October 27 2026, 06:15
The Cycle
Meg is a forensic pathologist working at an FBI science facility in the wilds of Oregon. Three bodies are found along a train track, one of which is her father who has been missing for thirty years. Bodies keep appearing in the area that look like they’ve been ripped apart by a wild animal. Meg helps the police try and find answers.
That synopsis is vague because one of the joys of this film is the turn it takes at the halfway point. It starts as a beautifully crafted forensic procedural thriller, drip-feeding curious details amongst plenty of shots of corpses and crime scenes. The second half is a more traditional horror film, with lots of practical special effects to please the CGI-weary horror heart.
It’s about a family, the reasons parents split up, and how our parents are unknowable in many ways. Deborah Ann Woll as Meg looks at home in the bleak laboratories of her profession, and the supporting cast are all perfectly drawn. There are a handful of dream sequences that are effective in a horror sense but feel like a bit of a narrative cheat. And the blacks of the dark spaces on my TV looked rubbish on Shudder. I would love to have had the chance to see this in a cinema.
October 23 2026, 07:05
Her Private Hell
Actress Elle arrives at a hotel in a mysterious city where she is to be in a film produced by her famous lothario father, Johnny Thunders. In the lobby she meets Hunter, a younger actress in the film, who joins them in the family’s suite. The city is shrouded in mist, and an entity called the Leatherman is prowling the streets killing young women. Elsewhere, an American G.I., Private K, is looking for his lost daughter.
I was excited to see this. Reviews were either love it or hate it, and after sitting with it for a few days, I’m still pondering some of the images, scenes and choices, which suggests it’s a rich film artistically. It was slow, but at no point was I bored because the camera is always looking at something interesting, and the score is majestically operatic. It’s a sensory experience. And the narrative wasn’t lacking, it just required some effort – the story isn’t spelled out.
Some of the metaphors are spelled out, though, my favourite being a woman being orgasmically ripped open by the Leatherman and crying out ‘Daddy!’. I found this funny rather than inept. There’s too much else going on to believe Refn wasn’t just enjoying himself with these details. Trusting the director’s vision is a choice I was happy to make.
As an experience, it’s like being in a warm bath with an eloquent aesthete (life goals). There are a lot of meta details in the media about how Refn had a heart operation and recovered his mojo, which didn’t endear me going in to the film, but I had a great time. It pairs well with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, and descends from the lineage of Dario Argento’s Inferno. For me, this is one of the more interesting films of the year.
October 22 2026, 05:46
Mayhem
A virus is sweeping the world that makes people lose all their inhibitions. Derek is a lawyer working in a high-rise for an expensive, corrupt law firm. When Melanie asks for Derek’s help to stop the firm taking her house from her, he takes the firm’s side, and she’s removed by security. Then the virus enters into the building, and the pent-up emotions of working in a brutal work environment are let loose causing... mayhem.
Samara Weaving plays Melanie in one of her early horror roles, and the chemistry she has with lead Steven Yeun is amazing. After that initial dismissal by Derek, they are thrown into the basement by firm owner John Towers (I admire the naming here), and with the virus coursing through them, have to fight and make up. As a combined force they are violent and very funny.
This is a masterclass in independent filmmaking. It’s a comedy horror with an important, if obvious, message that makes you root for the two heroes who just want to escape the capitalist rat race and go to art classes. Everyone in this iseems to be having fun. I had fun!
October 20 2026, 18:25
The Owl Service
Alison and her family, including new stepbrother Roger, are on holiday for the summer deep in a Welsh valley, in a house Alison has inherited. Local boy Gwyn and his mother Nancy are hired to look after the place while they are there. After hearing scratches in the attic, Roger and Alison go up and discover a dinner service decorated with a pattern of floral owls. Alison finds the plates fascinating, but she doesn’t realise the magical forces her attention will unleash.
I heard about The Owl Service from one of the first people I ever met on old Twitter back in 2014 or so. There’s a tremendous amount of dialogue, to the point where I wondered if it was imagined as a play. It’s set in a Welsh Valley somewhere north of Aberystwyth, and the characters are split between the outsider English family who live in an inherited home and the village locals whose first language is Welsh. I’m Welsh, and I recognise some of the spoken patterns of Gwyn, Nancy, and handyman Huw Halfbacon, so Garner must have spent plenty of time in these sorts of communities. The endless bickering and fighting is tiresome, but it’s also the primary mechanism through which Garner tells the story, which I begrudgingly admire.
