Annihilation

Alex Garland's directorial follow up to the great “Ex Machina” is another cerebral sci-fi thriller. It is an adaptation of the first part of Jeff VanderMeer's acclaimed “Southern Reach” trilogy, though Garland has streamlined the story and made it self contained.

It's a good job too, as no franchise is about to be kickstarted here. Paramount buried the film after Garland and his producer refused to make changes due to “disastrous” test screening responses. Thus “Annihilation” was not screened for critics, only had one trailer and was unceremoniously dumped on Netflix (outside of the US and China).

It turns out once again that test audiences are morons, because despite having the name of a fifth tier Nicolas Cage thriller, “Annihilation” is genuinely great. Comparisons are being made Andrei Tarkovsky's arty sci-fi masterpiece “Stalker” and may not be too far off the mark.

A meteorite lands near a lighthouse on the Florida coast and soon a mysterious zone called “The Shimmer” begins to expand across the nearby countryside. Ex-marine and current biologist Lana's (Natalie Portman) husband Kane was part of a special ops team sent into the zone to investigate, but has been missing for some time. When Kane (Oscar Isaac) does return something seems a bit off, plus he appears to be dying from catastrophic organ failure.

Lana and Kane are hijacked on the way to the hospital by Southern Reach, a mysterious branch of the US military led by Dr Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who are hoping to stop the Shimmer's inexorable advance. Lana and Ventress eventually lead an all female team of scientists into the Shimmer to try and find out what's going down.

Once there, they find themselves at the mercy of odd time anomalies and that plants and animals are mutating, which while making the flora look pretty is kinda bad news when the local fauna includes alligators and bears. However, the closer they get to the lighthouse, the more metaphysical the threats become.

“Annihilation” contains some startling, genuinely beautiful images once the action moves into the Shimmer. Bright, multicoloured vegetation climbs trees and buildings, light refracts in odd ways and the beach contains one of the loveliest and strangest things I've seen in a film for a while (I'll not spoil it).

It also features some shockingly gruesome scenes of body horror, as well some unnerving, real scares. The second scene with the bear (oh-god-the-bear) manages both at once, while the climax manages to be actually convey something convincingly alien. Once the film enters the lighthouse this viewer felt like they were holding their breath for 20 minutes as Garland bombards us with revelations and uniquely weird images.

Obviously Garland is best known for his writing, first as a novelist then with his scripts for the likes of “Sunshine”, “28 Days Later” and the hugely underrated “Dredd”, but “Annihilation” should cement his bona fides as a director. The cinematography is off kilter to better convey the oddness of the Shimmer, while all of the performances are just slightly “off”. Sometimes the actors are not using the right eye lines in dialogue, something which is so antithetical to the basics of making films that the result is very disconcerting. Even the usual film editing techniques could be masking time skips or gaps in Lana's memory.

“Annihilation” is a brilliant film, as thought-provoking as it is technically accomplished. I've only really talked about the latter here and not really touched on the film's themes of self-destructive behaviour, grief and malign biology. If the film is destined for cult classic status (which it almost certainly is) then that's just fine, but shame on that test audience for denying us the chance to see it on a big screen - 8

I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House review

Just before Halloween, Netflix dropped the second film by Oz Perkins. Eager to see it based on the festival buzz for his delayed release debut “The Blackcoat's Daughter”, your correspondent jumped right in a whole week later like the totally with it person he is.

Anyway, “Pretty Thing” (as I will henceforth refer to it) is an odd beast, not quite like anything else out there. It starts with an arresting and vaguely spooky image of the film's ghost slowly walking backwards while our protagonist Lily intones a monologue about how houses where deaths occurred are only rented from the living by the dead. We are soon introduced to Lily (Ruth Wilson, excellent) who it turns out is a hospice nurse, 28 years old and (as her narration tells us while she looks directly at the viewer) will never be 29. Ulp. She is here to look after an ailing writer called Iris who has penned numerous famous horror novels in her remote home.

Our Lily is a bit of a wuss when it comes to all things horror, and Wilson effectively portrays her nervousness through the scant interactions she has with her charge and her employer. Her dialogue is halting and scarce compared to the deliberately novelistic eloquence of her narration and things going bump in the night scare the whatsit out of her. Needless to say this is a bad thing.

