Los abrazos rotos (Broken Embraces Spain 2009)

Penélope as Audrey in the film within a film in Broken Embraces

I enjoyed the latest Almodóvar film, but I wasn’t excited by it – at least initially. It is more of an investigation of filmmaking than a melodrama, more a Bad Education noir thriller/romance than a Volver or an All About My Mother. Always ravishing to look at, the film seemed clever and intriguing rather than emotionally involving. Or more precisely, I didn’t ‘get’ the emotion until the closing quarter of the narrative. Perhaps if I watch it again, I’ll get more.

The story involves a filmmaker, Mateo (Lluís Homar), who is a blind scriptwriter when we first meet him, preferring to be known by his writing pseudoynm Harry Caine. (This is an intriguing name – is Almodóvar really interested in Michael Caine/Harry Palmer or is it a film noir reference to James M. Cain?). Mateo/Harry is supported by his agent Judit and her son Diego who acts as his amanuensis and surrogate son. The ‘inciting incident’ in the opening scenes is the newspaper announcement of the death of a wealthy industrialist, Ernesto Martel. A flashback to 1992 introduces us to the other two main characters in the narrative, Ernesto and his secretary Magdalena (Penélope Cruz). I’ll say no more than that the plot involves the making of a film with Mateo as director and ‘Lena’ as star. This is a film which clearly references Almodóvar’s first ‘breakout’ international hit, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Spain 1987).

There are several other direct references. At one point Mateo and Lena watch a scene from Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (Italy 1954). This is a film that I admire, but have also found difficult to engage with and I was at first baffled as to its significance here. Later I realised that the scene from Rossellini is possibly the basis for Almodóvar’s title. In the story, Ingrid Bergman (then married to Rossellini) plays a woman married to an Englishman (George Sanders). The couple have rented a villa in Southern Italy but their marriage is going through a very tricky time and when they visit the ruins of Pompeii, Ingrid breaks down at the image (described by the guide) of a couple overwhelmed by the lava flow that destroyed the city – and dying together in each other’s arms. Of course, this and several other references are explained in the film’s Press Pack – which I wish I’d read first and then I might have noticed a few more similar references. Almodóvar suggests in the Press Pack that the film is indeed about cinema and particularly about editing. Viaggio in Italia is also interesting in terms of the scripting process as well in that it is famously the film which Rossellini didn’t script but developed as he went along (goading and bewildering Sanders in the process, thus producing exactly the performance he wanted).

Several of the other references are obviously plot-related including Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession (I think it was in there somewhere!) a genuine melodrama in which Jane Wyman falls for the man whose rash behaviour led to her husband’s death and her own blindness. Louis Malle’s Lift to the Scaffold and several other noirs including Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven are also mentioned. Just as in Volver, Almodóvar revels in the chance to mould Penélope Cruz into visions of iconic stars such as Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn. Cruz is simply breathtaking in the film, even if much of the time she is playing a role within a role. The whole film is incredibly beautiful and this was one digital print I won’t be complaining about – I’m glad I got to see it on the best possible big screen projection. A lot of credit must go to Mexican cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto who has now added Almodóvar to a list that includes Spike Lee and Ang Lee as well as Alejandro González Iñárritu.

I confess I do miss both the surrealism of early Almodóvar and the melodrama of some of his later films. The DVD scheduled for Broken Embraces promises some outtakes from the sequences of ‘Broken Suitcases’, the ‘film within the film’ – but perhaps I should watch Women on the Verge again?

Ordinary Boys (Chicos Normales, Spain 2008)

El-Khader with one of his siblings

The chicos normales are youths in the Jaama Mezwak district of the Northern Moroccan city of Tétouan in this film by the Spanish documentarist Daniel Hernández. This is the director’s first feature after 30 documentaries and is funded by the Catalan broadcaster Televisió de Catalunya (TVC). I was intrigued by the promise of a Spanish perspective on Muslim youth in the current political climate and wondered whether there would be similarities with British films like Yasmin (UK 2004).

The setting for the film is the district which was the home of several of the Madrid bombers in 2004. I’ve only been a tourist in Morocco, but I do know two important facts about the country. One is its proximity to Spain, and therefore the EU, via both the short sea crossing from Tangier across the Straits of Gibraltar and the rather longer and more hazardous routes further across the Mediterranean and from the West coast to the Canaries. The second is the pressure to travel to Europe, prompted by the growth of the Moroccan population and the inability of the local economy to find jobs for young people.

