Tag Archives: EIFF2025

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.

EIFF - The Mortician 04

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