first five here? Well, yes. That’s because... and much to my surprise because I wasn’t done with the main characters yet... the first main arc of the book comes to a close at the end of the fifth volume and it seemed, with only the sixth volume starting the next arc actually out there so far, a natural place to break from what has been an intense binge session of a great work of art.

Sunstone tells the story of Lisa and Allison, two bisexual turned lesbian characters who have an intense BDSM relationship which turns very quickly into an intense love affair... which neither of them wants to admit for fear of the other one rejecting that their friendship and sexual role play (Alli is the domme and Lisa is the submissive) is anything more than that. Now the book is told from the point of view of Lisa, who is a writer, telling her story and, also, the story of many of the friends they make on their journey. It tells of how they met, how they both grew up and how their appreciation of the BDSM scene came about and, also, how everything jelled for their friends too. In fact, the nice thing about this book is that it jumps off on a tangent and the various other characters become as much people to care and worry about as the two main protagonists.

It also explains, to some extent, some of the different guises and forms from the world of BDSM which, I have to say, would probably be fairly educational to some people. I’ve been interested in and participating in certain aspects of that in my life in different guises and levels for a while now so I'm fairly experience in a wide range of stuff but, I’m happy to say, the writer is pushing ‘safety’ and ‘limits’... and the extension of those limits... to the forefront of the occasional sexually charged scenes within the story (of around 600 pages of story divided between the first five volumes). Heck, even the title of the strip is the safeword Alli gives to her subs and lovers when she is playing with them. As the pages go on a newbie to the scene can learn about stuff like harnesses, rigging, S&M play and also, on occasion, some of the risks involved... such as the consequences of someone stupidly cutting off the blood circulation with ropes applied incorrectly or a nice throwaway comment about the use of gags and how you play with them when a sub isn’t able to utter a safeword.

There’s also a lot of humour in the pages and, absolutely, a lack of casting judgement on the practices on display here from the writer... not always from some of the characters but, hey, that’s how you create the drama and provide the path to enlightenment. For instance, on the humour front... and its hard to recreate this without showing the panels but... let me just put it in script form...

Lisa narrating: We had to employ advanced tactics to persuade her...”

Person A: Come on!
Person B: No!
Person C: Come oon!
Person B: No!
Person A: Come ooooon!
Person B: “No!”
Person C: “Come ooooon!”
Person B: “Fine.”

Or in another scene where Alli has worn out Lisa’s now sore tongue by having her bound body going down on her for an incredibly long session so all her ‘s’ sounds become ‘sh’... and when Alli’s best friend Alan shows up just after and calls them on it... “Of course you don’t. Lisa merely developed a mean case of Connery by diving for pearls.” This book is really, very funny and, quite smart while also having tonnes of nerdy references to stuff like Star Trek, Doctor Who and even a ‘Dildo’ Baggins joke (at one point Lisa likens Comic Conventions to Fetish Conventions and, yeah, with what Comic Conventions have become over the years, I totally see that).

And the art is gorgeous too. Painted stuff which constantly walks a thin line between exquisitely detailed realism and cartoony expressionism, which shouldn’t quite work this well when combined but it really does. Also, the way the panels are designed in the comic are amazing. There’s a lot of stuff where you see simultaneous things happening, where the action of two individual characters and situations are crosscut visually on the same page, for instance. But, the artist manages to pull off this kind of stuff which does, in some pages and spreads, include some elabourate designs, without throwing up any impediment to the way the eyes decode the flow of the material on the page... which is a difficult thing to get right and, believe me, I’ve seen in a lot of published stuff where this can sometimes go wrong and your eye is left not knowing which part of the page to read next. This didn’t happen to me once within the first five volumes and... well, what can I say? This guy nailed it. And bearing in mind how tangential and sometimes devilishly metatextual some of the content in this book is, that’s really no mean feat.

