TIFF Part Four: The Loved Ones Review

I'm on holiday; leave me alone.

The Loved Ones

It was, of course, not the first Australian horror movie – it wasn’t even the first of this decade – but Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek is rightly seen as responsible for the revival of the country’s genre cinema. In terms of pure horror, there has not been a great Australian film since. Some have been quite good: McLean’s own follow up, crocodile flick Rogue, was a lot of fun; Storm Warning had some intensity. On the whole, however, the films have ranged from adequate to appalling. Enter Sean Byrne, and The Loved Ones.

Brent (Xavier Samuel) is a high school student in a country town. A stoner and self-harmer, he has almost climbed out of a depression caused by a tragedy six months earlier that he feels responsible for. He has a goofy best friend Sac (Richard Wilson), who is courting Holly (Victoria Thaine), the goth daughter of the local cop, and a girlfriend Mia (Jessica Macnamee) willing to put up with his stunted state. He also has a would be suitor, Lola (Robin McLeavey). A shy, pink-clad thing, Brent turns down her invitation to the school dance. Brent doesn’t know about Lola’s past, her father (John Brumpton), or what he will do for her.

No Australian horror film since Wolf Creek have reached the levels of intensity that The Loved Ones has; no Australian film in memory has reached its levels of violence. Brumpton – his character is credited only as “Daddy” – is a skin crawler, with his clear lust for his daughter and his willingness to oblige her every twisted whim. Lola herself is spectacular, with McLeavey going all out for her performance. She is breathtaking, scary, unstoppable and hilarious, and deserves to be remembered as a horror icon. Her performance is fearless, and her final moments in the film are mesmerizing. Everyone else is very good – our hero Samuel does fine work in what is, for a lot of the film, a silent role – but it is McLeavey who steals the film. And just wait until you meet Bright Eyes.

Byrne, like Greg McLean before him, has made a bold and brave first feature, unafraid to mess with audience expectations, and to have them writhing in their seats. His script turns the high school movie on its head, while his direction pushes the audience right to the edge, and then further.

The Loved Ones is as intense as a horror movie can get while still holding onto its humanity. It is the best Australian horror film in years, and one of the best from anywhere in the last decade.

9/10

This film - rightly so - won the audience award for Midnight Madness. The reaction on the night was amazing, so it wasn't a huge surprise, as great as it was. For me, this film was one I knew little about, and my excitement levels were low.

After the film, they were high.

There's something special about seeing a great local film that does enormous amounts with little money, especially if they're genre movies. The budget wasn't made explicit in the Q&A, but it wasn't high, but the film looked amazing.

Enough gushing. The film is released in Australia early 2010, and hopefully it will make it in overseas markets as well. It's not for the faint of heart, but if you like your horror intense, you've got something to look forward to.

TIFF Part Two: Daybreakers Review

I continue to be a bad blogger. Here's the second of the Midnight Madness lineup: the Australian/US co-production, Daybreakers.

Daybreakers

The Spierig brothers had a minor hit on their hands five years ago with Undead. As poor a release as this film received in its home country, it still brought them attention: a pair of brothers from Brisbane had managed to write, direct and produce a micro-budget film look much bigger than it really was, with the the vast majority film's extensive special effects handled by the Spierigs themselves, on their own computers. It was a huge effort, creative and impressive. The film itself was not great, with muddled plotting and mixed performances, but it served to show the brothers as filmmakers with great promise.

Promise fulfilled.

Where Undead took an original spin on zombies by throwing aliens into the mix, Daybreakers takes the fast-becoming-stale vampire mythology and gives it new life. We are introduced to a dystopia populated by vampires. Vampirism spread like a virus to the point where humans are almost extinct - and vampires are almost out of food. Running out of blood is causing the vampires to turn into psychotic and dangerous bat-like creatures. Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) is a doctor and researcher working for a blood production company, trying to create an artificial blood while becoming increasingly aware of his conscience, to the chagrin of his brother Frankie (Michael Dorman), and boss, Charles Bromley (Sam Neill). A chance encounter with a group of humans on the run - among them Lucy (Claudia Karvan) - leads Dalton to Elvis (Willem Dafoe), a vampire who has been cured.

