Darcy Read

Bugonia is a Conspiracy Comedy With a Lot on its Mind

October 25, 2025October 26, 2025Darcy Read

A dark comedy satire about modern conspiracies that devolves into chaos, Bugonia (2025) is a perfect follow-up for Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos’ uneven but fascinating 2024 triptych Kinds of Kindness. Based on Jang Joon-hwan’s too-early-for-the-moment film Save the Green Planet (2003), Lanthimos works with The Menu (2022) screenwriter Will Tracy, tapping into the moment of conspiracy and class-based desperation as the wealth gap opens into a chasm that flits between glancingly poignant insights.

Set around the outskirts of Atlanta, cousins Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbris in his first screen role) are conspiracy-addled loners living in Teddy’s family home, preparing to kidnap a nearby pharmaceutical CEO they believe is an alien hellbent on destroying the planet. The CEO in question, Michelle Fuller, played by now-regular Lanthimos collaborator and producing partner Emma Stone, holds this shaky film and script together with a powerfully committed performance that would command greater Oscar buzz if the film weren’t so off-putting, likely dissuading voters from admiring her work.

In quiet and chaotic scenes alike, Stone plays the cousins and audiences constantly, as we search for any clue as to whether Teddy is right about any of his ravings. While the film fluctuates in tone, never settling on a worldview of humanity that usually allows Lanthimos’ films to shine through the affectation, Stone is perhaps Hollywood’s most dexterous performer of tonality, with an ever-increasing ability to comfort and challenge an audience at a moment’s notice.

Jesse Plemons as Teddy in *Bugonia* (2025).

When the film is thriving, it bounces between satirical black comedy moments from Teddy’s conspiratorial ravings about aliens causing all of his personal problems and Michelle’s faux empathic conversations with her employees. By so heavily linking Teddy’s personal traumas to his conspiracies as well as his solution of convincing the aliens to spare Earth, we are drawn deeper into the spiral of empathising with a violent protagonist while never wavering in our scepticism. Teddy’s seeming displeasure with other people also has the audience questioning why his end goal is to save humanity, when he only appears to like his family and the bees he cares for.

Plemons and Stone have become so locked into Lanthimos’ sets that they become true extensions of the filmmaker that are worth the price of admission. Robbie Ryan’s 35mm Vistavision camera focuses so intently on faces during key confrontation scenes that complicate and enrich every fraught interaction between the three characters, playing out like an absurdist tragedy of modern nihilism and the cost of humanity in simple close-up.

(From Left) Emma Stone, Aiden Delbis, and Jesse Plemons in *Bugonia* (2025).

Even with its often bracing moments and artistic flourishes that have won and lost the Greek filmmaker’s fans over the years, Bugonia will go down smoother than recent entries due to its deliberately modern setting. With a pair of iconic needle-drops in Chappel Roan’s Good Luck, Babe and Green Day’s Basketcase, Lanthimos’ film stretches out past his own artistic bubble, offering a hand to a contemporary audience needing to be invited into his world that is richly rewarding.

Teddy is a beekeeper and blames Michelle’s company for the death of the countless bees (bees feature as prominently here as in Jason Statham’s bizarre 2024 film The Beekeeper), as well as the death of his mother, clouding the audience’s perceptions of whether this kidnapping is mostly an act of personal vengeance. The title Bugonia comes from an ancient Mediterranean ritual based on the belief that bees are produced from a cow’s carcass. This spiritual concept of rebirth, blossoming from an integral part of the ecosystem through the death of another being, is woven throughout the film, most clearly in its final images. Unfortunately, the rest of the film’s zippy nihilism clouds these fleeting ideas, never reaching above a wry smirk or passing glance towards a future it believes in.

The Greek auteur’s work can too often feel disconnected from our world, much like his clear idol, Terry Gillem, striving for the work to be seen and appreciated outside time rather than exist alongside it. In Bugonia, however, we live in an achingly dissolving world of Teddy’s conspiracies and Michelle’s jarring CEO ruthlessness, echoing much of the world in our mid-2020s in a similar vein to Ari Aster’s divisive Eddington (2025).

But in a current climate of political violence and peak conspiratorial thinking in positions of power, what does it mean to centre a violent conspiracy theorist in a contemporary movie? Kudos to Tracy and Lanthimos for adapting Jang Joon-hwan’s 22-year-old film into this fraught moment, but do they truly reckon with that decision? A film that plays with your ideas of truth and fiction, Bugonia lands in a certain vein of deterministic nihilism that questions why bother asking the question in the first place, leaving us with a satisfying movie but a bizarre aftertaste. Turning to conspiracy as a direct result of tragedy is an evocative core at the heart of a contemporary story, but are you willing to turn inwards and face that ugly humanness that is uncovered?

Bugonia is in theatres on October 30.

MIFF 2025: Darcy’s Notebook

August 21, 2025April 19, 2026Darcy Read

Another year, another chaotic year of MIFF. With some dizzying heights and impressive debuts, cinema feels in good hands as we march headfirst into the tail end of the 2020s (a wild thought). The festival is the highlight of the cinematic calendar for the city, defining the landscape as it shifts towards awards season, with a tremendous work of curation and bold decisions as addressed below that make August the best month of the year.

Twinless (2025) – James Sweeney

A proper dramedy with a complicated but compelling pair at its core, Twinless is a charming and confident debut not weighed down by its writer, director James Sweeney’s decision to also star in the film. Following a pair of twins who have recently lost their other half and meet at a support group, Dylan O’Brien’s Roman (and Rocky) and Sweeney’s Dennis fall into a quick friendship as they look to fill the void.

Would make an interesting double feature with Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship (2024) as a perceptive and darkly funny look at the pursuit of modern male friendship, with many screwball moments in Sweeney’s film feeling like I Think You Should Leave (2019) pitches. Sweeney excels in wrongfooting the audience into a charming dramedy that gives space to both sides of the genre mash.

The Mastermind (2025) – Kelly Reichardt

No one is operating on Kelly Reichardt’s small but vital level. With an autumnal romp that makes way for a surprisingly poignant introspection into one’s relationship to political change, Reichardt’s period heist mood piece captures you in a breathing world, and will linger on you long after you leave like the smell of last night’s smoke break.

