Film Reviews by PD

The heart of this one by young Ukranian Nariman Aliev, is a father-and-son-bonding tale unfolding against the backdrop of a fraught road trip from Kyiv to Russia-annexed Crimea.

As the film opens, Kyiv college student Alim (an affecting non-pro) and his father Mustafa (the impressive Akhtem Seitablayev), newly arrived from Crimea, are paying a visit to one of the capital’s morgues to claim the shrapnel-pocked body of Alim’s older brother Nazim, one of many Ukrainian soldiers killed in the conflict with Russia. Even though Nazim lived in Kyiv with his Ukrainian Orthodox wife Oleysa, the fierce Mustafa brusquely insists on taking his son’s body back to Crimea for a Muslim burial next to his mother’s grave, and won’t allow Oleysa to travel with them. A complicated backstory of familial estrangement is hinted at (it’s the first time Mustafa and Oleysa have met; Mustafa doesn’t know what Alim is studying; Oleysa talks about Mustafa being dangerous), but is never further elaborated or explained. Regardless of what may have happened in the past, there is definitely a gulf that is greater than generational in the relationship between the street-smart Mustafa and the now-citified Alim. Symbolizing this, they have only one shared language: Crimean Tatar, a Turkic tongue not related to Slavic languages. Like many Crimean Tatars of his generation, Mustafa grew up in Uzbekistan, where his relatives were deported in 1944. He learned Russian in school and Soviet ways of doing business. As Mustafa drives south and west with Alim, we see this style in operation as he tries to get his way with bribes or brute force. Meanwhile, teenager Alim wasn’t even alive during the Soviet period. And he speaks fluent Ukrainian, the tongue in which he converses with everyone else except his father. As Mustafa and Alim encounter and (often less credibly) solve many problems en route to Crimea, a wary mutual respect grows between father and son. But at the same time, it gradually becomes clear that Mustafa’s intense rush to bring Nazim’s body to the homeland is not just about the Muslim tradition to bury the dead as soon as possible.

The film's strongest suit is definitely the impressive cinematography by Anton Fursa. He frames the characters in tight closeups when in Kyiv and in the car, but as they approach Crimea, beautiful yet austere shots of the natural surroundings become more prominent. Particularly unforgettable are the visuals during the climactic scene that depicts Alim literally burdened by the weight of Tatar tradition. Aliev also cleverly eschews a music track, instead making strong use of diegetic sound and sound design.

There's quite a few problems: it's very short on character development and narrative depth, and there's is a decidedly male chauvinist undercurrent - women, whether Olyesa or a mechanic’s granddaughter Masha, being rather-too casually depicted as temptresses who lure Mustafa’s sons into trouble. Although Alim at first seems shocked by his father’s treatment of Oleysa and attempts to stay in touch with her by phone, he later abruptly dismisses her, which leaves a rather bitter taste. Nevertheless, the desire of Aliev to highlight the plight of Crimean Tatars (both historically and currently), and the mixed feelings of love and resentment between father and son — and their pride in their Tatar heritage and homeland — come through loud and clear.

This one's a terribly sentimental tale of overdue bonding between father and son over repairs to a Tuscan villa packed with memories, the main interest being Liam Neeson's role as Robert, a former toast-of-the-town, now-struggling artist. Both Neeson and his real-life son Micheál Richardson do ok with a painfully thin, pedestrian script and there's the occasional funny line, but for the most part this is a fluffy, banal piece which does not succeed in making us engage with either father or son. Annoyingly also, it simply sidelines the potentially interesting female characters - expat estate agent Kate (Lindsay Duncan - she's worth more than this), and local restaurateur Natalia, who is the all-too convenient romantic interest for Jack, tiresomely sketched as the 'dream girl' to balance Kate's 'strong woman'. Although to be fair, the film doesn’t do much more for its main male characters, wasting away the story’s emotional real-life echoes - the on-screen pair’s tearful confrontations around grief and locked-away memories seem puzzlingly forced here. Harmless enough I suppose, but it's never a good sign that some great shots of the countryside are what you'll remember most. Mercifully short.