The world of Daybreakers is endlessly inventive. The brothers fashioned a witty and believable update of our own world and how it could be adapted to suit a population who cannot go in daylight. A lot of dystopic films are creative in this way, and that's all, but Daybreakers is also a very solid genre action piece. We have sequences ranging from an intense attack by a malnourished vampire, to car chases, to huge shoot-outs. All the while the plot, and its intruiging turns, powers along.

Daybreakers may not quite be a film to rise to the top of the dystopia subgenre, but we do have a crowdpleaser that isn't stupid, a great Australian action movie, and a return to the highs of Australian genre filmmaking.

8/10

Advice if you're going to TIFF, or any film festivals with a lot of Q&As: get a camera with a zoom.

Left to right: Colin Geddes, the Midnight Madness programmer, The Spierig Brothers, Sam Neill, and Willem Dafoe, introducing the film.

After the screening, Dafoe had to leave. I asked if they had always planned to make the film an American-set one. They said that with the budget they wanted, it always would have been the only choice. Neill chimed in that he was playing Canadian, not American.

And from the night before, Jennifer's Body. So many fucking photographers. This is just a handful, blocking the view, just to see Megan Fox standing on stage. They didn't even stick around for the film or Q&A, they just wanted an image of her, standing on a stage. Just to make sure that she can, I guess.

And the Q&A. We have Geddes, director Karyn Kusama, Megan Fox, Johnny Simmons, Amanda Seyfried, Adam Brody, Diablo Cody, two producers, and Jason Reitman.

It was a pretty lively Q&A, mostly dominated by Kusama, Cody and Fox, with some loud remarks from Reitman. Reitman produced here, and was also showing his next film as director, Up in the Air. That looks to be a quieter drama, so Reitman was letting loose here, with his first horror crowd. Seyfried and Simmons were adorably shy. Kusama and Fox spoke of having no idea what some of Cody's dialogue was even about.

It was an enjoyable enough session, except for the idiots who wouldn't stop shouting their questions about the film's lesbian moments, sounding like drunk patrons at a strip club begging for another little bit of titty, while the girls on stage just want to go home. There are plenty of those places in Toronto, guys. Head there.

More to come!

How About... None of Them?

Can you pick Australia's Perfect Couple?

Fuck. I have to reevaluate what I know about relationships. It turns out that to be a "perfect couple" isn't about compatibility or trust or love or any of that stuff that, you know, logic suggests. It's about how quirky in a network-friendly way you are - "we're virgins!" "we argue a bit!" "we're different heights!" - and your ability to go through idiot fucking challenges!

And, of course, a handy tolerance for Jules Lund.


Jesus.

Not that I've worked in television for that long, but there's no way anyone on this production (bar the contestants, of course) cares about what they're creating. The production offices of this little gem aren't filled with proud people, safe in the knowledge they're creating something people will love and remember. They groan at every batch of rushes that get shit into the system.

No one's demanding a constant stream of high art, Australian television, but how about something that won't give its audiences a brain embolism?

I should thank my lovely girlfriend Tina for alerting me to the existence of Australia's Perfect Couple. One thing we can agree on, as a couple? This fucking show will be worse than Hitler. I wonder if that qualifies us to be on it?

Deal or No Deal Still Exists; Humanity Weeps

Deal or No Deal, despite all reason, and the Geneva Convention, still exists. It is a show of breathtaking stupidity. For those unaware, the way a contestant plays on this game show is by holding a briefcase.

That's about it.

Okay, there's more, but if you don't know, I could not be bothered explaining it to you. There's no skill involved, unless willingness to take risks is counted as a skill. (It's not.) In Australia the show is hosted by Andrew O'Keefe, who is the Antifunny.

