POMO

Initial contacts with approaching death at a retirement home, where “we all come only for a while, but we never go back”. The nice production design and fragile social spirit of this film about advanced age is underpinned by the wonderful acting of Maciej Damiecki. Night Silence is considered to be a horror movie because of the monsters that the protagonist faces in the basement. However, the linking of the monsters with his dreams and motivations is dubious and diminishes the film, which is otherwise an interesting metaphor for coming to terms with the end of one’s life. Three stars with blunted points and only for Maciej, who symbolically didn’t live to see the completed film. [Sitges FF]

Triangle of Sadness for communists and lovers of idiotic disaster movies in one. You don’t want that. I’ve already told you that The Platform was overrated. Being credited as the director of Rich Flu is an outright dishonor. Even so, it’s a spectacular production and Mary Elizabeth Winstead not only looks good in it, but she also performs well. [Sitges FF]

In the deluge of low-budget festival movies in which filmmakers try something out, Exhuma is pleasing thanks to its structured screenplay, professional technical execution and acting performances. The gradual build-up with the revealing of the contents of a deep grave works well. But the demon itself, changing into a flying ball of fire, didn’t impress me much. Not with its origins, the specific cultural elements around it or the way it is dealt with. [Sitges FF]

A minimalistic sci-fi movie built on an idea and its interesting rendering rather than on genre production design. It somewhat reminded me of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. Jérémy Clapin handles the dream passages with animated interludes, which he has experience with from the animated film I Lost My Body. The music, including the songs, also plays a significant, modular role here. However, Meanwhile on Earth doesn’t achieve the depth of thought and imagination found in I Lost My Body. Its ending makes sense, but it doesn’t adequately live up to the dramaturgy of the story. [Sitges FF]

Atmospheric locations in an abandoned village in the mountains of Calabria are the setting of this film, which shows us what we don’t need to see from the story rather than what we want to see. Not to mention the elements of the plot that are supposed to push the film somewhere but instead dwindle into nothingness. The nude bodies of young forest goddesses crawling out of a hole in a hill are not enough when we don’t know what they are supposed to represent, what the consequences of their presence might be for the humans, or why they ignore some of the humans and eliminate the others. [Sitges FF]

Teenagers finally stopped staring at their phones, instead giving vent to their emotions by screaming, tasting their own blood and pretending to be pack of predatory beasts. In a forest in which a mysterious creature roams and the corpse of their schoolmate occasionally appears. This premise sounds far better than what such a young director managed to make out of it (logically). The girls’ emotions are deeply felt and Summer H. Howell turns in a fine performance, but the motif of her character being overcome with rage after tasting the blood of a dead wild boar leads to nothing, the conflict between the pack of girls and the religious conservatism of the community lead by the local priest isn’t utilized effectively and the murders are pushed so far into the background that we forget about them over the course of the film. [Sitges FF]

For a small, indie thriller about one of today’s most disturbing real issues, A Desert is good. But we’ve already seen the same conflict depicted much more impressively and enjoyably in the fifth episode of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Too Old to Die Young. The expository build-up before the key twist is better than the execution of the twist itself. The scene that’s supposed to be the most shocking isn’t very shocking at all and the director completely avoids bringing it to a resolution in which the tension would take our breath away. And I’m afraid he avoided it not because he wanted to be original, but because he didn’t know to do it better. [Sitges FF]

A desert and a gas station with a weirdo and a confused girl after a car accident. The motif of intersecting time planes is not exactly original, but as always, it is reliably entertaining. And when the film’s pace starts to slow, clever connections are made, as in the films of Moorhead and Benson. At one moment, it even seems like a promising reflection on fateful “coincidences”, which touches the heart. But then the director strips the sentiment out of the story in the climax. [Sitges FF]

MadS breaks some kind of record in serving up a brilliant (!) exposition and then criminally failing to fulfil expectations. With its inverted dramatic arc, MadS is impressive in its strong technical ambitions of a continuous one-take film, kicked off with an extreme situation promising great development to come, only to lose its lustre in the second half with gradually diminishing ideas due to screenwriting incompetence. And wretched logic. What a shame! [Sitges FF]

A family movie about a pragmatic young girl becoming close with her outsider father on a trip into the New Zealand wilderness. With a strongly childlike viewpoint and mostly naïve humour. Little Nell Fisher is charming in the way of one of Spielberg’s child characters, the Cliffhanger scene is thrilling and the film has a spirit of adventure, but it’s memorable only because of the wide-angle mountain panoramas and the presence of Elijah Wood. [Sitges FF]