Tag Archives: Edinburgh International Film Festival 2025

EIFF 2025 – Dead Lover

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EIFF 2025 – Dead Lover,
Grace Glowicki,
Starring Grace Glowicki, Leah Doz, Lowen Morrow, Ben Petrie

Another of the wonderfully out-there selection from this year’s Midnight Madness strand, and, oh boy, this one was a total hoot! Using a tiny main cast of four actors, each of whom plays multiple roles (adopting very obvious disguises and accents for maximum comedic effect), and all shot on a set using minimal décor with strategically placed lighting, Glowicki, who co-writes, directs and stars (as the Gravedigger) conjures a delightfully fun romp riffing on Frankenstein.

The Gravedigger (Glowicki in brilliant make-up and with an amazing range of facial expressions) is love-lorn – she comes from a long line of grave diggers, and has been doing the job so long no—one will come near her because she now has a permanent stink of the grave about her. Even the priest at the burials asks her to keep her distance. Desperate for a lover of her own, how is she to achieve this when nobody can stand being within a few feet of her?

She turns to her books and experiments in her shack in the boneyard, trying various concoctions to disguise her sepulchral scent, to little avail. However when burying the deceased wife of The Widower (Lowen Morrow, playing a comedy cross between Poe and Byron), sister to The Poet (Ben Petrie), the Poet runs off, overcome with grief, straight into the Deep Dark Woods, where, naturally, he is at once attacked by a wolf, which the Gravedigger saves him from. On scenting her unique aroma he is far from repelled, in fact he is intoxicated. A man who has wallowed in all the outrageous and scandalous pleasures, here he has found a new taboo-breaking one, and soon pledges eternal love to the Gravedigger, to her delight.

Sadly, the course of true love never runs smooth, even in an oddball horror-comedy, and returning from a voyage (to have his naughty bits restored to health, no less), his ship is wrecked, and the Poet is lost, only his finger with the ring she gave him saved by a dementedly daft group of fishermen with incomprehensible accents (all played by the main four actors again), who return it to the Gravedigger. She turns to her books and chemicals to try and restore her lover from the finger, leading to, shall we say, a partial success, but not quite what she’s looking for, so digging up bodies it shall be…

The lo-fi sets and sheer sense of fun here were a delight – Glowicki was hoping to be at the Festival, but being heavily pregnant couldn’t travel, so she sent a recorded message to show before the film, and she told everyone not to think about it too much, that it was made to be fun, so just take it that way, and she’s right. If you laughed at Mike Cheslik’s brilliantly bonkers Hundreds of Beavers, this has a similar feel – low budget but with invention making the most of what they have, and a small group just trying to have and make something fun.

This review was originally penned for Live For Films

EIFF – Mortician

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EIFF 2025 – Mortician,
Directed by Abdolreza Kahani,
Starring Nima Sadr, Rahim Bahrami, Erfan Bokaei, Gola, Srwa Hassani, Hamidreza Hosseini, Kimia Motevalli

 

Mojtaba (Nima Sadr, who previously worked with Kahani on A Shrine), is the titular Mortician – an Iranian living and working in Canada to send money back home to his struggling family in Iran. He specialises in the important ritual of the washing of the body before an Islamic funeral, Mojtaba is a quiet, self-contained man, who criss-crosses Canada from city to snowbound city (most of the film is shot in a wintery palette) to carry out his duties.

Distanced from his family, he’s alone other than a few loose friends, fellow Iranians, who have gotten to know him through his work to the Islamic community in Canada, and he lives out of a single suitcase, couch-surfing courtesy of these friends as he goes from job to job in different cities. He stops at the required times of day to observe his prayers, removing his shoes and kneeling on a small, special prayer rug created for travelling. He takes his work seriously and observes the religious rules, leaving those few who know him to be somewhat bemused (asking him why not relax, have a drink, live a little, you’re not in Iran now), but he considers his observances to be a part of his work.