Josh O’Connor’s niche as a dirtbag charmer continues with his best Elliot Gould here (absolute cinematic catnip for me) as an art school washout living in suburbia with a wife (an underused Alana Haim) and two kids who have a side hustle-slash-obsession with art heists. While not on the level of O’Connor’s recent classic La Chimera (2023), this cool, warm-hued hangout film will only expand as the months go on, where I would not be surprised if it lands on end-of-year lists and amongst Reichardt’s most beloved films.

Blue Moon (2025) – Richard Linklater

A frenetic script by novelist Robert Kaplow and a high-level performance from Ethan Hawke allow Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon to shine through its humble boundaries as a film that should’ve been a play. Set against the background of the opening night of Oklahoma! On Broadway in 1943, Hawke plays the famed but troubled songwriter Lorenz Hart, who is stewing at Sardi’s, the bar soon to be the venue for the show’s party.

Hawke is flanked by a terrific cast who bounce off and counter his manic energy wonderfully, including Bobby Cannavale, Margaret Qualley, Andrew Scott, and Patrick Kennedy as an array of famous names the film nods to. Thankfully, Linklater’s love and curiosity for these artists and individuals dance energetically around the screen, allowing even those with no Broadway knowledge to understand and appreciate the film.

Sirât (2025) – Oliver Laxe

In a year of great horror and thrillers, there is no more visceral or dire theatre going experience than Óliver Laxe’s Cannes Jury Prize winning film Sirāt. Aided by the festival’s bold decision to screen this anxiety ridden, grim family nightmare at IMAX. We follow father and son Luis (Sergi López) and Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) into the Moroccan desert in search of their daughter and sister Mar, leading them into an EDM festival where they are briefly liberated from the bounds of society. With its pounding techno score and 16mm film stock, Sirāt is a sensory marvel that pulls you into its world and commands you to walk desperately into the desert and into the unknown.

With a political undercurrent and bare-boned family drama, Sirāt uses the visual language of the immortal William Friedkin fever dream Sorcerer (1977) to illustrate an Odyssey-like adventure in a world quickly becoming unrecognisable. This is a film that will take days to process, asking unique questions of yourself and to what extent you’ll chase exhilaration in your own life and in an experience on screen.

Exit 8 (2025) – Genki Kawamura

No experience illustrates the power the festival has over the city than the sold-out IMAX screening of Genki Kawamura’s Exit 8, a chaotic and mesmerising Escher painting of a horror film about being trapped in a loop in Shinjuku station. With a dozen references to The Shining (1980), Kawamura focuses on mood and engagement with a game audience to draw us along its short and concise runtime. We are given just enough narrative to fill a feature, trapped in a propulsive active viewing experience, a wonderful feeling in a sold-out crowd. In a great year for horror, this is not one to miss when it enters theatres.

Resurrection (2025) – Bi Gan

What to say about the film that has everything. Bursting at the seams with plots in miniature and arthouse bravura, Bi Gan’s follow-up to the extraordinary Long Days Journey into Night (2018) is the cinematic odyssey Resurrection. An undefinable tapestry that wears many genre hats as a sci monster powered like a projected as the line dreamer in a world that has learnt the secret to eternal life, so long as they don’t dream. Or something like that. While Gan’s previous film is expansive but intimate in its storytelling scope, Resurrection operates as basically six short genre pieces that have the density and plot to inhabit for its entire 160-minute run-time. That is a testament to Gan’s visual style and conceptual scope, even if he can get caught up in its own luxuriating to succeed as a narrative.

An interesting film to compare this expansive odyssey with is Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (2023). Both grand-scale odysseys following a pair of characters that can’t help but pursue one another, across time or across cinematic dreams. The key distinction is that Resurrection is a work of sentiment told across cinematic history, akin to Babylon (2022), whereas Bonello’s film operates as an incisive look at relationships through the lens of their pair.

With wonderful performances by Jackson Yee and Shu Qi, played across many genres including silent film, noir, and a gangster vampire romance shot as a 30 minute oner on New Years’ Eve 1999, Resurrection can and will show you its whole heart if you’ll let it, overwhelming you with ideas and concepts rooted in the undeniable truth that the cinematic dream is irreplaceable.

Dreams (Sex Love) (2025) – Dag Johan Haugerud

A delicate exploration of teenage love and obsession that treats it with sensuality and respect, while allowing space for realism and reflection. The third part of Norwegian Dag Johan Haugerud’s collection of films on love and desire made in quick succession, Dreams (Sex Love) centres on a teenage art student Johanne (Ella Øverbye) who pines for her new teacher Johanna (Selome Emnetu), eventually pouring her feelings and desires into a book she gives to her poet grandmother.

The film shifts in unexpected ways while still following Johanne’s emotional journey that resonates with the fresh wisdom of a good teen romance novel. The prolific nature of Haugerud’s work does not diminish the literary quality of his films, which leave room for many poignant interpersonal conversations that span generations. I was only able to catch this single entry in the collection, but I will endeavour to complete the trilogy by year’s end.

BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (2024) – Kahlil Joseph

Kahlil Joseph did not set out to make a documentary. Expanding on his two screen art installations of the same name, Joseph explodes his vision of an intertwining Black past and future through an extravagant reimagining of history and form with a frenetic energy that bounces from lush Afrofuturist narratives with some of the best production design of the year to reaction memes.

With cinematography from the great Bradford Young and a pulsating score by experimental artist Klein, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions sees beauty in the interplay between sweeping science fiction storytelling with dense, academic dialogue and modern internet culture, something rarely seen projected on a large screen. While not an easy film to grasp or comprehend in real-time, Joseph and his writing collective have crafted a dizzying piece of art that will hopefully inspire new nonfiction visual artists to explore their craft in inventive and genre-breaking ways. The film of the festival for me.

Cloud (2024) – Kiyoshi Kurosawa

A cynical master storyteller returning to the twisty world of revenge cinema through the lens of a modern huckster dirtbag trying to turn a quick buck as an online reseller, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud forces us to confront our relationship to ground-level late-stage capitalism in unexpected and darkly comedic ways. Unaware of the mild carnage he leaves behind him as he attempts to secure a comfortable life on his own terms, Masaki Soda’s Ryôsuke Yoshii is just smart enough to spot an opportunity to coldly swindle desperate people out of their undervalued goods, but not smart enough to avoid danger and risk.

There’s no greater feeling in the theatre than when Kurosawa is moving through his spider web plots with the tension of a vintage paranoia thriller. When a true master of form and craft is still interested in the modern world and can critique and perceive it in compelling ways, we can’t afford to ignore it. Especially when they’re this enjoyable in a crowd.