 I haven’t quite figured out how he’s able to write female characters so well yet but, it all seems pretty authentic to me and he does manage to explore a few different ‘character voices’ over the arc and none of them seem out of place or too overly like anyone else when they are talking or thinking. And this, I’m sure, is one of the things that makes this book so addictive. I seriously didn’t want to put it down and that’s why I’ve had to stop for a while now that Lisa and Alli are no longer going to be part of the next arc. I mean, yeah, I’m sure they’ll feature heavily in it, actually but, this is the majority of their story done I think (although there are some important bits hinted at that we’ll obviously see from a different perspective when the time comes, I am guessing). The book takes the form of a flashback to real events from Lisa, Alli and their friends’ life in the past but, occasionally, the past will be interrupted by a little intrusion from ‘the present’ where Lisa is writing from and, obviously, things are still moving towards where they are at in their lives now.

I am, of course, referring to these characters as real people because, very quickly (like from the first couple of pages) they became just that for me... and I’m telling you now it’s rare for me to get this attached to fictional characters, for sure. Presumably because the writer has a very good ear and there is a strong sense of 'the truth of things' coming across in the writing all the way through. This is just plain good writing. Period.

So, yeah, as you can probably tell, this comic totally had me hooked and I feel like I need to come down a little to exorcise the addictive hold it has on me... which is, of course, where me writing a review of it comes in. If you write about something then maybe it stops holding power over you, right? At the moment I’m not sure whether to go onto Book Six or wait until the next couple of volumes come out before getting back to it. Either way though, I’m guessing you can tell from my somewhat clumsy enthusiasm here that I’ll definitely be recommending it to pretty much anyone I meet who has an interest in either the format of the comic strip or the particular subject matter at hand. Sunstone is seriously a comic book that means a lot to me right now so... yeah... this one is something you should read, for sure.

Kiss Of The Damned

A Vampire Under The Influence

Kiss Of The Damned
USA 2012
Directed by Xan Cassavetes
Disney Blu Ray Zone 2

I’ve become somewhat jaded over the last ten years or so to the vampire genre. I went on record a couple of years ago saying that, over the last decade, there have only been four really decent additions to this particular niche of horror fantasy that I know of which are worth crossing running water for and they are Let The Right One In (reviewed here), We Are The Night (reviewed here), Byzantium (reviewed here) and Only Lovers Left Alive (reviewed here). After seeing the trailer for Kiss Of The Damned, a relatively recent vampire movie written and directed by John Cassavetes’ daughter Xan, I was hoping to add another to that short list but, for all its strengths and charm, I don’t think it quite makes it but... it’s definitely got an interesting vibe to it, that’s for sure.

After some establishing shots of a lady in a white house, we see that she is a vampire and follow her first attack on... something... out in the night. This first vampire kill of the film, like the majority of them in this picture, is not particularly graphic in nature and is more composed of a kind of abstract impression of violence, rather than outright showing the fang to flesh ripping so common in modern iterations of the vampire myth. It’s actually an interesting way to do it and I might normally applaud that approach but, it has to be said, I didn’t find this nearly as effective at clarifying or conveying the raw nature of the kind of violence associated with this ‘after dark’ species and... well... something didn’t feel that right with this approach here, for some reason. Maybe it just wasn’t shocking enough in terms of the way it was edited. Who knows?

The name of the vampire in question is Djuna and she’s played here, very intriguingly, by Joséphine de La Baume. She soon hooks up with an equally astonishing actor, Milo Ventimiglia, who plays a writer named Paolo, who she meets by chance when she’s returning her videos one night at her local rental store. She tries to warn Paolo about her ‘not so available because I’m a bloodsucking vampire’ status but, after some persistence on the part of the young writer, she caves in and lets him into her place for a second time.

