film reviews, interviews, features | BRWC

Author: Joel Fisher

  • At Night Comes Wolves: Review

    At Night Comes Wolves: Review

    Leah (Gabi Alves) does everything she can to please her husband, Daniel (Jacob Allen Weldy). She makes sure they have a well-kept home, she cooks and even dresses up for him on his birthday – but it’s still not enough.

    After a night of passion, Leah finds Daniel unexpectedly unsatisfied with their night and when she finds out what’s wrong, she’s horrified. She still does the best that she can to please him, but realising that it may never be enough and that Daniel treats her like an object, she leaves.

    On the road, she stops at a diner and meets Mary May (Sarah Serio), a persuasive woman who Leah feels a close connection to even though they’ve only just met. After a while, Mary May convinces Leah to meet Davey (Vladimir Noel) who can tell her more about what they do.

    Leah starts talking about her situation and Daniel and when she starts talking about the stranger aspects of Daniel’s behaviour, it strikes a chord in Mary May and Davey, thinking that they may have met him before. Promising Leah great things and the ability to change the world, they set out to find Daniel and put things right.

    At Night Comes Wolves is a horror thriller directed by Tj Marine in his feature directorial debut. Billed as an anti-misogynist horror, At Night Comes Wolves starts out as what the audience may believe to be a straightforward revenge film.

    However, as the plot continues it seems that there are stranger things going on and unfortunately this also means that the plot is a little muddled as it tries to do multiple things. The problem is that it never focuses on one thing for too long.

    The cast all do a great job and Alves in particular gives a great performance, but it’s unfortunate that the story changes and goes in different directions so quickly. In fact, the way that Leah, Mary May and Davey deal with Daniel make it unclear to the audience who the villains really are. By the end, At Night Comes Wolves may be an ambitious project, but one that feels like it wants to do something else.

  • The Banishing: Review

    The Banishing: Review

    Marianne (Jessican Brown Findlay) has been married to Linus (John Heffernan) for a short time after he agreed to take her in and her daughter, Adelaide (Anya McKenna-Bruce) and they’ve just moved in to a new home. A home where Linus will be leading the local Catholic parish in his role as the local priest.

    There was a rather large stigma about unmarried women with children at the time and although Marianne is thankful, there are people including Father Malachi (John Lynch) who thinks that she should be more than grateful of her privileged position.

    War is on the horizon, so tensions are rising and the arrival of a strange man named Harry Price (Sean Harris) doesn’t make things better. Especially when he tells Linus about the curse that bestows the house and how the previous owner met a grisly end. Linus and Marianne ignore his warnings, but soon Marianne starts to experience hallucinations and Adelaide’s behaviour starts to concern her. Not to mention the threat of hooded figures that are seen around the grounds of the house.

    The Banishing is a supernatural pre-war horror movie exclusively on Shudder. Probably taking inspiration from the recent success of Netflix’s Haunting of… series, The Banishing sets the tone for a creepy, atmospheric ghost story. However, the problem is that it seems like it has a lot of ideas and has put them all in at once.

    Madeleine is a suitably creepy child who plays with spooky looking dolls and talks to apparitions that Marianne cannot see. There’s talk about the house being cursed and many of the locals become frightened when there’s mention of the new family living there.

    There’s even a suggestion of a demonic cult by way of the dolls that Madeleine plays with, although none of these suggestions ever really lead anywhere.

    The cast all do well with a somewhat cliched script and a muddled plot, but in the end The Banishing raises a lot of questions, but doesn’t give any satisfactory answers. There’s also a lot of subtext to things the characters say and do and it frustratingly never deals with them properly either. A well-made production with a good cast, just a pale imitation of something that could have been more fulfilling.

  • Reefa: Review

    Reefa: Review

    Israel ‘Reefa’ Hernandez (Tyler Dean Flores) lived with his father, Israel Sr. (José Zúñiga), mother, Jackeline (Margarita Rosa de Francisco) and little sister, Offir (Cinthya Carmona) in Miami on a visa while waiting to go to school in New York to study art. Israel had a passion for art and life and in particular graffiti art which would help him make his mark in the world.

    He was a good-looking young man with charm, wit and the whole world ahead of him. Then one day while working on a photoshoot he met a young model named Frankie (Clara McGregor) and thanks to his smooth talking, they hit it off and started dating.

    However, Reefa’s parents are concerned about their son because although he has a lot of potential, they know that they should keep their heads down in fear of being deported back to Colombia.

