Category: Parenting


From book to film – taking the Folk Horror of Starve Acre to darker places

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August 15, 2024

STARVE ACRE : a novel by Andrew Michael Hurley (First published by Dead Ink Books, 2019), a film by Daniel Kokotajlo (UK, 2024)

“What you go searching for and what you find aren’t always the same”

When you look for hope you can find horror or, in the case of Starve Acre, Folk Horror.

This term was first coined by The League of Gentleman’s Mark Gatiss and this flourishing subgenre is currently undergoing a major cinematic revival.

The film version of Andrew Michael Hurley’s sinister novella will add to the popularity of this moniker which is as uniquely British as Hammer Horror was in the 1960s.  It will also encourage the belief  that darkness lingers below of surface of  the apparently idyllic British countryside just as surely as Lynchian nightmares lurk behind white picket fences of middle America.

Andrew Michael Hurley’s distinctive third novel is a book about grief and a couple trying to overcome a personal trauma. The catalyst is that Richard and Juliette Willoughby’s 5 year old son, Ewan, has died suddenly in mysterious circumstances.

This tragic event occurs after the married couple’s move from the city (Leeds) to a house in the Yorkshire Dales inherited from Richard’s recently deceased parents. The new home is described as having three storeys of heavy stone, shuttered windows and a “utilitarian black” front door.

Heavy, shuttered and black? What could possible go wrong?

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Ben Whishaw’s madness masterclass

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July 17, 2024

SURGE directed by Aniel Karia (United Kingdom , 2020)

Ben Whishaw confronts himself as Joseph in Surge

If there were an acting class devoted to madness studies then ‘Surge’ would be required viewing.

For ‘madness’ read ‘mental health issues’ although where one ends and the other begins is very much the moot point here.

What this debut feature film does show is how a cocktail of loneliness, alienation and a loss of hope can have devastating effects.

Director Aneil Karia has gone on record to say that he didn’t set out to make a social commentary. However, many, I include myself among them, will see it and wonder why no-one was looking out for Joseph, played with spectacular authenticity by Ben Whishaw.

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The Fabelmans – It’s a family affair

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December 28, 2022

THE FABELMANS directed by Steven Spielberg (USA, 2022)

I thought we were going to see ‘Jaws’!

Steven Spielberg has a happy knack of making me wish that life was more like the movies . There’s not a trace of social realism in his latest sugary-sweet film but because it is made by Spielberg and about his own family I want it to be real.

Spielberg always makes family friendly movies. Even the harrowing war scenes of Saving Private Ryan are counterbalanced by a fundamental belief in the decency of human beings. His movie career has been guided by an old school desire to make movies where entertainment is always fundamental.

It’s no great surprise to learn that Spielberg comes from a well-healed and comfortable Jewish-American family. His parents were loving and supportive even when their relationship was struggling. One of the most traumatic events as a child was being uprooted from Arizona to California. 

We see the young Spielberg portrayed as Sam Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle)  beginning his experiments in film by getting a home movie camera to replicate the train crash scene from Cecil B. DeMille’s ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’. The ‘hobby’ soon becomes an obsession and, by this fictionalised account, he was a born director. Who can possibly argue with this?

His father Burt (Paul Damo) was a computer engineer who seems to know everything about science but misses the fact that his wife’s friendship with his own best friend Bennie (Seth Rogan) is not all it seems.  Sam’s mother Mitzi is played by Michelle Williams with a bright-eyed vulnerability that reminded me of Judy Garland.

This is Spielberg’s most personal movie and it’s as sweet and flavoursome as apple pie; a coming of age story that we all know will have a happy ending. Even the anti-semetic high school bullies don’t seem so bad.  It is classic storytelling from one of America’s greatest movie storytellers.

The one stroke of genius was the decision to cast David Lynch as ageing film director John Ford. This hilarious cameo performance ends the movie on a high. The rest as they say, is history. No sequels required.

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Olive Kitteridge, again and again

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August 30, 2022

‘Olive Kitteridge’ (2008) and ‘Olive, Again’ (2019) by Elizabeth Strout

‘Olive Kitteridge’ directed by Lisa Cholodenko (HBO mini-series ,2014)

How many books really stick in the mind? Frequently, I struggle to recollect plots and characters of novels I know I have read, even those I have enjoyed. 

I first read ‘Olive Kitteridge’ soon after it earned Elizabeth Strout the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 and casually decided to re-read it after watching the excellent HBO TV series based on the novel.

I immediately continued to the follow up, ‘Olive, Again’ and feel now slightly bereft that this is the end of her story (unless Strout decides to write about the first 60 years of her life!)

I was struck by just how much I had forgotten or completely overlooked in the original novel. In revisiting it, the theme of ageing now resonated more fully with my own life.  There’s quite a difference between reading this book in middle-age and now I am at an age (approaching 65) regarded by institutions and individuals as officially old. You can soften this with terms like ‘silver surfers’ or speak in terms of the ‘third age’ but the hard truth is that I am (if I’m lucky) entering the last couple of decades of my life.

As I get older, mortality is no longer an abstract concept  but a harsh reality. This is the first full year without my mother who died on Christmas Day 2021 aged 93 (my father passed away in 1986 aged 60).

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The autoeroticism of Titane

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October 23, 2021

TITANE directed by Julia Ducournau (France, 2021)

“An auto-crash can be more sexually stimulating than a pornographic picture” – William Burroughs (From the preface to The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard)

While conventional cinema barely scratches the surface of the psychopathology of sexual relationships. ‘Titane’ dares to go deeper and the results are a heady mix of disturbing realism and rampant absurdism. The violence is stylised yet gruesome; the tenderness is awkward yet credible.

The singular fate of Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) is to be more turned on by the gleaming metal of cars than the flesh of humans. As a steamy, sensual dancer she dry humps Cadillacs and when the showtime is over she climaxes in the back seat of one of these vehicles to bring a new meaning to the term auto-eroticism. Later, she literally bleeds motor engine oil.

She has a prominent tattoo on her chest denoting the title of Charles Bukowski’s book of poetry : “Love is a dog from hell.” This gives fair warning that she is not of a romantic disposition. Things end badly for those who enter her intimate space. You can look but don’t touch.  

Bukowski also wrote “there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock” and the pain of Alexia’s isolation is evident. Self-harm is for her a way of life.  To say that she is damaged goods would be an understatement. After a childhood car crash, she wears a titanium plate in her head as a badge of honor.

After a brutal killing spree, Alexia finds unlikely solace in the equally troubled Vincent (Vincent Lindon) who becomes a surrogate father figure. Both crave closeness yet their driven natures mean they are forever destined to be loners.

The fetishism towards automobiles is so obviously Ballardian that Ducournau’s vision has inevitably been linked with David Cronenberg’s  ‘ Crash’ , a movie which won the Special Jury Prize at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival “for originality, for daring, and for audacity”.

 In 2021,  Titane won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for the similarly provocative and deliberately polarizing treatment of sex and violence. Aside from obvious affinities with  ‘Crash’, it is probable that Cronenberg’s remake of  the body horror classic ‘The Fly’ was also an inspiration to Julia Ducournau.

Its plot holes are plain to see but this is filmmaking that is prepared to take risks rather than making do with conventional feel good confections that pass for entertainment. The flaws are evident but the uncompromisingly full-blooded performances of Rousselle and Lindon make this an unmissable treat for lovers of mindfuck movies and an instant cult classic.

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