December 19 2025, 16:00
Reflection in a Dead Diamond
Director: Bruno Forzani, Hélène Cattet
Release year: 2025
Yikes, the plot of this one... John Diman is an old man staying at an expensive hotel on the French Riviera, but he was once a secret agent for a clandestine government organisation. He spent years trying to catch a leather-clad female assassin called Serpentik, but she evaded him to the end. Memories and reality merge as he walks the hotel grounds and wonders if Serpentik has at last come for him.
It’s rare to find a film that is so impressionistic and reliant on associations through cuts, slides and jumps of editing, that you can get almost to the end and still not be sure what exactly is going on. It jumps through time, between characters, between the actors playing characters, and more, in an exhilarating and thoughtful way. It’s a love letter to a sort of film that was everywhere in the sixties, especially in Italy—the cheap euro-spy-thriller cashing in on the popularity of the Bond films.
The camera effects and costumes and dialogue are familiar from other genres I do know, and I can’t think of anyone better to do a film like this than Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet’s, who have done a similar job with giallo (Amor) and spaghetti westerns (Let the Corpses Tan).
Serpentik is a fascinating villain (or is she?), with an ever-changing face, an array of feminine weapons (steel nails! hair hooks! poison rings! samurai swords!), and a barely concealed rage that is amusingly counter to Diman’s confused lust and professional outrage that he can’t catch her. And the ending is deliciously ambiguous.
December 14 2025, 10:59
Lucio’s Confession
Author: Mário de Sá-Carneiro
First published: 1913
105 pages, 8 chapters, ~38,000 words
I bought this while visiting "the oldest bookshop in the world", Livraria Bertrand in the Chiado district of Lisbon, at which the staff stamp the inside cover in a cute proof that it was bought there. There was a small English-language section, and only a handful of books by Portuguese authors translated into English. This one jumped out at me because of the red cover, suggestive blurb, a quote from The Sunday Times describing it as “a thoroughly decadent story of an unusual menage à trois which ends in a killing”. I mean, of course—I’m in!
Lucio Vas is a writer in Paris in 1895, enrolled to study Law, but instead mostly hanging out with a charismatic poet, Gervásio Vila-Nova. Through a series of social encounters, Lucio meets Ricardo de Loureiro and strikes up a strong friendship. Ricardo suddenly returns to Lisbon, and after a year of little contact, Lucio follows him, only to find that his friend has a new wife, Marta. The relationships between Lucio, Ricardo and Marta become murky as Lucio embarks on an affair with Marta that seems to be with Ricardo’s consent.
The novel is framed by the idea that it is written as a confession by Lucio after serving a ten year prison sentence for a murder he claims he didn’t commit, but at the same time didn’t defend himself against the charges. We come to see that Lucio suffered some kind of mental health crisis once back in Lisbon and in contact with Ricardo again, who alludes to being homosexual, unable to feel love, and yet perhaps in love with Lucio.
Romantic or sexual love between two men was socially impossible at the time of the book, and Lucio constantly questions whether Marta, who he has endless sex with, really exists. Lucio whips himself into an emotional frenzy, and at the denouement, it is still unclear who was shot in reality. Perhaps to be published, that final reveal needed to be kept as an implication, although it goes further and doesn’t allow Lucio any clarity, and he remains with the impossibility of his experience to the end.
December 13 2025, 14:42
Warning Sign
Director: Hal Barwood
Release year: 1985
At a remote agricultural biochemical facility, a group of scientists are celebrating a discovery, but while taking a photograph a vial is accidentally broken and the whole building is immediately shut down. Government forces arrive to manage the incident, confusing the people of the town who don’t know the facility’s true purpose. Sheriff Cal Morse knows his wife is trapped inside and decides he has to try to get her out.
It moves quickly, and the first half is a particularly intriguing blend of The Andromeda Strain, The Crazies, and more cheesy TV movies of the time. This makes it extremely watchable. The cast is decent, and Yaphet Kotto as Major Connolly is charismatic and brings some edge to things, but towards the end it gets flabby plot-wise and too melodramatic for my taste. I was never bored though.
