Human Resource

In the middle of Human Resource, Fren (Prapamonton Eiamchan, in a singular performance) and her husband are deciding whether they are willing to pay a non-refundable, half-a-million baht deposit to reserve a spot at an international school for their unborn child. The husband is enthusiastic about it: he is already planning the precise ways in which their hustling for the future of their child will guarantee success, outlining that the rest of their lives will be dedicated solely to ensuring that this child will climb the social ladder higher than they managed to do. Fren is a lot more cautious – she was already hesitant to tell him about being pregnant in the first place, before an accident revealed it regardless, and she is now faced with having to make a decision about a future she can’t even imagine in her head. Instead, she is thinking about the pressure of raising someone to be “good” – all the choices, all the work, that goes into making a good person, in the unspoken context of a world that is increasingly more violent, chaotic, exerting pressure on everyone trying to survive in it. It captures the central themes of the film, how the hustle of survival – or in this case, the hustle of someone who is middle-class not to fall behind, to keep her place. When her husband talks about his negative experiences of going to a public school, when they visit Fren’s mother, who seems to lead a simple life as a shop-keeper and is suffering from constant pain in her leg, they are making clear what the stakes of not keeping up are. It’s the inherent struggle of the (in this case, newly minted) middle-class: memories of their parents lack of options haunt them, falling behind is a vivid possibility, but the option of climbing higher on the social ladder is dangled like a just-out-of-reach carrot to keep the wheels turning. This sense of precarity is translated into a constant sense of unease, of un-mooredness, along with the destabilising sense that society is collapsing around the characters, with news about violence, predictions about future catastrophes, filtering in through the news.

The dichotomy of “being a good person” and “surviving in a capitalistic hellscape” is at the centre of the film. Fren works as a recruiter in HR, feeding desperate people who cannot turn down a job even when it comes with a requirement to work six days a week and face an intolerable boss who frequently throws things at his underlings when he is frustrated (or resorts to quiet, psychological terror, openly exerting his power especially when he is in the wrong) into the machine, knowing what toll it will take on them because she is living with the burden of it every day. There is an empty workstation in the office reminding her every day what it means, morally, to recruit: the woman who used to sit there has disappeared, her mother hasn’t heard from her for days, and the film eventually reveals that she has committed suicide after quietly bearing the burden for too long. The spectre of the consequences haunt Fren throughout the film, as does the deadline of finding someone to replace the employee so that things can continue as usual. If she weren’t pregnant, if her husband didn’t have such grand plans for their child, perhaps she could quit, but through how she and her colleague speak about the potential hires, it becomes clear that the job market is tight enough that it would be difficult to find a new job – and she doesn’t have rich parents to fall back on, or a financial cushion to make this clearly necessary decision. What does it mean for a society when it becomes impossible to make a moral decision, to be a good person? 

Fren’s inability to act and how trapped she is in her situation is contrasted with how her husband adapts to the circumstances of their life. He is a product rep for bulletproof vests, and chasing an expensive contract with the police force that is putting him in contact with very powerful men. Fren seems morally cautious about his involvement, as he is quite literally profiting from an increase in violence, from the uncertainty that is haunting her, to the extent where he is hounding down the most blood-thirsty, captivating news story to make his sales pitch stronger. At the same time, he is in a constant battle against the motorcycle riders who disregard the one-way-street leading to their apartment building: he might not have real, actual power anywhere else in his life, but he tries to regain it by enforcing the road rules they disregard to his inconvenience, in a process that first puts Fren in physical danger, and then, at the end of the film, leads him to an actual act of violence that he commits because he knows that he now has the kind of highly-placed friends in the police force that will mean he is protected against consequences. This is the kind of corruption, the lack of consequences for the well-connected to the detriment of everyone else, that is the cause for both her woes at work and the chaos in society in general, but the film hasn’t really left her with any way out – she is trapped by circumstance. 

Phanakngan Mai (Prod Rap Wai Phicharana), 2025, directed by Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit, starring Prapamonton Eiamchan, Paopetch Charoensook, Pimmada Chaisakaoen, Chanakan Rattana-Udom.

Summer's Camera

Summer’s (Kim Si-a, delivering a beautiful performance) father died a year ago and she enters her first year of high school carrying bits and pieces of him around, perhaps as an attempt to feel closer to him or to try and get closer to an ambiguous death that she herself can’t explain. Hit in the middle of the road while taking photographs, it was maybe not an accident, maybe suicide, and there is nothing that can give her clarity about it: her mother is in the depths of her own grief, still caring and loving, but unreachable at the same time as she is making her own way through her feelings about the death of her husband. She is in the process of packing up her dad’s office, framed photographs on the ground, detritus of him everywhere. Summer, carrying her father’s photobooks, notebooks and watch in her big red backpack, has stopped taking photos herself, which means that there is still an unfinished roll of film in her father’s old analogue Nikon: a perfect symbol for being in the middle of grief, arrested in a moment of time. Finishing the roll would mean developing it, and finding the last things her father cared about enough to take a photo of.

Summer’s Camera is a coming-of-age film that contains within itself the entire history of Summer’s first relationship, from beginning to end. It starts when the school’s adored soccer star Yeon-woo (Yu Ga-eun) accidentally kicks a ball towards her and Summer finds her so arresting that she feels compelled to photograph her. Later, she will describe the feeling as “hearing the shutter click”, a turn of phrase that her father used to describe the feeling of strong emotions in a moment that necessitate capturing it in a picture. Later on her best friend explains she has learned in physics class that moving faster than light slows turn time: but Summer has already figured out how to do that through the lens of her camera.

What makes Summer so compelling is her character is a level of self-certainty, in the midst of all the emotional turmoil of her loss and the things she later finds out about her father, that feels so unusual in a character so young. She has a crush, she pursues that crush. She comes out to her best friend and is supported – her friend isn’t surprised because she’s only ever been interested in photographing girls. None of the drama of the film comes from her not being accepted, or having to fight prejudice. Instead, Summer’s Camera is a film about navigating a relationship with another person who has a whole world of their own inside them, and what happens when their wants and ideas about the future don’t line up with your own: in the case of Yeon-woo, she is less dedicated to Summer than to soccer (it’s interesting how Summer’s passion for photography seems to line up with her relationship to Yeon-woo while Yeon-woo’s passion for soccer is in conflict with it). In the case of Summer’s dad, it’s a world of secrets she discovers once she does develop that final roll of film in the Nikon. What she finds is portrait photographs of a man she has never seen before, after a lifetime of believing her father didn’t take portraits. This stranger turns out to be her father’s lover who has been with him since high school – a man who only finds out about his death from his daughter, and has to work through his own grief while Summer relies on his advice as she navigates her first relationship. It’s tender and tragic to see these two characters, with all the complexities of emotions behind them, keep each other company: Summer the daughter of a man he loved (and very straightforward in her questions, desperate to understand her father better), he the secret that her father kept (and arrested in resentment, in pain), that her mother maybe knew about, but it’s impossible to ask her these questions. The film captures the almost untouchable nature of this man in Summer’s and Maru’s memories of him at different stages of his life: Summer remembers seeing him take photographs in the woods, always at a slight remove from his family, impossible to imagine, she explains to Yeon-woo at some point, as aging into being a grandparent, as if already arrested in time before his death.