A rare look at a Korean family trying to make a go of it in 1980s Arkansas, Lee Isaac Chung’s autobiographical, low-key piece is warmly observant and gently humorous but also doesn't shy away from the enormous strains the struggle places on the family. It's a very specific context but also universally relatable.

The opening shot of the family arriving at their new home—a dilapidated trailer sitting in the middle of a field - neatly subverts the white-picket-fence American Dream, and we're immediately aware that things are going to go very wrong between horrified wife Monica (Yeri Han) and her defiantly optimistic husband Jacob (Steven Yeun) for whom this marks a step up from the humiliation of working in a chicken hatchery. Jacob has big dreams of building out a small farm on his land, composed of Korean vegetables to cater to the growing Korean immigrant population in America, but the strains this puts on the relationship with Monica provides much of the focus of the film and is very well-handled. Another key development is, after a marital bust-up (neatly accompanied by the children making paper aeroplanes with 'don't fight' written on them - we've all been there), the arrival of Monica's mother, Soon-ja (Yuh-Jung Youn) from South Korea. Not your conventional grandmother, the cursing wily matriarch only adds more conflict: young David, in particular, resists her presence with all the (considerable) ammunition at his disposal. While predictably, the two misfits eventually form a bond, Minari expands upon this rather clichéd connection between grandmother and grandson (yes, Ozu’s Tokyo Story does come to mind) to tackle more substantive issues of what it means to cultivate a better life and what it takes for relationships to survive and thrive, even in the worst of times.

Chung's affection for his characters, and the Arkansas farmland where he grew up—always shines through, and there’s never a moment where you don’t root for and care for each family member. There’s even a certain fondness for Will Patton’s Paul, a batty evangelical farmer with stringy hair and big glasses, who carries a giant cross on Sundays ('this is my church' he says), a wild detail that could only come from real life (as apparently, Chung remembered it from his youth). He's neatly contrasted with the po-faced regular churchgoers who, for all their going-on about Jesus and the Second Coming and whatnnot, don't ever seem to lift a finger to help.

There's some less successful touches - young David's potentially serious medical condition is all a bit superfluous and not very well treated, and the significant new adversity which provides an anchor for the third-act climax is all a bit heavy; the film is also insufficiently clear about showing how the family crisis is resolved at the end. However all in all a very highly-accomplished, totally absorbing piece.

Rather frustrating viewing, sadly, because there's little effort to make this feel like a film - instead, it's like sitting through one of those cinema tie-ins from the NT, only here, perhaps because there's no audience, the whole things falls rather flat. The shooting consists of shots of the whole stage with close-ups of the actors here and there, and the result is very tired eyes and brains (I had to watch it stages - in the cinema I would have fallen asleep, and I'm a fan of this sort of thing).

The material is of course rather topical - sheer boredom from being at home with the ensuing tensions between family members, the all-too present prospect of environmental destruction, the dread of ageing, the frailties and frustrations of love - human experience never changes, but a truly dreadful translation which sounds to me like someone trying to shoehorn their own interpretation onto proceedings means that you're forever trying to guess what this is rather than being absorbed into Chekhov. Toby Jones and Richard Armitage are fine actors, but it requires a huge suspension of disbelief to identify with them here, and the staging and pace are so staid that the only effect is to try our patience: the (essential)humour all but lost. And whoever instructed the woefully miscast Aimee Lou Wood (an impossibly young and attractive Sonia) to be nodding and shaking her head during the last speech needs to watch it over and over again to make sure they never do this again. A big disappointment, I'm afraid.

This disturbing psychological drama from Kosovan documentary maker Antoneta Kastrati is a very painful, sombre meditation on lingering wartime trauma.