She does her best to practice safe sex with him and, in this case, safe sex means she’s spread eagled and chained to all corners of her four poster bed in a vision of BDSM style loveliness while the wordsmith has his way with her but, as he becomes attached to her during their sexual relations, he frees her and she bites him in her passion... vamping him up and turning her new lover into one of her own kind.  Which is nice and he fits right in with her social circles of various vampires who have been walking among us for centuries. And since he writes at home, he doesn’t even have to change his work routine too much now that he has, because of the whole allergic to sunlight thing, become a bit of a night owl.

But of course, all dramas have to have a challenging element to upset the status quo and, just like the aforementioned Jarmusch film, Only Lovers Left Alive, it comes in the shape of the main female protagonist’s bratty vampire sister, who has to come and stay with them for a week or two while a new safe haven can be found for her. That’s when the complications begin, of course, as sister Mimi (played by Roxane Mesquida) is, at best, a trouble maker and, at worst, someone who threatens the status quo of not just our two blood crossed lovers but the whole existing vampire society on the planet.

The film itself is absolutely beautiful to look at, I have to say. The shots are filled with bright colours and the director chooses different palettes for different scenes and, coupled with some clean compositions, things look a zillion bucks. I know everybody has been getting tired of blue and teal and the various variations of that colour combination over the last 25 or so years in Hollywoodland but there are some truly great orange versus blue set ups here which really play against each other to make those colours pop.

The compositions are, as I said, very clean and tidy in their design, demonstrating a meticulousness almost bordering on obsession and it makes for some nice moments of linear beauty throughout the film. For example, a shot looking down a staircase might have made Hitchcock proud. There’s a beautiful shot, too, of the two main protagonists making love in what appears to be a slightly blurred blue wash and we then realise we are watching them through the other side of an aquarium with the fish and their environment in sharp focus against the two vampire lovers.

Everybody looks really good too and it’s like we've been invited to a party where all the ‘beautiful people’ are attending. Some of the dialogue is quite interesting, exploring the politics of the vampire world and the cocktail conversations about just who got here first on this planet... humans or vampires... are kinda interesting.

However, the film has some minus points too. By about the half way mark it kind of goes downhill a little and... well maybe I’m being too demanding but it just didn’t seem to be exploring too many new territories, instead allowing the natural path of the ‘story’ take over in a less interesting way than the carefully observed details of the world building had made their mark in the earlier scenes. Also, the score is mixed a little too loudly in some places and obscures the ability to easily hear certain information, it seemed to me.

All that being said, however, Kiss Of The Damned is still a nice little vampire movie and while it’s not one of the absolute best in recent memory, it’s still standing head and fangs above the majority of those made in the last ten years and I really loved what looked like an homage to Jean Rollin in terms of the typography on the end credits. So, not exactly the best vampire movie I’ve seen but certainly something I would recommend to enthusiasts of the genre if they are running on empty to get their next fix. I think the director has a lot of promise and I look forward to seeing more of her movies at some point.

Nina Forever

Anaïs Nina

Nina Forever
2015 UK Directed by The Blaine Brothers
UK cinema release print.

One of the things that makes looking at the cinematic arts a worthwhile experience is that, just occasionally, you get something popping up which is an absolute joy to watch and which reminds you exactly why you spend so much time watching flickering images projected onto one screen or another in the first place. Nina Forever, a film I kind of picked up on as being something to watch out for while on Twitter towards the end of last year, is one such monument to near cinematic perfection. It’s also very cheap on Blu Ray right now (always a help) and, despite winning a number of festival prizes, still doesn’t seem to be very well known and, frankly, that’s really got to change. This is definitely a movie which people should know about.