It’s like Summer is assembling puzzle pieces to arrive at a more complete picture of her father after his death, coming to terms with the idea that he had a whole world inside of him that she didn’t have access to before: but the final puzzle piece is an affirmation of his love, when she finally goes through the final photos on the digital camera he used right before the accident. It’s a moment where she sees herself, photographed with the same love and devotion, asserting her own place in her father’s life, loved and cherished the way he showed his devotion. 

2025, directed by Divine Sung, starring Kim Si-a, Yu Ga-eun, Kwak Min-gyu.

Linda Linda Linda

What stands out to me the most about Nobuhiro Yamashita’s 2005 film Linda Linda Linda (inspiration for the riot grrrl band the Linda Lindas, the title taken from Japanese punk band The Blue Hearts’ song that the girls in the film are covering) is how joyful it is: it’s about four teenage girls who are learning to function as a band together in a short period of time, but there are no institutional obstacles in their way, no outside mocking or hatred for their enthusiasm or dedication. Instead, Yamashita focuses on their dynamics: if there is conflict, it comes from how the characters handle pressure and stress, from the difficulties of learning and getting used to new people and shifting into a functioning relationship with each other. It’s a film about shared passion and the magic of puzzle pieces fitting perfectly to form a picture, which captures the very essence of what it means to be a band that performs well together and manages to convey that enthusiasm to a rapt audience. This sets it apart from the film that it reminded me of, watching it for the first time more than 25 years after its release: Lukas Moodysson’s 2013 film Vi är bäst!, which captures the same love of music, but is about the outside obstacles in the way of its protagonists that are difficult to overcome.

At the beginning of the film, the success of the band is precariously balances. The original guitarist has injured her hand in a basketball game and the singer of the band has left alongside her because of conflicts within the band. The remaining three girls decide to press on without Moe (Shione Yukawa) and Rinko (Takayo Mimura), with Kei (Yû Kashii), the band’s keyboardist, learning how to play the guitar, and the recruitment of the first girl they set eyes on across the school yard as their new singer, who just happens to be Korean exchange student Son (Bae Doona, Sense8), who still struggles with her Japanese fluency and doesn’t really know what she’s agreeing to at first, but then embraces the challenge enthusiastically (the scenes of her practising by herself in a karaoke bar are some of the best of the film). It takes them a while to find their stride together, especially with Son changing up their dynamic, but the narrow time window to perfect the song they pick – the film pays close attention to how they go through old cassette tapes, reverently picking something that probably just predates their births forces them together in late-night sessions and shared attempts to gather the necessary resources.

I also really enjoyed how the film never depicts the other kids at school as mocking of their efforts. Instead, the boys around them – two of them clearly lovestruck, with differing levels of awkwardness – are supportive, a very cool classmate who is an accomplished musician herself compliments them on their choice and enthusiastically supports them, and at their final grand performance at the cultural festival, the crowd goes wild for them as all the pieces fit together perfectly in the moment. 

2005, directed by Nobuhiro Yamashita, starring Bae Doona, Aki Maeda, Yû Kashii, Shiori Sekine, Takayo Mimura.

Undertone

Don’t be afraid of the dark. Be afraid of the silence.

What would trap someone in a haunted house, beyond the a supernatural curse that traps, blocks doors, removes exits, twists hallways back upon themselves until they become loops? I don’t know if Evy’s family home in Undertone is haunted per se as much as perhaps possessed, if it is the place that is the problem or if there is a demon that has moved itself in like an infection, making use of a hallowed out space inside her mother. There aren’t many answers found here, beyond the observations that things happen without her noticing (it’s a film that rewards close attention) that make it clear that whatever is happening goes beyond the idea of a fractured mind – by insomnia, grief, guilt, stress – latching on to increasingly more complex and horrible stories and projecting them on the unbearable situation she finds herself in.
Evy is caring for her terminally ill and uncommunicative mother. The first shot of the film captures all the detritus of care work: the toilet chair, the absorbent sheets for the bed – and it sets up the context of who the person she cares for is, the open bible that is being read, the religious statues around the house, the pictures of her at her first communion. Evy’s mother is a deeply religious person, and Evy, as her sole carer, has moved back into this realm even if she herself has perhaps no other connection to that religion except what she experienced in her childhood. When her work is done, she goes downstairs to record a podcast with her friend Justin, who lives in London – forcing her to do this work in the middle of the night – where she plays the resident sceptic to his open-minded, maybe naive and trusting Mulder as they dissect stories about hauntings and ghosts. It’s an established routine at this point, and each time she puts on her headphones to talk to him, they run through the same routine of Justin, worriedly asking about her mother, always receiving the same answer that there has been no change. The first time, Evy voices her deepest and darkest thought: that she is wishing for an end, even if it means her mother’s death, because waiting for the “death rattle” (the nurse, explaining how it will end, trying to use gentle language) is unbearable. Her mother is no longer eating or drinking, and she hasn’t been communicating with her. Her boyfriend is absent in this ordeal. Justin says he understands, but to what extent he really can grasp the routines of caring for someone who will die is questionable from his far remove. His concern is genuine, but Evy is in this entirely alone, and her only connection to the outside world is through phone calls. If she does leave, the camera does not follow her – we are trapped with her in the house.
Into this backdrop, they begin a new episode about a series of ten recordings they have been sent in an email with no explanation. They cover the story of a couple, Mike and Jessa, through the process of their own deterioration. Mike has been recording Jessa during the night because she sleeptalks (for me, one of the most heartbreaking small moments of the film is Evy’s clear longing when she hears them interact for the first time, their intimacy, their closeness), but what he uncovers in these recordings goes beyond that, like their house has become haunted as well, and along with them, Justin and Evy, with their respective ideological interpretations of reality, try to interpret the mysteriously filled sinks, the noises of a baby that should not exist crying, Jessa’s increasing distress and Mike’s futile attempts to help her. The act of bearing witness without being able to affect the outcome begins affecting both Justin and Evy, especially as Evy’s own perception of reality begins breaking down. She isn’t sleeping, and the noises begin creeping in, in the way that outside noise subtly sneaks in when you’re wearing noise-cancelling headphones (she can never be sure – it’s like she is sensing it more than hearing it). In addition to the recordings, Justin becomes obsessed with the idea that every detail – nursery rhymes, names that appear, songs played backwards – have meaning beyond themselves, endless rabbit holes that lead down wikipedia pages and obscure sites and historical horrors (in a way, the film portrays how conspiracy theories can become embedded in minds that are desperate to find meaning when reality becomes inexplicable). Without an outside source of reassurance, Evy seems to become trapped in these stories as well. Her responsibility for her mother, her detachment from the outside world, her ability to sleep, the alcohol she begins drinking and the sleeping tablets she takes, begin eroding her ability to apply her scepticism to what is happening around her, and because we are trapped alongside her, and with her as she moves through the house, the audience becomes unable to escape as well. It doesn’t help that the details of what Justin uncovers in his “research” seem to map so neatly onto Evy’s anxiety (at the point of complete breakdown, she goes so far as accusing him of gaslighting her) – her pregnancy, her guilt over not praying with her mother that she thinks is connected to her catatonic state and terminal illness, the stories of women killing their children, the idea that children suffer for what adults do, all mix together in the final explosion, when the walls break down.
Tuason achieves his horrors mainly through how he films the house, determining what is visible and invisible with light and angles, his sound design. But it’s Nina Kiri’s extraordinary performance – in what is essentially a chamber play – that carries the Undertone, and makes it so great. 