We follow this distanced life of Mojtaba, respected for his work by the community, but alone, no place to settle down in Canada, and far from his real home and family in Iran, going to some of his fellow Iranians with businesses in Canada to arrange to send most of his wages back home, keeping little for himself. When the boss of his company tells him they are closing down, he needs more work – he can’t earn the same money back home. And this is what eventually brings him into the orbit of Jana.

Jana is a famous singer and activist, played by real-life singer Gola, who somewhat scandalises Mojtaba by telling him she wants him to wash her corpse after she is dead. For starters, he protests, it should be a woman who does this, second she is young, how can she be about to die? And why did she contact him so many times before meeting, using a variety of different phone numbers, then meet in the middle of nowhere?

So cut off from the wider popular culture, he has no idea who she is, but his friends tell him, and that with a loud voice and many social media followers, Jana doesn’t just make art, she makes art criticising the repression of the people by the authoritarian regime in Iran, and this, of course, means she has to be careful who she meets, because she is a large, visible thorn in their side, even here in a distant land. She has decided that she will kill herself – not because she is suicidal, but as a protest against that brutal regime, to draw attention to her message and the plight of regular Iranians under the regime’s steel claws, and she wants him to help her film a series of videos to be released post-mortem, as well as performing the rites on her corpse.

Of course Jana’s creation of art to draw attention to the brutal repression of the regime mirrors the work of the director himself, as Kahani’s work here is, as he told the festival audience, fictional, but drawn on real events. He, Gola and Sadr are all too sadly familiar with the methods of this regime, how they can still reach out to threaten dissidents and protestors even in distant lands using agents, or to control them by threatening family members still in Iran. It was clear this wasn’t just making a statement, this is heartfelt, born from desperate experience, and all involved almost certainly help draw a target on their own backs with their work, and yet they do it then take it to the world audience.

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EIFF - The Mortician 06
(Kahani and his main actors, talking with the film festival audience in the Filmhouse. Pics from my Flickr)
EIFF - The Mortician 07

It’s a quietly powerful piece of work, for its message, for its slow but fascinating two-hander between Jana and Mojtaba, two very different people, but also interesting to anyone who loves the film medium for its approach. Kahani told the audience how he worked with a tiny crew, shooting on phones, often using quite static talking head scenes, and how this frees him up as a film-maker. While not the only film by an means to be shot on a phone, his methods feel more measured than some others who have tried similar approaches, there’s a feeling of pushing the envelope of how to make a film. This even extends to the credits – Kahani told us he doesn’t like the regular credits on movies, so his are more like an epilogue, talking about some of the making of the film.

As the 78th Edinburgh International Film Festival drew to a close, the winners of the films in competition were announced: the Sean Connery Prize for Feature Filmmaking Excellence, funded by the Connery Foundation, with a significant prize of £50, 000 towards future work, was announced, and went to Kahani for Mortician. Rather nicely this award is decided by votes from the film festival’s audiences, not a panel of judges – it is the film lovers who paid for tickets and came out to the cinemas to see these films (some ten, feature-length movies in competition this year), the people who are supporting the festival and the artists, who cast the votes, and I rather like that.

This review was originally penned for Live For Films

EIFF 2025 – The Toxic Avenger

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More from this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival:

EIFF 2025 – The Toxic Avenger,
Directed by Macon Blair
Staring Peter Dinklage, Kevin Bacon, Jacob Tremblay, Taylour Paige, Luisa Guerrero, David Yow, Annette Badland Elijah Wood, Julia Davis

We live in an age of constant reboots – or “it’s not a reboot, it’s a re-imagining!” – but I must admit I was very surprised when I first heard that a new version of 1980s schlock classic The Toxic Avenger was in the works. Like many of you reading this, I suspect, I grew up raiding the video rental store at the weekend (ah, the pre-internet, pre-streaming days!), and my chums and I delighted in the “so bad it’s good style of film”. Indeed something I still delight in (see my recent review of the Japanese flick Hot Spring Shark Attack here!).