[Spoilers follow]

The film is a form of neorealist fiction based on the day-to-day lives of two young men, Youseff and El-Khader, and Rabia a female law graduate. All the actors are locals, the credits list Youseff as playing ‘himself’ and the other actors also use their own names for their characters. The narrative begins with a funeral and flashes back to explain what happened during the previous months. Like Yasmin, the events of the story came from discussions with the actors and other members of the local community themselves although the script was written by Daniel Hernández and Gabi Martínez. The credits list a translator/interpreter and I was impressed by the seeming authenticity of the whole enterprise. It could have been a Moroccan film for me (though since I’ve only seen a couple of other Moroccan films, that might not mean much).  

Youseff is the ‘bad boy’. He has been stabbed in the leg in a fight and has allowed the wound to become infected, consequently he needs an operation and is on crutches. He has failed to learn to read and becomes easily frustrated when attempting to earn a living with a market stall. Youseff wants money quickly – for the operation to heal his leg and to spend with his friends. The most lucrative form of ‘employment’ is offered by the local drug smugglers.

El-Khader is a more sympathetic character, but in a sense equally lost. He wants most of all to become a performer and attempts to engage in street theatre, but it doesn’t pay and his friends and relatives mock him for not having a more ‘masculine’ interest. He begins to fret about how he can support his mother and his younger siblings. Taking the illegal route to Europe seems the only answer.

Rabia

Rabia has decided that she wants to become a fashion designer rather than use her law degree. She manages to join a co-operative and get started as a seamstress on local commissions whilst she plans her future, but she is also struggling to decide how to be a modern young woman in Morocco. Her boyfriend has gone to Austria and doesn’t look like returning soon. She has a dalliance in an online chatroom and an interesting encounter with a young (and rather arrogant) religious teacher. She is not wearing a headscarf in the first part of the film and says that she will wear one when she deems it appropriate rather than be forced to wear it by the pressure of patriarchal society. Later we see her carefully putting on a headscarf, carefully covering her hair but otherwise presenting her very beautiful face to the world – it isn’t clear why she is now doing this.

At first, I found the film difficult to watch. Shot on digital, I found the scenes ‘cold’ and brash. I wasn’t sure if this was a fiction or a documentary and I missed the familiar cues as to which were the central characters and how the narrative was developing, so although I was learning something about the community, I wasn’t being drawn into a story. After about 20 minutes or so, I finally found my way into the narrative and from then on I enjoyed the film.

What is most interesting from a UK (and especially Bradford) perspective is that instead of focusing on what may propel Muslim youth towards an engagement with terrorism, the three main characters have their own concerns and the ‘fundamentalists’ are generally marginalised and only mentioned because they used to meet in a similar location “in another street” to the one in which Rabia sets up her sewing business. The youth are generally not interested in politics except in the case of Palestine, where they recognise that resistance to occupation is justified and should be supported. Youssef’s older brother was sent abroad by the fundamentalists and now he is missing assumed dead since he has not returned (or been listed as being in an American gaol). Yousseff continues to look for news and he has help from older people in the community – another difference to representations of British Muslim communities is that there is little suggestion of a generation gap in attitudes (although the youth are not surprisingly sometimes more aggressive). The future which faces the three Moroccan youths is not rosy and their chances of success are not high but at least this film has offered us a glimpse of what those problems might be and has presented us with recognisable characters in a human drama – even if the events may be too low key and predictable for fans of mainstream cinema.

Yousseff and El Khader

I hope the film gets a release – or a showing on UK television. I think it would work on BBC4 or Channel 4. It is an interesting venture to put alongside the work of British directors like Michael Winterbottom who have been willing to go to Muslim countries to attempt to make films about issues that concern us all. As Spain enters a deep recession, I can only fear for the future of young Moroccans for whom a dangerous trip across the Med may prove to be futile.

¡Viva! 15th Spanish and Latin American Film Festival

If you are interested in Spanish language cinema, there is only one place in the UK to be during the first half of March and that is Manchester, where Cornerhouse Cinema hosts the ¡Viva! Spanish and Latin American Film Festival. But don’t despair, if you can’t get to Manchester you can still see some of the films on tour around the UK (and in Dublin) at various specialised cinemas.

