After the excellent opening titles by producer/designer Marta Carracedo, director Aditya Vishwanath’s latest film Shadows Fall is definitely intriguing.

Senka’s (Dylan Quigg) life is miserable and she is on edge. Not surprising when you see the size of the fridge protruding out from the kitchen wall…an architect’s nightmare. Work deadlines, a wandering psychopath and nosy neighbours contribute to her nervousness. When she’s not consulting her voodoo book and having visits from Amis (Christian Wennberg), the Swedish demon she has done a deal with, she is having yet another soul-searching conversation with her husband, or at least staring at him.

Fortunately Raine & Willem arrive, the new neighbours, bringing both a necessary boost to the film as well as a comic element. But the major question and film’s premise is Jonas (Jener Dasilva) – is he there or not? His constant brow-wrinkling and confused state contributes to the dubiousness of it all. The visual clues – dead flowers, Senka looking progressively gaunt as the film progresses, Jonas taking on zombie qualities – suggest that things are definitely not right.

Combine that with a mediocre script of hons, dears, sweethearts and other limited conversations in the vein of “sweetie, is this everything you wanted?”, layer it with some haunting music and a smattering of clichés and the situation is dire. The only thing that kept me watching was wondering whether Willem was ever going to speak.

If Jonas really is dead, then Senka should have left him that way. Their co-dependency probably made them miserable. With a re-edit to knock off an hour, a rewrite and a resync, this film could have legs. And quoting Senka, it could also be renamed “Hell is us”.

Der Bunker (The Bunker) is the debut feature from German writer, director and producer Nikias Chryssos. The dark comedy is set entirely within a windowless bunker housing a father (David Scheller), a mother (Oona Von Maydell) and their son Klaus (Daniel Fripan), supposedly 8 years old. A solitary man walks through a snowy deserted forest looking for his rental with a lakeview, hoping for peace and quiet in which to think and write. However as he arrives at the family’s bunker, he suspects that he has arrived at the airbnb from hell…

The lakeview turns out to be a small picture pinned to the wall of the windowless concrete low-ceilinged room. The host washes the newly arrived student’s feet (Pit Bukowski), feeding him dumplings while surreptitiously noting down the quantity consumed. Heinrich, a distant and opinionated booming voice, is directing the family from an open wound on the mother’s leg. Heinrich orders that the student becomes Klaus’ teacher, something which his father has previously done, and Klaus is suddenly exposed to new ideas, time to play and friendship from the hesitant student. This means he no longer accepts the burden and hope his parents have placed on him, as well as their treatment of the man-child he has become and whom they desperately want to decorate and keep control of.

Although styled as a dark comedy, my thoughts kept returning to the many young women who have been held hostage in similar bunkers, from Austrian Fritzl in 2008 to a Swedish doctor just this year. A quick search online unfortunately brings up pages of similar incidents. Hidden away from the world and underground without light or fresh air, abused and dominated, this film is definitely dark, with slight twists that resemble comedy. As Chryssos describes his comedic style, “I want to use humour as a means of anarchy. That’s what some of my favourite comedies do.” It is a twisted tale with a serious message about education and childhood, where the abnormal gradually becomes normal.

Der Bunker won a few awards in 2015 at Austin’s Fantastic Fest, with Daniel Fripan deservedly winning best actor for his role as Klaus.

Henrike Naumann’s costumes, Melanie Raab’s production design and Matthias Reisser’s cinematography turned the abandoned bunker into something looking like a shoot from the magazine Dazed – an eclectically styled and beautifully lit house.

The film is completely compelling as you wonder how bad it is going to get.

Der Bunker is newly released on DVD, BluRay and Vimeo with English subtitles.

Pierre (Naomi Nero) and his little sister Jacqueline (Lais Dais) live with their widowed mother Arcay (Dani Nefussi). Pierre, a beautiful gender-ambivalent 17-year-old is boring his way through high-school while playing in a garage band, cross-dressing and grunting at his mother. The results of a police-requested DNA test mean the end to family life as he knows it.

It is a story that is unfortunately a very contemporary one. On the Missing Kids UK website, it states that a child is reported missing every three minutes. On the site a lot of the missing children are now adults, and interestingly a lot of them disappeared at about the age of 16, the age when some 16 year olds are ready to run away and establish their own identity. Pierre, aged 17, has been unwittingly found. Just as he is discovering his interior life, his external life explodes. One of the key questions is what does it mean to be connected by blood ties and nothing else?