So I have history with Troma’s oeuvre, and Lloyd Kaufman is up there for me as an even schlockier (in the good way!) Roger Corman. But much as I loved Toxie, I was still surprised – this didn’t strike me as the usual IP to plunder for a reboot. And then I heard it was starring Peter Dinklage, Kevin Bacon and Elijah Wood among others, and I found myself intrigued. I strongly suspected those actors too had fond memories of watching the originals on VHS back in the day, and so when the film cropped up in the final Midnight Madness screening of this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, well of course I was going.

In the broadest strokes, this pretty much follows the simple formula from the 1980s: mild-mannered, put-upon everyman, now a janitor, Winston Gooze (Dinklage, using his hangdog expression perfectly here) has been dealt a series of bows, one after the other. He lies in St Romaville (the letters on the sign are faded so mostly the “T” and “ROMA” are visible, Geddit?), a rough, urban wasteland, run-down, polluted (by the very company he works for), run by corrupt politicians and gangsters in cahoots. He lost his wife,partner a year before, is now stepfather to a young boy with mental health difficulties, who doesn’t connect with him, despite him trying his best to look after him, then he discovers he has an inoperable brain condition, with only months to live.

But hey, fear not, there is a new experimental medicine! And his polluting company’s health insurance will totally cover it, right? Right?? Ah, no. An almost comical-tragical attempt to beg for help from the CEO (Kevin Bacon, clearly having fun here as a thoroughly despicable and preening villain) sees yet more rejection and disappointment, forcing him into a desperate attempt to break into his own workplace to steal money from the vault for his treatment.

Which of course goes wrong – he intersects with Taylor Paige’s environmentalist, J.J., who has been working with a crusading journalist to expose all the pollution and illnesses caused by the company, while Bob Harbinger (Bacon) has his minions, a metal group of psychopathic killers, commanded by his brother Fritz, a superbly creepy Elijah Wood chasing her. When their paths cross, she gets away, he is shot in the head and dumped into a tank of Toxic waste and… Well, I think most of you know what happens next!

Since most folks who are going to be interested in this new version are more than likely existing fans of the earlier films, comics and other media, I’m not going to rehash the plot here, you pretty much know what it is going to be: dunked in chemicals, mutations, new powers, coming to terms with it, using those powers to defend the town (with Luisa Guerrero donning the suit, having worked closely with Dinklage to match his mannerisms through the latex). The important question is, with modern resources and better budget than dear old Troma could ever have managed, does this still feel like a Toxie flick?

Well, of course it is a bit different, but overall this plays a lot of the familiar beats you both expect and want. Gags, puerile sexual references, ridiculously OTT splatter-gore (arms will be ripped off, heads removed by the glowing, Toxic mop, acidic pee will be deployed, toilet bowls are weapons!). It’s Grand Guignol, it’s messy, but it is also delightfully, knowingly silly, and all that violence and gore is so cartoonish that it is funny rather than horrifying. Kaufman himself makes a cameo, and according to a recent interview is delighted with the result.

The Toxic Avenger goes on general release at the end of August, and it is the sort of film best seen with a group of friends. Grab some drinks, some popcorn and sit in a group and laugh and cheer, and just enjoy some OTT fun (with an environmental message!).

This review was originally penned for Live For Films

EIFF 2025 – Redux Redux

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Redux Redux,
Directed by Kevin and Matthew McManus,
Starring Michaela McManus, Stella Marcus, Jeremy Holm, Jim Cummings, Taylor Misiak, Dendrie Taylor

Redux Redux begins as it intends to mostly go on – powerfully. A woman dispatching a man tied to a fallen chair in the desert, by burning him alive. The same woman in a desperate, hand to hand struggle with the same man in a wretched looking shack of a home, until she finally gets the upper hand and dispatches him again, violently, shooting him through a mattress. In between we see her searching a small box the man has hidden, finding a lock of hair with the number “12” on it. These are the trophies of a serial killer.