The festival includes screenings (with a mini Cuban festival during this year’s celebration of 50 years since the Revolution), guest appearances, Q&As and special events, education events for Spanish language students and much more (including a salsa demonstration in the bar and Spanish-themed food and drink). Cornerhouse is helped to produce the festival by staff from the two Manchester Universities and the University of Salford plus the Instituto Cervantes.

It’s always difficult for me to get to festivals during term time, but this year I managed a day at ¡Viva! and relished the opportunity to enjoy three films and to feel the buzz of being in such a lively atmosphere. First up was a new documentary about one of my favourite directors, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, the best known Cuban filmmaker outside Cuba and arguably one of the two or three most influential figures in the history of Cuban Cinema.

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea

This 2008 documentary, a Cuban/Spanish co-production titled Titón, de la Habana a Guantanamera and directed by his wife Mirta Ibarra, is a memorial, a love letter and a celebration. It also offers a persuasive argument in favour of one of the great filmmakers of the last century who chose to work in revolutionary Cuba rather than move to North America or Europe – where it would have been easier to make films and to promote himself.

Through a combination of interviews, newsreel and film extracts, ‘home movies’ and photos, Ibarra has concocted an engaging and informative documentary record. I was particularly interested in the early material dealing with Alea’s time at the Cine Centro Experimentale in Rome and his subsequent career in primitive advertising films in Cuba prior to the 1959 Revolution. Most of his earlier films have not, to my knowledge, been available in the UK and it was fascinating to learn more about these. The documentary also provides more contextual material for any analysis of Alea’s better known work such as Memories of Underdevelopment (1968). Alea’s ‘middle period’ features in the 1970s and 1980s are also unfamiliar for most UK audiences and again I found that the documentary whetted my appetite for more.

Perhaps the most important achievement here is the presentation of Alea’s criticism of the Cuban Revolution as the positive supportive action of a man who believed in the true concept of ‘constant revolution’ – the only real way to support struggle is to keep arguing for more and better changes. Any of those puzzled American critics who still persist in seeing Alea’s best-known films like Memories and Strawberries and Chocolate (1993) as somehow subversive of the Revolution would do well to study Ibarra’s film.

The only slight downer in this screening was the poor quality of the archive material on show. It looks to me as if ICAIC, the Cuban film institute, must have transferred its archive of newsreel footage to video. The documentary itself, like many festival screenings these days was projected from Digi-Beta tape.

The Black Virgin (Venezuela 2008)
I don’t think that I’ve seen a Venezuelan film before and I found this one a bit of a struggle to pin down. Cornerhouse had a poster suggesting a romantic comedy. It certainly had its comedy as well as melodrama moments. It was also presented with what I must reluctantly assume was ‘magic realism’ (that term seems now to be so overused). The story is narrated (in an adult voice) by a young boy and he may of course be an ‘unreliable narrator’. He begins by describing his affection for his beautiful teacher and being mildly irritated by the attentions of his precocious classmate who expects to marry him. But the narrative’s main focus is the despair of a woman who thinks her husband is ‘playing away’. We then learn that this community lives in a unique ‘town of black people’ on the coast of Venezuela. In a sequence straight out of a ‘Columbus discovers America’ movie, we see a flashback to a Spanish woman arriving on the coast with her aged husband and the coffins of her three sons all killed in the Spanish Civil war. ‘Senora Isabel’ is played by Almodóvar’s 1980s heroine Carmen Maura on fine form (but in a rather limited role).

Francisco Díaz and Carmen Maura in La virgen negra

Senora Isabel has built the town and is responsible for its people. When the aggrieved woman seeks the help of a local woman with some form of magic power, she learns that the way to get a wish granted is to change the figure of the Virgin in the local church for a ‘Black Virgin’. Senora Isabel grants the woman’s wish. The Black Virgin appears and all kinds of wishes – good and bad – come true.

I’m assuming that many of the allusions and references in the film (e.g. the presence of a Brazilian in the village) have specific meanings in Venezuela. I found myself drawing on my limited knowledge of other Hispanic Caribbean/African communities such as Cuba and Nicaragua to make sense of the cultural mix and especially the use of religious imagery and music. The photography is very stylised with extensive use of filters or digital manipulation to create the magic realist tone. The film ended abruptly after the intrusion of a second narrative associated with an external threat to the town. I think it would be difficult to release this film in the UK, so I was grateful for the chance to see it. We get too few opportunities to see how other cultures attempt to use cinema to tell local stories. 