2025, directed by Ian Tuason, starring Nina Kiri, Adam DiMarco, Michèle Duquet.

Rental Family

In the beginning of Rental Family, Phillip Vanderploeg (Brendan Fraser) has been living in Japan for seven years. He is an actor who originally arrived to shoot one toothpaste commercial but has stuck around, trying to build a career, but it is evident from his face – Brendan Fraser giving one of the most stunning performance of sadness and loneliness – that it hasn’t quite worked out. He is isolated, he is struggling, the bit parts he is getting are frustrating. As he is watching people in the building opposite his small apartment at night, observing their routines, their togetherness, his solitude becomes even more apparent. He isn’t just an outsider in this country that he is eager to understand but hasn’t quite grasped, a man who speaks the language but still reverts to English when he can, but a stranger in his own life.

Then, accidentally, a life-changing opportunity comes his way. He is hired to play a “sad American” (a role made for him, you might say) at what he thinks is a funeral but is actually a fake production to allow the “deceased” to experience how much he is loved and cherished. The owner of the company is Shinji Tada (Takehiro Hira from Giri/Haji, Shōgun, and Monarch) and he is eager to hire Phillip as the “token white guy”. His business: hiring out people who pretend to be family members or mourners or party guests, to provide experiences to his clients that exist on the spectrum of providing prestige to creating catharsis in a country where mental health problems are rarely discussed and resources for treatment are difficult to access. Shinji is a complex character (how complex will be revealed late in the film in a truly shocking, Dollhouse-esque scene): he seems convinced about the deep emotional value that his company provides, proudly displaying the hundreds of client files to remind himself of all the people he is helped, yet too business-driven to make ethical decisions about which cases to take on and which to pass because they might cause lasting emotional damage in either the clients or his employees. Phillip’s first assignment seems hand-picked for him to only see the good side. He poses as the groom for a woman eager to escape her family while helping them to keep face: after the marriage, she will “move to Canada” with her husband, except it turns out this is a ploy for her to be able to begin her life with her wife. It’s a genuinely moving moment in spite of the inherent sadness in the idea that the bride’s father would be so enthusiastic about a man he has only met at his daughter’s wedding sharing her life while she has to keep the person that means the most to her secret. Phillip, in observing what he has made possible with his performance, seems to finally have found meaning, the promise that his work can have a lasting positive impact. It’s enough to sway him to sign on, in spite of his initial jitters (he almost does not go through with it and needs to be coaxed through by his frustrated colleague Aiko, played by Mari Yamamoto in a scene-stealing performance) not just because of what he can do for others, but because he is determined to understand his new country and all of its social intricacies better (he could spend 100 years here and still not quite get it, he is told early, and maybe that’s something to keep in mind).

The limits of the business concept are immediately obvious to the viewers but Phillip’s eagerness to participate in something that gives him meaning ameliorates his doubts. A woman hires him to play an estranged father to her young daughter, a necessary deception to get her into a prestigious private school. It would be different if the kid (Shannon Mahina Gorman) was in on it, but instead she is being deceived as well: and as her initial rage at this man who supposedly abandoned her and her mother turns into genuine feelings of affections because Phillip tries so hard to be a good father figure, the emotional fall-out of the inevitable (when the deception is revealed, and Phillip stops showing up) becomes overbearing. The idea of the authentic within the fake – because the feelings are real, even if it is all based on a performance – is at the centre of the film, because Phillip is a deeply empathetic person, who might be better suited to the job if he were more cynical and detached. Instead, the experience has changed him, as he is spending more and more time with his clients and gets entangled in their lives. What is the difference between a fake father and a real one, when is is providing emotional support that the client desperately needs? How is his care for an old actor with dementia who is retelling his life story to preserve his most cherished memories any less real than if he were an actual journalist, writing about him, if the emotional impact on the man is so genuine and life-changing that he is eager to set out for a last journey into his past to retrieve lost treasures? Phillip can’t draw boundaries, and so there are none. He himself is filling an emotional abyss with meaning he derives from this work, and so he can’t pull back or stop himself when he is going too far. The film also provides an emotional counterweight in showing how Aiko’s experience of the work differs radically from Phillip’s: as a woman, she is frequently asked to play fake mistresses who are asked to apologise to cheating husband’s wives for their transgressions. She doesn’t get any of Phillip’s catharsis of genuine human connection, instead suffering beatings that she can’t escape but charges extra for, in work that looks more harrowing than meaningful, and drives her to the brink. 

At any stage, this film could have veered off into being a completely different film: a thriller, perhaps, because the stakes are so high, especially when Phillip decides to break out the actor for his final journey. Instead, director Hikari, supported by beautiful cinematography and a soundtrack by Jónsi, creates a beautifully emotional film that is sad and funny at the same time, and carried by a stunning, maybe career-best performance by Fraser, who is so good at capturing every emotion with his face. 

2025, directed by Hikari, starring Brendan Fraser, Takehiro Hira, Mari Yamamoto, Shannon Mahina Gorman, Akira Emoto. 