When the characters are allowed to stop talking, the descriptions are intoxicating and poetic, thick with sensory details and a feeling of history. The story uses a Welsh legend to tie the modern-day characters into a mystery they don’t understand. Everyone seems to know the legend, but they can’t see how they are being made to act it out, and it’s Garner’s skill that hides this from the reader too until close to the end.
October 18 2026, 21:27
The House by the Cemetery
To close out Fulci’s "gates of hell" trilogy... Dr. Norman Boyle moves his family from New York to a small town in Massachusetts to continue the research of his recently-dead professor. On arrival, Norman’s wife Lucy is surprised to learn the professor killed his mistress in the house they are to stay in then hung himself. He was investigating a Dr Freudstein, and the longer they stay in the house, the more clues they find suggesting they are not alone.
In the opening scene, a creature stabs a woman with scissors and drags her into the basement. We come to learn that the creature is Dr Freudstein, a surgeon from the nineteenth century, still alive and living under the house, although it’s quite confusing how he’s managed to do that, or why. The best parts of the film are the various attacks, with the most memorable by a bat that goes on bloodily for what feels like several minutes.
Catriona MacColl as Lucy is (of course) excellent, but she’s fighting a losing battle with the obvious dubbing, poor acting around her, and uneven pace of the story. I wonder if Fulci’s reputation has coloured my judgement of these three films, because this one wasn’t very good. It makes me question how much I really enjoyed The Beyond and City of the Living Dead. But I’m not going back to watch them again and find out. Not for a while.
October 11 2026, 16:01
Late Fame
Ed Saxberger, once a poet of local renown, works in a New York post office sorting letters. One night, returning home, he spots a young man across the street, Meyers, who gushes over Saxberger’s old poetry and invites him to meet his group of artistic friends. Saxberger hasn’t written a poem in decades but is seduced by the enthusiasm of the motley troupe of playwrights, poets and actors into performing with them. This makes him reassess a part of himself he thought was long dead.
I’m not as old as Saxberger, but the idea of an older man who published one book and then stopped writing, hanging out with young people who have their creative lives ahead of them, got under my skin. Willem Dafoe has such an expressive face, I could look at him for hours, and he plays a man who has settled into a simple, comfortable, possibly lonely life. The only genuine talent in the new artistic group is slightly older actress Gloria, played by Greta Lee, and it’s through her presence that Saxberger experiences a renewal of creative energy.
Saxberger’s life is one of peaceful working class stagnation. Embodying the persona of a poet again brings him into conflict with his old friends, but his new friends, it becomes clear, are more interested in being famous than doing any creative work. Gloria and Saxberger spark off each other enough that she is inspired to take a job in an acting company in another city, but he is much older and unable to change so drastically. The finale is a bitter blow that shows Saxberger what’s truly important at his stage of life.
I’m trying to curate a mix of films in this #ShadesofAutumn list, old and new, horror and arthouse. I’ve seen far more films in the cinema than at home, so that’s driving the unexpectedly high number of new releases I’m posting about. I seem to be defining the idea as I go along. Let’s see what it looks like when it’s done – October 31st is probably the place to stop.
October 02 2026, 21:09
Contrapposto
I bought this in hardback based on a (very) brief promotional piece I saw somewhere online, which is unlike me. I think I was thirsty for a story about an artist from the writer of The Circle, which I loved and found exhausting in equal measure. Contrapposto is a visual arts term for a position of the human body, and the novel is about an artist who specialises in life drawing.
Cricket and Olympia meet as children and, even though they move in and out of each others lives, maintain a lifelong relationship that is a mixture of romantic, platonic, art-collaborative and soulmate. Cricket can draw, and through his life he expands his repertoire into many areas of art, but because he isn’t ambitious, he never finds the sort of success that Olympia imagines for him. Olympia is a marketing genius and ideas person and formidable organiser, and she has a long career working behind the scenes of the art world.
The book is in seven sections interleaved with life drawings. Each section is from a part of Cricket’s life, from being nine years old in a working class family in the Midwestern United States, to modern-day Paris in his seventies. Olympia is both the love of his life and someone he find impossible to be with because of their differing temperaments. Many other people come and go, but the story is really about Cricket’s development as an artist, his relationship with Olympia, and the role of commerce in the art world.
It reads smoothly, and several times I stopped to admire an exquisitely written sequence, but I also almost stopped reading completely at the half way mark because of my frustration at Egger’s tendency to over explain and hammer points home. It becomes more propulsive in the second half and both Cricket and Olympia become softer characters to spend time with. I was particularly glad that he nailed the ending. No mean feat.