Luis Fernando Peña as 'Memo' in Sleep Dealer

Sleep Dealer (Mexico/US 2008)

This terrific ’speculative fiction’ movie combines an impressive array of contemporary developments in both technological and political activity to produce a genre picture with real soul.

‘Memo’, the neatly named protagonist, is a youth in a village in Oaxaca in the far south of Mexico. His father has a small agricultural plot – a ‘milpa’ where beans are grown as a combination crop with corn. But life is hard. A US multinational company has damned the river and taken ownership of all the water – the campesinos must pay to irrigate their land and the dam is protected by robot guards with video cameras and machine guns.

Memo is bored and sets up an illegal satellite dish hacking into phone lines around the globe. One night he is listening in on a conversation when he realises hat he has been detected and he immediately shuts down. Shortly after, he and his brother set off on a short trip, but watching TV in a bar they suddenly realise that the reality TV show which shows American security forces blowing up the hideouts of suspected terrorists has detected Memo’s satellite dish and a ‘drone fighter’ piloted by a controller in San Diego is set to demolish their home. They are too late to save the shack and their father who is shot down as he tries to escape.

In despair, Memo heads for the North to become a sleep dealer in Tijuana. The border with the US is closed but Mexicans still do the work for Americans. They go to factories in Tijuana where they jack into a neural system and operate robots carrying out all kinds of tasks in US industry and services. This work eventually makes the worn-out workers blind. The final main narrative idea is that neural bloggers offer ‘memories’ for the nostalgia industry on the neural network and Memo has his own memories ‘uploaded’ without his knowledge. How will he react when he finds out?

All of these ideas leap off the news headlines. Water as a commodity, private security, US drone strikes in Pakistan etc. are ripe for exploitation. There are obvious reference points to Phil K. Dick (he would have loved the neural blogging of memories as an idea) and to films like David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ and Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46. This a really clever script with its play on the Mexican-American cultural experience. I was also reminded of the first Robocop movie when seemingly outrageous ideas were delivered in TV broadcasts. It’s a cliche now perhaps, but as in Paul Verhoeven’s later Starship Troopers, there is still mileage in hearing a reality TV announcer warning you that there is extreme violence coming up and then exhorting you to make sure that your youngest kids don’t miss it! This and similar sick jokes got big laughs at the screening.

A Sundance-supported film, this Mexican-US release (largely in Spanish) looks like it has been picked up by Fortissimo and might well get a UK release. Director Alex Rivera is American with Latin-American parentage who decided on a Spanish language production with Hispanic characters (in America and Mexico). I’d urge you not to miss it if it does appear. With the earlier La Zona this is further proof of the strength of popular Mexican cinema and its ideas about speculative fiction.

The screenings of both La virgen negra and Sleep Dealer were close to full houses and this added to the fun of watching the films. ¡Viva! is a festival well worth supporting. See you there next year in March? And don’t forget the tour!

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Spain/US 2008)

Javier Bardem and Rebecca Hall

I don’t think I’ve seen a Woody Allen film since the early 1990s and I wouldn’t have gone to this one if my partner hadn’t suggested it. I enjoyed aspects of the film but overall it was a bit of a mess. Trying to make sense of what Allen was trying to achieve, I could only think of 1930s/40s musicals and romantic comedies. I’m not sure why, but I thought of Fred Astaire in Flying Down to Rio and Jesse Matthews in First A Girl. I also thought about something that might be directed by Max Ophuls, perhaps La Ronde? But all these references are to films with a sureness of touch that seems to have evaded poor Woody. He has four excellent actors, a beautiful city, one of Spain’s greatest cinematographers in Javier Aguirresarobe and some beautiful guitar music. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to have done too much work on the script.

The voiceover narration has come in for a lot of stick. I have no problem with it as a device and it could work in this context, but not delivered by the rather ugly voice here (which I believe comes from someone best known for US cop shows). The narration is also ungrammatical and I spent a couple of scenes re-running the lines in my head. The plot is ridiculous in parts and insulting to the intelligence of the audience. I think that Bardem’s character is at some point referred to as a ‘Catalan artist’, yet he comes from Asturias. Vicky is supposed to be doing a Masters in ‘Catalan identity’ but she can’t speak Castillian very well and seems unaware that Catalans speak a different language (or rather the whole script seems to ignore this local peculiarity). OK, if this was a Hollywood romcom we wouldn’t worry about this, but it’s a Spanish co-production and the script insists on several scenes in which Javier Bardem has to keep telling Penelope Cruz to speak in English, so language is an issue.