Revolver Lily

There is a deep sadness to the idea of being incredibly good at something, perhaps even one of the best in the world, but for that talent to be associated only with death and sadness. At the beginning of Revolver Lily, Yuri Ozone (Haruka Ayase) has retired from her career as a famed assassin. She has settled into a life where she keeps the company of rich men happy to pay for having drinks with a beautiful woman. She lives with two women she seems very close to, one like a daughter, the other like a partner (later she will say that they are "pledged to death" to each other). The year is 1924 (a year after the devastating Great Kantō Earthquake, the political context, which plays an important role in Isao Yukisada’s film, is Japan’s military ambition as bloodthirsty leaders of its army and navy struggle for the resources to build up for future wars of conquest. Yuri is forced back into the life she has left behind when a boy (Jinsei Hamura), the last survivor of a brutal attack on his family (by, as we later find out, army men in civilian clothes), seeks out her help. She reads about the murder of the family in the newspaper and finds the name of someone she knows, and knows not to be a murderer, associated with the crime, and goes to investigate. Shinta comes across her accidentally, but she happens to be the person he was told to find for help. He is carrying vital documents, she is deeply reluctant, but can’t help but use her abilities to save him, again and again, as he gets himself into increasingly desperate situations, from those who seek to harm him. As she returns to her old life, memories of her past trauma – the loss of her own family, her own child – haunt her, explaining why she approaches this responsibility with stoicism and the sadness that comes with having to return to something she has left behind for a reason. Eventually, when she realises how personally connected she is to Shinta’s family, her full frustration at being unable to live in peace and away from the violence comes out. It is thanks to Ayase’s outstanding performance that her complex emotions shine through in spite of Yuri’s toughness and strength. It becomes apparent immediately how good Yuri is at causing harm. Her abilities outweigh her opponents even when they are armed with weapons superior to hers, her movements so precise and fast that in the blink of an eye, she leaves only devastation behind. The fight scenes are beautifully choreographed, especially when she is fighting a worthy opponent who challenges her. It’s difficult not to be in awe.

The true accomplishment of the film is the inherent dissonance at its heart: Revolver Lily is a film opposing militarisation and warmongering, but to achieve these goals, its main character has to resort to – practised, precise, devastating – violence. The film pits the individual but reluctant heroism of Yuri against both the individual ambitions of powerful men and the institutional violence of a military apparatus that is seeking future glory, with the actual history of Japan throughout the 1930s and 1940s looming over the narrative as the known outcome that nothing Yuri accomplishes here can ultimately prevent, only delay.

Visually, Revolver Lily is stunning. The sets and costuming are beautiful. The film captures a period of transition in Japan, expressed through the presence of Western dress alongside traditional clothing. It juxtaposes the modern army – uniformed, armed with rifles and guns, not swords – against older styles of one-on-one battle. Nothing expresses the confusion and chaos of this period in-between better than a small moment between Yuri’s attorney and adviser Iwami (Hiroki Hasegawa), who seeks the help of an old friend who is working on his Cubist painting in the middle of his traditional living room. This is a society undergoing radical change, a moment of flux, and Yuri alongside her friends and companions is attempting to steer it towards a less violent outcome – ultimately a doomed effort, but Revolver Lily makes the attempt look spectacular. 

2023, directed by Isao Yukisada, starring Haruka Ayase, Hiroki Hasegawa, Jinsei Hamura, Kavka Shisodo.

Beolsae (House of Hummingbird)

In Kim Bo-ra’s House of Hummingbird, teenager Eun-hee (Park Ji-huk, giving a stunning performance) goes unrecognised and isolated in most of the spheres she operates in. As the youngest daughter in her family, her parents pay avid attention to the success and failure of her older brother, but mostly ignore her. This brother, pressured to achieve academic success, lets out his frustrations violently at his younger sister, and is only cautioned for it once when he does it in a way that shows disrespect to his father. At school, she is ostracised – her family isn’t rich, and her talents don’t lend themselves to success in a conventional learning environment. Her blossoming relationship to a boyfriend seems tender and close, but he doesn’t seem to take it as seriously as she does. Her relationship with her best friend becomes strained over time when Eun-hee’s problems become so overwhelming that she stops being able to support or even see her friend’s problems. 
It’s hard to discover your own identity in an environment so unsupportive, where you might as well be a ghost haunting the halls. Without any clear pathways into the future or a sense of who she might want to be, and nobody believing there is anything she could do at all, Eun-hee seems stuck, and in a film where she is in every scene, this lack of genuine connection to others or to herself plays into the sense of loneliness.

There is a shift when a new Chinese teacher begins working at Eun-hee’s cram school. Young-ji (Kim Sae-byeok) takes an interest in Eun-hee, inviting her to stay and have tea with her, and share what she is actually passionate about. She gives Eun-hee a sense that there are ways to exist in the world that she might not have previously considered, ways that are more unconventional than were thinkable to her within the confines of her family. Young-ji has taken a break from University to teach at the cram school, and she seems invested in giving herself time to grow and change. She functions like a window into a world that was previously closed to Eun-hee, a world that might allow her to use her talent for drawing, a world that might actually see her, where she does not have to exist in the background anymore. At the same time, the need for surgery removes Eun-hee from her family and into a hospital environment, where the other patients dote on her – an experience so foreign and new to her that she seems to prefer staying at the hospital to going home to her parents. A girl named Yuri (Hye-in Seol) shows interest in her and it’s the first time someone appears to do so with genuine care and effort. 

Set in 1994, the film works within a historic framework of notable events that are mostly mediated through a television screen. Korea’s progress through the FIFA World Cup, the death of North Korea’s leader Kim Il-sung, the tragic and devastating collapse of the Seongsu Bridge in October that will have repercussions for Eun-hee all happen in the background of scenes until the last one fully draws her attention, the way that events that might have a personal impact, not a theoretical one, do. The disaster robs Eun-hee of who may just be the most important person in her life so far, and yet it can’t take from her the belief that there is a future for her out there that is waiting, in spite of all the obstacles ahead of her. 

2018, directed by Kim Bo-ra, starring Park Ji-hu, Kim Sae-byeok, Jeong In-gi, Son Sang-yeon, Lee Seung-yun, Park Soo-Yeon.

Yunhui-ege (Moonlit Winter)

The snow in the Hokkaido town of Otaru builds up in dunes, covering sidewalks and cars. One of the main character’s aunt describes what it means to live with it through winter: you shovel it, it builds up again, you shovel it again. Life is the constant process of excavating a pathway, again and again, until winter passes. It’s a powerful symbol in Dae Hyung Lim’s film about buried feelings, about two lives derailed early and tragically by societal pressure. 
Yoon-he (Kim Hee-ae) lives in Korea with her teenage daughter Sae-bom (Kim So-hye). She is recently divorced from her husband and her daughter is about to graduate high school and attend university in Seoul, so this is a turning point in her life, an expected emptiness that may hold the potential for change. Jun (Yûko Nakamura) has been living in Japan since her own parents divorced and is sharing her life with her aunt. They seem to have built a comfortable routine around her work as a veterinarian and the running of a cosy cafe in town. Both women have built a life away from each other but they are also living in an arrested state of suspense, as if their lives since their forced separation has evolved in ways that they didn’t get to choose. Jun writes a letter, it reaches Yoon-he’s daughter, who decides to take her mother for a holiday in Otaru to learn more about her. 