The film is centred around trainee paramedic (and part-time supermarket worker) Holly, played by Abigail Hardingham and Rob, played by Cian Berry. Holly admires Rob because, after the death in a car accident of his girlfriend Nina (played by Fiona O'Shaughnessy), he had tried to kill himself. Following a break up with her current boyfriend who leaves her because she is ‘too vanilla’ and ‘not dark enough’, Holly actively tries to insert herself into the distressed Rob’s life and, after not very long, the two become involved. However, their troubles start right from the very first time they begin to get intimate because, you see, the damaged, bloody, ghostly corpse of Nina manifests itself in their bed and starts making acerbic comments every time the two are in the middle of ‘getting it on’. This is no flimsy apparition, either, as Nina leaves her mark on things whenever she is manifested and, pretty soon, dumping the blood soaked bed sheets and turning over the bloody mattress becomes a regular fixture of Holly and Rob’s life.

And so that’s the basic set up of the movie but, despite how that sounds, the film is far from being a horror movie or, to be honest, even the “fucked up fairytale” the film’s cover proclaims it to be. In actual fact, it’s a poignant, sometimes very touching but, almost always, very charming romantic comedy.

Let’s start with the acting. Abigail Hardingham is unbelievably cute in this and one of those actresses who you fall in love with immediately you start to get to know her character. She is just absolutely amazing, does wonders with her facial reactions/expressions and has the audience involved with things right from the outset. Cian Berry is also pretty cool and turns in a strong performance, with some great comic timing, as the movie progresses towards its unusual conclusion. Fiona O'Shaughnessy’s Nina, apart from being the talking point that moves the tale forward, is actually not in it for a lot of the time as she only pops up when the two main protagonists are having sex, but she does bring her own dynamic to the picture and is a perfect contrast to Hardingham’s Holly. I can imagine that, if this film had been made 20 years ago, it’s the kind of role someone might have asked Eileen Daley to have a go at. Although her personality grates in contrast to the others, she is the much needed third part of this triangle which lives within the film and takes the audience on a journey like none before.

The film starts with some beautiful titles which, even on Blu Ray, are hard to read. These slowly fade in and then suddenly flare up into readability for a fraction of a second before quickly diminishing to make room for the next. An electronic build up on the foley suddenly turns into the sound of a motor vehicle crash and then we see the very first shot of the movie. And it’s seriously arresting and beautiful in its stillness as we see a roadway with Rob and his crashed bike with dominant blues and blacks in the colour palette, a slow rising column of smoke adding the only real movement in this long held shot until Rob starts moving again and we realise he is alive. It’s actually quite breathtaking in its beauty and, like a lot of the establishing shots seen throughout the film, containing a kind of dream-like and contemplative quality that I could only compare to the poetic cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky.

The film is just full of wonderful stuff like this and, combined with the absolutely spot on character acting, contrasting with some beautiful moments of visual punctuation, it all contributes towards marking this film out as a minor masterpiece. Like a couple of films have done recently, for better or worse, the Blaine Brothers use animated, typographic text on screen to illustrate what’s going on when various characters text each other. Far from being distracting and gimmicky as it was earlier in the year in The Shallows (reviewed here), this actually adds a layer of emotional depth to the proceedings and perfectly captures the unspoken communication which has begun to dominate our daily lives. For instance, after their first ‘almost date’, Holly is woken in the middle of the night by a text from an ‘unknown’ caller (meaning she hasn’t gotten around to putting Rob’s name in as a contact on her phone yet), simply saying “I really wish I’d kissed you.” The text goes unanswered but the expression on her face tells us that she is looking forward to the start of a new relationship.

Another perfect moment where text is used to augment the emotional qualities of the movie is when Rob, who has been in an argument and is spending time away from Holly, leaves the house of his dead girlfriend’s parents and starts to write a text to Holly... but we then see the text backtrack and erase itself as we realise that he is uncertain of what to say... whether the text would cause more harm than good... and he then decides to leave his thoughts unsaid. It’s great stuff and shows how much the writers, directors and, of course, the actors, understand these carefully observed moments which are part and parcel of everyday, contemporary life.

