Black Gate

“Prophet” was written and directed by Reza Gamini; it’s an 18-minute horror short about the survivors of an attack from creatures drawn by sound. The monsters return periodically, killing people at the slightest noise. Which becomes a problem for babies and the parents of babies. This is a dark story about people responding to a brutal situation — refugees gathering on a beach, fearing the next attack, where previous waves of refugees have set up some social structures with basic rules. The cinematography’s striking, with harsh lights and shadows, and the dialogue’s tight and tense.

Bundled with the short was Martyrs Lane, a film from British writer-director Ruth Platt. Leah (Kiera Thompson) is a moderately unhappy tween daughter to an English vicar, living with her parents and older sister in the vicarage. And then she starts to see a winged ghost (Sienna Sayer) at night. The two girls, living and dead, strike up a friendship. They begin to play a peculiar game like a scavenger hunt, in which Leah goes searching for odd objects in odd places; and finds them. But what is their significance, one wonders, and what is the real game the ghost is playing?

There are some lovely narrative ideas here, like an M.R. James story with little girls instead of aging academics. And there’s some equally lovely technical craft, with strong sound design and cinematography that alternately washes the screen in light and freezes it in chilly hues. But for me the story doesn’t quite come together, because I found I was lost for much of the film, lacking some basic context with which to understand the story.

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“She and the Darkness” (“Ella y la Oscuridad”) is a 13-minute Spanish film from director Daniel Romero, who co-wrote it with Rubin Stein. A janitor (Beatriz Arjona) suffering from extreme depression sees something unexpected during a stress-driven walk one night, a girl who should not be alive. Which discovery leads her into some strange and violent situations. This is another short that’s heavy on atmosphere and shadows, but has minimal dialogue. Often, as here, the attempt to tell a story purely visually results in points of incomprehension; we understand the girl means something to the woman, but not exactly what. In turn, again as here, this insistence on the visual at the expense of the verbal ends up with a well-crafted but frustrating film, as the audience is left to imagine possibilities never paid off by the movie as it actually is.

Bundled with the short came All The Moons (Todas las Lunas), a Franco-Spanish co-production directed by Igor Legarreta and written by Legarreta with Jon Sagala. In Spain in 1876, the violence of the Third Carlist War leaves a young girl (Haizea Carneros) alone and wounded. A woman (Itziar Ituño) offers to cure her pain, and does, but what she does to the girl causes other issues — including flesh burning when exposed to sunlight, and a sudden aversion to garlic soup. The girl ends up separated from the woman, but finds another surrogate parent; and then risks losing him as well.

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“Ghost Dogs” is an animated short film from Joe Cappa, who directed and co-wrote the script with J.W. Hallford. It’s a fine 11-minute piece about a dog exploring his new home and finding more than he understands. There’s no dialogue, being entirely from the perspective of the dog wandering about the not-quite empty house, and the movie gets some fine effects by having him uncover things that mean nothing to him but tell human viewers quite a bit. The 2D animation has a style that gets across both weird humour and moments of horror. It’s a strange movie, and a very good one, macabre and satisfying.

With the short was bundled the feature film Strawberry Mansions. It is a deeply weird work from the writer-director team of Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney, in which Audley also stars as James Prebble. Prebble works for the government auditing dreams, and one day he wakes from a dream filled with suspicious friends and product placement and goes to audit the long-unlooked-at dreams of an old lady named Arabella Isadora (Penny Fuller). He sets to work, reviewing dreams as far back as the 1980s, and finds himself falling in love. Complications ensue, including time loops, objects falling out of the sky, an unexpected death, a plot to manipulate dreams, and an endless trove of metamorphoses.

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Interesting movie on Netflix last night, which I hadn’t heard about and enjoyed very much.

The Forgotten Battle centers around the Allied attempt to push a shipping lane through to Antwerp at the same time as Operation Marketgarden (Arnhem, much further inland), and which led to heavy, island-to-island fighting with the SS, much of it hand-to-hand. The tale is told via an ensemble cast, mostly unknowns (though Tom Felton of Harry Potter fame is in it), primarily British, Canadian, Dutch and German.

It’s grey, grim and gritty, with intense combat sequences, which fully capture the horror of war. If the Battle of the Scheldt, as it became called, has genuinely been forgotten, I suspect that’s mainly by Hollywood because there was no American involvement.

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“The Horse Guessing Game” is a 9-minute short by Xia Leilei. It’s a beautiful piece of work made of stop-motion paper dolls and shadowplay, mostly black-and-white, with colour used briefly and well to heighten the significance of one sequence. I can’t claim to understand it entirely, but it opens with a woman or girl isolated from those around her, and appears to show her entering into a shadow-world with great potential and great danger where she might gain a voice and learn to speak to those around her, or else might be swallowed up and lost. As I read the film, it’s about imagination, a bit like Plato’s cave. But there is a lot of ambiguity to the story, and it took a second viewing for me to properly follow it. The movie takes a bit of effort, in other words, but is worth it. You can judge for yourself, as the film’s online here.

Next came Cryptozoo, written and directed by Dash Shaw. It’s an animated story set in the late 60s, about a woman named Lauren Gray (voice of Lake Bell) who rescues mythological creatures, cryptids, from around the world. She’s part of a team under the direction of an older woman named Joan (Grace Zabriskie) who plans to open Cryptozoo — a place where the creatures of myth can live and work with regular humans. But the American government has nefarious plans to use the Japanese dream-eating creature called the Baku (AKA the Tapir, also seen at Fantasia this year in Hello! Tapir) to eat the dreams of the counterculture. A violent chase to find the Baku ensues, and at its core are the questions of whether the zoo is the best future for the cryptids, and whether they really can integrate into human society.

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