The show had been scrubbed from my mind, but I inadvertently caught a bit of it today, and... it's grown stupider. If the show used to be as smart as, say, Paris Hilton, it's now as smart as Paris Hilton were she hit by a bus but survived, unable to communicate save for a few gurgling noises as she tries to say "don't you have any pink hospital gowns?"

First of all, it's the special Dancing With the Stars* week, where the celebrities** from that show play the game for home viewers. Today, it was Rob Mills, known for his time on Australian Idol and a brief fling with Paris Hilton, before her tragic bus accident. He's on a game show to promote the reality show he's on due to his fame from being of a reality show. If that circle of inanity wasn't enough, the show itself has increased its audience participation tenfold. Picture a game show audience. Picture the people who take time out of their lives to go to a studio and watch people open cases. Now picture them holding their arms in front of them in the shape of an X, collectively yelling "NO DEAL!". Picture them holding both arms up, on either side of their heads, rubbing their fingers together with glee, yelling "DEAL!" The contestant makes those gestures back at them, giving them validation, like the participant in the middle of a bukkake circle saying "thanks" at the end of it.

Never validate an idiot. No good will come of it.

*They're not really stars. There's a blind guy and the host of Today Tonight, and that's it.
**Really, they're not.

Hacked to the Rafters

Oh yes. The puns keep on coming.

Packed to the Rafters, the Australian dramedy, was one of my favourite punching bags of last year. Largely because, despite being labelled as such, it contained neither dram, nor edy. Worst of all, however: it's called Packed to the Rafters. To the uninitiated, this might seem inoffensive enough. A bit of a cliche, perhaps, but a title's a title.

It's about a family named Rafter. A family with grown children who all at once move back home, or near enough to it, making the home... Packed to the Rafters. Get it? Get it? Far be it for me to complain when I myself use puns as post titles (including this one) but this Goddamned show has not a hint of irony to it. It's soaked through with saccharine and Australian viewers lap it up like the last drops of water in the desert. Bad punning is an artform, but the producers aren't going for that. They were aiming for clever, and thought they hit a bullseye. Alas, they hit the bullseye of the next target over. Further, the characters were named for the purpose of the terrible title. It would be more forgivable (although not much more) had the characters been named Rafter already, they were searching for a title, and somebody's cartoon lightbulb went off, but that's not the case. It's so constructed that it needs a sledgehammer taken to it.

The twist is: I hadn't watched an episode of the show. The title was enough to put me off watching it, not to mention the advertisements. I had only seen clips. Snippets of episodes. It was enough.

An example from last year:

The father character, played by Erik Thompson, has some wacky suburban cricket rivalry with another player. There's a big scene on the field, which culminates with Thompson's opponent getting a cricket ball to the groin. Kooky music ensues. Oh! Those Rafters!

The very next scene has Rebecca Gibney's mother character talking to her daughter, played by Jessica Marais. It's a sad scene; you can tell, because Gibney looks sad. Her daughter has left a long term relationship, and her former partner, she reveals... is on ice. This makes sense, because ice addiction is very common in middle-class suburban Sydney.

Then, Gibney asks:

"Are you addicted to ice, too?"

So we have a comedy scene, as broad as they get, followed by over-the-top sad family melodramatics. Shows such as Six Feet Under have mastered the tone-shift, but the Rafters are not the Fishers, nor will they ever be. This juxtaposition is as jarring as a rape scene in the middle of a Disney movie.

Tonight, however, I watched a full episode. It was unfair of me to judge the show without sitting through an entire one. Also, I was waiting for the lottery results, which were delayed to trick even more people into watching this tripe.