The film takes place in a sleepy rural corner of western Kosovo 10 years after the Balkan wars have ended, but the scars of conflict still shape the psychic landscape. Kastrati presents contemporary Kosovan society as suspended in limbo between the old world and the new, between science and superstition, where smartphones and YouTube videos co-exist with beliefs in witches and demons, fortune tellers and faith healers. There's quite a few horror-film-style touches used to illuminate central character Lume’s fractured mental state which are a bit hit-and-miss (much more effective is a scratchy VHS tape depicting the exhumation of wartime casualties), with echoes of Rosemary’s Baby and Don’t Look Now, but of course the real 'horror' is how Lume is treated rather than any of the spells or exorcisms she is subjected to.

Zana is also about the inner wounds of patriarchy and misogyny, which are relentlessly (and often not very subtly) depicted. Even in her most despairing depths, Lume is rejected by family on all sides, demeaned by her husband and harshly judged by her peers, her social standing reduced to her duty as a baby-breeding machine, although Kastrati is careful to avoid placing the blame on mono-dimensional villains: Lume's husband Ilir, for example, evidently has tender and protective feelings for his wife despite their unbalanced gender roles. Nevertheless, the film remains a powerful indictment of how Lume's family see her role,; the fact that Lume seems to slowly losing her mind is agonizingly believable in these circumstances.

The plot is a little disjointed and repetitive, but Adriane Matoshi’s quietly devastating performance conveys a lot with very little, her impassive features revealing submerged grief with scant trace of melodrama. Lume is clearly intended to be emblematic of an entire generation of Kosovan women still scarred by wartime trauma, and in a heartbreaking last word, Kastrati ends with a dedication to her mother Ajshe and sister Luljeta, both killed in the conflict 20 years ago.

This one concerns the life and work of Mary Anning, whose contributions to palaeontology influenced Darwin. It depicts a middle-aged Anning, played by Kate Winslet, being acclaimed for her work but being also overlooked within the scientific community. She lives a modest life on the Jurassic coast, spending most of her days searching for fossils to sell to tourists in order to support herself and her mother. But the mundane routine of her life is disrupted by the arrival of a young middle-class woman, Charlotte Murchison (Saoirse Ronan), who has been instructed to convalesce by the sea by her husband, Roderick. The pair quickly develop an intense relationship that changes their lives.

The film is beautifully shot and unsurprisingly well-acted, but, watchable as it undoubtedly is, I'm coming away thinking Mary Anning has been sold short here. Yes, it makes us painfully aware that Anning was getting a raw deal in professional terms, and that, as well as being female, one of her major disadvantages was her working-class roots. But unfortunately there is very little exploration of this due to the central focus on a romantic lesbian relationship, of which there is absolutely no historical justification beyond (presumably) an inference from the fact that Anning never married.

Lee wants to portray two lonely women united by the constraints of their gender within a patriarchal society - but while this is may well be a laudable aim, it plays havoc with what we know of Murchison, who, far from being restricted in opportunity by a controlling husband, was in fact the impetus behind his career. Interestingly also, the real Murchison was about a decade older than Mary, whereas her the age difference is switched so that Anning is the senior of the pair, which is very odd. Worse still, Mary was emphatically NOT some kind of misanthropic outsider. She maintained a number of close female friendships and professional relationships throughout her life, notably Elizabeth Philpot, who built on Anning's work. Philpot does appear (played by Fiona Shaw), but here she takes the form of a local villager whose relationship with Anning is somewhat strained, Philpot's charm and warmth serving as a mirror to Anning's aloofness; predictably, there is a suggestion that Philpot is a former lover of Anning, and that this is the source of the tension between the two. I find this a shame, because we have no indication that this was the case - quite the contrary in fact.

Perhaps a more historically accurate (or at least plausible) film would not have received the attention that this has got. And of course it's perfectly possible just to ignore the fact that it's based on Mary Anning and just let the tale stand in its own right. But I still find it a bit of a pity that the 'real' Anning is lost amongst the passion: surely a tale of the dawn of science meets female enablement would have been of interest? It says a lot about us, I fear, that we just can't let Anning's intellectual achievements speak for themselves.

This latest offering from Roy Andersson is typically bleak, and even his trademark humour is in noticeably short supply here, although to be fair the film is not without brief snatches of joy amidst the rubble.