When things inevitably turn spook-shaped, Lily discovers that events closely match those in a novel Iris wrote involving a murdered girl called Polly. To make things more creepy, Iris consistently refers to Lily as Polly. Past, present and future, fact and fiction are soon inseparably intertwined.

“Pretty Thing” is a slow, lyrical film that lets you know from the off from that you're not in for a ghost train of jump scares. In fact, Perkins holds static camera shots featuring dark doorways and windows to lead you on. You expect a shock but he pulls away with nothing happening. The unease this creates is one of the film's greatest assets, while the scant “traditional scares” feel all the more earned for making you wait.

So it's not for everyone, and indeed the backlash has been brutal. It might be a bit too slow even for Mildly Unnerving, and Lily's endless posthumous narration can grate a little. However, if you can tune it to its strange frequency and let the chilly atmosphere seep in it does reward the patient viewer with a unique and intelligent take on the ol' haunted house mystery - 6/10

Black Mirrior Season 3

Hurray! Charlie Brooker's 10 minutes in the future sci-fi anthology-ma-jig is back! With twice as many episodes! On Netflix!

I am going to review them in order. I'm also now going to give a score out of 10 rather than 5, for “nuance” May contain spoilers.

Nosedive

Lovely Bryce Dallas Howard is obsessed with keeping up her score out of 5 in a world where everyone is rated. People beg for good reviews because the lower your score the worse a person everyone thinks you are.

I imagine it was based on almighty shit-for-brains “Yelp for people” app Peeple, but for me the giant elephant in the room is the “Meow Meow Beanz” episode of Community which mines the same concept but with more laughs, While “Nosedive” is probably a more realistic interpretation about how this bullshit would work, Community was more inventive and had a ton more fun with it.

“Nosedive” also deals in cringey, squirmy social embarrassment, something I genuinely struggle to watch these days (in comedy or drama). It ends on a hope spot but getting there was gruelling in a non-entertaining way – 6/10

Playtest

Massive bellend tourist who refuses to talk to his mum loses all his money and takes a job playtesting a new VR gaming thingy. Things predictably go massively shit shaped in horror movie style.

If you've watched as many horror movies as me it was as scary as it was surprising, which is to say not remotely. The lead was too annoying for me to really care about what was happening and I found the implied link between dementia and the unreality of the game mildly distasteful. At least a triple fake out there though which was impressive – 4/10

Shut Up and Dance

People who have done bad things are bullied into other bad things by the world's most patient internet arseholes (seriously, how many people must they have been watching and for how long to catch the handful of people we see in the episode?) I guess that there was some point to be made online vigilantism but it's hidden behind the suffocating nastiness and cheap shocks

Vaguely nightmarish in the way it escalated and the feeling of powerlessness (and the fact that it could basically be done now), but felt a bit Brooker by numbers. I've seen people reacting like it's the most horrifying then they've ever seen but I was mostly bored. - 4/10

San Junipero

The best time travelling VR romance story of the year! Genuinely heartfelt and heartwarming and showing that Black Mirror can do upbeat and nice, San Junipero is one of its best episodes to date. The way the concept is never hidden as such but still revealed gradually is masterfully done, the evolving relationship between Yorkie and Kelly is beautifully written and acted and the 80's soundtrack is on point.

Technology is never exactly the enemy in BR, it just allows us to bring out our worst instincts (JUST LIKE IN REAL LIFE YEAH), but here everyone is nice to each other and everything works out! Even though people die they get to spend eternity in digital heaven reliving the youth they may never have had. Plus the relationship is a same-sex one and this is not much of a plot point, a depressing rare occurrence. 9/10

Men Against Fire

Soldiers in some unnamed future warzone (in Eastern Europe perhaps) are fighting horrible genetic mutants. They use massive guns as well as weird augmented reality implants which give then tactical info as well as reward them with explicit sex dreams when they kill the enemy.

Expect (dramatic sting) the mutants aren't the arse-ugly monsters the implants are showing them, which our protagonist realises when one of them zaps him with a...thing. Yep, turns out that the military and the government are using tech to dehumanise the enemy. Guess the point is that the shitbags in charge always try dehumanise the enemy (just look at the language that the media use about refugees right now).