I didn't win, in more ways than one. Here are some highlights:

• A psychic. They've brought in a psychic, who has made predictions for what's to come. If it wasn't enough to add a stupid supernatural element to proceedings, the show's audience also needs things telegraphed, because just watching stories unfold is too damn hard!
• The daughter character - having curbed her ice addiction, it seems - has a high school reunion. Not wanting to be embarrassed for being - sacre bleu! - single, she makes up a boyfriend. Jesus Christ; I'm surprised she didn't name him George Glass.
• At the reunion, the man she has roped into pretending to be her boyfriend, a dopey friend of her brother, threatens to humiliate her further by being a dumb fuck. Happily, some music starts, and he dances; the daughter dances with him, they both look silly, and she realises it doesn't matter what people thing of you. A nice moral! What have we all learned today, children?
• Gibney's forty-something character is pregnant. Not only does this pass for a plot twist, but name a single show that hasn't been ruined by the addition of a baby.
• A character bags out Juno. Be a better show before you start pulling that shit, Rafters.
• The music. Dear God. If you've ever had trouble with the music in Gilmore Girls, don't watch this show within arm's reach of sharp objects. It's so happy and goofy it makes The Wiggles sound like Norwegian death metal.
  
• There's a voiceover. A narration. Why? Because there's a voiceover in every single episode, by a different character. Not used creatively. Not used ironically, or to be funny. Just. Fucking. There. In case thinking about the things that happen in the show are too taxing without a bit of help.

The saving grace here is: I can now trash the show without fear. It's a kind of freedom. But please, Packed to the Rafters, could you at least tone it down a little? You make it difficult to defend Australian cinema and television.

I'm going to go watch some Frontline.

Have some clips!

Sydney Film Festival: Days 9 and 10

Friday Night: it was time to watch some dudes fuckin'.

Humpday

Lynn Shelton's American refreshingly indie indie has a simple premise: two straight guys decide to make a porno where they sleep with each other. It managers to be as funny as it sounds, but not quite in the way you might expect.

Mark Duplass, of the mumblecore movement, plays Ben, a man just starting to try for a child with his wife Anna (Alycia Delmore). It's his last stop on the train to being a fully licenced suburbanite, when his college friend Andrew (Joshua Leonard, of The Blair Witch Project) knocks on his door at 2am, a drifter looking to reconnect. When Andrew ends up at a party full of free-spirited creative types, Ben joins him, and they are informed of a high-brow art-porn short film festival. In their drunken and drugged state, they decide to make a film together; Ben even books a hotel room. Over the next two days, the two refuse to back down to each other, both wanting to save face; neither wants to be seen to be boxed in by boundaries of sexuality or lack of artfulness.

It's a three-hander. All the humour in this film comes not from bawdy sex jokes (not that there's not room for that in cinema) but from the interactions of the three core cast members, who are uniformly hilarious. The Internet Movie Database doesn't have a writer credited; this may be a mistake, but the naturalness of the dialogue indicates that the film was fully improvised. It's also very easy to identify with the characters; the threat of becoming just another suburb-dweller is scary; this is what our characters are fighting against. While low-key indies of this type can be so low-key as to be impossible to get into, this has enough forward momentum and humour so it avoids that trap.

8/10

Saturday brought two more films, and two (!) sightings, at last, of Hugo Weaving.

The Girlfriend Experience

Steven Soderbergh deserves credit for, in between studio efforts, experimenting with both storytelling and film distribution. The Girlfriend Experience is his latest effort, starring Sascha Grey as Chelsea, a high-class prostitute offering the experience of the title to her wealthy clients, while juggling a having a boyfriend Chris (Chris Santos) and her business in a time of economic crisis. There's also a subplot of Chris going to Las Vegas with a group of businessmen as he tries to get ahead in the gym industry.