Asides from the stunning photography, capturing an almost ‘other worldly realm’ whenever any of the characters are on their own, the film has some nicely put together pieces of ‘visual stuttering’ which almost reminded me of Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey in their sophistication and the sheer arrogance of the directors at making the sequences work in this manner. For instance, the first time Holly takes off her clothes, as she is about to make love to Rob for the first time, it’s approached in little flashbacks from a point when Holly is thinking back to it. However, these little twos and fros, backwards and forwards in time as we watch Holly remove her clothes and watch her remembering removing her clothes, displaced and fractured from the main narrative conventions, serves to set up the scene as we are about to see it played out back in the present, in real time... and when we see it again, certain parts are left out for the sake of brevity and it’s the perfect balance, once more displaying the deft touch of the directors/editors as they weave a spell of timeless romance and still having it make perfect sense in terms of the way our brains decode this visual syntax.

And a word about those sex scenes... since it’s about the manifestation of a dead girlfriend who only comes out to play when sex is happening. There are a fair few of them but, somehow, the directors manage to make them both incredibly raunchy and, amazingly tastefully shot at the same time. Which is no mean feat when you think about it. And it's brilliantly light visual touches riffing on a more ‘in your face’ theme, along with stunning lines such as “Neither of us thought permanent marker was permanent enough”, that help to make Nina Forever the absolute triumph of movie making that it is.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, Nina Forever absolutely blew me away. It’s both intense yet achingly sweet in its dissection of young love and, to boot, it has an ending which I really didn’t see coming and which is, in some ways, a bit of a twist. Well, okay, I can’t truthfully say I didn’t contemplate the possibility of this kind of conclusion but I jettisoned the possibility that the ending could play out like this because it’s not the easiest to articulate and I was personally plumping for one of two other endings... one ecstatically happy and the other one kind of bittersweet in its finality and gateway status when, in fact, the ending which we do get is infinitely more interesting and, in some ways, a lot stronger than the one I was most expecting. I can only applaud the subtlety and the challenge to one of the characters that this particular ending brings (and it’s really, probably, not the one you are thinking it could be) and I have to say that this movie really marks out the Blaine Brothers as immense cinematic talents to look out for in future (and I’ll certainly be looking out for Abigail Hardingham too, you can bet on that).

If I’d have somehow managed to see this at the cinema last year, bearing in mind I’m not even sure this movie got any kind of mainstream release beyond maybe a few festival screenings, then this movie would easily have made one of the top few places of my ‘greatest films of the year’ list. As it is, this one is certainly a hard recommend from me and, all I can say is, I wish I’d discovered this earlier. It’s still haunting me now, weeks after first watching it. Give it a go if you get a chance... it’s got a magic all of its own.

Crimson Peak

Redded Bliss

Crimson Peak
2015 USA
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Slight spoilers in this one 
in terms of the first half of the movie.

Well... this one surprised me by completely living up to my expectations of it... which were unrealistically high, it has to be said.

I first saw the trailer for Crimson Peak online, either at the end of 2014 or early 2015, if my memory is not playing tricks on me. I admire Guillermo del Toro as a director but find him a bit hit and miss when it comes to making movies which are able to entertain me. Films like Pan’s Labyrinth which, with its surrealistic fairytale leanings, should have been right up my street... left me a little cold, to be honest. Whereas stuff like the Hellboy movies (especially the second one) and Pacific Rim, to a certain extent  (reviewed by me here), are films I could happily repeat watch. However, even the films I find less than entertaining by him are always worth a look because they are usually so arresting at a visual level. Crimson Peak is no exception but, I’m happy to say, it’s also wildly entertaining and, frankly, a bit of a masterpiece of modern Gothic romance.

Now, I’m pretty sure I read a tweet by del Toro saying that the film is not a horror movie. Well, I guess it depends on your definition of horror. For me, anything with non-human monsters - be they off-planet, other-wordly or supernatural phenomena, falls firmly into the horror movie camp for me... and the presence of a handful of ghosts in this film certainly does the trick here. However, the horror details are really the icing on the cake of this delicious crimson confection... the movie is both more than that, and less than that, in equal parts... depending on your point of view.