The film is narrated by a young woman who 'remembers' certain people from an undefined future (beyond the grave?). What follows is a series of vignettes or poetic fragments of varying degrees of absurdity and scope, with a priest's crisis of faith one of the few linking threads, although certain themes reoccur often, notably the way people become so engrossed in their own concerns that the essence of eternity is hidden from them. A man whose car breaks down on a lonely road fails to see the extraordinary sight of a flock of migrating birds wheeling overhead — much less the majestic plain that surrounds him under a canopy of sky; a dentist who has become dependent on the bottle stares glumly into his glass at the bar, unwilling to turn around and look at the sight of snow falling while ethereal voices sing “Silent Night.” “Everything is fantastic!” another man prompts him, but the dentist doesn’t even try to engage with him.

Andersson's trademark minimalist, austere style, eschewing conventional character development, plot, traditional editing, camera movement etc is once again very effective here, although few of the scenes here stick in the mind as much as some of the others in his so-called 'trilogy about being a human being' series. That said, it's still clearly an impressive piece of work.

This film, Henry Blake's debut feature, deals with the delicate subject of how an introverted 14-year-old boy is lured all too easily into the world of county lines drug trafficking.

Harris Dickinson and Ashley Madekwe both cede the spotlight to young lead Conrad Khan, who delivers an outstanding performance of unnerving stillness and tightly coiled anguish. 18 at the time of filming, he convincingly plays the younger Tyler, a taciturn social outcast in the pupil referral unit he sporadically attends. Belittled and bullied in class, he’s the man of the house at home, effectively parenting his young sister Aliyah while his single mother Toni (Madekwe) works menial night shifts and sleeps off the days.

Blake’s economical script doesn’t dwell on the history that took Tyler out of school but it's clear enough that he hasn't had much of a chance, with limited support from the authorities and the over-burdened Toni. Rudderless, isolated children like Tyler are easy prey for dealers seeking county lines runners, who apparently are often targeted out of pupil referral units. Blake, who spent some time working in a PRU, plainly knows his terrain here, and when Tyler is defended from bullies one evening by imposing “entrepreneur” Simon (Dickinson), viewers will sense the grooming machine in motion well before the teen, Dickinson subtly mirroring Tyler’s sloping body language and terse, congested speech to suggest how he, too, may once have been in the boy’s uncomfortable skin, cyclically recruited in the same predatory way. A crisp jump to six months later, meanwhile, shows how fast the process can be. Fully immersed in grim drug-mule duty, a hardened Tyler has gone from withdrawn to stone-blank, a transition that Khan navigates with considerable restraint. Between the film’s portraits of hemmed-in masculinity, meanwhile, Madekwe offers a moving study of imperfect motherhood that is far more easily punished than assisted.

There's quite a few weakness: some scenes are a little heavy-handed, and the stylised camerawork doesn't always come off, whilst the score is an irritating distraction; the ending, moreover, is perhaps more convenient than it is convincing. But overall there's a lot of humanity here and the director has done very well to highlight such an important, difficult subject so powerfully yet so sensitively.

One of those superficial tv-doc style things which rapidly runs through the life and works of Christie without anything in the way of depth. The format is predictable - some brief clips from some of the film / tv adaptations with various bods making comments, but there's zero insight here, and some of the comments border on the trite. May be of interest to someone who knows nothing about the subject (unlikely to find many in this category, I would have thought) but that's about it. Very disappointing.

This one's a very hard watch at times, but by-and-large director Lucy Brydon is successful at giving us an honest, sensitive portrayal of severe anorexia.

Unusually for a film on this subject, her protagonist is not a troubled adolescent but a 30-something single mother, Stephanie (Sian Brooke), who finds her efforts to reconnect with her long-suffering but totally out-of-her depth mother Susan (Amanda Burton) and spiky 15-year-old daughter Pearl (the superb Fabienne Piolini-Castle) invariably come to grief. Brooke is excellent, giving us a thoroughly convincing display of a woman's internal demons and how she is constantly teetering on the edge, although the (rather important) backstory of her (presumably traumatic) former life as a war photographer is left to our imagination.

