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.