More than that because they support what is basically a contemporary take on an old school gothic romance, a film firmly following a direct lineage of movie versions of such works as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre or Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca. Less, because the movie is more about the characters and their relation to their situation rather than a full on ghost movie... although this really isn’t to suggest the movie is anything less than scary in certain sections. What we have here is the style of those kinds of earlier literary works infused with a quite chilling rendition, due to del Toro’s very good taste at getting things to look and feel right, of the kind of modern incarnations of ghost horror movies such as Mama (reviewed here) and Dark Water.

The film follows a young lady called Edith Cushing, played by Mia Wasikowska, as she finds herself in an unlikely romantic entanglement with her former Only Lovers Left Alive (reviewed here) co-star Tom Hiddleston as Thomas Sharpe and his sinister sister Lucille Sharpe, played by Jessica Chastain. After the violent murder of her rich father by an unseen assailant, she and her money return with the Sharpes to live with them in England, to his ancestral home which... as Edith finds out far too late (certainly much later than anyone in the audience would expect, given that Tom starts talking to her father and his colleagues about red clay)... is known by the locals under the nickname Crimson Peak. This is a place she has been warned of, by her dead mother, and told to stay away from... so obviously there wouldn’t be a story here unless she ended up at this place at some point in the film’s running time. Her biggest concern... and the audiences... is to try and figure out just who or what is there that may mean her harm. Is it the ghosts of the violently deceased that plague her in the night or are either Tom or Jessica less transparent in their intentions than they are letting on?

Well, I’ll tell you now you probably won’t take too much time seeing through the various clues, highlighted in the cinematic equivalent of a giant marker pen on paper... but the mystery element in the story should keep some people happy and it’s not the story, anyway, which makes this film such compelling viewing. It’s del Toro’s deft touch and signature on the frames themselves which will have you riveted to see what beautiful set piece is coming next. There is high romance (a lit candle for a waltz scene), lurking terror (the entire environment Edith ends up in) and there’s also the terrifyingly rendered ghosts in the movie... I promise you, you would not want to meet one of these creations on a dark night. Above all though, there’s also a deep and lacerating sense of violence which boils up when, admittedly, you most suspect it but... honestly... with a certain visceral force that leaves you with a schism in your head as you try to marry up the contrast between rich, romantic gothic atmosphere and the viciousness and goriness of an expression of violence in which del Toro certainly doesn’t pull any punches.

It’s a terrible cliché for me to write in a review but the film truly is a rich, visual and, also, aural feast - the sound design is beautiful with whispers of dread and terror lurking in your ears as you follow the characters through the old house on Crimson Peak. This is, of course, exactly what I would expect of the director and his artistic sensibilities. He has apparently gone on record as saying that the design of the film was his attempt to recreate the look of Mario Bava. Now, as regular readers will know, I cite Bava’s influence in films a lot but I wouldn’t have necessarily highlighted that here unless prompted by the director’s own words. What I will say is that I was much more struck by the film’s resemblance, on some visual level, to the mid 1950s to late 1960s horror movies put out by England’s Hammer studios. The dense colours don’t quite seem to be as luminous as one might expect to encounter in the works of Bava, to my mind, and more like what you would see in a Christopher Lee Dracula movie, for instance (my review of the first Hammer Dracula can be found here). Indeed, the fact that Mia Wasikowska’s main protagonist is presumably named after one of Hammer’s best loved actors, Peter Cushing, presumably demonstrates that these films were also in the director’s mind when he was working on this film.