We soon realise the woman, Irene (Michaela McManus) is not only hunting this serial killer, Neville (Jeremy Holm) to take brutal revenge, she is killing multiple Nevilles across parallel dimensions. Neville abducted, tortured and killed her daughter, and she has never even managed to have the tiny bit of closure that at least finding a body would do. “Where is she?!” she screams at one Neville, before blowing his brains out all over a wall. This is a woman on a missions, powered by raw grief and rage.

Between each killing and the subsequent escape to the steel coffin-like box that transports her to the next dimension, we slowly get more of Irene’s history. She’s been doing this for quite a while, and each universe is very similar, so certain points bring her back time and again. Not just the obvious target of her rage, Neville – and after so many times, she now knows his patterns, making him much easier to track and kill – but her former family home, abandoned in most realities, nobody wanting to buy a home steeped in such tragedy (not only the loss of her daughter, but other versions of Irene later ended their own lives). In some ways the anger and retribution, along with a diminishing desire to find a reality where she and her child are safe and happy (after so many trips, she has never yet found one), are what keeps this Irene going, while the others ended their lives.

Up till now you might be thinking nice idea, little bit Terminator / Sarah Connor, perhaps, but then she finds something new when hunting another Neville: Mia (Stella Marcus). Another victim of Neville, she finds her in his lair and rescues her while taking care of this Neville. A kid who has been in and out of care homes – sadly with little actual care – and was caught by Neville while running away from her latest place, she is distrustful, wary, and combative with Irene, but you already know there’s going to be something developing there.

And yes, you can feel that coming, but here that’s no bad thing, because you want to see these two grow closer together. When Mia goes from disbelief to seeing proof of Irene’s dimensional travelling, she decides she too wants revenge on Neville for nearly killing her (and all the other hers across different worlds), but an almost broken Irene tells her no, how even though this hunt keeps her going, it has taken all her humanity from her. The loving parent has disappeared under a vengeful woman with no mercy, committing brutal death after death after death, with no end in sight.

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(actor Stella Marcus, who played Mia, talking to the audience in the Filmhouse after the film festival screening of Redux Redux, pics from my Flickr)

EIFF - Redux Redux 02

Mia’s arrival signals the start of a disruption to this seemingly endless pattern Irene has trapped herself in, unable to stop or walk away, but hating herself for it. It also ups the emotional level – the smaller glimpses into the magnitude of what was done to make her this way are replaced by a much deeper emotional awareness growing. Along the way we also get some exceptionally fine and tense action scenes – sneaking at night into the decrepit hovel Neville lives in is reminiscent of Clarice in Buffalo Bill’s basement, while other sequences are straight-out action, with multiple cops chasing Irene.

Yes, there are a few moments where you can guess which direction this is taking, but when it does it is actually normally satisfying, the growing emotional aspect draws you in (McManus and Marcus, in her first feature role, really sell the damaged souls slowly finding something more), while the tense and action filled scenes give you some serious spectacle too. An absolutely excellent slice of action-SF, with an emotional core.

This review was originally penned for Live For Films

EIFF 2025 – Sorry, Baby

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More from the 78th annual Edinburgh International Film Festival

Sorry, Baby,
Directed by Eva Victor,
Starring Eva Victor, Naomi Ackie, Louis Cancelmi, Kelly McCormack, Lucas Hedges, John Carroll Lynch

A UK premiere for Eva Victor’s debut (writing, directing and starring) at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, and I have to say a film I absolutely loved. Told out of sequence, with each part getting its own chapter heading to keep things straight, we open with Victor’s Agnes greeting her best friend, Lydie (Naomi Ackie) to her house in rural New England for a weekend together. Best friends throughout grad school, Lydie is now living and working in New York, her career moving, and her personal life (she’s realised she preferred girls and has found the one she wants).

