Less is certainly more in elegant, bittersweet masterpiece
and part-time water diviner, he regales her with stories about “the south”, his home region, and as she follows his wanderings through their town she gradually uncovers what it was that caused him to leave. His and the young Estella’s stories are told in voiceover by her older self (Iciar Bollain, now an acclaimed director and wife of Scottish screenwriter Paul Laverty), adding a further layer of melancholy.
Erice’s original vision was for a three-hour film, but his producers withdrew their funding so the mooted second half, which would have seen the teenage Estella pick up her life in southern Spain with her father’s relatives, had to be abandoned. But the film as it was eventually presented to the 1983 Cannes film festival, with a running time of a mere 95 minutes, was considered so enigmatic and brilliant as it was that even had the funds become available, Erice would probably have thought twice about trying to finish it. Perhaps, in the end, its relative brevity is one of its strengths. Either way, it’s a beautifully weighted story about secrets, regrets and a bittersweet coming of age in Franco’s Spain. Eureka Entertainment, £19.99 Hard on the heels of last year’s quirky ghostly romance Journey To The Shore – a dead husband returns to his wife and together they take a road trip, mostly by bus – Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa returns to the horror genre in which he first made his name with films like Pulse and Retribution.
At first sight, the title is a terrible one. In fact it’s brilliant because there’s no other way to describe the growing sense of unease as ex-cop Koichi Takakura (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and his wife Yasuko (Yuko Takeuchi) move to a new home in the suburbs with their dog Max and encounter an unfriendly new neighbour, Mr Nishino (Teruyuki Kagawa), who’s just a little bit on the unsettling side.
When an ex-colleague drags Koichi into an unsolved serial killer case, his speciality when he was on the force and now the subject he teaches in his new role as a criminology professor, he starts to wonder if it’s possible that Mr Nishino is somehow involved. Or is he seeing connections where there just aren’t any?
Kurosawa ramps up the mystery and the air of unease skilfully and in tiny increments, often simply by showing two characters talking without letting us hear what’s being said or what their gestures mean.
If you’ve seen the explosive closing scene of Michael Haneke’s Hidden, you’ll know how powerful the technique can be. Creepy’s own final scenes pack a punch which is almost Hidden’s equal, as a story of suspicious neighbours and suburban disquiet lurches into the terrifying and the grotesque. A well-crafted essay on the banality of evil. Axiom Films, £14.99 While scouting for extras as they prepared to shoot a film in their native New York in 2014, brothers Josh and Benny Safdie encountered and then befriended one Arielle Holmes. As they talked, the young woman’s story gradually unfolded – to the extent that the brothers asked her to write it down, which she did, mostly in uptown Apple stores where she had free access to a computer.
It turned out that Holmes was actually a homeless drug addict, and her insights and revelations about her life and that of her boyfriend, Ilya, were so startling that the brothers abandoned their original film and instead shot one based on this “memoir”.
Holmes plays the lead character, Harley, which is to say she effectively plays herself as a thieving, drug-taking, pan-handling “hood rat”. The role of Ilya is taken by Caleb LandryJones (X Men: First Class) while Brooklyn rapper Necro plays Skully, another friend from the streets. Completing the cast is drug dealer Mike, played by real life drug dealer Buddy Duress, a man for whom incarceration is clearly an occupational hazard: in an on-set interview in the extras section, he reveals that he was only released from Rikers Island four hours earlier and is still wearing his prison shoes.
That same extras package shows footage of the real-life Ilya on set, images which have a desperate poignancy given that the film’s opening dedication is to him. He died of a drug overdose shortly after production ended. So Heaven Knows What is, essentially, a love story, though not the sort to which you’d ever attach the genre label “rom-com”. Things have turned out better for Holmes, however. A mesmerising presence on screen from start to finish, she was subsequently cast as Pagan, one of the leads in Andrea Arnold’s acclaimed 2016 road movie American Honey.