Moonlit Winter could have been a film about rekindled feelings, with flashbacks of what Jun and Yoon-he shared in the past: instead the profoundness of their connection is made clear in how it has left them adrift in their present, clear in Yoon-he’s loneliness and unhappiness, her isolation and inability to communicate her feelings to her daughter, who is desperate to know her, and in Jun’s unwillingness to consider a new relationship (reacting with almost violent frustration at the suggestion of marriage, turning down a potential suitor by insisting that she too keep her private feelings to herself, in case she is met with same societal condemnation she once was) with someone else after all these years. It’s more about how their interrupted love has affected their personal relationships with other people in the present, especially between Yoon-hee and her daughter, who perceives her mother’s loneliness and unhappiness but doesn’t know why they are so profound. Sae-bom, an aspiring photographer, is trying to get to know her mother through this trip into the past, and there is a beautiful symmetry to the idea that what originally caused her to be so remote, distant, unreachable could now be the reason for a new intimacy and closeness found in having a better understanding of one another. 

The actual reunion, bittersweet and tender, happens late in the film, and feels like a catalyst, like a circle closing so that the characters can finally live lives closer to what they were meant to have, without the outside pressure and the damage of non-acceptance. It’s not the ending you might expect from a film about two past lovers reconnecting but it resonates deeply regardless. 

2019, directed by Dae Hyung Lim, starring Kim Hee-ae, Yûko Nakamura, Kim So-hye, Sung Yoo-bin, Hana Kino.

Happyend

Neo Sora’s Happyend, about a friendship between a group of high schoolers and more intimately about two boys who have known each other for years but are now threatening to grow apart, is one of the most compelling portraits of individuals living through the ascent of fascism. It is set in what feels like a very near future: everything except some minor advancements in (surveillance) technology looks the same as it does now. Connected by a passion for music, especially EDM, these teenagers hunt for the exhilarating experience of sound wherever they can find it, even if it lands them right in the middle of a police raid on an underground concert. Their passion is palpable, the sheer joy of sharing these moments, but the overbearing forces of state control intrude on it already before the true horrors have even begun. Worse, the signs of what will ultimately divide them is already visible in how their stakes differ: Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) is Japanese, and the police pass over him after a quick face scan, but Kou (Yukito Hidaka) is only a resident, even though his family has lived in Japan for four generations, and falls under additional, terrorising scrutiny that will follow his throughout the film. 
It begins with a prank. The film establishes the stakes, the context, through videos of a Japanese Prime Minister thirsting to use the threat of a predicted big earthquake as a thin excuse to establish a totalitarian state, raising fears about migrants to justify an escalating surveillance regime, utilising fear for his political aim of gaining more power. These little snippets are like background noise: they happen on ever-present screens, but the reality for these teenagers is still the small world of their high school, where they get to follow their passion for music in the music lab, where the visible regime of control isn’t the greater political apparatus, but the small-minded little dictator of a principal who parks his ridiculous yellow sports car for all to see. The morning after the aborted concert, Yuto dares Kou to topple the car. The result looks like a piece of sculptural art, eagerly filmed by the students. It is a prank, but in the context of the world these kids now live in, the principal, furious, misconstrues it as an act of terrorism that justifies his institution of a surveillance system in the school that automatically deducts points for any infringement. Something as small as not wearing the correct uniform – one of their friends likes wearing a skirt instead of trousers – results in demerits, creating an atmosphere of fear that no longer allows for expression of individuality. 

While the surrounding world becomes increasingly erratic, dominated by pro- and anti-government protests that are met with violence from the security forces, the smaller world of the high school begins mirroring those wider conflicts. Kou, more affected by the open racism where whether or not he is required to carry his residency card on him has become irrelevant because there are no limits to the power police can exert, begins to think of the wider picture, spurred on by Fumi (Kilala Inori), a politically active student who is trying to find ways to push back against their principal, who insists on fighting back against the intolerable even if it comes at a personal cost. She advocates for her non-Japanese fellow students who are being increasingly marginalised, and the general apathy in the student body that stays quiet in the face of the escalation, or even accommodating. Yuto remains as he always has been, pursuing his passion for music, but otherwise politically naive. The gap between them widens up to a point where Kou wonders if they would even be friends if they met now, but the film never falls into the despair of an irretrievably broken friendship: instead, they come back to one another, even as their graduation puts them on separate courses in life and Yuto, realising that there is less at stake for him personally than for his friend, steps up to protect him. 

All of this makes Happyend an incredibly prescient film to watch in these first weeks of 2026, where the limits of tolerating the intolerable are becoming more and more clear. 

2024, directed by Neo Sora, starring Makiko Watanabe, Yukito Hidaka, Ayumu Nakajima, Arazi, Shina Peng, Kosuke Tanaka, Kilala Inori, Hayato Kurihara, Shirô Sano, Yûta Hayashi.

Chan hang rawang rao (Flat Girls)

I don’t know what a good entry point for writing about this film is: it hit me as a complete surprise, the kind of quiet story that gets stuck in your brain and just keeps growing in significance as it bounces around in there. It’s a small, slice-of-life tale that covers maybe a year of life in a run-down, lively Bangkok apartment block: a place that has a communal badminton court where the lights keep breaking, where the apartments units don’t seem to have enough space for the people they contain, where there is a constant worry about the future, the precarity of making rent. Downstairs, there’s a place reserved for secret, illegal gambling, where much of the misery that follows some characters around is magnified. 
The film follows two teenage girls who have grown up together, are best friends, and are both struggling to figure out if what they feel for each other goes beyond friendship. The two girls may live in the same place, but otherwise their situations are different enough that the gulf threatens the core of their relationship. Ann (Fatima Dechawaleekul) is the overburdened older daughter of a woman with a gambling addiction. Her father, a police officer, has died on the line of duty, threatening the family’s right to remain in this apartment block reserved for serving police officers. She is helping her mother by caring for her siblings, taking on small jobs. There seems to be no way out for her: as much as she dreams of being a stewardess, she knows that in the end, her economic circumstances determine her path in life, and the realistic way out is either joining the police herself, or marrying. Jane (Fairy Kirana Pipityakorn) is the only child of the woman who collects rent in the apartment complex and has enough pull and influence to advocate for others when they fall behind on their payments. Her family is considering purchasing a house and leaving – for much of the film, Ann fears losing the safety of having a roof over her head while Jane struggles with having to leave everything she knows behind for a place that is more luxurious and allows more space and safety. 
Then, the film throws policeman Tong (Boy Pakorn Chadborirak) into the mix. He’s in his thirties, but recruited by Jane’s forever-body-shaming mum to help her daughter lose weight. It’s a point in the film where things could go different, where a grown man enters the established routines of two teenage girls and proves to be a predator, but instead, there’s a tenderness in how he begins to truly care for both Ann and Jane, how he fits into their dynamic and provides them with a kind of freedom (mostly through his access to a car) while respectfully stepping back when he knows he should. If he upsets the dynamic, it’s by accident: the film doesn’t explicitly talk about Jane’s relationship to gender but there are enough hints here that something is going on. She wears a binder, and her growing relationship with Tong exists on a spectrum between admiration and attraction that can’t quite decide if she wants or wants to be. The question of the nature of the relationship between Ann and Jane is similarly subtle, as the growing financial pressure on Ann’s family muddles things. When they kiss, Jane pretends that it affects her less than she thought it would, but Ann is the one who seems radically changed, to have realised something about herself that she can’t quite afford to put in words. In any case, Ann argues, love if for people who have money, and as much as Jane supports her dreams, Ann knows they are tragically unattainable. 
The second half of the film becomes more complex, with the film once again refusing to clearly spell out everything for the viewer, leaving it to interpretation. Tong may genuinely have feelings for Ann or be driven by an instinct to help in the only way that he is allowed to. In any case, he fades into the background as Ann’s mother’s gambling addiction puts her family into peril, as the inevitable moment of separation arrives. Still, the thing that will stay with me is Tong’s insistence on treating others with kindness, of telling Jane that happiness is a more worthwhile pursuit than riches, especially in a place where other adults seem to be constantly locked in a fight for survival, seem to be too selfish to see their daughters as people with their own ideas about what they want their lives to be. 


