film reviews, interviews, features | BRWC

Author: Esme Betamax

  • Deep Tissue: Final Girls Berlin Review

    Deep Tissue: Final Girls Berlin Review

    Deep Tissue: Final Girls Berlin Review

    If you have ever been on the receiving end of a sports massage and been left thinking “That really fucking hurt, but I feel better for it.” Then you can probably hazard a guess at the inspiration for Meredith Alloway’s horror short Deep Tissue.

    Deep Tissue features Peter Vack, a Robert Pattinson/Steve Harrington mashup, as the unnamed man who pays a visit to an unnamed woman played by Alloway herself. She explores the awkwardness and embarrassment, covered by false bravado, stemming from the uncertainty around how the encounter is supposed to play out.

    Deep Tissue is body-horror with a whimsical side. It is standalone, but could have fit as one storyline within a larger series of vignettes, with strong echoes of Miranda July–particularly with regard to clumsy interaction between strangers and the potential for violent acts (see July’s The Future, 2011; Me and You and Everyone we Know, 2005).

    Alloway displays an interest in the relationship between pleasure and pain, and horror within daylight/ordinary activities. Another of her films, Ride, is set in a nightmarish spin class.

    Meredith Alloway is a producer and director, known for Deep Tissue (2019), Interior Teresa (2016) and Mutt (2017).

    Final Girls Berlin Film Festival showcases horror cinema that’s directed, written, or produced by women and non-binary filmmakers. We are committed to creating space for female voices and visions, whether monstrous, heroic or some messy combination of the two, in the horror genre. We’ve seen more than enough representations of women as beautified victims and constructions of male fantasies or anxieties, and are working towards the primacy of women as subjects and storytellers in horror.

  • Sin Cielo: Review

    Sin Cielo: Review

    In a U.S. – Mexico border town the magic of first love is cut dangerously short when a boy hustling to help his family inadvertently finds himself in the middle of a violent trafficking network after the girl he loves is kidnapped. – //sincielofilm.com/

    Directed by Jianna Maarten, Sin Cielo is set in the borderlands of Mexico. It addresses the real danger of kidnapping, trafficking, and femicide in that area. 

    Fenessa Pineda (Rambo: Last Blood, 2019) plays Delia, and David Gurrola (the US version of Shameless, 2016) is Memo. Ordinary teenagers who, separately,  find themselves quickly out of their depth.

    Sin Cielo
    Sin Cielo

    Maarten likes to build dread into her stories (Dinner with Ana, 2013; Fervor, 2015) Bringing each element of production together into a fine balance—cinematography, editing, soundtrack—that evokes the change in air pressure before an electrical storm.

    A counterbalance to the impending turmoil there is so much beauty to be found in the landscape, and the characters’ lives, captured by cinematographer Marcin Banasiak.

    Sin Cielo
    Sin Cielo

    There is no simple answer to this for the families that live with a combination of fear, stoicism and grief. But it is evident that Sin Cielo is a call to action to fight an issue prevalent, not just in Mexico’s borderlands, but globally. 

    Maarten lists the names of hundreds of missing women and girls as a reminder that, though this is a fictional short, it is very much grounded in truth.

    TRAILER – SIN CIELO from Salaud Morisset on Vimeo.

    The film has been nominated for several awards, and has taken home the Grand Jury prize at the Seattle International Film Festival for Best Narrative Short.

  • Toxic Beauty: BRWC Raindance Review

    Toxic Beauty: BRWC Raindance Review

    Toxic Beauty. The ingredients in your makeup could kill you.

    Toxic Beauty is very much tip-of-the-iceberg stuff. Director Phyllis Ellis recognises this, and concentrates on two threads throughout. Firstly, a group of women affected by the Johnson & Johnson talc scandal. Secondly, medical student Mymy Nguyen’s decision to test herself for the toxins absorbed from her regular beauty routine.

    Phyllis Ellis does not pitch makeup as the bad guy. She doesn’t press too hard on unattainable beauty standards—it’s mentioned, but the scare here lies in the fact that these toxins can be found in the most basic of hygiene products: soap, toothpaste, shampoo.

    The European viewer can take a little comfort in the knowledge that many of these products are regulated in the European Union (that’s an example of the ‘red tape’ certain politicians are keen to do away with), but it’s a global problem, and a slippery fish at that. Formulations change, problem substances are renamed. It avoids becoming an extended advertisement for “clean” products, but does suggest that they exist.

    Toxic Beauty
    Toxic Beauty

    The film is peppered with occasional appearances from glassy-eyed corporate creeps delivering their uncanny valley monologues. That these almost-definitely-not-a-bot-humanoids appear suddenly between interviews with real victims at their most vulnerable makes them all the more jarring. 