It doesn't always come off - the scenes involving her 'relationship' with a distinctly unprofessional nurse are rather weak, and the group therapy sessions resort to cliche at times, but some scenes are truly heart-rending, notably an extended sequence in which she gorges alone, in silent desperation. Brydon’s restrained, unmelodramatic screenplay, which doesn’t attempt to psychoanalyse Stephanie, works well with Darran Bragg's detached cinematography. Powerful stuff.

This powerful debut from Rose Glass is one of those religious fanatic meets psychological horror things, charting the gradual breakdown of a lonely young woman convinced that she is on a divine mission, and features a terrific performance from Jennifer Ehle as faded celebrity Amanda, and a bold, quietly nerve-shredding lead from Morfydd Clark. It's at its best when it sticks to psychological unease (the first half) and at its worst when it goes for the horror (the last section).

Clark as Maud is really good throughout, but especially in the claustrophobic live-in nurse first half, supplying palliative care to the prickly, cynical Amanda, who surprisingly warms to Maud’s artless devotion and God-given / self-appointed divine purpose to save this ‘lost soul’. The film’s classiness lies in the way that, for the most part, it depicts a realistic depiction of Maud’s mentally and economically distressed world, superbly evoked in Paulina Rzeszowksa’s production design and in Ben Fordesman’s camerawork (I'll ignore the score, which is awful). Rather than weigh things down with too much pathological case history, Glass adroitly lets us guess at the background of a seemingly brainwashed cradle-Catholic, but who, as revealed partly in encounters with a former co-worker, once lived a very different life and is anything but. Glass also impressively achieves a delicate balance in taking Maud’s religious conviction seriously, while sensitively portraying the mental disturbance that drives it, and astutely uses religious imagery to get inside Maud’s head (it didn't need William Blake, but I gettit), whilst being just as skillful in portraying the painful near-immobility of Amanda, whose art has stood for the freedom of the female body. While the story is clearly set in the present, production design, costumes etc subtly blur markers of the period, with hints of the 60s and 70s. This teasing indeterminacy gives the film a timelessness that also accentuates its echoes of Polanski’s Repulsion; indeed, Clark gives a performance that is as bold, and as vulnerably isolated, as Catherine Deneuve, and that's quite something.

Glass overplays her hand in the second section where the film briefly lurches into more generic horror mode, which jars with the painstakingly established realism. But overall, the film is ultimately successful, a moving study of a troubled soul.

This coming-of-age tale by Leonie Krippendorff captures with some sensitivity issues such as having to deal with confusing hormones and peer pressure at a time when finding love and fitting in feel like the most important things in the world. Unable to attend a school trip due to a broken hand, 14-year-old Nora is temporarily placed into her older sister Jule's class and becomes embroiled in her friendship group where she is forced to sit on the side lines of parties and outings while Jule sometimes resents her presence. Soon, the arrival of a new girl, Romy, awakens different emotions in Nora which she spends the summer trying to reconcile.

Krippendorff’s film has a fairly typical coming-of-age plot in which a young girl explores her sexuality as bodily changes expose her to new questions about her identity and interests, but what sets 'Cocoon' apart are the various ways in which Krippendorff frames her story, an urban experience set in a low-income multicultural neighbourhood where parentless teenagers are left to fend for themselves. Nora and Jule have an alcoholic mother who would rather spend time in the local bar than notice the needs of her children, who are basically left to care for themselves. A good sequence, when the optimistic Jule agrees to take care of a baby simulation doll, avoids the usual comic scenes, instead focusing on the girls’ experience of neglect.

The film is also peppered with the wider influence and pressure that the media and rap music place on young girls, and the audience is shown various discussions about losing weight by eating cotton wool soaked in orange juice, hearing the vlogs that Jule spends time listening to with advice on finding boyfriends, or performing sexualised dance moves at parties to please the boys in the group. Nora and Jules, Krippendorff implies, are left to learn about the world from Internet strangers with no one guiding them safely through some of the most formative experiences. There is also a visual honesty in Cocoon in which the sometimes embarrassing experiences of teenage girls are openly represented. When Nora has her first period and a very public leak Krippendorff shows it without ceremony or melodrama – still a rare sight on screen.