It’s winter in the countryside, and the bare trees and dark nights stand in contrast to the warmth both of Agnes’s home, and her friendship with Lydie, as the two catch up, talk, relax. Both actors do a wonderful job here, you get a real feeling of a deep, years-old friendship from both of them, not just in the dialogue and emotions, but the body language, the domestic set-up they so easily fall into. Beneath it all, though, Lydie is worried about Agnes – she’s gone from student to being a professor but in the same department of the same small college, and still lives in the same house she shared with Lydie as students, almost like her life is moving forward, but with the sluggishness of an iced-over river in winter.

Agnes deflects her concerns, and mostly shows an upbeat view of things, except when she quietly bemoans Lydie being too far away from her now and wanting her to visit more often. They are both going to a meal with some other former student friends, including Natasha (Kelly McCormack), a flighty, twitchy, needy personality who is clearly jealous that Agnes was the best in their group, and the first one to get a full-time teaching post from it. When Natasha makes a barbed comment about their former tutor, in a quiet, but telling moment we see Lydie take her hand under the dinner table.

As we find out in another chapter, which takes us back in time to the Year of the Bad Thing, her incredibly supportive and nice tutor, Preston (Louis Cancelmi), who had encouraged her work, used his position to force himself on her, sexually. The act is, thankfully, not depicted; instead Victor uses the passing of the short, winter day to denote something has happened over the course of that time, a time too long for a simply talk about her graduation thesis, showing us the outside of the house, night falling, lights coming on, still nothing but the house, until the door opens and Agnes walks out, pausing only to put her boots on (not even lacing them up) before stomping in an unusual gait back through the dark to her car, Preston glimpsed standing behind the door, watching.

Of course this is a tremendously sensitive subject to handle, and I found Victor’s approach to be interesting, and different from other narratives dealing with trauma (especially of the non-consensual sexual variety). We do see her, still in shock at what has happened, clearly not quite grasping it all yet, trying to explain to Lydie back home, then subsequent scenes with an incredibly lacking in empathy doctor to examine her, and HR people at the college who wear obvious “we really care and take this seriously” masks, but who will do nothing really (apart from tell Agnes “they understand” because “we are women too”, when clearly they don’t and would rather the problem just went quietly away).

The story could easily have followed the trope of shattered confidence and broken life, and trying to overcome the trauma, but instead Victor gives us Agnes moving on, at least a little. She gets a full time teaching post, but in a thoughtless move the admin staff give her the same office of her former tutor and abuser (who resigned before any action could be taken against him). So she has her dream job, her students love her, her fellow staff admire her work, but there is a strong feeling under the surface that she has much to process (little clues like feeling constantly there is someone outside on the porch at night, but there never is, leading her to cover a window up with pages of her own thesis), and is in a place that is a constant reminder of her former tutor (but at least she now has a rescue kitten).

Instead of the long, dark, night of the soul and then some sort of sudden catharsis, we get something more naturalistic, as the rest of the film follows Agnes, often getting on with her life, not thinking about what happened, but then some days it hits her like a brick. There’s a beautiful little scene with veteran actor John Carroll Lynch, as a seemingly grumpy older guy, who is about to tell her off for bad parking, but recognises the pain she is in, and his demeanour changes and softens, and she finds herself able to talk to him about it, how some days she is fine, doesn’t think about it, then she feels bad for not thinking about it, then she does think about it… The kindness of strangers comes through here in a small but emotionally touching scene, and anyone who has been through any kind of emotional trauma will likely recognise much of her behaviour.

Sorry, Baby is a beautifully-made debut film, played very naturally, not overly dramatising the events, which makes them feel all the more human and real. The humour Agnes often uses means that, despite dealing with some very sensitive and difficult material, the film often remains feeling light and engaging, as do both Lydie and Agnes. Despite that core trauma, there’s a real feeling of human warmth running through Sorry, Baby, and I am hopeful this marks out Victor as a new talent to watch for.