The Girlfriend Experience is competently done; it's got a handheld digital aesthetic that might put some people off but gives a nice sense of immediacy to proceedings. The acting is fine; Sascha Grey is carries the film well enough, but Chelsea is such a shut-off, unemotive character that this can't have been too much of a challenge. The themes explored are interesting enough: central is the idea of having a loving relationship when one party openly sleeps with a lot of other people, even if there is no emotional connection to those outside the relationship. It's also perhaps the first film to explicitly, and frequently, reference the current financial crisis. But the film is bogged down by an irritating, cut-up structure. It's not a difficult to follow story, exactly, even if it's not clear at what point in the story Chelsea's sexual encounters fit; perhaps this is the point. But it serves as a barrier to a viewer getting emotionally involved in the story. Again, perhaps this is the point, but it makes the movie an worthy experiment about a collection of interesting themes, rather than something to rush out and see.

5/10

Following The Girlfriend Experience was my only retrospective film of the festival.

Wake in Fright

Wake in Fright is an important film in Australian cinema history: were it not for Wake in Fright, there might not be Australian cinema today. While that might be an overstatement, the film kickstarted an industry that was nearly dead, with a willingness to show Australians in a light far from flattering. It took Ted Kotcheff, a Canadian, to do it.

John Grant (Gary Bond) is a teacher; an Englishman trapped at a school in the Australian outback. It's the end of the school year, and he's going to Sydney to see his fiance. To get to Sydney, he has to pass through the town of Bundanyabba: "The Yabba". He encounters the locals, among them the friendly but pushy digger Jock Crawford (Chips Rafferty), depressive Jannette (Sylvia Kay), and alcoholic Doc Tydon (Donald Pleasence). Stranded there due to some foolish gambling attempts, John finds himself sucked into the town's fixation on a lifestyle of drinking, violence, and little else.

There isn't a huge amount in the film's plot that would classify it as a thriller, but that doesn't stop it from being an unsettling experience from start to end. Kotcheff captures the alcohol-drenched lifestyle from a sober point of view and drags his audience in, only to leave them in harsh sunlight at the end of it. The atmosphere of the film is spot on. Performances are uniformly excellent, especially Bond's headstrong and cold Grant and Pleasence's disturbing Doc Tydon. He's a character who's hard to shake from your mind after leaving the film. On a technical point of view, the film looks great: it was once thought lost, with only edited VHS and poor-quality bootlegs available. But the film was found in full form and remastered to perfection. Even if it wasn't so important to Australia's cinema history, Wake in Fright would remain vital viewing. A lost gem found.

9/10

After the film there was a question and answer question with Kotcheff, editor Anthony Buckley (responsible for tracking down the film) and actor Jack Thompson, whose first major screen role was in Wake in Fright. The story of tracking the film down is as amazing as the film itself: Buckley travelled the world to find the lost reels, arriving in England a week after it has been shipped away. He followed it to Pittsburgh, where it was in a vault marked "for destruction". Had he been a week late, the film would be gone forever. They discussed the restoration process. It had to be done frame by frame, as an automatic digital clean-up would remove flies from shots. Kotcheff talked about Chips Rafferty, an Australian actor who died after Wake in Fright was released. While other actors would drink non-alcoholic beer, Rafferty refused, drinking glass after glass with no effect.

Kotcheff's work on Weekend at Bernie's was not discussed.

Lessons Learned

• 10am is too early for a film.

• Or at least for a film as disappointing as The Girlfriend Experience.
  

Sydney Film Festival: Day 5

Still no Hugo Weaving, the bastard. I had to settle for gritty Australian convict cannibalism and fake blaxploitation instead.

Van Diemen's Land

Alexander Pierce has influenced a lot of entertainment of late; it's like he's a volcano and it's the mid-nineties. Earlier in the year, ABC screened a factual film, The Confession of Alexander Pearce, and his legend was used as the basis for the awful Dying Breed, where his descendants are the villains. Now Van Diemen's Land shows his story as it played out: a group of eight convicts, upon escaping their penal colony, resort to cannibalism to stave of starvation. If you ever wanted a film that could make cannibalism boring, Van Diemen's Land has granted your wish.