Krippendorff makes the central love story a little too gushingly romantic, with a montage of rather cliched scenes as the couple go skinny dipping, joyfully attend a pride parade and lay together in sunny fields that contrast awkwardly with the urban energy of the rest of the film. And whilst the Director is careful to avoid any scenes of the Nora having sex with Romy, the implication is still rather awkward, especially with several scenes of nudity and acts of masturbation. But Lena Urzendowsky strikes the right balance as Nora, an uncertain outsider who says very little but seems to feel out of place and awkward at every moment before starting to find her own path. There is good support from Lena Klenke as 16-year old Jule already swept up in compliance with her gang but still craving guidance from her mother and sister, while Jella Haase gives Romy plenty of 'free-spirited cool' that makes the character so inspiring to Nora.

The caterpillar to butterfly metaphor is a little heavy-handed but Krippendorff recognisably charts Nora’s painful transition from child to young woman while capturing the heat of the summer in a dense city environment that shapes the raging hormones and pressures felt by the characters as they navigate the highs and lows of first love while barely knowing who they are. Well worth a look.

Probably not the thing to watch late at night if you live in a dark, creaky old house with your elderly mother, but this highly original piece by Japanese Australian first-timer Natalie Erika James is for the most part a compelling psychological horror. There's terrifying dreams, deeply buried memories of traumas past, plaster infested with creeping black mould and a scrabbling noise in the brickwork, nasty-looking bruises across breastbones and strips of skin that shear away from flesh. But in many ways the movie’s simplest conceit is its most chilling and gives rise to its most impressively scarifying filmmaking: a house as metaphor for the mind of its inhabitant. So when that inhabitant is slowly losing herself to dementia, the house begins to collapse in on itself, a labyrinth of dead ends, foreshortened impossible geometries and doorways that turn into solid walls behind your back. If growing up is often portrayed as realising you can never go home again, here growing old is realising that even as home betrays you, you can never get away from it.

The house's longtime resident is Edna (Robyn Nevin), whose long white hair is a handy indicator of how together she is — neatly pinned back when she’s her spiky self, loose and straggly when she’s become disoriented. It's full of post-it notes bearing reminders that range from the banal, like “take pills,” to the cryptic — like “don’t follow it.” For a time she seems fine, merely irritated to be treated like an invalid, but soon starts to deteriorate, and daughter Kay is faced with tough decisions about her mother’s future while also being troubled by nightmares and noises that send her creeping through darkened hallways at night — a motif that admittedly becomes increasingly unsubtle and rather overused. DP Charlie Sarroff’s photography is terrific though, with patient, observant frames accumulating mood steadily; things that are cheerful become ominous, like the pulsing of Christmas tree lights, and images such as Edna working at her candle art, become inexplicably sinister.

There are times when you can't help thinking that a lot of the women’s anxiety could be dissipated with a couple of 100-watt lightbulbs, and occasionally James overplays her horror-movie hand and we notice the contrivances. But generally, though, the excesses are forgiven due to the cleanly drawn psychologies of the three actors, whose excellent performances neatly draw the intergenerational relationships between grandmother, mother and daughter with great subtlety and insight; we observe the sad truism of how a daughter can deeply love her mother while also despising or fearing the ageing version of her own self that Mum represents. More to come, hopefully, from a talented director.

This one starts really well, with Rose Nemser (Odessa Young), reading Shirley Jackson's great story, 'The Lottery' on a train, before, strangely aroused by it, dragging her husband, Fred (Logan Lerman), into the lavatory for sex. The two of them, as it happens, are on their way to Bennington, Vt., where Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) lives with her husband, the literary critic and campus lech Stanley Edgar Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg). It’s supposed to be a temporary arrangement, but the young couple, like characters in a dark fairy tale, find themselves trapped in a spooky, ivy-covered house full of both menace and enchantment, and we, like them, are taken on a journey of psychological horror and erotic implication.