Brand New Landscape (2025) – Yuiga Danzuka

Danzuka’s debut feature made waves as the youngest Japanese director ever to be featured in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, beginning with an extended Ozu-like exploration of a family in quiet crisis. Brand New Landscape wears its compelling, if slightly clouded themes proudly of a shifting Tokyo, and more specifically Shibuya, as a space aimed to accommodate a younger generation, even if it harms its current occupants.

The film displays the ripple effects from an unimaginable event that fractures a familiar family structure alongside the construction and evolution of several key spaces in the famous Tokyo area. Brand New Landscape never reaches a triumphant peak of dramatic storytelling, but it does leave you with both a unique perspective of Tokyo and of your own experiences in your own city and neighbourhood. A rather remarkable feat for a young filmmaker to garner.

Sorry, Baby (2025) – Eva Victor

The most assured and confident debut of the year, Eva Victor writes, directs, and stars in a playful yet poignant dramedy on the lasting impacts of trauma that finds new ground in the familiar lane of modern storytelling. As a liberal arts grad still living near campus and on the verge of starting a full-time teaching position while still processing and working through deep trauma, Agnes (Victor) feels stuck while her closest friend Lydie (Naomie Ackie) returns to tell her she’s pregnant.

A film about the adult anxiety of never being sure of the right thing to do or feel in any situation, Victor is perceptive with a sharp eye for when to be kind and when to be cutting. Sorry, Baby has such a strong command of a difficult tone throughout that the audience quickly settles into the hands of a commanding filmmaker, a rare feat in a first feature. There may be no better scene in indie cinema this year than the jury duty scene in this film with its ability to float between wry humour, female camaraderie in unlikely situations, and quiet character storytelling that announced Victor as am impressive filmmaker and performer.

The End (2024) – Joshua Oppenheimer

A film about a family resolute in their self delusion, unflinching in their avoidance of personal reckoning after a climate apocalypse they helped create, played out as a musical, the genre defined by its characters constantly reckoning with their own feelings and decisions through song.

A remarkable ensemble that elevates the film above an impressive academic genre experiment, particularly George Mackay, who, after starring in Bonello’s The Beast (wow, two nods in one festival for this film), has more than proven his bona fides as a young star able to breathe life into some art cinema trappings. Oppenheimer clearly has a lot on his mind with the ability of the most powerful people in the world to craft self-delusions to survive within and what happens when others encounter and potentially destabilise those delusions, a throughline that ties his totemic documentary films to The End. The decision to mine new thematic ground in a wildly different way may go down as a defining cinematic decision of the decade, and while this film does not reach some of the transcendent moments of The Act of Killing (2012) or The Look of Silence (2014), The End is certainly worth your time and hopefully not a final foray into narrative film.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is a Wholly Satisfying Sci-Fi Adventure

July 23, 2025Darcy Read

It can be daunting being the first. The first people in space. The first superheroes in the world, uncertain of the responsibility their power demands. The first child. Crossing that uneasy bridge from the familiar into the depths of the unknown. This was once a core aspect of superhero storytelling, but after thirty-seven entries in the compounding Marvel enterprise, it feels impossible to return to. Even the recent release of James Gunn’s Superman (2025) — a new frontier on the DC side of larger storytelling building blocks, while successful in its storytelling — had notes of this and still couldn’t help itself surround their central figure with larger but unnecessary chatter.

But this is where The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025) succeeds and earns its colonised titling and a real throwback to why the MCU has built a legacy on quality films. Set in an alternate Earth from the familiar stomping ground of the MCU, and heavily focused on its famous foursome and not its larger worldbuilding, director Matt Shackman has crafted a brisk and entertaining sci-fi-focused ride that will leave you wholly satisfied; a feeling Marvel films used to give us.

the Fantastic Four, led by Reed Richards and Sue Storm, brought to life better than ever by Pedro Pascal and Venessa Kirby, and flanked by Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn), arrive on screens in an Jetsons-themed alternate reality giving them the freedom of not needing less compelling super friends to give passing screen time too. Portrayed with enthusiasm and sincerity that reflects outwards into the whole film while still avoiding a saccharine mawkishness, making this Fantastic Four entry feel like a delightful throwback.

Four years into their journey, that is just settling in until the unexpected arrives both in-house and extra-terrestrially; the surprising pregnancy of Sue and the arrival of the Herald of Galactus (Ralph Ineson), The Silver Surfer (played with a pride and melancholy by the great Julia Garner), spelling doom for the Earth.

Joseph Quinn and Pedro Pascal in *The Fantastic Four: First Steps*

Building a competent film around these four characters has proved difficult in the past (this is the fourth go around for the crew in cinema, maybe they needed the luck?), but writers Eric Pearson, Josh Friedman, Jeff Kaplan, and Ian Springer have found success by properly centering the four actors, allowing plot and CGI battles to whizz past their family sci-fi soap opera. Told with sincerity and a deep love of the characters strengths and weaknesses, Shackman is allowed to stretch out and tell a full story, showing the potential from his directorial work on WandaVision (2021), perhaps the only successful Marvel TV show post Daredevil, even if it relied on a lazy final battle to conclude its story.

By centring two terrific performers who have shown the ability to operate in an old Hollywood mode, Pedro Pascal (in full Clark Gable mode) and Venessa Kirby jump off the screen with a chemistry and guile built from the characters out. Even as the world around them monumentally shifts with the arrival of a new child and a new Earth-destroying threat, we constantly see them lock eyes and respond to each other with a depth of understanding and empathy that wouldn’t be amiss in an awards season marriage drama. Pascal is at his best as a supportive scene partner, an invisible hand that allows others to shine instead of absorbing the audience’s attention.

Rounding out the team is Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn who have an easy banter built on warmth and care that adds to scenes. Quinn in particular is given a full story that is surprising and compelling, improving on the reductive framing we often see of the Human Torch.

A refreshing turn in the superhero genre that is potentially in its death throes, The Fantastic Four: First Steps focuses on an older sci-fi genre package with longer dialogue scenes, fewer action moments with a passing amount of care and attention to story, and a visual language that mostly grounds itself in its own reality (several scenes still feel deeply 2020s which the film seemed intent on avoiding in its first hour).