2025, directed by Jirassaya Wongsutin, starring Fairy Kirana Pipityakorn, Fatima Dechawaleekul, Boy Pakorn Chadborirak.

Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value)

I wrote it for you. You're the only one who can play it.

So with the house empty and the doors locked and the mattresses rolled round, those stray airs, advance guards of great armies, blustered in, brushed bare boards, nibbled and fanned, met nothing in bedroom or drawing-room that wholly resisted them but only hangings that flapped, wood that creaked, the bare legs of tables, saucepans and china already furred, tarnished, cracked. What people had shed and left -- a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes -- those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again.

Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse

This house in Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, my favourite film of his since Oslo, 31. august, holds generations of a family, memories going back decades, a century. People have been born and have died in this house. It made me think of how the rooms of my grandparents’ house in which I spent summers are inscribed in my brain more than any place that I ever actually lived in: built by my grandfather, it held something more than the suburban home of my childhood, and it appears often in my dreams, years after it has been sold and therefore lost to me forever. 
Trier uses this house to tell the story of his characters: Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), an aging and well-respected film director who hasn’t finished a project in a long time, spent his childhood there, witnessed his mother’s suicide, then moved away, and later raised his two daughters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) there with his wife, until a divorce and an abandonment that sits at the centre of the film like a bleeding wound. The house itself has a literal crack in it, a foundational fault, one that feels like it symbolises the pain and hurt that has existed in the family: in Nora’s childhood, she once did a project on a house that imagined it as a living being with preferences, for being full, or maybe empty and silent, lived in, for holding life, but the crack in the wall made it feel like the house had been slowly collapsing ever since it was built, threatening to take its inhabitants with it, suspending them in a slow fall towards the ground. 

 

At the beginning of the film, Gustav is about to return to Oslo, and his children are packing up the decades of memories, all the keepsakes that have filled the house, readying it for a potential sale. It’s the kind of task that makes it impossible not to ruminate on what has happened in the past. Agnes, now a historian, is investigating the family history, specifically a first wound. Gustav’s mother, arrested during the German occupation for anti-Nazi activities, was tortured in prison – we see her flicking through the horrifying pages of the re-enactment, imagining the grandmother she never met and how she would have returned carrying that trauma into Gustav’s childhood. Gustav has written a script, his most personal yet, and wants his daughter Nora, who is now a successful stage and television actress (with horrifying stage fright), to play his own mother. The script is written for her, but she can not forgive that he left them in childhood, and every interaction these two have with each other is terse and ends in an argument. Gustav does not value the theatre (he dislikes that she acts in centuries-old plays – he likes her acting, but not the format), he thinks television is too small for her. He does not show up for her premieres. Nora turns him down because she cannot be around her father for too long. Gustav only knows how to express himself through writing, but his profession, his obsession with his art, was the reason for his leaving: he could not figure out how to be an artist and a father at the same time, he could not show up for his family and create at the same time. Even with his grandson, he only connects through (profoundly age-inappropriate) films: for Christmas, he gifts a parcel full of DVDs, including Haneke’s The Piano Teacher of all things (“to help him learn about the maternal instinct” he explains, luckily Agnes does not have a DVD player). He loves and is proud of his daughters but the only way he knows to include them, to be around them, is to make films with them. We see a retrospective film screening of a movie he made 20 years ago with Agnes, the younger daughter, that must have been close to the last thing he completed before he left them. Agnes is fantastic in it but she did not become an actress, as if something about the experience deterred her.

 

Instead of Nora, Gustav casts Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning). He is charmed by her adoration for him and his films, and her involvement means funding – from Netflix, of all places, an arrangement that seems doomed from the start for a director who has such a clear conception of complete artistic freedom and disdain for economic constraints. It reminded me of Olivier Assayas’ 2022 Irma Vep show, a thinly veiled satire about the director making a series about his own film, made by HBO – as much about film production conditions in the 2020s as it was about his personal life. They work on the script together in the house. Gustav is deliberately elusive about how much of this story is truly his, about what is authentic and what isn’t – in one scene claiming his mother used a footstool to hang herself that his daughter, in on the joke, identifies as being from IKEA. Rachel is excited for the project but realises soon that she is only a second choice. Gustav asks her to die her hair the same colour of Nora, and meeting her, she realises that she is a stand-in for someone else, an obvious approximation because she is forcing this personal story of Gustav’s childhood trauma – his mother hanging herself in the house when he was seven - to be translated into English. There is a conflict here, an alienation and mis-translation: hoping to bridge it, she practices a fake Scandinavian accent so that the difference between her and the other actors in the film won’t stand out too much, but it becomes obvious immediately that this is a fundamentally flawed undertaking that threatens to undermine the film. Rachel is genuine and passionate enough about the project to drop out in time. 

Gustav’s script, once Agnes reads it, hesitant to allow her own son to perform the role of Gustav in it, appears several times throughout the film: Gustav carries it around in a plastic bag, Nora refuses to read it because reading it would be a concession to her father, or it might reveal something about him she isn’t ready to face. In reading it, Agnes realises that it is a love letter to Nora more than Gustav’s mother: it may have been written about Agnes’ grandmother, but it was written for Nora, with Gustav, who they think unaware of Nora’s own suicide attempt, managing to write about it like it indirectly through his mother’s death. It’s like the crack in the house, persisting through the decades, unavoidable, a repeating pattern in their family history. The film is about the terse relationship between the two sisters and their fathers, but it is at its most moving when it shows how Nora and Agnes survived their childhood together, and especially, how Nora made the kind of childhood for Agnes that allowed her to thrive, and eventually make her own family, because she was not alone and had someone care for her when her parents didn’t. “I had you”, Agnes says in the pivotal scene of the film. Gustav’s insistence that life irritates art so much that he had to leave to continue making films is undermined: instead, what the house held in all those years was the two sisters and love for each other. In the end, the house itself is transformed, completely stripped of its history by a pre-sale transformation that turns it into the kind of indistinguishable canvas of every 2020s trend in interior decoration. Grey surfaces, new floorboards, empty surfaces, undistinguishable furniture, the crack presumably plastered and painted over, it has died, in a way, become separated from its history and how it intertwines with the Borgs. Instead, Gustav is finally filming his film on a sound stage which through the presence of the actors and the story alone becomes authentic. It’s not a home that has ever held people, but it is ready to hold their lives regardless. transposed into the present tense, with Nora in the leading role and her nephew acting alongside her, the story loses none of its poignancy, because it is about the people that Gustav, in his own lacking way, loves. 

