BFILFF: SPOILER-Riddled Non-Professional Reviews From The 57th BFI London Film Festival

Harmony Lessons

It isn't every day you see a film from Kazakhstan. There's one called Tulpan, which involves a lot of sheep. Only one sheep here, making a kind of cameo appearance, but it does walk on water. Practically bounds, in fact. But that's by the by - this is a coolly elegant study of victimisation, in which a bullied schoolboy torments cockroaches (even making a dinky little electric chair for one) and finally is himself tortured by the police after he kills his main tormentor with a home-made gun. It's the circle of life.

This is intelligent and striking. And if it left me a bit cold – as if the director were dissecting insects also – it was probably meant to.

The police in Kazakhstan, I notice, wear big hats.

Borgman

Dutch film in which a housewife unwisely gives shelter to a tramp her husband has beaten up. He is rather more than a tramp, in fact – Borgman is part organised criminal, part spiritual guru, and all psychopath. Even the act of making him the new gardener (by now the wife has decided that she can't live without him) entails deaths, the victims ending up at the bottom of a lake with their heads in buckets of concrete. This is in the Laugh strand of the festival. And laugh we did. Uneasily.

The joke turns on what those who lead 'privileged' lives are prepared to ignore in order to lead those lives. And how that stuff we're ignoring may assume nightmarish proportions while we're not looking. So we can never be quite sure what Borgman represents, and this is in many ways the film's strength. Though it's a messy film in some ways - like the wife's action paintings, it favours bold strokes over fine detail, and yet the ending seems a bit too neat, so it isn't even consistently messy. But there's a lot of fun to be had here. Can't see it getting a good review in The Big Issue though.

One Night When The Rain Falls

Indonesia now, and the various members of a family leave the dinner table to become embroiled in separate stories. First the gay son fails to come out to his Dad – then the daughter is attacked by something, before going home to find that Mum has split into several different versions of herself. That's the horror section, and the final segment – involving the straight son – is more a sort of romcom about domestic abuse. It's almost as if the director wants to demonstrate his versatility and if that's the case: job done. I was beguiled. As to what it all adds up to – well, a fun night out for all the family, that's what.

Sx- Tape

Whatever happened to Candyman director Bernard Rose? He's been directing films, of course – modern-day adaptations of Tolstoy, and this addition to the annals of found-footage horror.

It showed in a rather ancient screen in the Cineworld Haymarket that looked like it might make a good setting for a horror film itself. Rose was on hand to say of horror that it's a 'debased genre' and 'a challenge' in that a horror film either works or it doesn't. This didn't; and did.

A man obsessively films his artist girlfriend as she explores a derelict hospital which she's thinking of using for a show. The usual awkward question in these films – why are you still filming in spite of the fact that everything is clearly going to shit? - has an emotional resonance here because the camera is transparently the (largely unseen) protagonist's way of exerting control over his existence and over his girlfriend, who he seems to particularly enjoy filming in sexual situations, though only ones involving him. Meanwhile, we are told that the hospital was once a place where women designated 'insane' for, say, having a child out of wedlock, were incarcerated. Now I like a feminist subtext as much as the next man, but sadly there isn't much here that veers from the customary trajectory of found-footage horror which goes, more or less: everything's fine...everything's still fine, just a bit creepy...what the fuck? WHAT THE FUCK?....shit, dropped the camera. And there's a ghost that's too visible too soon, disrupting the build-up of tension instead of adding to it. You have to be careful with ghosts. I was still interested though.

At the end the camera disappears into a hole in the cameraman's head. I wasn't expecting that.

you don't have to be mad to work here

On my desk at work is an ancient post-it note, rescued from an old job bag during the archiving process. It says, in bold black letters: 'Ready to print, laminate, and send to Wales.' This oddly inspiring phrase has become a kind of positive mantra to me. Its complete irrelevance to anything in the present day somehow only heightens the effect. 'Yes!', say I to myself on the morning of every working day, 'I'm ready to print, laminate and send to Wales!' Then I fill in another spreadsheet.

The other day, however, an opportunity to make a lasting contribution fell into my lap. Into everybody in the department's laps, actually, via e-mail. They were asking for a new organ donation campaign idea to replace the existing one, for an interim period. However, my suggested slogan – 'Give us your bloody organs' – has not been used, even though it immediately suggests some striking visuals and is, moreover, that precious thing - a joint message: blood and organ donation. Oh well. There's no doubt that most of the important stuff is decided at meetings, and I don't get to go to many of those.

Not that I don't necessarily benefit from meetings. The other day everybody in the next office went to a meeting about branding and returned with teacakes salvaged from the feast. Admittedly, they were a little bit squashed in transit, and consequently looked like they had been made by Salvador Dali rather than Marks and Spencer. When you peeled off the foil you discovered that the marshmallow foam had exploded out of the shattered chocolate: you couldn't remove the teacake from the foil, you had to put your mouth to it. It was the nearest I was likely to get to eating a teacake slaughtered in the wild, and much more satisfying than a pristine one would have been. This meeting had a good outcome as far as I was concerned.

But in terms of influencing contemporary thought, my best hope would be ringing in to the Jeremy Vine Show on Radio 2, and other people tend to get there before me. There was controversy recently over a 'mental patient' Halloween costume sold in a major supermarket. Alistair Campbell was called in to express his outrage. Well, he should know about mental illness, having doubtless helped to cause quite a lot of it in his time. A self-described former mental patient rang in to say that the costume didn't bother him, and that he routinely wore a T-shirt saying 'Psycho'. 'What do you think of that?', asked Jeremy of a female caller who had been offended by the costume. I'd have given my frontal lobe to hear her say: 'Well Jeremy, he's mental isn't he? I mean, he said so himself.' But she was tactful.

They should have asked disgraced UKIP MP Godfrey Bloom what he thought. He did turn up later to defend his position on calling female UKIP members 'sluts'. This was clearly a joke, but the fact remains: the man's a tool. Make him – I dunno – Mayor Of London or something. Or he can take over from Jeremy Kyle when something happens to him. Anything except politics. Numerous people rang in to say that he was 'a breath of fresh air'. Breath of stale air, more like. He can use that as his mayoral campaign slogan - Godfrey Bloom, A Breath Of Stale Air. I won't even charge.