Pedro Pascal in *The Fantastic Four: First Steps*

With special effects that actually looked like the VFX team was given time to fully render and actualise ideas from scratch, The Fantastic Four: First Steps withheld the action at the centre of the story in place for a simple but emotive narrative built on a new, emerging family. Even Galactus, once portrayed as a large cloud in a film too embarrassed by its own sci-fi story, is given a tactile nature and a quality performance by Ineson, perhaps the best voice in the industry. In few words, Ineson displays a menace to his words but a clarity in character motivation one wouldn’t expect from an enormous villain desperate to consume planets. It’s not just that Shackman found space for the key six characters to show dimension and character through considered relationship work within a sci-fi framework; it’s that we could achieve this while wrapping up the film in under two hours.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is a fast-moving train that has a real destination in mind, an aspect of American genre storytelling we took for granted and allowed to bloat and stagnate, too satisfied with its own navel-gazing to realise they were left as the only people looking. With a recent run of superhero films, Thunderbolts* (2025), Superman, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps, we are potentially rounding the corner into the enjoyment and craft that built this genre into the cinematic tentpole that it strives to hold onto.

By giving these characters a fully rounded narrative that satisfies more than stringing you along with the promise of a larger experience in the future, Shackman and co have achieved what was supposed to be the goal of cinematic genre storytelling; something familiar and something new, contained in an entertaining and sometimes emotional time at the movies. Where James Gunn’s Superman stretched far and wide to populate his emerging franchise venture, making for a fun but frustrating experience, The Fantastic Four: First Steps focuses on a small collection of characters where the biggest spectacle is the arrival of a new family member, the largest event in most audience members’ lives as well.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is in theatres now.

Thunderbolts* is the Best Post-Endgame Marvel Film

May 3, 2025May 4, 2025Darcy Read

Marketed with a keen focus on its crew’s previous work with the production company de jour A24, Marvel’s attempted rebound back into the public consciousness has arrived in the Florence Pugh led Thunderbolts* (2025). The film is emotional and built from the inside out with a commitment to its characters, a collection of misfit Marvel characters played by an incredible cast of emerging talents that shows when the call is made, they will deliver.

Much like an aggressive chiropractic session, the Marvel project desperately needed realignment, no matter the clunkiness to achieve it. By bringing in emerging creatives to develop a more personal character story — what used to be the MCU’s calling card in the early years — Thunderbolts* arrives fashionably late to a series in need of rescue. While modest in its pursuits (for a blockbuster feature), Thunderbolts* is built off the back of two terrific performances in Pugh as Helena and Lewis Pullman as Bob. Their chemistry stems from the characters’ visible mental health struggles that long for meaning and connection in a world devoid of both, a difficult idea to place front and centre in a film with multiple car flips.

After a haphazard and almost impressively uninspired handover film Captain America: A Brave New World (2025), Marvel’s loaded release schedule picks back up with a darker, sharper, and wittier ensemble film that stands on its own feet before the navel-gazing returns with a new Fantastic Four and Avengers films in the next 12 months.

Beef’s (2024) Jake Schreier, alongside many of his collaborators on the acclaimed series, puts character above all in a seemingly obvious pivot away from the plug-and-play style of most post-Endgame MCU films that has put the company on the brink.

Never undercutting its emotional weight with a cheap joke in the same sentence, screenwriters Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo keep their characters, in particular Yelena (a tremendous Florence Pugh), on clearly defined and recognisable tracks. Even as one of the world’s best assassin’s, Yelena’s mental health struggles and ennui is expressed with a profound clarity that underscores the entire film.

By taking their story of literalising mental health struggles to a fulfilling breaking point, Thunderbolts* shows what can be achieved in the best comic book stories by reflecting these superpowered people’s humanity out into the world. Thunderbolts* elicits an unusual feeling: nostalgia for the early entrants in the Marvel cinematic project. Slimmed down to bare essentials with an antagonist that reflects the interior conflicts of our soon-to-be heroes, the film knows the power it holds with its outstanding cast and when to cede ground to their talents.

From the outset, the score out of electronic trio Son Lux stands apart from the swathe of superhero cinema. In many critical scenes, their emotional intelligence shines through, giving the story of depression and reconciliation a clarity of vision that easily could’ve fallen through our hands like sand. The acoustic and electronic work sustains an unexpected grace that should be applauded.

With an eventual villain in The Sentry that embodies the call of the void itself, Thunderbolts* excels in grounding every element of its story within its characters. Much like Tony Stark being forced to reckon with his role in war profiteering to survive, Yelena must contend with her depression and learn to live alongside it.

The film excels in its modesty, even if it sets a pivotal confrontation in the old Avengers tower (baby steps!). Thunderbolts* uses a potent mix of humour and contemporary emotional turmoil to place itself a tier above the durge of action cinema that doesn’t even arrive at the boilerplate. While striving to be remembered as more than a footnote on the way to back-to-back billion-dollar cheques, Schreier’s film places potent themes of loneliness and emptiness at the forefront of a superhero story that separates itself from the studio’s recent shortfalls.

Thunderbolts* is in theatres now.

The Amateur is a Spy Thriller Uncomfortable in its Own Shoes

April 10, 2025Darcy Read

Helmed by British Television veteran James Hawes, The Amateur is a spy thriller unable to capture its own personality or separate itself from the recently booming subgenre. Focusing on a CIA data analyst-slash-hacker (Rami Malek, in his wheelhouse) who forces himself into the field by any means necessary after the death of his wife (Rachel Brosnahan) during a terrorist hostage crisis in London, the film’s fractured cadence and lack of narrative momentum despite this inciting incident means you don’t know where you’ll be taken next, but also uncertain about whether you’ll care.

Based on Robert Litell’s 1981 spy novel of the same name and adapted by Black Hawk Down (2001) screenwriter Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli, The Amateur plays both sides of the Atlantic with its approach to the spy thriller. This, unfortunately, means the film never finds a singular drive or point of view but is made with a great cast and a refined crew that keeps the train on the tracks.

A surprisingly small-scale espionage thriller even as Malek makes his way through many cities, The Amateur shuffles along from moment to moment, with many cast members rarely appearing in multiple locations, restricting the narrative momentum of every sequence. Even the pivot hostage scene with Brosnahan plays out in short news clipping bursts, forcing Malek to shoulder the weight of every emotional and narrative beat, something very few actors can manage.

Rami Malek combined his experiences in the TV series Mr Robot (2015-2019) and No Time to Die (2021) to lead his own spy thriller in the vein of Jason Bourne if his amnesia expanded to include the trainee manual. With a tremendous cast of faces alongside Malek with Laurence Fishburne, Brosnahan, Jon Bernthal, Michael Stuhlbarg, Caitríona Balfe, Holt McCallany, and Julianne Nicholson, elevate rote scenes with barely a hint of drama or characterisation.