Either way, Hammer and Bava are not the only references for horror or, indeed, giallo fans to sink their teeth into. For example, the murder of Edith’s father is straight out of a Dario Argento giallo... in fact, I suspect it’s inspired by a murder scene in Profondo Rosso (aka Deep Red, reviewed by me here) but the director really manages to up the stakes and make the violence in this particular scene, among others, something you almost want to look away from. Which, frankly, is what violence should be... something you really want to look away from. The director uses the brutality of the violence to punctuate certain scenes, especially in the last reel, and really hits home that the characters populating the story, no matter how beautiful they all look in his perfect shot compositions and framed within his leisurely moving camera, are very much real people with a lot at risk. It helps add to the gravitas already conjured up by the three main leads and Charlie Hunnam’s character, who becomes more important toward the end. I’m happy to say that the ‘deus ex machina’ arc of Hunnam's character doesn’t necessarily follow the exact path the audience thinks it’s going to... and he's not very smart in some scenes, it has to be said.

Del Toro’s Crimson Peak is an absolutely beautiful film and it’s steeped in the gothic tradition of the literature of over a hundred years ago, filtered in a deliberately post-modern fashion through some of the best directors of colourful horror films of the past but, at no times, does it ever stop from being the unique and personal vision that you would expect from this Mexican master of cinema. Guillermo del Toro is one of the absolute key modern players of what is still the most popular art form of our time... the motion picture. Crimson Peak is, I will say again, a masterpiece and, from my view at this stage of his career, one of his key films.... certainly my favourite so far of all his works. Great beauty for fans of gothic romance and tales of ghostly spirits bearing warnings from the dead. Definitely one you should catch up with and see on a big screen. Such a beautiful film.

Perfect Sense

Five To One Odds

Perfect Sense
2011 USA 
Directed by David Mackenzie
Arrow UK DVD Region 2

Warning: I guess there are spoilers here but they are kinda given as part of the trailer, for the most part.

Perfect Sense is another of those films which was totally off of my radar until @screamqueenlauren on twitter said I should take a look at it (so thanks for that Lauren - see her stuff here). It doesn’t seem to be that well known a film and I don’t remember it getting much, if any, of a cinema release over here... which is a pity because its a nice little gem of a movie.

Set in Scotland, the film stars two very strong actors in the lead roles... Eva Green as a scientist, Susan, and Ewan McGregor as a chef, Michael, who works in a restaurant where the back entrance is directly opposite the floor below the windows of Susan’s apartment. These two main protagonists, and the opening salvos and triumphs of the start of their relationship, gives us the window in which we watch the main, science fiction premise of the movie, affecting the lives of everyone on the planet as mankind tries to survive the onset of a new and mysterious disease. And, likewise, the use of a sci-fi plot idea allows us to explore the limits of a relationship to a degree which it wouldn’t have been possible to reach without the basic “what if” element of the story... which is the key thing that good science fiction allows us to do, of course. Stretch real life ideas and emotions beyond their logical conclusions which then allows us to at least have the illusion that we can understand them better.

The central idea of the movie is that there is a virus or disease or possibly something even more mysterious which, slowly at first, begins to strip the population of the entire planet of each of their five senses in both a specific order and, much to the frustration and anger of Susan and her colleagues who are trying to find out what’s going on, without any discoverable way of isolating it to even try and stop it. In this regard, Perfect Sense behaves very much in the way that most post-George A. Romero zombie films do. That is to say, that no explanation or reason is given for the devastation caused by the central premise even if, as in this case, at least one of the main protagonists is actively engaged in finding one.

The film is at once beautiful and powerfully frenetic in places. Sometimes utilising a style such as a slow moving, very precise camera movement with very specific framing and then pitching it against a hand held style of looking at things. For example there’s a beautiful couple of shots of Eva Green in her apartment early on where her room is split into rectangular planes by various bits of furniture to highlight her in her immediate environment and, as she walks to her windows, the reverse shot frames her in the same rectangular space on screen as that previous shot, but using the verticals and horizontals of the windows as the framing device. There’s even a nice but, perhaps, obvious tribute to Ingmar Bergman’s eye for composition in one particular shot of Green and McGregor in bed.