    We are familiar with this kind of behaviour, with so many examples of corporations engaging in a harm/cover-up loop, from Big Tobacco to The Radium Girls. But this doesn’t make Toxic Beauty any less heartbreaking. “Corporate greed is a type of cancer in our democracy right now.” A punchy statement tucked in right at the end of the credits. The speaker’s nameplate frustratingly out of view.

    Hopefully Ellis is not done with this. There are many more avenues to explore with Toxic Beauty as a starting point. Her style is engaging and understated—shocking enough without trying to fabricate drama. It is informative without being dry. 

    I was expecting a Supersize Me for makeup, but it’s much more sophisticated than that. Spurlock went out of his way to prove a point, inviting drama in a Michael Moore meets Jackass stunt. In contrast, Mymy Nguyen and the other women are simply operating as normal, having been lulled into a false sense of security by large corporations. Worryingly, this type of exposé runs the risk of adding fuel to the anti-vaxxer fire—with their fear of chemical ingredients, but that’s a whole different documentary.

  • Freaks: Review

    Freaks: Review

    “A bold girl discovers a bizarre, threatening, and mysterious new world beyond her front door after she escapes her father’s protective and paranoid control.”

    Freaks is a sci-fi thriller that follows 7 year old Chloe as she tries to make sense of her father’s erratic behaviour. They are holed up in a dilapidated suburban house, running through “safety drills”, which include Chloe reciting personal information: “My name is Eleanor Reed, I am 7 years old, my favourite sport is baseball”

    Paranoid dad, Henry (Emile Hirch), walks a fine line to keep the audience guessing for the first 20 minutes or so—Is he telling the truth, or completely delusional? Lexy Kolker’s headstrong Chloe is reminiscent of a young Drew Barrymore, and Bruce Dern is a good fit as cantankerous Mr Snowcone.

    Freaks should pique the interest of anyone who enjoyed Monsters (2010), Looper (2012) or the first season of  Umbrella Academy (2019-).

    Freaks takes Marvelesque mutants and puts them in an environment akin to Shyamalan’s shaky supernatural joint Signs (2002). Although it contains all the right elements Freaks struggles to break new ground. It is not just the abundance of X-Men-type stories of recent years that causes Freaks to suffer, but our new viewing habits.

    Freaks runs to just over 100 minutes, which is on the short side for a feature these days, but it was a surprise to be left thinking “is that it?” I am now so accustomed to watching at least a handful of episodes back-to-back that I think a 1 hour 40 minute film is unfinished. I may have finally noticed the Netflix effect. Freaks did not need to be any longer—the story was complete. But maybe the presence of Grace Park reminded me of BSG binges.  

     Read the BRWC interview with directors Zach Lipovsky & Adam Stein here

    Freaks
    Freaks
  • Review: Making Noise Quietly

    Review: Making Noise Quietly

    Someone once told me that every generation has the impression that it is living in end times. I could have done without their patronising tone—after all, the apocalypse can feel disconcertingly close at times—but I could see their point.

    We don’t have a monopoly on catastrophe: History is full of it. That message is illustrated neatly in Dominic Dromgoole’s Making Noise Quietly. The film poses these questions: How do different people experience war, and how do they carry that experience with them, after the fact?

    Three conversations take place, plucked from three different decades, but with a wartime thread running through each one. A conscientious objector (Luke Thompson) and an injured gay man (Matthew Tennyson) discuss life as civilians during the conflict.

    Then a woman from a military family hears news of her son during the Falklands war. Finally, a former soldier who is struggling to look after his son is taken in by a woman living in The Black Forest, Germany during the 1990s. 

    Making Noise Quietly
    Making Noise Quietly

    Making Noise Quietly is Dromgoole’s first feature, following a lengthy run of Shakespeare Shorts, which makes sense, because it started life as a play. The cast includes familiar faces from British TV: Barbara Marten, Deborah Findlay—both outstanding performances—as well as Joanne Howarth and Pauline McLynn. 

    Each is a conversation between strangers, so the characters navigate their encounters tentatively. They test the water, and find themselves becoming angry, obstinate, vulnerable. Emotions shift rapidly, with each person feeling the need to justify their position.

    Social media gets a bad rap when it comes to the polarisation of politics and society, but as Making Noise Quietly shows, the pendulum continues to swing over time. Twitter is the facilitator, not the cause.

    Making Noise Quietly presents conversations between people with different viewpoints. Not opposite, just different. Each conversation is difficult but necessary. It does not make for comfortable viewing, but then these are not comfortable times.