Tag Archives: EIFF 2025

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.

EIFF - Redux Redux 01

(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)

Ben Wheatley At The Edinburgh International Film Festival 06

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