So, it’s a mess, but there is still plenty to enjoy. Bardem and Cruz are wonderful (and make me want to watch Jamon, Jamon again) and Scarlett Johansson is perfectly fine. The revelation for me was Rebecca Hall. At first, I found the character irritating but as the narrative developed she got more and more interesting and I thought that there was a real sense of sexual tension in the way she tried to resist Bardem, but really wanted him very badly. I’ve not seen her before and now I’m looking forward to the UK TV plays set in Yorkshire in the 1970s (Red Riding 1974) and written by David Peace in which she has a role.

Woody Allen works in his own way, but I think if this had been written by someone else and Allen had directed it in a particular style suited to its genre, it could have been very successful.

La Lengua de las mariposas, (The Butterfly’s Tongue, Spain, 1999)

The face of hatred

SPOILERS: DON’T READ THIS UNTIL YOU’VE SEEN THIS WONDERFUL FILM.

This is an extraordinary film; the bulk of it is the coming of age story of the asthmatic Moncho (a performance by Manuel Lozano to rival Ana Torrent in Spirit of the Beehive) and then, in the final 10 minutes, the Civil War starts. The beautifully presented scenes of a young boy growing up end abruptly; I can’t recall another film that suddenly, and unflinchingly, switches tone so precipitously at the climax. It is an immensely powerful transition, portraying the horrendous nature of Civil War and fascism.

Fernando Fernán Gómez, who plays the teacher who mentors Moncho, played the father in Beehive and so links the films. His performance, like those of all the principals, is brilliant; he sensitively conveys the feelings of a teacher at the end of his career who loves introducing children to the vagaries of life. New German Cinema dealt with W.Germany coming to terms with its Nazi past; Spanish cinema is coming to terms with the country’s fascist history.

El orfanato Part 2

 

The UK poster for the film

Nick posted his reaction to El orfanato a couple of months back and now that I’m teaching the film, I’d like to expand on his comments about one of the best films of the year in UK distribution. The DVD of the film offers a rich mixture of extras and commentaries which help to explain the director’s approach – and why it was so enthusiastically ‘presented’ by Guillermo del Toro. Del Toro’s name on the credits helps to sell the film in the US and UK, but it is a little misleading in terms of audience expectations. El orfanato is much more closely connected to Spanish cinema history/influences than El laberinto del fauno, even though the latter refers more directly to Spanish history. The different box office careers of the films are interesting – in Spain, El orfanato was the much bigger success, grossing over €24 million and taking top box office position for the year (by comparison, Pan’s Labyrinth took under €8 million). In the US, the fortunes of the films were reversed with Pan’s Labyrinth taking five times more at the box office ($37million to $7million). In the UK, Pan’s Labyrinth took slightly more. Overall, the figures show a very successful pair of films, which are both Spanish-language productions with a focus on children in various genre mixes that involve horror and fairy tales. The difference between the other genre repertoires involved in the mix is the means of separating them.

Perhaps the most interesting essay on El orfanato that I have read was published in Sight and Sound, April 2008. Maria Delgado situates El orfanato in terms of the lost children and families from the Spanish Civil War, making the observation that it is only within the last year that the Spanish government has finally passed legislation that allows families to finally come to terms with their losses:

Spain’s Law of Historical Memory was finally passed by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s socialist government late last year, with the result that the bodies of between 30,000 and 150,000 civilians who opposed the right-wing Nationalists during the Civil War and its aftermath can be exhumed from the mass graves in which they are believed to lie. The Orphanage adeptly explores the legacy of a buried past.