The story is about the risks governments take without informing the public, in this period specifically genetically modified foods and the biological weapons race in the later stages of the Cold War. I’m always fascinated by how genre films like this got made. First-time (and only-time) director Hal Barwood was a writer-for-hire, and he wrote the script for Warning Signs with long-time writing partner Matthew Robbins as a manageable project for Barwood to try his hand at directing a film himself.
It feels remarkably accomplished, even though it bombed at the box office, because he had Academy Award-winning professionals all around him, including Spartacus editor Robert Lawrence, Dean Cundey as cinematographer, and Henry Bumstead as production designer, who later worked on Cape Fear, Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby.
I suspect the producer, Jim Bloom, played a major role in how this film came together (he's the second of the three interviews in this three-hour video!).
December 08 2025, 22:07
The Shrouds
Director: David Cronenberg
Release year: 2024
Karsh Relikh part-owns GraveTech, a company that wraps up dead bodies in a material that allows the living to view it in its grave. His wife, Becca, died of cancer, but five years on, through the technology, he notices mysterious growths on her decomposing body. Soon after, the graveyard is seriously damaged, the technology of the graves hacked, and Karsh’s business hangs in the balance.
David Cronenberg wrote this film after the death of his wife, Carolyn, in 2017, but has said there is no catharsis for him in his art. In grief, we suffer, but in The Shrouds there is also plenty of life, humour and sex. Karsh wants to keep his wife’s memory alive by observing her body in the ground as it decomposes. At one point, he tries on one of the shrouds to see what it might feel like for her, and we see him, alone, wrapped in material, looking (and feeling) ridiculous. It’s a fatally flawed enterprise.
To investigate the destruction at the cemetery, Karsh asks his brother-in-law, professional hacker Maury, for help. Maury is paranoid and the ex-husband of Becca’s sister, Terry, who is sexually aroused by conspiracy theories. Karsh is pulled into the strange inner workings of Maury and Terry’s broken marriage, and they send him on a rollercoaster ride of theories involving the Chinese government, Russian spies, Hungarian businessmen, and Icelandic eco-terrorists.
In his dreams, Karsh continues to see Becca in their bedroom, slowly deteriorating from her treatments, but still hungry for love and to be sexually desired. The awkward, absurd, terrible realities of watching someone you love die is captured in the deep oddness of how the people in this film interact. The dialogue feels unnatural and the performances are slightly stilted— the characters often say outrageous things to each other and barely bat an eyelid. Karsh often falls asleep, and in a way the whole film is like a dream, completely unlike real life, and at the same time expressing something true.
December 06 2025, 20:50
Cloud
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Release year: 2024
Ryōsuke Yoshii buys and sells things on the internet. He has a knack for sensing what’s valuable to the market, then buying cheap and coldly selling for enormous profits. He escapes Tokyo with girlfriend Akiko to find more space for his wares, cutting off his boss and other business associates to do it, but his insensitivity makes him enemies, and a group of them track him down for revenge.
The first half of the film shows Yoshii’s life as an online reseller, buying and selling on an auction website, collecting boxes of anonymous products, staring at a computer screen like he’s betting at machines in a casino. He’s always calculating the options to make money. It’s like in the film Wall Street, where the traders make money by destroying businesses and livelihoods. Yoshii doesn’t care if his goods are real or fake, safe or harmful, as long as they are sold quickly. He seems completely disassociated from the feelings of the people around him.
This unempathic, blank affect, along with a camera that, as in Kurosawa’s earlier films, Pulse and Cure, makes the empty spaces behind characters feel threatening, creates a deep sense of dread. Yushii’s ex-boss represents the straight road of business, and at the start of the film wants to take Yoshii under his wing, but in the film’s second half he shows up with a shotgun and a gang in tow. Things take a turn away from horror and more into a mixture of thriller and black comedy. This didn’t work as well for me.