2025, directed by Joachim Trier, starring Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning, Anders Danielsen Lie, Øyvind Hesjedal Loven. 

Daedosiui sarangbeob (Love in the Big City)

 

Starting this new year with a film that I knew nothing about before watching it has been a genuine joy and surprise. I was motivated by falling down a rabbit-hole that should have started last year, when Kim Go-eun delivered her unforgettable performance in Pamyo, but it’s taken until her appearance in the thriller series The Price of Confession to want to dive into a filmography defined by interesting choices. 

Daedosiui sarangbeob is about two outsiders who find each other and share a life through their twenties and early thirties. In the beginning, there is loneliness: Heung-soo’s (Steve Noh, Pachinko) hiding and isolation because he is afraid to come out as gay in a society that is still deeply homophobic, to a mother who has devoted herself to Church after catching him with another boy, and Jae-hee’s (Kim Go-eun) solitude because she is ostracised as a weirdo, mainly for not confirming to preconceived notions about how she is meant to act as a woman. When Jae-hee first notices Heung-soo, it feels like she is lit up by the mutual recognition of having something in common. They become friends – as the years pass, they move in together, are the closest relationship each of them has in their life, even as their diverging ideas about romance cause chaos. Closeted Heung-soo doesn’t allow himself love even when it persistently shows up in his life, fearing what it would mean to commit, or to have to reveal himself to the world. Jae-hee falls into relationships with men who inevitably fall on a spectrum from ridiculous to useless to violently jealous, never really conceding that she deserves so much better because she’s been told too often that she doesn’t. Heung-soo is arrested in his career because he doesn’t commit there either – he’s been writing forever but he seems incapable of making choices that aren’t prescribed for him. Jae-hee lands in an office job where she is undervalued and suffers from misogynistic power structures. 
The film is carried by their love and care for each other: a relationship that grows as they do. Noh and Kim Go-eun have the kind of undeniable chemistry that feels magical on screen – Jae-hee’s fearlessness and energy shine even more against Heung-soo’s reservedness and restraint. This is a beautifully filmed and acted portrait of friendship. 

2024, directed by Eon-hee Lee, starring Kim Go-eun, Steve Sanghyun Noh, Kim Chae-eun, Kwak Dong-yeon, Jang Hye-jin. 

Films of the Year

Sorry, Baby (2025, Eva Victor)  

Nickel Boys (2024, RaMell Ross)

Sinners (2025, Ryan Coogler) 

Hedda (2025, Nia DaCosta) 

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (2025, Mary Bronstein) 

Presence (2024, Steven Soderbergh)

A Real Pain (2024, Jesse Eisenberg) 

Wake Up Dead Man (2025, Rian Johnson) 

The Mastermind (2025, Kelly Reichardt) 

We Were Dangerous (2024, Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu)

I Used to Be Funny (2023, Ally Pankiw) 

28 Years Later (2025, Danny Boyle) 

Good Boy (2025, Ben Leonberg) 

The Assessment (2025, Fleur Fortune) 

Straume (2024, Gints Zilbalodis)

 

Also: 

 

September 5 (2024, Tim Fehlbaum)

The Friend (2024, Scott McGehee, David Siegel) 

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024, Rungano Nyoni)

Sister Midnight (2024, Karan Kandhari) 

My Dead Friend Zoe (2024, Kyle Hausmann-Stokes)

Theater Camp (2023, Molly Gordon, Nick Lieberman)

Weapons (2025, Zach Cregger) 

The Order (2024, Justin Kurzel)  

 

2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024

Hedda

 

“Sometimes I can’t help myself. I do things all of a sudden, on a whim.”

“Hedda Gabler doesn’t love anyone but herself, and Hedda Tesman doesn’t exist.”

“I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being, just as you are--or, at all events, that I must try and become one.”

Nora in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll’s House

There are many memorable scenes in Nia DaCosta’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play, but the one that will stick with me the longest doesn’t even have the titular character in it – it’s Nina Hoss’ Eileen Lovborg, entering a room in which the learned men have segregated themselves to smoke their cigars, casting a spell on them when she tells them about the book she is working on. Nina Hoss, who played Hedda Gabler herself for six years on the stage of the Berlin Deutsches Theater, is an outsider. She has a doctorate and is conducting groundbreaking research into human sexuality, and is hoping to ascend to a professorship for which Hedda’s husband George (Tom Bateman) is also competing, and the cards are stacked against her in 1950s England, mostly because of her gender but also because she’s an out lesbian. She enters the room with the confidence of a few drinks (after a period of abstinence that Hedda has deliberately sabotaged, knowing she is likely to ill-behave while drunk) and the fury of a woman who is brilliant but marginalised. Not only are these men keeping her out, they have, collectively but specifically in the case of George, also proven themselves to be boring at best, irrelevant at worst, stagnant in their views and research. She grasps them entirely when she talks about how she has come to research fetishes. They miss why the research is salient, life-saving, to her: that the idea of things considered beyond the pale in the past may become acceptable in society in the future holds a promise that she will one day be accepted for her own sexuality. Her audience sexualises her through her story, but it also becomes clear that what she could contribute to academia far outweighs what they could in their mediocrity. The potency of her story is a hint at how successful her book will be, and how this will make her professorship more likely, by making herself so undeniable that not even Hedda’s meddling or George’s connection to the establishment will save him. It’s spell-binding, but also, ultimately, her doom. 

Hoss has been an undeniable actress for a long time now, especially in her films with German director Christian Petzold (Yella, Jerichow, Barbara), but was in my opinion criminally underused in Todd Field’s Tár – here she gets to shine, and play against Tessa Thompson, who is following up her stunning performance in Rebecca Hall’s Passing with another unforgettable one. Hedda and George have just moved into their new mansion, a property that far outstretches their limited budget. The lavish party they are throwing is meant to ensure George’s professorship, and it isn’t George’s ability to prove his worth on which this endeavour depends, but Hedda’s, to charm the people who are making the decision. George is a precarious character with little to recommend himself: he has snagged Hedda, an unlikely achievement, but beyond that there is little he can do on his own. He has bought the mansion because Hedda, in an awkward pause in their conversation, has passingly remarked that she would like to live in it, to give us a sense of the kind of person he is, and he seems to doubt his inability to keep his wife, especially when the people invited to the party remind him how many of them she has had affairs with. If he doesn’t get the job, the entire undertaking would collapse: even the staff know they are likely to lose a house they can’t even fill with servants permanently, and Hedda doesn’t seem the kind of wife who would stick around very long if financial ruin should befall them. 