Rami Malek in *The Amateur*. Screening provided by 20th Century Studios.

Malek’s compelling anti-chemistry as a leading man works in fits and starts, primarily when he is acting alongside some of the best working actors in Bernthal, Stuhlbarg, and Fishbourne. Mr Robot thrived in its ability to work to Malek’s strength as a performer by constantly giving him unique counterweights to act against. In a surprisingly thin script, Malek and the other actors are repeatedly left out to dry, forced to fend for themselves while the ship chugs along to a near nonstop score.

The film is not assisted by Oscar-winning composer Volker Bertelmann’s austere score that opts to flatten much of the proceedings. The constant score certainly elevates the uncompelling exposition scenes but never highlights the entertaining and thrilling set pieces that are the film’s shining light.

However, almost in spite of itself, the film comes together in a worthwhile and satisfying way, even as it frays around the edges of time and drama. This is largely due to its creative action set pieces where each element, especially Malek’s performance, clicks into place into pure enjoyment. While the revenge narrative is established with a reckless abandon, it is thrilling to see where Hawes places these pivotal scenes, including a highrise pool and a final confrontation in the Russian-Finnish ocean border.

Due to this narrative style, The Amateur is not dissimilar to Tenet (2020) in how it moves quickly between setting up and executing inventive action set pieces instead of exploring the characters within its espionage world. This is surprising given The Amateur’s stellar cast, even if they are rarely given any meat on the bone.

Ultimately, there were high hopes for The Amateur due to its cast and veteran crew in a subgenre currently in a mini-boom. Still, without a unique style or handle on tone, the film moves shakily between sequences, never arriving sure of foot. Thankfully, the film’s trump card for a final sequence, a charming and compelling Michael Stuhlbarg performance, pretty successfully ties up a desperately fraying narrative yearning for a satisfying end note.

The Amateur is in theatres now.

Hard Truths is a Difficult but Rewarding Watch

March 6, 2025Darcy Read

A caustic character study of depression, expressed in a near limitless capacity of anger and frustration, the legend Mike Leigh and Marianne Jean-Baptiste reunite for a potent and captivating film like no other. At times an excruciating viewing experience, Hard Truths (2024) is as rewarding a film as you’ll find this year, sneaking up on you with seasoned patience so few filmmakers deploy.

John Waters lovingly called Jean-Baptiste’s Pansy “the most unpleasant sourpuss in the history of cinema”, and it’s hard to argue with him. An open wound that reacts to every possible moment like a critically endangered animal hoping to survive another day, even if they’re unsure why they cling to life so hard.

An ornery and occasionally cruel working-class mother of an adult-at-home son, Pansy doesn’t drift across days as much as she bulldozes through every waking moment. We learn everything you need to know about Pansy by the way she wakes up. In multiple instances across Hard Truths, we grow desperately empathetic to the peacefulness she exudes while sleeping, but is constantly jolted awake, activating an instantaneous fight mode.

While Jean-Baptiste is prone to blot out the sun with her performance, Leigh leaves room for some truly remarkable supporting performances. David Webber and Tuwaine Barrett, as Pansy’s husband Curtley and reclusive and introverted son Moses, manage to withstand the ocean storm that is Pansy through a deep connection to characters given little room to breathe but require a wide berth.

Leigh is a cinematic master through his ability to create a cumulative character experience that bursts at the seams of its final ensemble sequence. Like a well-crafted play, Hard Truths walks you towards a profound moment of empathy and attachment in a naturally unexpected cadence. With little plot outside of a Mother’s Day date for Pansy and her sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), Leigh gives his ensemble enormous space to fill the frame with nuanced character portraits that will feel like mirrors into the soul of the modern-day middle-class, seen with honesty and respect.

While Pansy is increasingly vocal about an uncertain ailment that is fuelling a violent discomfort with life, she harbours a real hesitation in improving her situation. From a doctor’s appointment to a trip to the dentist (with Leigh using a real dentist!), these scenes carry a weight that sustains the film’s second half, as the audience grows increasingly desperate for the reason in all this internal suffering perpetually boiling over. She is nothing but a raw nerve, longing for a connection without the capability to find it.

A desperate need to be understood and heard hidden within a desperate need to be left alone, Jean-Baptiste, with Leigh by her side, reflects a moment of modern life not seen in the old cinematic masters. While Leigh’s best films are where he forces his fractured characters into unfamiliar places (Topsy Turvy, Naked), Hard Truths can be placed among a select few films that express the early 2020s with an honest reflection you’d more likely see in a period piece made decades after. We cannot take his movies for granted.

Hard Truths is in select theatres now.

Presence Sees the World Through a Ghost’s Eyes

February 7, 2025February 7, 2025Darcy Read

Presence preview provided by Rialto Distribution.

From the outset of Steven Soderbergh’s newest cinematic experiment, Presence (2024), it is clear this gambit will pay off. As we, through the anxious eyes of a new ghost, experience a new world, through a nimble first-person lens that never relents. This new world in question is the arrival of a young family of four in a large suburban house after the traumatic deaths of teenager Chloe’s (a wonderful Callina Liang) two friends in the city, leaving them in need of a fresh start.

Beginning with one of 2022’s best films Kimi, veteran filmmakers Steven Soderbergh and David Koepp have united to create a series of impressively contemporary small-scale American films (with another set for 2025 with Black Bag), that feels wholly unique on the movie calendar. With Presence, the pair shift from tech thriller to modern ghost tale with an equally impressive lens pointed directly at the connection in contemporary life.

Through a floating visual language, we explore this young family in moments of both intimate quiet and explosive argument. The parents, high-powered exec Rebecca (Lucy Liu) and the more emotive Chris (Chris Sullivan), have clear strong ties to individual children, creating a constant tension between the four characters. Rebecca sees herself and the potential for great success in their arrogant older son Tyler (Eddy Maday), whereas Chris’ more emotional side draws him to his daughter Chloe, an isolated teen dealing with tremendous grief at a young age that pierces through the screen.

Chris Sullivan and Lucy Liu in *Presence*.

Themes of accidental overdoses and youth deaths are complicated but important issues to place in a film, particularly at its emotional core. While Presence floats freely between potential genre trappings, it is grounded by this potent story element that is sure to resonate with many.