Shots like this are countered by an increasing amount of hand held work which is sometimes slow but always exploratory. The kind of camera eye that allows the audience to feel like it’s reacting voyeuristically with the characters, adjusting slightly to more fully integrate with something that might then become the focus of the shot or a specific scene. Neither of these stylistic approaches are in any way new, of course, and nor is the director’s intentions to make the two styles work side by side somehow... but the fact is, he does manage to mix these different approaches very well and without any jarring moments when the juxtapositions happen. So my hat off to him for that (not that I wear hats, to be honest).

The film is split into a number of sections with a voice over narrative by Eva Green that lets you know what is going on all over the planet, either by direct account or poetic metaphor, usually a mixture of the two. This is accompanied by montage sequences, most of which look like real found footage, newsreel stock shots purchased from a library which have just been edited together, showing the world reacting to the situation in various ways. This is often accompanied by am intricate musical cue and it really gives you an idea of the environmental dangers in which our dashing young couple find themselves. Acting like super-duper, establishing shots for the central idea and it’s course of devastation throughout the movie, these sequences reminded me of the Newsreel sections of John Dos Passos USA Trilogy of novels (specifically, for me, The 42nd Parallel) which achieved a similar effect as a counterpoint to the specifics of the main text, but with words printed on paper as opposed to the images and audio narrative specific to the medium of film.

As the story progresses, both audience and characters alike begin to realise that, for the general population of the planet, each devastating loss of one of the five senses is heralded with a strong, very specific, emotional reaction experienced by everyone. In fact, Susan leaves Michael at the onset of one of these emotional highs (or should that be lows), this one specifically causing a lot of anger and the desire to lash out at those closest to you, and then she experiences exactly the same thing when she goes back to her lab before, like Michael, she goes deaf.

The thing is, there’s a nice bit of subtext to the condition the disease leaves the human race with after each emotional battle for acceptance of their new disability (it’s not that blatant but it’s not hiding itself either). This manifests in a natural coping skill which kicks in and allows people to substitute a different aspect of a sensation in place of the one that was there. For instance, when everybody loses their smell, Michael’s restaurant puts extra salt and sugar in the food so people, regardless of the fact that they can’t smell the food, will come and eat it anyway. Similarly, when everyone loses their taste, people still go out to eat but they concentrate, as in a review of the restaurant read out in the film, on the texture and colour of the food itself. These surrogate sensations manifest themselves in the most interesting ways throughout the running time, such as a scene where Susan and Michael are sharing a bath and they start eating a bar of soap and some shaving foam. And when everybody goes deaf, people still go to watch bands play live, but so they can feels the vibrations created by the various instruments on the speakers in place of listening to the music itself. These aspects of the flip side of the premise are never overplayed and are there as background almost, to the situation on hand so... like I said. Nicely done bit of subtext about the human beings adaptive skills.


The film is beautifully put together and the apocalyptic nature of its ultimate destination starts off by creeping in slowly and then rushes in, as Eva Green’s character compares the onset of the ice age and its effect on the wooly mammoth, leaving a trail of devastation and more things to endure for the human race in general. There’s a point in the movie where absolutely everyone in the world goes into an eating frenzy almost simultaneously before being robbed of another sense... it’s at this point where things start to get really scary and you look at it and you start to speculate what the chances of surviving such an unreal proposition as this would be. And when you start thinking like that you know the film has really got under your skin and, once more, you fear for the future of the young couple burning at the heart of the story... and when a film does this to you then you know you’ve seen a good ‘un.

So not much more to say about this one. Perfect Sense is an almost perfect film and I even liked the ending with it’s sly way of plunging the audience into the same fate as the viewer, it’s coda which then leaves you puzzling as to how that structure of the film even exists in this manner in terms of the characters and, ultimately, the sucker punch when you start to figure out what could possibly be a way forward for the future of the species after the end credits roll. A thoroughly effective and emotionally draining watch which I would recommend for anybody in love with cinema. Check it out if you get a chance.