At the centre of Hedda a question of freedom. Both Hedda and Eileen are limited by society and have carved opposite ways into an approximation of liberty, but both are still trapped, and their paths towards more of it pit them against each other. Hedda needs her husband to be successful so they can pay for the lifestyle she wants, a lifestyle that mainly functions as a distraction from the boredom of a brilliant mind contained by a tedious marriage. Even Eileen’s escape is closed to her: as a black woman she would have been even less likely to succeed in academia, and Eileen’s pleas to her to try and build something for herself instead of her husband don’t take into account how much harder that would be for her. Eileen – now helped by her new girlfriend, the very sober (in both senses of the word) Thea (Imogen Poots) is closer to being respected academically than she has ever been, her research is focused and brilliant, but in the end, she is still the only woman in a room full of men who only listen to her because her stories are salacious. And regardless of how much of her work is helped along in essential ways by her partner, Thea still isn’t given credit in her writing, but subsumed in Eileen’s success. 

To complicate matters, Hedda and Eileen used to be lovers. Eileen’s entrance into the party shows – it’s maybe the only time, except for the last moment of the film, where we get close to seeing Hedda not wear a mask, to seeing her true self – that Hedda still loves her. They have their own theme music, and everything around them appears to still. Later, there will be allusions to their turbulent relationship that almost ended in homicide, but in the background to all the events is an alternate reality in which Hedda chose Eileen instead of a conventional life with a husband, where she was brave enough to attempt the same wire act that Eileen is trying to pull off. It is only after Eileen makes it clear to her that she now loves Thea that Hedda begins executing her plan of destruction, a plan so tailored to work to bring down Eileen that it could only have been created by someone who knows her intimately. She destroys her sobriety by taunting that the men would never take her seriously if she can’t drink with them. She creates the circumstances that allow her to destroy the valuable manuscript – that Eileen has inexplicably brought to the party. She is deliberately driving Eileen to suicide, to self-destruction, and hands her one of her father’s guns in the end. These guns are highly symbolic of their own. Hedda was the illegitimate child of a general, beloved, but her only inheritance is her father’s beloved gun collection, and instead of turning these weapons against the masculine structures that contain her, she aims them at Eileen, another woman struggling with the same restrictions. All her father has given her is these weapons and a sense that she deserves more than she has been allowed to have, but to achieve more she must destroy a woman she still loves. 

Hedda is at times a surprisingly funny film, for centring a woman whose only freedom is to toy with others like they are pieces on a board (often, Hedda is found elevated above the party, watching what is happening, planning her next move), for a film in which there is no sense of solidarity between the female characters struggling for control over their own lives. The men are pathetic, or predatorial, especially the character of the Judge (Nicholas Pinnock), who has helped George purchase the mansion but is only waiting for an opening to take possession of Hedda by any means necessary. DaCosta’s ability to contain all of this within a party and the grounds of this grand house is stunning – the standards from the live band, the dresses, the set decorations as lavish as they hint at the doom looming from their unaffordability – and it is only at the end, in the water of the lake, when Hedda has swum away from shore, that there is a glimpse of a future that may not end in destruction. 

2025, directed by Nia DaCosta, starring Tessa Thompson, Nina Hoss, Imogen Poots, Nicholas Pinnock, Tom Bateman, Finbar Lynch, Mirren Mack, Kathryn Hunter. 

Horror Wednesday: Good Boy

Good Boy is a very good film regardless but laden with a whole other layer of emotional resonance if the viewer has a dog of their own. It’s impossible to watch Indy, the Duck Tolling Retriever star of the film, and not steal occasional glances to the dog curled up next to you and wonder about their interior life. Director and owner of Indy Ben Leonberg reminds us in the film itself that humans have lived with dogs for thousands of years, for companionship and protection – there is footage here of a documentary about cave paintings that include them. Their bravery and devotion have been celebrated in films countless times. Virginia Woolf’s beautiful Flush, a “biography” of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog, the connection between dog and human transcends language, and it considers how the world would look through the specific sensory perception of Flush. 
Indy finds himself in a horror film though, a genius idea because it riffs on the supernatural – haunting presences, traumatic history inscribed on a house – by implying that the vastly superior senses of a dog would be able to pick up on things that remain hidden to humans. There is nothing truly supernatural in this film but what Indy can detect goes so far beyond human ability that it might as well be. As we get glimpses of what has previously happened in the family home in which Todd’s (Shane Jensen) grandfather has died (and his own dog, Bandit, has disappeared in), Indy collects his own traces of this history through his sense of smell, through his superior hearing. From the beginning, when he and Todd move into the house in the woods on a rainy night, Indy is hesitant to enter, clearly sensing that this is not a good place. But he follows Todd regardless, because that’s what dogs do for the owners they love.

As much as the unravelling of the history is horrifying, bits and pieces of the truth coming to light as Indy explores his new environment – proving again and again that true bravery is doing something even though you’re scared - and as Todd speaks on the phone to Vera, his sister, in increasingly frustrated and aggressive conversations, the true horror of Good Boy lies in how Todd changes. All the hints at the truth – Todd’s coughing, his doctor’s appointments, his sister’s worries about something coming back, the plasters on his hand after he has left Indy for almost a whole day – register with the viewer and begin to form a coherent story of catastrophic illness (an illness shared by his grandfather and perhaps many more members of his family – in a walk through a family graveyard, Todd darkly says that many of them have died young). Indy isn’t capable of this interpretation, because he’s a dog, but what he does perceive is Todd being haunted by something, a creature made of mud or tar, first hiding in corners, then coming close enough to touch. Vera asks Todd about Indy’s behaviour, if he has shown signs of being disconcerted, because she has read that dogs can sense illness. Good Boy finds a visual language for that heightened perception, a personification of illness as a dark spectre that will, in the end, win out. 

Todd doesn’t want to discuss his health with his sister, and he can’t talk about what is happening to him to Indy, because it is language beyond the dog’s understanding. This is one of the most difficult realities of living with a dog: not being able to explain things, like how you will return after a certain amount of time has elapsed when you leave, or why they need to go to the vet for injections, even if they are terrified of them.
There is no way to explain to Indy why Todd needs more space to rest, why he is becoming increasingly more erratic. All Indy wants to do is protect him, and there is no greater horror in this film than the moment when Todd exiles Indy outside, chained to a dog house in the pouring rain, where he is forced to watch him struggle without being able to help. In a way, it’s a kind of horror that The Babadook also relied on – what happens when the person someone depends on entirely is shifting and changing into something unrecognisable and potentially dangerous, and there is no outside entity to appeal to for help? 

2025, directed by Ben Leonberg, starring Indy, Shane Jensen, Arielle Friedman, Larry Fessenden, Stuart Rudin.