To achieve the sensation of a first-person camera narrative that has real expression through the lens, Soderbergh — acting as his own cinematographer as he often does — filmed Presence chronologically, with the camera beginning in a more trepidatious, larval state before coming into its own by the film’s midpoint. The camera does not glide effortlessly through the house to open the movie. Instead, we feel every step as we move around the space, like a young foal taking its awkward first steps into the world. The camera has physical tics and safe spaces inside the home that, through repetition, just like an acting performance, breathes life into the lens. This deft and crucial weight of intent allows the film to quickly transcend from a small-scale cinema experiment into a riveting family drama where the absence is just as visceral.

It’s remarkable how quickly you can slide into the position as a fly-on-the-wall observer by wielding the camera this way, and how the emotion of a scene can play out with sharp efficiency (a Soderbergh hallmark) when the personification of the camera holds so much weight.

The film operates as an interesting refraction to David Lowery’s poetic A Ghost Story (2017), which focuses on a ghostly presence with a level of banal reality that transforms slowly into a beautiful understanding of a greater spiritual moment. Much like that film, the innovative style of filmmaking on hand here works effectively because of the decision to place a young ghost at the heart of both stories.

While the structure of the film allows a flow state of dramatic experiences for the family, the final 10 minutes of Presence are as distressed as you’ll feel at the movies this year with its clear eyed understanding of modern life and pressures. This shouldn’t be a surprise as it’s a ghost film, but over the course of this innovative family drama on loss and connection, this shift has an overwhelming weight of emotion that is wonderfully unexpected. Through Koepp and Soderbergh, we have a new creative powerhouse partnership that is breathing new life into modern American storytelling.

Presence is in theatres now.

Best of 2024: Darcy’s Picks

February 6, 2025Darcy Read

With 2024 having drawn to a close, Rating Frames is looking back at the past twelve months of cinema and streaming releases that have come our way. In the second of our series of articles, Darcy is taking a look at his ten favourite films of the year that was.

With a dense collection of titles with no clear standout, 2024 was the hardest year to rank recent releases in a long time. With a collection of new voices and revered personal icons, 2024 had a wide mixture of films that went head-on in tackling modern life, something that has felt lacking in the last few years. The only key omission to this list upon release is Ramell Ross’ Nickel Boys, a book I love from an exciting new artistic voice in the medium I’ve been desperate to see all year, which is releasing via Amazon at the end of the month. With that being said, I’m happy with how this list came together and hope these rankings get someone to check out a new exciting film.

10. Chime

I struggled with whether to include this short film by one of my favourite filmmakers Kiyoshi Kurosawa ahead of more ambitious titles (like The Brutalist 2024), but ultimately this sinister snapshot of reality was impossible to shake. In a year, and what’s shaping as a decade defined by crucial filmmakers reflecting on their lives and creative work, Kurosawa used multiple 2024 projects to open a dialogue with his early and defining work, even going as far as remaking his 1998 film Serpent’s Path with the same name but in the French language.

In Chime, Kurosawa continues his pursuit into modern perceptions of evil and the malice of life through a brief lens into a culinary school, with a student seemingly driven mad by a noise no one else can hear. What happens next is a remarkable level of cinematic dread that burrows deep into your skin, taking up space in your soul. Kurosawa’s ability to communicate complicated ideas within the short film format is astounding, making this film a must-watch whenever it becomes more widely available.

9. Perfect Days

In a year stacked with esteemed filmmakers returning with a work deep in reflection of their first works, none felt as complete as Wim Wenders’ Japanese-language quotidian reflection piece Perfect Days. Centring on a Shibuya public toilet cleaner, Hirayama, performed by screen legend Kôji Yakusho, Wenders’ film reflects his global curiosity and evolving perspective on humanity through humour and grace. It will be a film I return to often in the coming years.

8. Janet Planet

Janet Planet is a film that knows the smell and crunch of autumn leaves outside a family home that can define a childhood. Annie Baker’s debut work in the cinema space (after years as one of Broadway’s great unsung playwrights), inhabits the in-between with an honest curiosity.

Centring on a wonderful child performance by Zoe Ziegler as the 11-year-old Lacy and her mother Janet (a gravity-altering Julianne Nicholson), Janet Planet is keenly aware of the way a child can refract the adults around them, revealing new parts of a parent and child that is rare in its respect for both sides.

7. Red Rooms

No film crawled under my skin more in 2024, where it continues to remain. While Canadian filmmaker Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms contains no violence, it is the most violently confrontational film you’ll encounter from the last year. At once a spiritual successor to David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011) and a keenly modern devolution of how the internet has isolated and festered our worst impulses, Red Rooms is one of the great underground discoveries of the year, a chilling interrogation into modern life through the lens of true crime, dark web violence, and modern voyeur culture.

At the front of the lens of the film is Kelly-Anne, portrayed by Juliette Gariépy as an all-time thriller character on the level of Patrick Bateman. A statuette beauty who spends her time modelling, crushing people in online poker, and obsessively attending the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), a serial killer of adolescent girls who uploads his extreme violence to the dark web for those who wish to see, can. With Vincent Biron’s dexterous and compelling camera, we are intoxicated by a mesmerising oscillation between extreme unwatchability and an engrossing thriller, caught in a spiderweb where escape is too late. Achieves a lot from very little.

6. Evil Does Not Exist

The best score of the year can be found in Ryuichi Hamaguchi’s follow-up to this decade’s best film Drive My Car (2021), Evil Does Not Exist (more than halfway through the decade these lists should be beginning to solidify), with its elegiac jazz progressions that evolve into a haunting rapture from Eiko Ishibashi.

As a tale of eco-modernism that leaves room for the farcical ways contemporary metropolitan life seeks to corrupt what remains of the natural world which displays Hamaguchi’s breadth and quality as a writer. When consultants for a work retreat glamping company seek to operate within the small village of Mizubiki, they are confronted by an uncooperative community.

Like its overwhelming musical compositions, Evil Does Not Exist climaxes in a confounding but engrossing final moment that lingers and provokes long after you leave. Ishibashi and Hamaguchi are carving out a place as the composer-filmmaker collaboration which the industry should be measured up against.

5. Anora

The unexpected hit out of Cannes, making it the first American film to win the Palme d’Or since Tree of Life (2011) on top of being a Best Picture contender, Sean Baker’s eighth feature Anora is larger and broader than any film he’s made before while still capturing his uptempo yet sobering look into the contemporary American underbelly.