Mae So Ha Uma, literally translated from Portuguese as There’s Only One Mother, has been released with three different titles that I’m aware of including, Don’t Call Me Son (English) and From One Family To Another (French). In this case, these three sum up most of the themes of the film.

This is writer and director Anna Muylaert’s third feature-film after the award-winning The Second Mother and the story is based on a real event that occurred in Brasilia. Muylaert has a rich background in the Brazilian entertainment industry, as an award-winning writer and director, as well as one of the first female directors to have had overseas film sales.

Director of photography Barbara Alvarez has created a visually intriguing film with the simple ambient sounds – cooking, rain, parties – which introduce us to the story before the image does. Anna Muylaert has created a brilliantly constructed and emotionally-rich story with a great cast. Intriguing, beautiful and provocative.

Between Tunisia and Sicily, the Italian volcanic island of Pantelleria is the setting of A BIGGER SPLASH: A house, four people and a load of emotional conflict.  Pantelleria is a 15km long former penal colony with sulfuric mud baths, beautiful rock pools, Giorgio Armani’s holiday house and thousands of stranded North African refugees attempting to make it to Europe. It is politically Italian and geographically African.

Famous rock musician Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton, channelling Bowie in full makeup) and her younger photographer partner Paul (Mathieu Schoenaerts) are living an idyllic life in a borrowed house, while she silently recovers from debilitating throat surgery. Reading, rest, sunbathing, swimming, sex, repeat.

Loquacious music-producer Harry Hawkes (Ralph Fiennes) surprisingly turns up to this remote place with his newly discovered daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson), an enigmatic provocateur seemingly trying on her newly-discovered Dad’s style for size. Harry is the type of character that nobody can resist – talks to everyone, smiles widely and has no inhibitions. Ambiguous relationships between each character are slowly revealed, creating a slow-burn tension.

Director Luca Guadagnino has collaborated with Tilda Swinton for the past 25 years, with their most prominent films together being LOVE FACTORY & I AM LOVE. Producers Studio Canal approached Guadagnino with the idea to reinterpret Jacques Deray’s 1969 classic, La Piscine. Initially underwhelmed, he approached writer David Kajganich (BLOOD CREEK & TRUE STORY) and they collaborated on a subversive alternative to the original, keeping the names of the original characters as well as the basic plot.

Marianne’s enforced silence was Swinton’s suggestion, and despite a necessary reworking of the script, Kajganich exploited the opportunity: “When you’re writing, you’re always looking for a way to maximise the dramatic potential of a scene without text. If you can find ways for people to explore what they want or try to get what they want without just talking about it, it is really helpful”.

Swinton says her motivation came from a real need to stop talking: “At a moment in my own life when I was all out of words, I proposed the idea of this woman unable to speak into the established story of ancient histories and new lives thrown into relief by one another. Not only as a twist to ramp up the tensions between the characters, but also as a way of exploring the possibilities of silence in a portrait of a character surrounded by the noise of others and the legacy of the noise she had herself made in the past.”

Someone does eventually vanish and we are left to speculate on the inside stories of each character. The film is an excellent introspective trip with a heightened aesthetic. I bet you will desperately or curiously read the credits in search of the name of the designer who created every beautiful thing that Tilda Swinton wore…It was Raf Simons for Dior.

Four versions of swimming pool have been made, some inspired by Alain Page’s novel of the same name. For some warm summer evening viewing, here are three more:

Jacques Deray’s original film LA PISCINE (1969) with Alain Delon, Romy Schneider and Jane Birkin gravitating around the pool in St Tropez. Two versions were made in French and English, with the English version having a slightly different ending, so take your pick.

Indian director J. Sasikumar made the Malayalam-language version SWIMMING POOL (1976). No synopsis exists so if any watches it, let me know.

French director Francois Ozon’s SWIMMING POOL (2003) has crime writer Charlotte Rampling seeking solitude in her agent’s holiday house with the inevitable pool in the south of France.  Her agent’s daughter (Ludivine Sagnier) turns up, bringing complications and the inevitable crime.