Delgado references a wide range of films in her persuasive account of how El orfanato is so deeply embedded within Spanish film culture. I haven’t seen all the films she mentions, but certain links – to Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others and to both The Spirit of the Beehive and Cría cuervos (Raise Ravens) are ones that struck me straight away. The last two titles both feature Ana Torrent, then aged 6 and 8 respectively. She made her name with these two films, becoming a child star right at the end of Franco’s domination of Spanish culture – when children were venerated in cinema and society at large. Both films were critiques of fascism presented in highly ambiguous metaphors. In Cría cuervos, Ana is a little girl who believes she has murdered her father – motivated by her mother’s death for which she thinks her father was responsible. (The father was an Army Officer and Ana’s family offers a kind of microcosm of Spain under Franco.) Ana’s mother is played by Geraldine Chaplin (director Carlos Saura’s wife) and she also plays the older Ana who is later revealed to be telling the story in flashback. In El orfanato, Geraldine Chaplin plays the ’spirit medium’ who Simón’s mother hires when he goes missing.

None of these references will mean much outside Spain, but they clearly had resonances for sections of the Spanish audience. Some other aspects of the plot offer more universal symbols associated with 20th century wars – e.g. human remains hidden in ovens.

The extracts I have been using during an event analysing El orfanato are:

The Innocents (UK 1961)

The Others (Spain/US 2001) 

Dark Water (Japan 2002)

Kilómetro 31 (Mexico 2006)

What has struck me most is the repetition of quite specific elements across several films. For instance, drawings of ghosts by children occur in The Ring (US 2002), The Others, Dark Water and El orfanato. Children’s games such as hide and seek or ‘grandmother’s footsteps’ appear in The Innocents, Dark Water and El orfanato etc.

I’ll try to add to this over the next few weeks.

In the meantime, here’s a useful fansite reference:

http://www.horrorphile.net/el-orfanato/

El Espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive, Spain, 1973)

Seeing the world through a child

“Now without bitterness nor contempt

now without fear of changes;

only thirst…a thirst

of a little something that kills me.

Rivers of life, where do you run?

Air! it’s air I need.

What do you see in the dark depths?

What is it that makes you tremble and fall silent?

I can’t see! I look on like

a blindman face to face with the sun.

I’m going to fall in the place where

they who fall can never get up.”

This poem is recited by a primary school child directly to the camera (text quoted from http://www.xtheunknown.com/Reviews/SpiritBeehiveN) and is a plea for enlightenment, a state impossible in a fascist society. Set during the Civil War (1936-9) The Spirit of the Beehive is a poetic meditation on childhood innocence and the reality of fascist hatred. Its poetic, tangential, take on repression was necessary because it was made whilst the victor of the Civil War, Franco, was still in power. This was just over 30 years ago. 25% of Austrians voted for neo-fascists in their recent election and even the British National Party is attractive to some! The problem is still with us.

The attraction of fascism is in some people’s need for a strong leader and others need to dominate. Neither psychological state is healthy but may be intrinsic to human personality so it is something we should be ready to fight.

What is the ‘spirit of the beehive’? The central character, in the benchmark performance by a child in cinema, is 6 year-old Ana (Ana Torrent) who cannot tell the difference between reality and film (the movie starts with a screening of Frankenstein in the village). Her sister tells her that the monster lives just outside the village so Ana seeks it only to find a wounded Republican (who opposed the fascist Nationalists). Her father devotes his life to studying bees – trying to understand their spirit – and her mother longs after a lost lover – presumably a victim of the War. Their house is itself shot as if it were a hive – honeycombed leading is on the windows – suggesting that the father is trying to understand the human spirit; how could it have succumbed to the fascists?

The film is not only poetic in its use of metaphor, the imagery is often breathtaking to observe. The director, Victor Erice, is not afraid of using the long take to allow audiences to think about what they are seeing. The Spirit of the Beehive is undoubtedly one of the greatest of films.

El Orfanato (The Orphanage, Spain, 2007)

Boy or ghost?

WARNING: THIS IS FULL OF SPOILERS. This movie pinned me back in my seat in the cinema but, as it’s an example of the ‘fantastic’ – where everything might simply be a figment of the protagonist’s imagination – I wondered whether it would work on a second viewing: it does. The opening half hour, certainly, is less successful if you know the ending, but after that the sheer craft of the film is more than engaging.

The film uses many of the tropes of the ghost story (though, as my son noted, ‘thank god someone in a horror movie has turned the light on’) and so, although there’s nothing supernatural about the ‘ghosts’, it is a truly horrific story as we find at the denouement when the mother understands what’s happened to her son; the moment of realisation is one the most chilling moments in cinema.