Mastemah
Unsatisfying French horror in which Camille Rezat plays Louise, a terrible psychiatrist whose patients all seem to end up killing themselves while she herself spends much of the runtime under the influence of large quantities of self-administered psychiatric drugs. She works in a similarly poor hospital which seems to have a policy of leaving the windows open on high floors so patients can throw themselves out if they want after her latest bout of failed hypnotherapy. Louise relocates to the country and pretty soon an entire local family is dead of gunshot wounds while she is being visited by a hairy stranger for yet more of her unvalidated treatments. One sincerely hopes MASTEMAH isn't intended as a reflection of the current state of French psychiatric practice. It's also glacially slow and so gloomily photographed the rural area of France to which Louise moves seems to need electric lighting even outside in the middle of the day. If there is a worthwhile story buried in here all the above elements are far too distracting (there's also some of the silliest Latin to grace a horror film I've ever seen) to allow one to get into it.
Or rather INCROYABLE MAIS VRAI because here's another film from the decidedly peculiar imagination of French writer-director Quentin Dupieux. M. Dupieux's previous films include RUBBER (2009) about a sentient homicidal car tyre, and more recently DEERSKIN (2019) about a man who develops a singularly odd relationship with his supernatural deerskin jacket. In his latest film a couple buy a house where a duct in the cellar leads to a bizarre form of time travel to which the wife becomes addicted with appropriately horrific results. Meanwhile the husband's boss has had a new electronic device fitted in Japan, the misadventures of which are singularly French. INCROYABLE MAIS VRAI has a few too many ideas crammed into its scant 74 minutes, making it the most scattergun and undisciplined of Dupieux's movies. That said if you liked his previous work (and I very much did) there's a lot to enjoy (and laugh uproariously at) here, just don't expect it to go the TIMECRIMES route or for the cat that turns up to have any major significance.
Quentin Dupieux's INCREDIBLE BUT TRUE will be getting a release on the Arrow Academy label.
Aka My Mother Married A Werewolf, or it would have been if it was a story by the great British writer R Chetwynd-Hayes. Instead WOLFKIN is from Luxembourg and for a country whose horror tradition (if any) is somewhat muted in the eyes of the world this is actually surprisingly good stuff. Single mother Elaine (Louise Manteau) becomes concerned when her ten year old son starts biting his schoolmates. His father deserted the family years ago, Could his parents help explain the boy's behaviour? Only a trip to their splendidly gothic ancestral manor can provide the answer. WOLFKIN is a Frightfest highlight with great acting, directing, and a storyline that's intriguing and well-handled, as are the special effects so if you're a werewolf fan don't worry about having to put up with crappy CGI as the film has its own way of dealing with the curse that afflicts the family.
If Edgar Wright snorted a bucketload of cocaine and got his similarly chemically enhanced friends to make a fast-paced comedy movie about a heist gone wrong, one involving lots of high speed driving in Belgium accompanied by one of those banging house / dub / trance soundtracks that will endear this to as many as it will likely alienate then H4Z4RD is it. It is very funny and it is very fast paced and while your mileage may vary if this is your sort of thing you will think you've died and gone to heaven
A best-selling writer gets blocked trying to come up with his second novel and moves to the isolated country retreat of his late father in search of inspiration. He finds it in a rolled up manuscript jammed up the kitchen sink and starts to see manifestations of what may be ghosts from his father's past. THE GHOST WRITER feels like a film made by people unfamiliar with a genre whose tropes, twists and turns are so well known to fans that those fans are advised to steer well clear because they'll likely find the whole of this rather hard going. Some of the performanecs are sadly lacking although Andrea Deck as Jane the 1940s-style temptress is spot on and has real presence. Quite why the flashback scenes feel as if they are set in the 1940s is a bit odd as presumably the lead's father would have been active in the 1990s at the earliest but with washed out photography and a meandering ending that's the least of THE GHOST WRITER's problems.
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