A tale of mystery and imagination
I SEE YOU
★★★✩✩
(15 98 mins)
Adam Randall
Helen Hunt, Jon Tenney, Judah
Lewis
THE COUNTY
★★★✩✩
(12, 92 mins)
Grímur Hákonarson
Arndís Hrönn Egilsdóttir, Hinrik Ólafsson, Sigurður Sigurjónsson
I★★✩✩✩
WAS surprised and a little saddened to discover Oscar-winner Helen Hunt was in a low budget chiller on the straight-to-video route well before the cinemas closed.
And I wasn’t exactly reassured by the opening sequence.an eerie score and floaty aerial shots of small town America seemed to be setting up one of those cheap horror movies that Nicolas Cage has been knocking out since he landed that massive tax bill.
But thankfully, it turns out there is far more to this twisty thriller than meets the eye. The As Good As It Gets actress plays Jackie Harper who we meet as she’s flipping breakfast pancakes for her surly teenage son Connor (Judah Lewis).
Her embittered detective husband Greg (Jon Tenney) isn’t any help, refusing to get up from his sofa bed when his son erupts over his wife’s recent affair.then again, Greg has a lot on his plate. A serial killer appears to have returned to town, 15 years after he was sent to prison.
When the police find his calling card in the woodland where a 12-year-old boy disappeared, they suspect a copycat is on the prowl.
The only alternative theory, that they sent down the wrong man, isn’t popular down at the station.
A series of mysterious incidents in the huge Harper house also add to the tension.the cutlery suddenly disappears from a kitchen drawer and Greg finds himself briefly locked in a cupboard after chasing the escaped family hamster.
The supernatural opening and the convincing domestic squabbles give this low octane mystery a spooky edge.
After working through the horror tropes, the film switches genres with a sudden midpoint twist.
The details of this, and the way screenwriter Devon Graye neatly ties together his subplots, are best left as a surprise. Hunt has acted with far bigger stars, but I don’t remember any of her films being as tightly plotted as this one. The Archers meets Erin Brockovich in
an engaging Icelandic drama from writer-director Grímur Hákonarson. In his previous film, Rams, he found offbeat comedy and touching drama in the true story of warring shepherd brothers. Here he nudges the tension up with a tale of a feisty, whistleblowing dairy farmer. Exhausted middleaged couple Inga (Arndís Hrönn Egilsdóttir) and Reynir (Hinrik Ólafsson) are struggling to keep their heads above water.their dairy farm has been in the family for generations but their new robotic milking station isn’t making enough to cover their expenses with the local dairy farmers’ co-operative.
When Inga proposes they break the co-op’s rules by swerving its pricey store to buy their fertiliser online, a sullen Reynir refuses to discuss it. Although his sullen demeanour suggests he isn’t sticking to the tradition out of loyalty...
After he is killed when his truck mysteriously goes off the road, Inga discovers that he had been covering up the extent of their debts. She is about to declare bankruptcy when she discovers a dark secret about Reynir’s dealings with slimy co-op boss Eyjólfur (Sigurður Sigurjónsson).
Suddenly enraged, she fires off a furious Facebook post comparing the co-op to the mafia.when this is picked up by a TV news reporter, the co-op shows its teeth and an enraged Inga vows to expose the corruption at its heart.
What follows is a David vs Goliath battle between a plucky, muck-splattered outsider and the double-dealing, selfserving bureaucrats in suits.
It’s neither as touching nor as amusing as Rams, but this flame-haired warrior speaks to theviking in us all.
reminded me of a harrowing incident in a recently gentrified north London bar. In what now seems a different life, I rashly splurged £10 on a measure of single malt whisky.
I was already regretting it when a bored young man in experimental trousers loped over with my top-price tipple swirling around in an old jam jar.
This trauma came crashing back to me while watching this documentary about the unashamedly gay grappler Saúl Armendáriz. Under the stage name of Cassandro, Saúl is one of the biggest stars in Mexican wrestling where he plays the role of the “Exotico” – a flamboyant, big-haired wrestler who duffs up the muscle men in masks when things get a bit too macho.
French filmmaker Marie Losier has a very tasty tale.the cheery 48-year-old’s life has been a cocktail of broken bones, mad outfits, gravity-defying leaps and death-defying battles with bullies.
I just wished I had a chance to appreciate his acrobatic moves and his unusual story. Because Losier made this with what looks like grandad’s fluffridden cine camera, with a piece of string and a couple of old baked bean cans to do the sound.
She’s going for a home movie look, but if you stream this on your 4K set-up, you may feel like I did about that waiter.