Yoshii’s new assistant, Sano, emerges as a real-world gangland counterpoint to the motley group of kidnappers. Sano’s easy violence becomes a path for Yoshii to follow and they gradually pick off the gang in an abandoned warehouse. It’s like an awkward, slow video game. The comparison between online and real-world violence is clear, and by the end Yoshii realises his immoral actions have set him on the path to hell.
December 01 2025, 20:07
Demons
Director: Lamberto Bava
Release year: 1985
Music student Cheryl accepts tickets to a film event at an old cinema from a man in a demon mask. She takes her friend Hannah, and they hook up with two boys to watch the start of a horror movie. In it, two similarly dressed couples disturb the grave of Nostradamus and uncover a demon mask. Events in the film are mirrored in the cinema, leading to demons being released and running amok.
I found lots to love here. The people at the cinema are a fun mix of clichéd teens and more realistic adults that don’t act as you might expect. The demons are gloopy and scary, closer to running zombies than demons, converting humans with a slash of their talons. The venue is a fun mix of art deco and eighties trash decor, matched by a synth score and slew of fun eighties rock needles drops.
The dialogue is cheesy, and the acting is so-so, but you also get Billy Idol’s White Wedding kicking in while a man on a motorbike rides around the cinema stalls slaying chasing zombies with a samurai sword. The film within a film idea felt unexpectedly fresh, helped by the maximalist tone. It’s short, tightly edited, and ultimately a splash of gory joy that doesn’t ask much of the viewer except to meet it where it is.
November 30 2025, 15:12
Cursed Bunny
Author: Bora Chung
First published: 2017
Ten short stories. ~5,000 each
There’s a transition that happens if you read the stories in order. It starts with what feels like horrific folk tales, where women are fighting their bodies, families and the cultural norms of South Korea. The tone changes around halfway, becoming more mixed, and the genres open up to include sci-fi and fantasy.
The prose style is simple and clear. I’m never sure with translated works how much of that is down to the translator. I think I was stung by the stories of Raymond Carver’s editor changing the voice in the short stories into what we read today. Having never translated anything, I’m guessing the aim is to be as faithful to the author’s original text as possible. Translators are not editors.
The longest story, Scars, is a mysterious tale about a young boy chained in a cave for a monster to feed on. He escapes and, having seemingly taken on some of the powers of the monster, is made to fight as a slave for a cruel master. It reads like fantasy mixed with a fairy tale. The battles are written in brutal detail, and the ending is haunting. (Spoiler: all of her endings are haunting.)
Her style inspired me to write something fresh for the first time in months, so she must have gotten under my skin. Short stories don’t have to be ‘publishable’, whatever that means. They can be sketches, ideas, drafts; they can be complete-for-now and available to be developed further, if that’s what the story wants.
November 07 2025, 15:29
November mood
I’m between a couple of unusual (for me) adventures and recovering from a cold. We flew to Lisbon for three nights with our daughter—she’s into marine conservation, and the Oceanário de Lisboa is the second-biggest aquarium in the world. It’s a beautiful city. I was worried about the hills, but doing the strength work all summer served me well. On the flight out I must have picked up a virus, because within hours of getting home my throat started to hurt. It wasn’t Covid, but I haven’t had a cold in over a year so I was comically grumpy about it.
Next week is the Abertoir Film Festival, a.k.a., THE INTERNATIONAL HORROR FESTIVAL OF WALES, in Aberystwyth. This will be my first time at a horror film festival, and my work-in-progress novel has one, so it’s both for pleasure and research. The mix of the old and the new is particularly exciting. They’re showing BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, EYES WITHOUT A FACE, THE GHOST, a documentary on the making of Michael Mann’s THE KEEP, an in-person show with Garth Marenghi on the opening night, talks on the Gothic in video games, a pub quiz, famous faces from the seventies... I’m vibrating thinking about it.
Until leaving for Lisbon, all my creative projects were ticking along well. Writing, guitar, reading, strength. No stress, just doing a bit each day. The local swimming pool closed because a pump failed, so I haven’t swum since September. That’s a bit of a blow. I’m sure my muscles will remember what to do when the time comes.