Anyhow, well shot and acted, but again hugely obvious in where it was going 6/10.

Hated By The Nation

Your common-or-garden police procedural spiced up by Twitter hate mobs and robot bees. And Kelly McDonald, who is always brilliant (I want a series just based around her character tbh).

Another heavy handed moral but delivered some panache, despite thinking that a rapper would ever call themselves “Tusk”. The reveal that the celebrity hate figures weren't the real target was neat-o, but the criminal mastermind behind it all had pretty vague and undefined motivations. Given that they took half an hour longer (and was needed) to roll this one out that seems weird – 6/10

I now have no friends because they all love this series. Ah well.

Netflix Halloween

I have watched quite a few of the horror films on Netflix. Most of them are rubbish but here are some I can recommend (if not always unreservedly) should you want something spooky to watch over Halloween weekend.

30 Days of Night

One for the gore fans, 30 Days of Night sees a group of absolute bloodsucking bastards descend on an isolated Alaskan town as it bids goodbye to the sun for a month. Violent and impressively nasty, it's not for the squeamish but wrings effective scares from its nightmarish premise.

As Above, So Below

I normally dislike found footage films, and As Above, So Below commits many of the sub-genre's sins (cheap jump scares, making you wonder why the idiots keep filming), but wins points for going absolutely batshit mental in it's final 20 minutes. A group of urban explorers venture into the Parisian sewers looking for the plot and keep heading downwards until they reach possibly Hell itself. Not brilliant by any stretch but worth a look.

The Babadook

One of my favourite films (horror or otherwise) of the last few years and one of the best films on Netflix. A single mother and her odd son become haunted by the titular whatsit after reading the world's scariest bedtime story. Most of my favourite horror films don't scare me, but The Babadook had me hiding behind a cushion. Add two amazing central performances and a rich thematic depth exploring grief and bereavement and you have one truly astonishing film.

From Beyond

Another (very loose) HP Lovecraft adaptation by Reanimator director Stuart Gordon, with a scientist again messing with things Man Was Not Meant To Know. Instead simply bringing the dead back to life, this one involves all sorts of interdimensional nasties and stomach churning body horror. Laced with black humour and filled with dated but charming physical special effects, it's one to watch with a few beers in you.

Housebound

A young woman is fitted with an electronic tag and sentenced to house arrest back at the family home. Unfortunately said home appears to be haunted. As much a comedy as a horror, Housebound features one of my favourite female protagonists of recent times; practical, world weary and not about take any shit from anyone, ghost or not.

Insidious

Though it loses it badly towards the end by over-explaining the nature of it's big bad and climaxing in what looks like a mid-80s soft rock video, the first hour of Insidious is actually a great mainstream horror film. It has some effective and inventive scares including one jumpy moment that still sends shivers down my spine.

The Keep

An early curio from Michael Mann, this sees a bunch of German soldiers in WW2 coming up against a demonic entity in the titular castle. Genuinely odd and unsettling, it won't be for everyone but is worth a look if you're after something different.

Paranormal Activity

I intend to write a longer post about why I think the Paranormal Activity films squander their interesting premise, but suffice to say here at the first film is still an effective chiller. Number 3 is also surprisingly good, probably delivering the best scares of the series (oh god that bit with the bed sheet). Worth a look if you haven't watched it. Micah is a dick though.

Spring

Almost feels like a spoiler calling this one a horror, and the horror elements are pretty low on the list of what I like about it. A young American man, mourning his mother and having pissed off the local gangster, sods off to Italy where he meets a beguiling and gorgeous young woman. Obviously she's not what she seems, but the film doesn't take the obvious route at any point. Part naturalistic drama, part romance and part horror, Spring is an odd merging of genres but it makes it work. Also I didn't cry at the end. Nope. Definitely not.

What We Do In The Shadows

More comedy than horror, but has it's moments. A mockumentary about a group of vampires living in New Zealand (3 of these 10 are Antipodean btw, just felt it worth mentioning), it shows how they deal with modern life, vampire hunters and the local werewolf pack. Genuinely funny but with enough spookiness to satisfy your Halloween cravings.