The modern chronicler of contemporary fringe America maintains his scepticism-bordering-on-cynicism about his homeland throughout his filmography, which is stretched to a compelling breaking point here. The internet has explained the film as a modern-day Pretty Woman (1990) by way of Uncut Gems (2019) with a Goodfellas (1990) like structure, but Sean Baker and star Mikey Madison are more interested in exploring how Ani is placed within different worlds than how the world changes her. Anora is a fully realised character that still carves out space to surprise us in moving and memorable ways.

4. The Seed of the Sacred Fig

A film with a backstory as compelling as its on-screen drama (filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, the cast and creatives were forced to flee during production due to a warrant out for their arrest in Iran for filmmaking that goes against the regime), Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig speaks generationally about the modern Iranian moment through the language of family drama and genre filmmaking.

Through the use of social media footage from a recent student protest that turned violent—surprisingly a late addition in the editing process once they had fled the country—Rasoulof creates a certain surreality that arrives through this directness. This allows the simmering political drama to expand past the confines of the narrative into an explosive condemnation of authoritarian rule. While its final tonal shift won’t be for all audiences, it complicates and transforms the film into something larger and more elliptical than its humble and understated beginnings.

3. I Saw the TV Glow

In the days since the passing of the great David Lynch, much has been made about how modern cinema has increasingly lacked this effervescent feeling come to be known as ‘Lynchian’. But with the emergence of Jane Schoenberg and their second feature, I Saw the TV Glow in 2024, that essential Lynchian sensation that has defined indie filmmaking for 40 years has returned to breathe new life into our contemporary world.

With a close kinship to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) — in contention for best film of the 90s — I Saw the TV Glow ties 90s television fan nostalgia with the dissociative world of the adolescent trans experience that is willing to go to some deeply uncomfortable depths of the soul. Schoenberg’s modern reflection of the trans experience as a Lynchian world won’t place it within the awards season conversation, but alongside the extraordinary documentary No Other Land (2024), I Saw the TV Glow is the only essential film to arrive in theatres this year.

2. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World

The funniest film of the year is also the hardest to wrestle with. Rade Jude is indie cinema’s great punk rocker, throwing rotten fruit at those that need it. After releasing what will eventually be seen as the definitive Covid satire, 2021’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, the Romanian satirist Jude returns to take aim at the capitalistic infrastructure of modern Bucharest, the gig economy, and the iron claw multinational corporations hold over even small production companies just trying to get by.

With Ilinca Manolache at the centre of his film as production assistant and part-time TikTok satirist Angela, Jude has the perfect muse for life in the Romanian capital, strained in every direction to get by, all for the financial security of a soulless multinational corporation, personified by a great cameo by Nina Hoss.

With its expansive 163-minute runtime, Jude holds many feet to the fire, concluding with a virtuosic yet simple long take for a workplace safety video which will prevent the families from suing the company for culpability, that both cements and brushes off its themes and frustrations like a poetic middle finger to the ruling class.

By culminating this long-form screed on modernity with a capitalistic nightmare version of Bob Dylan’s iconic music video for Subterranean Homesick Blues, with the family of a worker injured at work told to hold up blank pages meant to express their side of the story but will be written in post instead of in their own voice, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World cements Jude as the modern satirist to compare all others to. No one is doing it like him, but I wish more tried.

1. All We Imagine as Light

In a deep movie year with no real standouts like previous years have had, picking a number one was exceedingly difficult. That being said, no film expanded and deepened in my mind on rewatch as Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light. I was recently able to review this film properly since its showing at MIFF left me staggered. Kapadia’s soulful rendering of modern-day Mumbai is gorgeous and a must-see while it remains in theatres.

With a refined hand through documentary work, Kapadia flourishes in small moments. Whether it’s the embrace of a rice cooker given by a distant-slash-estranged husband working in Germany, or the small gesture of helping an older colleague move her things back to her old home after being wrongfully evicted, All We Imagine as Light embraces the aching emotionality of the quotidian, knowing these fleeting moments create a mosaic that reflects the light of human experience.

Honourable mentions: The Brutalist, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus, Challengers, No Other Land.

All We Imagine as Light is Unforgettable

December 26, 2024December 26, 2024Darcy Read

Screener provided by Rialto Pictures.

“I’ve lived here maybe 23 years. But I feel afraid to call it home. There’s always the feeling that I’ll have to leave.” These opening words, by a nameless individual, ring out throughout Payal Kapadia’s extraordinary film All We Imagine as Light (2024), shot against the backdrop of Mumbai, focusing on the women who inhabit it.

The most soulful film in years is also perhaps the best feature of the year, documentarian turned fiction filmmaker Kapadia exploding onto the scene with an honest and poetic portrait of humanity in modern India. A powerful blend of personal womanhood inside the political sprawled across modern Mumbai, Kapadia’s gorgeous and lyrical film centres on three multigenerational nurses navigating a world unwilling to accommodate their lives.

Centring on a pair of nurses, seasoned veteran Prabha (Kani Kusruti), and the youthful and expressive Anu (Divya Prabha), navigate an economically and politically uncertain time in Mumbai, along with older nurse Parvarty (Chhaya Kadam), who is facing eviction after the death of her husband. Prabha is dealing with the extended absence of her husband. This arranged marriage almost immediately left Mumbai to work in Germany, sending gestures to her home like a European rice cooker that only highlights the void he has left. On the other hand, Anu is attempting to balance her life while forming an interfaith romance with Muslim boy Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), an increasingly contentious issue in current-day India.

Kani Kusruti as Prabha in *All We Imagine as Light.*

We first see Anu and Prabha on public transport on their way to work, inside the lyrical six-minute opening sequence that guides you immediately into the world Kapadia is sharing with us. Anu is asleep on her side on a train seat, demonstrating her naive sense of safety in her position while also telling the audience her level of preparedness to arrive at work. In the immediate next shot, we see Prabha, gracefully shown in a medium closeup holding onto the pole of the same train for stability (seen above). By only showing Prabha from the shoulders up here, Cinematographer and frequent collaborator Ranabir Das portrays the battle-hardened nurse in grace with the world around her, yet never settled into one place.

There is a fear this remarkable film will be lost in the awards race shuffle due to India’s increasingly conservative film body and government not submitting it for the Academy Awards, even with the film winning the Grand Prix at Cannes. This is a sad but unsurprising occurrence after Kapadia emerged onto the film scene with her 2021 documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, also critical of India’s patriarchal system.