This review was originally penned for Live For Films

EIFF 2025 – Ben Wheatley returns with Bulk

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Bulk,
Directed by Ben Wheatley,
Starring Sam Riley, Alexandra Maria Lara, Noah Taylor, Mark Monero

The Midnight Madness strand returns to the the 78th Edinburgh International Film Festival, and as with last year’s strand, it is where you will find some of the more unusual works at this year’s festival (or as one festival staffer put it in the introduction to the midnight audience, “are you ready to watch some f**ked up movies?” The very first one this year was Ben Wheatley with Bulk, and I have to say I had that very unusual thing of going into a film knowing next to nothing about it in advance, a deliberate move on the part of the film-makers and the festival. How often does that happen today? Most of us have seen clips, interviews, articles etc so we have some context going in.

Not so here, not for me anyway, and I found that quite refreshing (yes I am aware of the irony of talking about not knowing much about a film beforehand, while giving you a review of it!). And, truth be told, no review is really going to give you that much of an idea of quite what to expect here. This is Wheatley back in his more experimental, playful, low-budget mode – having fun on a shoestring, but that tiny budget giving him and his cast and crew a free hand to indulge themselves and explore and play, and, oh boy, do they.

Central to Bulk is the Multiverse – before you groan that this idea those of us who love SF have known about for decades, but which is now everywhere thanks to the Marvel Universe and Everything Everywhere, All At Once has been over-used in the last few years, let me reassure you, no not like this. This is Wheatley playing with the idea and minimalist budget, sets and effects, relying on some clever lighting and framing to make an otherwise normal house and rooms feel slightly otherworldly, as Sam Riley’s journalist wakes from a seemingly drugged sleep to find himself in the back of a car, driven at night by Noah Taylor, to the house.

Is it a kidnapping? An unusual job? Partial pieces of memory come back to him as he is taken inside and introduced to Alexandra Maria Lara’s character, who talks about Mark Monero famous tech-genius and a peculiar accident when trying to tap into other dimensions for energy. Woozy from some sort of drug or poison, Riley’s character is lead through events, often clueless, but slowly starting to pick up bits and pieces, except, the pieces being scattered across dimensions, they don’t all fit together, or even work together, while the same is true of the small cast (who appear as multiple versions of themselves).

Ben Wheatley At The Edinburgh International Film Festival 01

(above, Ben Wheatley and his cast, talking in the Cameo Cinema to the film festival audience after the midnight premiere of his film, Bulk; below, director Ben Wheatley talking after the first screening of Bulk, pics from my Flickr)

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The effects in the other worlds are delightfully low-fi, almost like a graduation project film by a particularly gifted student – yes, those are old Airfix model kits bashed together to make very (deliberately) obvious warplanes, or a model Land Rover on an also-obvious model terrain. There’s a sheer delight to much of this, the basic but fun visual effects, even to the confusion the narrative sows in its wake, and the midnight audience were laughing along in many places, enjoying the heck out of it.

Ben Wheatley At The Edinburgh International Film Festival 05
(some of the cast and crew of Ben Wheatley’s film, Bulk, talking to the audience after the premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, pic from my Flickr)

This isn’t the sort of film you can sum up easily in a review, not in narrative terms – this is a classic head-trip piece of film-making, and a total blast to boot. It won’t be for everyone, but those of us who loved Ben’s more out-there work like A Field in England will be on board for this, they will get and happily go along for the ride. The film, for all its tiny budget and lean running time, is packed with references to so many inspirations, from odd SF like Alphaville to the venerable 2000 AD comic, and the hand-written closing credits pay tribute to many of these inspirations.

As I left the cinema at two o’clock in the morning, I heard two people behind me discussing the film, and one saying how glad they were we still had Film4, and that they were up for helping get wonderfully weird, experimental films like this made, and that chap was absolutely right.

This review was originally penned for Live For Films