The Sydney Film Festival's organizers have put the film alongside Dead Snow and Paranormal Activity in the horror strand. Their failing here can't be held against the film; that would the same as begrudging Finding Nemo after being told it was a film noir. It's not scary or fast moving, but it's not supposed to be. It's barely even a thriller: it's a drama. While Van Diemen's Land cannot be faulted for being a genre film without tension, it can be faulted for being a drama without tension. We start the film by meeting eight convicts in the mid-1800s in what now is Tasmania. They escape, led by one who doesn't appear to actually know where he is heading. It is out of desperation that the idea of cannibalism is raised.

The production values here are great. It almost does feel as if the filmmakers – it's Jonathan auf der Heide's feature debut – were dropped into the bushland a century and a half ago, and hired local actors. Authenticity is high; everything's dirty and dangerous, and any romanticised ideas of Australian colonial life are thrown out the window. Here, the straightforwardness of the story lets it down. Events simply unfold without any turns. The convicts walk; one is killed and eaten, they walk some more, then another is offed. Ethical questions aren't really raised, although that may have made this film Alive 2: The Convicts, so we can be thankful for that. It would have helped were we given a character to let us into the story. Pearce himself (Oscar Redding, who cowrote the film with auf der Heide), is the closest to a lead character, but no attempts beyond the occasional arty voiceover are made to help us to understand him. Auf der Heide is happy to just show the slow journey and the forces of nature instead.

The problem is the story. "Convicts resort to cannibalism" makes an interesting sentence, but not a two-hour feature, when that's all that happens. In prose form, with access to the inner workings of the convicts, but that lacks here. Despite the impressive production and the fine acting, this film just doesn't grab. It aims for bleak, but hits dreary.

4/10

Since seeing Van Diemen's Land I've come across more positive reviews than negative, and after talking to other festival-goers who have seen it, I seem to be in the minority in my opinion. Turns out I'm an artless pleb.

Black Dynamite

Jive suckers.

Sick of spoofs yet? When those motherfuckers Seltzer and Goldberg churn out a new [Blank] Movie every thirty seconds that lampoon the most fleeting elements of pop culture simply be recreating them; when the Wayans brothers are ripping of those two, who were ripping them off in the first place; when even David Zucker has lost his touch, by celebrating US conservatism and, even worse, not being funny when he does so, we're in trouble. That's what makes Black Dynamite so refreshing: it won't date, as it actually feels like it comes from the period it's spoofing, and belongs to the genre: 70s blaxploitation. The jokes will still work in a decade's time. Also: it's fucking hilarious. That helps things.

The titular Black Dynamite (Michael Jai White, who also cowrote) is a badass former CIA agent from the CIA who sets out to avenge the death of his brother, after promising in adolescence to their dying mother that he'll never let him die. He follows the trail from his local neighbourhood, soon uncovering a nefarious honky plot that leads to China and all the way to Washington. Black Dynamite is a funny character in himself, but at the same time, is a genuine action figure. This helps cement the film in the seventies, as if it were actually made then – and at times it's easy to forget that it wasn't. It does this as well as Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, which takes apart bad 80s television horror, but is even funnier.

There's some slight lag in the middle of the film but laughs still come throughout. The soundtrack, by Adrian Younge, deserves special praise too, not just (as with everything on display) for feeling so period-real, but for being so spot-on funny. Director Scott Sanders has done such good work here, if the film weren't so perfectly contained, I wouldn't complain about him handling a number of sequels chronicling Black Dynamite's further adventures. As it is, the film is destined for cult status. It is deserved.

8/10

I was running out of synonyms for "funny" there. Word suggested "mirthful". Fuck you, Word.

Lessons Learned

• Cannibalism isn't as glamorous as Anthony Hopkins will have you believe.
  
• Cannibalism isn't as funny as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 would have you believe.
  
• People still have to try a lot harder if they want to beat Dying Breed at being the worst thing inspired by Alexander Pearce
  

Points for Trying

I swear this thing isn't going to be entirely about horror movies.