Adapted by Sarah Gubbins from Susan Scarf Merrell’s novel, it's not (thankfully) a 'biopic'. Decker and Moss instead approach Jackson as if she were a character in her own fiction, which is to say as an object of pity, terror, fascination and awe rather than straightforward sympathy. As she works feverishly on her next novel, she casts a spell on Rose, bedeviling her waking hours with tantrums and haunting her dreams. “I’m a witch,” Shirley proclaims, and it doesn’t seem like metaphor or hyperbole. She guesses the secret of Rose’s pregnancy by looking at her face. Rose, trembling between fear and lust, becomes Shirley’s nursemaid and her muse, her secret sharer and her prey.

Decker and the cinematographer, Sturla Brandth Grovlen, blur the boundaries of realism, interweaving domestic drama with scenes of fantasy, so that by the end we are not sure whose hallucination, or what kind of experience, we are witnessing, and at times the academic power games Shirley and Stanley play with Rose and Fred evoke Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” The film is also successful with its suggestion of the link between creativity and mental disorder: Shirley is a demonic genius, her brilliance hard to separate from her instability and eccentricity.

One notable liberty that “Shirley” takes with the biographical record is to make Jackson and Hyman childless. In real life, they raised four children, and some of Jackson’s most popular writing consisted of articles and stories about parenthood and everyday domesticity. In removing this thread, and making the unliterary, uneducated Rose (who dropped out of college to marry Fred) an emblem of fertility, the filmmakers impose a stark separation of roles on Jackson that she herself defied, and this seriously undermines the character's complexity.

The ending is all a bit tired and feeble after all the build up, but we are left with more than a suggestion that both Rose and Shirley are victims of a hypocritical, repressive, male-dominated world, though the actual men in their lives are weak, preening mediocrities, whilst the libidinal current that runs between the women, is convincing. Hopefully a lot more to come from a talented director.

With films about cults a dime a dozen these days, it takes an original work to stand out, and by and large Malgorzata Szumowska’s The Other Lamb does just that. It’s due in large part to the film succeeding across multiple fronts, not merely just as an exploration of a mysterious group organized around the semi-deity of the cult leader (Michiel Huisman as Shepherd), for Szumowska's interest lies not in what brought them to fall under his spell but rather in what keeps them there.

Much of the connection is, predictably, a stubborn belief in their religious convictions, but Shepherd’s prodigious breeding creates two tiers among the group – Wives and Daughters, and it's this dynamic which captures our interest predominantly. Much of our understanding of how the group functions comes through the eyes of the protagonist, Sela, superbly played by Raffey Cassidy, a Daughter who has no sense of identity or perspective that doesn’t involve the group. Her coming-of-age story has the potential to alter all relationships and structures as power and sexuality entrances her, but control and subjugation repels her. As told through Szumowska’s (admittedly rather heavy-handed at times) symbolic aesthetic, the film makes for a chilling glance at the strange pull that cults exert on their members and how their values imprint themselves on their members in irrevocable ways. And of course it all might well be taking place inside Sela’s head - her unconscious signalling the onset of enslavement rather than the first stirrings of adult freedom. She is now ripe for Shepherd but also soiled, given that he judges menstruating women “unclean” and remands them to a dark shack. Shepherd melts out of the mist like a hybrid of Jesus, Rasputin and Dracula. He is all engulfing males rolled into one.

The film is heavily reliant on deliberately unnerving imagery, often at the expense of dialogue, and the painfully slow pace will undoubtedly put off many, whilst the idea is that vulnerable women will give up their autonomy, indeed their very identities, to such an entitled being, requires a bit of an imaginative leap (although of course there are historic precedents). However, Cassidy carries us through, she is superb at evoking the quintessential teenage demeanor: superiority with glints of uncertainty. Recalling 'The Witch' and 'The Handmaid’s Tale', it reminds us how the folk-horror genre has long been interested in female bodies that are used and abused by men, and how they often become entwined inextricably with practices of twisted religious devotion. Gripping stuff.