That‘s where I’m at. No dramas. I’m trying to create a stronger connection with my unconscious flow. My Bluesky account feels pretty dry and dull. If I’m worried at all, it’s that I’m too busy in the shallows and not going deep enough. No dreams, either. Well, unconscious, I’m open to a dream if you’ve got one for me.
October 21 2025, 17:42
Moderation
Author: Elaine Castillo
First published: 2025
~ 105,000 words. Third person limited. Girlie Delmundo.
It’s been a while since I last posted a review. I’m a fast reader, but I tend to read in short bursts, perhaps twenty minutes once or twice a day. The blurb and jacket description (and opening third, tbf) make you think it’s a techno thriller, but it pivots around the halfway point into clear literary romance territory, which I wasn’t expecting.
Girlie Delmundo is a content moderator specialising in taking down child abuse videos for a global social media company . She seems completely disassociated from any feelings this brings up for her, and her excellence in the role brings her to the attention of new bosses. She’s headhunted into a role moderating a virtual reality world called Playground. Her new manager is William, a man as distant and awkward socially as she is, who it turns out is one of the few remaining initial employees of the company that built Playground, and he has a surprising agenda.
In the opening chapters, there are deliberately graphic descriptions of the awful videos content moderators have to assess, and it’s implied that something from Girlie’s past allows her to be able to do the job she does. There are also detailed descriptions of Filipino family dynamics, the American class system, the experiences of the Filipino diaspora in California and Las Vegas, the effects of capitalism on... everything. Girlie’s family becomes a vital part of the story.
The technology created to give access to Playground is described evocatively and realistically. One of the themes is how VR technology can be used to create both healing and traumatic experiences (and everything in between), but it’s easy to get confused about what is real when you are wearing a full bodysuit that simulates the sensations of reality. There is also the question of what is being done with all the data. Capitalism demands profit, and it treats data as a resource to be mined.
There is a promise of darkness in the first half of the book that doesn’t ultimately get fulfilled. It’s a story about a woman breaking down the emotional barriers she’s created inside herself and falling in love. The descriptions and depth of thought that’s gone into the world are amazing. Writing a novel is another way to create a world to lose yourself in. There’s a lot of different things happening in this book, and it's not wholly successful for my taste, but there's so much to admire.
October 06 2025, 20:35
The Men
Author: Sandra Newman
First published: 2022
~70,000 words. 15 chapters. First person, Jane Pearson. Also, third person, other characters.
On a camping trip in the North Californian mountains with her husband and son, Jane Pearson experiences "an intense nothing" and is suddenly alone. Across the world, all males have simultaneously disappeared—men, children and babies. This conceit launches us into an exploration of how the world might feel for women without men around, and the potential female utopia that could be created.
The men's shadow is still present in snippets of video that start appearing online. The men are faceless and altered, existing like zombies in a hellish world inhabited by strange creatures within an ever-shifting desolate landscape. Some women become addicted to watching, and those who do tend to see the loved ones they've lost on their screens.
Tying the story together is our protagonist, Jane, and her ex-lover, Evangelyne, who bonded on a college campus when both were infamous for different reasons. Jane was in a devastatingly abusive relationship with her ballet teacher, Alain, who manipulates the underage Jane into having sex with ever-younger boys, leaving her with a reputation as a paedophile. Evangelyne is escaping her own traumatic teenage relationship with a girl whose psychosis leaks into the story of the men's disappearance.
The prose is terrific. Sandra Newman has a wonderful way of describing her uncanny world. The level of detail is intimidating. She invents an entire social movement around commensalism, a biological term for one organism benefiting from another without affecting it for better or worse, while diving deep into the fraught waters of racism, sexism and police brutality, all while telling a love story.
The women are almost all shown as better off without the men in their lives. Both Jane and Evangelyne have life experiences that could be inferred as the cause of the men's disappearance, and this is part of the book's mysterious dance.