The sweet centre of the film lies in the blossoming romance between Anu and Shiaz, a relationship that blends religion and the modern political moment in the city. In a series of push-pull romantic moments which includes a heartbreaking yet comedic booty call where Anu must purchase a hijab to visit him in the Muslim district where he lives. Kapadia avoids easy exits with this romance, concluding powerfully with an honest and poetic moment of acceptance and beauty, tied into an honest moment of private security.

In contrast to this romance, Prabha and her complicated relationship with her absent husband fills the remaining emotional bandwidth. Born of an arranged marriage that ties her to the city she does not call her own. In the opening prologue, a resident tells us, “That’s life. You better get used to the impermanence”. In a film centred on the relationship between people and the places they inhabit, this line pangs with an honest awareness.

Divya Prabha as Anu in *All We Imagine as Light*.

A film that comes to mind while watching Kapadia’s film is Steve McQueen’s Lover’s Rock (2020) from his Small Axe series, and not just because composers Dhritiman Das and Topshe’s playful piano score could’ve fallen out of one of his films. The short and sweet feature is in contention for the film of the decade, a complicated work of desire and connection inside a wealth of sumptuous visual storytelling and guile that simply overwhelms you. Both films use colour and vivid travelogue-styled cinematography to embrace the human connection of place. What separates the two films is Kapadia’s deceptively critical eye when depicting modern Mumbai, especially the three women’s place within it.

The slow, simmering drama underneath the film’s central pair is the wrongful eviction of a third nurse at the hospital, the older woman Parvaty. Her husband has died, removing her right to live in her own home. The potency of the feminist politics that simmer underneath All We Imagine as Light is in the grounded reality of the characters’ situation, one they are helpless to improve, finding solace in their own uneasy but accepting companionship.

The film operates within two acts, the first within the city that flows downstream into its latter half as the trio of women go to the beachside village that Parvaty grew up in. Kapadia, through her documentary lens, views characters as people who have been steeped in a certain place like tea, becoming more like a place the longer you inhabit it. While Mumbai is described as a place of impermanence and instability for the characters we meet, it is only in venturing out of the rapid city do they begin to view their life and their wants more clearly. In its final moments, would Anu and Shiaz ever have the courage to meet Prabha without this opportunity outside the city? And would Prabha’s spiritual exchange with her husband which opened her eyes to what she is holding onto and what she needs to give up to change have occurred in the melancholy that followed her throughout Mumbai?

Kapadia, with a refined hand through documentary work, flourishes in small moments. Whether it’s the embrace of a rice cooker given by a distant-slash-estranged husband working in Germany, or the small gesture of helping an older colleague move her things back to her old home after being wrongfully evicted, All We Imagine as Light embraces the aching emotionality of the quotidian, knowing these fleeting moments create a mosaic that reflects the light of human experience.

All We Imagine as Light is in select theatres now.

Swinton and Moore Excel in The Room Next Door

December 24, 2024December 24, 2024Darcy Read

The Room Next Door preview screening provided by Sony Pictures.

The blurred lines between long-term friends, and lovers, and the rapid progression of time once a career begins to slow have become legendary Spanish auteur, Pedro Almodóvar’s, chief fascination in recent years, percolating and expanding in unique ways that complicate his melodramatic stories. With an extensive filmography of Spanish melodramas and knotty adult dramas spanning almost 50 years, Almodóvar is exploring a new world of cinema with his new Golden Lion-winning feature The Room Next Door (2024); his first English-language feature film and only his third work of adaptation.

After learning of a recent cancer diagnosis from an old friend, novelist Ingrid (Julliane Moore) rekindles the relationship from her youthful days at a magazine with war correspondent Martha (Tilda Swinton). In light of this diagnosis, the rekindled friendship forms a compelling inseparability, tying the melodrama to some probing ideas on the connection between relationships of all kinds and the presence of death. This friendship is immediately pressurised as Martha decides she doesn’t want to continue treatment, instead acquiring illegal medication to end her life on her own terms, in a secluded house in Upstate New York, with Ingrid accompanying her in the room next door. While not always effective as a knotty dramedy, The Room Next Door is a worthy modern entry in this new phase of Almodóvar, a singular voice in cinema.

Merging a cinematic melodrama inside of an Edward Hopper-influenced (including a centrally placed painting for maximum impact) backdrop shouldn’t sing this harmoniously, but Almodóvar makes it look like breathing. In his first non-Spanish-language feature (after his uneven but charming short Strange Way of Life from last year), Almodóvar’s passion for American literature is evident. However, the chasm between his Spanish lyricism and his English translations flitters haphazardly throughout the film. Like panning for gold in a murky riverbed, The Room Next Door contains beautifully poetic moments of humanity in the face of the end, while many other lines and whole scenes fall flat.

Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in *The Room Next Door*.

Luckily, the film is kept afloat by two of the best working actors and the best candidates to shepherd the Spanish auteur’s unique form of melodrama into the English language. Moore and Swinton are extraordinary together, quickly adapting to the certain quirks and manners that make Almodóvar’s style stand out in modern cinema. While the film relaxes into its story slower than his previous films, no doubt a complication from this being his first feature in English, its unique blend of offbeat humour and all-encompassing melodrama creates a luscious bedrock to lay in the sun with.

Even with the film adapted from the 2020 novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez, The Room Next Door is a spiritual sequel to Almodóvar’s brilliant and tangly Pain and Glory (2019). While not as successful as the Antonio Banderas-led dramedy that operates achingly close to the auteur’s own life, The Room Next Door still excels in exploring contemporary ideas of loss and death in an increasingly uncertain world. In the second half of the film, fluttering between climate change doomsday scenarios brought on by John Turturro’s character Damian — an environmental academic and a previous lover of both Martha and Ingrid — and the criminal coverup necessary to keep Ingrid legally protected from Martha’s assisted suicide plan, is a rush of blood to the head, expanding this seemingly intimate story about two friends into a wider conversation about modern living. While unsuccessful in bridging this gap between late-stage friendship scenarios and the crushing weight of contemporary concerns, Almodóvar’s style still makes for an engaging and breezy ride through Upstate New York.

A final poetic choice involving Swinton’s daughter Michelle will be divisive, simultaneously poking holes at the film’s clear eyed look at death while also exploring notions of interpersonal legacy in moments of tragedy. Much like Pain and Glory, Almodóvar has given audiences a full meal to chew on for years to come.

The Room Next Door is in select theatres Boxing Day.