But here are two more.

Acolytes

Is there such a thing as the opposite of a blessing in disguise?

Jon Hewitt's Australian horror film Acolytes is a rare thing: one where the main focus is on machinations of plot. The whole isolated teens being killed off one-by-one thing can still be done well – a recent example being All the Boys Love Mandy Lane – but it's nice to see a horror movie deliberately going in directions not necessarily telegraphed in its opening moments. This, however, is also what leads to its main issue.

Acolytes revolves around three teenagers – actually played by teenagers! – and two older men. Mark (Sebastian Gregory), James (Joshua Payne) and Chasely (Hanna Mangan Lawrence) are high schoolers and not the most model students. James is going out with Chasley, while Mark is clearly harbouring strong feelings for her. James and Mark also have a strange past with a local, older bully, Gary Parker (Michael Dorman) – he did something to them not made clear until well into the film. Meanwhile, the kids come across a body in a shallow grave in local bushland, and track down the man who buried it: a killer named Ian Wright (Joel Edgerton).

It's difficult to tell where this film will go, and that's something to admire it for. It's also its major failing; the film is overloaded with story at the expense of tension. Some scenes that could act as suspense sequences – characters being captured, even a death scene – are omitted completely. It would be better if the story were more compelling than it is, but it doesn't quite get there. A shift of focus could help; we don't ever really get to understand the character of Ian or exactly how he works.

Another issue is that characters often do things not because people would do them, but because they look good on camera. It's all very pretty, but "scary" should trump "aesthetically pleasing" in a horror movie.

Edgerton and Dorman are, as usual, strong. The kids are less so, although Mangan Lawrence shows promise that shines even stronger in The Square, another film where she appears with Edgerton. The boys aren't as strong, although this could be put down to their dialogue and some rather awkward editing near the start.

It's not a great film, but a commendable one. It essentially went straight to video in its home country – it made some film festival showings, and played in one cinema, for one week, in Sydney, before being released on DVD a couple of weeks after – and a long time after its completion. So while it's not brilliant, it deserved a lot better than that.

6/10

So this one practically went straight to video while Dying Breed – a movie worse than a rectal prolapse – got a big cinema release and ad campaign. The only way the Australian horror industry can make me forgive it is if Natalie Bassingthwaite's Prey gets a giant release. That movie looks mind-blowing, with a captital b. For blowing.

Vinyan

Fabrice Du Welz's follow up to The Ordeal is another mixed affair. It stars Rufus Sewell and Emmanuelle Béart as Paul and Jeanne Belhmer, a couple living in Thailand who lost their son Joshua in the 2004 Tsunami. They appear happy, but are quietly falling apart. Jeanne sees who she thinks is Joshua in a video filmed in Burma, so the couple try to go there to find him.

The film starts strong. You can feel the sadness, especially with Jeanne. Once they meet up with various Thai characters, who take their money to possibly help them, it just gets more tragic, as it's hard not to feel that they are being taken advantage of. The tension builds in the first half of the film until a painful moment at the midpoint. From here, the movie should get even more intense, but the opposite happens. The characters and story start to make less sense, and Du Welz shows near-Haneke levels of disdain for the audience as the film goes to strange places – disturbing places, but by this point you're too separated from the movie to be engaged.

It's gorgeously shot, and brave in its lack or traditional horror narrative. Béart is great throughout, and Sewell is reliable – although when he loses it two thirds of the way through, it's uncomfortable viewing when it should be upsetting. The Thai actors are good too, especially Petch Osathanugrah. But Vinyan loses its way too early on, limping to its finale when it should be at its most terrifying.

4/10

I was going to make a crack about Belgians, because Fabrice Du Welz is from there, and then I mentioned Haneke. But it turned out Haneke was Austrian, so I couldn't vilify a whole nation like I wanted to.

Next time, Belgium. Next time.