    Reefa is a bittersweet coming of age drama and true story about the young life of Israel ‘Reefa’ Hernandez, written and directed by Jessica Kavana Dornbusch. It tells the story of a young man taken too soon in his prime by a police officer who was meant to be keeping the peace and upholding the law.

    Reefa himself comes across as a young man who not only had a whole life waiting for him, but had everything every young man would want in spades. Flores’ performance is likeable and charming and with Dornbusch’s script, Reefa becomes a driven young man who knew what he wanted and knew how to get it. Not to mention that he had a talent for saying just the right things to Frankie when it counted.

    Reefa not only shows the small, close knit family, but also the community and environment of Miami and captures it perfectly so that it’s not just a place where Reefa lived, but a part of his identity.

    Many immigrants come to the US hoping to have a better life and nobody expected Reefa to be a victim of police brutality. Hopefully Reefa’s story will be seen far and wide and serve as yet another reminder that to bring peace, there has to be change.

  • The Misadventures Of Mistress Maneater: Review

    The Misadventures Of Mistress Maneater: Review

    The Misadventures Of Mistress Maneater: Review – Ava Moriarty (Lorrisa Julianus) is a dominatrix known as Mistress Maneater and she’s tired of her day job. The problem is that her boyfriend is a Russian gangster and when he dumps her, she has to pay back everything he owes her – to the tune of five hundred thousand dollars. Ava tries to think of ways that she can pay him back, although she knows that she could get the money if only she had enough time.

    Then she gets involved with the wrong man, Mayor Kupsik (Dave Lichty) who tells her to seduce an Episcopalian priest in order to start a scandal and he’ll give her the money she wants. The trouble is that when Ava starts to get to know Radovan (Mickey O’Sullivan), she starts to fall for him.

    Not only that, but she finds a priceless painting in his house which may do just as well to get the money that she owes.

    The Misadventures of Mistress Maneater is a romantic comedy written by Lorrisa Julianus and directed by C.J. Julianus. As filmmakers their ethos is to make unique, smart and inspiring films that audiences haven’t seen before.

    However as far as the script goes, there may be smart characters in there and the plot is certainly subversive, but it feels like two movies working alongside each other and often not cooperating.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUGm1CEAh34

    The character of Ava Moriarty is well written and at first the character seems like a surface level idea of what a screenwriter thinks is feminism, but further exploration shows that the character is more complex. Lorrisa Julianus does do a great job in the role as well, but it seems that the tone of the movie is too confused.

    What’s billed as a romantic comedy takes a while to get going and often feels like a crime thriller as Ava tries to escape her ex-boyfriend and earn her freedom. O’Sullivan’s choice of accent is a little misjudged too and it sometimes creates a barrier between him and Ava as they’re supposed to be forming a bond. Ava Moriarty is a great character in the wrong movie, it may have been better if one genre was picked.

  • The Inheritance: Review

    The Inheritance: Review

    Sasha (Natalia Ryumina) has inherited a house in her family’s home country of Ukraine, so despite the long trip and the expense, Sasha and her husband, Peter (Nick Wittman) head off to Ukraine where they can get settled in. Sasha soon starts exploring the house, but Peter has other ideas and is hoping to convince Sasha to sell the house so they can spend the inheritance more wisely.

    However, during Sasha’s investigation of the house, she starts to find thing that were hidden away and soon discovers a dark history of her family that should have been forgotten.

    The Inheritance is a horror mystery thriller shot in Ukraine, written and directed by Chad Barager and Kevin Speckmaier. The set up for the movie is very familiar and for those who think they may have seen it all before they may not be that surprised. However, for those wishing to see a standard thriller with elements of the supernatural and a bit of mystery thrown in may not be disappointed.

    As Sasha searches the house further, there are elements which may leave the audience to believe that there may be more going on than they expected. Sasha starts hearing noises, seeing things that Peter doesn’t and she even finds physical evidence that the house is hiding secrets.

    Barager and Speckmaier do indeed create a tense atmosphere, and coupled with ethereal music and moody lighting, the scene is indeed set for something sinister for Sasha to uncover.

    Unfortunately, there’s not a lot more to the movie that audiences haven’t already seen done before many times over. Sasha’s investigation does take her out into Ukraine so the audience may get to see sights they haven’t seen before, but the whole thing is rather predictable and formulaic.

    There’s a little humour during Sasha’s journey to uncover the truth, but it’s all heading to a point in the script where characters start acting strangely and things just seem to happen to finish the story. There may be a few twists and turns along the way, but nothing that will make an audience sit up and take notice.