September 30 2026, 20:23
Loner
Angus signs up for a retreat in a sparse cabin in an isolated part of Northumbria and films his experience for his vlogging channel. He settles in, but quickly begins to unravel as the reality of his position in life hits home and the noises he hears in the woods become increasingly threatening.
Charlie Robb, who plays Angus, has natural comic chops, and for most of the film he is alone on camera playing an urban man lost in an unexpectedly brutal woodland. We seem to be watching the unedited footage of his vlog, including outtakes, which allows Robb to channel the ghosts of David Brent and Alan Partridge, although Angus is a far more nuanced and realistic character, adrift in modern life.
A second character, Eve, a student of folklore, glimpsed on Angus’s initial walk in to the woods, returns to play a key role in the film’s latter half. Angus’s flaws make him susceptible to whatever is in the woods, but him understanding that does seem to offer a chance of a way out.
For some people, modern life is unbearably lonely, and being online is their only way to feel seen. Loner reminds me of The Blair Witch Project, of course, but also Creep, The Borderlands, there’s some Inside No 9 vibes, and I think ultimately the Britishness of Angus, his underlying sadness and inability to connect with people in real life, sticks with me most.
September 23 2026, 18:29
Bitter Christmas
Raúl Durán is an aging writer-director trying to write a script after five years without a new film. The script he’s working on isn’t working, so he starts to pull in details from the people around him which breaks through his writer’s block. However, the people around him are also his first readers, and it doesn’t take long for them to discover what he is doing.
This is a real meta curiosity. Almodóvar has made a film about a director, Raúl, modelled on himself, writing a film script. Raúl’s film is based on the people around him, and Raúl’s main character is a failed film director, Elsa, who begins to write about the people around her. At each level, the characters being written about realise what’s happening and begin to rebel. Drawing attention to the artificiality of what you’re watching means that, as excellent as the acting is, it’s hard to care too much about the characters. They are fragments from Almodóvar’s imagination that he uses to make an artistic point.
However, there’s plenty to enjoy. The script is a little melodramatic for my taste, but the confrontations about how it feels to be used as material by a writer do hit hard, and Raúl’s insistence on prioritising his art over everyone around him is by the end pretty brutal. It’s like Almodóvar is enjoying giving himself a beating. It’s an interesting film, a bit cold, but it has enough ideas and strong performances to make it worth the time.
September 19 2026, 11:50
Resident Evil (2026)
Medical courier Bryan takes an extra job at the end of the night to get an emergency bag to the general hospital in Racoon City. It’s snowy and dark, and on the road through the mountains he hits a woman who is infected with something... nasty. Stuck in a remote wilderness, Bryan has to get to Raccoon City with his medical bag, which is more important than he knows.
I'm surprised two of the horror video game adaptations that have come out this year have been about young men wrestling with the possibility of becoming a father. Whereas Exit 8 plays it straight, Resident Evil is very much a horror comedy, and I laughed quite a bit. There are plenty of jump scares, and one in a farmhouse actually made me shout out loud, which is something Bryan does a lot of too, along with cursing, whimpering, squealing and screaming. Simple things are hard. Padlocks won’t break. Gates won’t open. Cars won’t start. Guns won’t fire. We watch Bryan learn how to do things that in other films would happen more naturally. He’s like someone playing a video game for the first time and working out the mechanics as he goes.
On a side note, I don’t like the mechanics of the Resident Evil games. I’ve tried to play more than one a few times, but I get too frustrated with the aiming of the gun. Maybe I’m not using the right console or controller. The vibe and stories fascinate me though.
The source idea — a shadowy corporation working in secret labs to create bioweapons that are accidentally released on the population of a remote city causing monstrous chaos — is a generic enough sandbox to let directors and writers to let come up with many different stories and characters (and even genres — I’ve enjoyed all the Milla Jovovich films, which are nothing like the video games (and made over a billion dollars)). The source idea is also specific enough to always mark the stories as being in a Resident Evil world. The threat of greedy corporations and ambitious scientists being unethical in a rush to make money feels real and ever-present. Story-wise, it seems to never get old.
Zach Cregger has come up with a fresh perspective on a thirty-year-old franchise. It’s a true rollercoaster ride, fast paced and thrilling, but knowing when to slow at the corners to give just enough time to think about what just happened before throwing you into the next gloopy set piece. It’s one of those rare films this year where I really want to go again.