HOME ALONE... AND THE CREEPY NEIGHBOUR’S WATCHING
WATCHER ( ★★★★☆, 15, 91 mins) is a gripping psychological thriller, set in Bucharest where an American couple, Francis (Karl Glusman) and Julia (Maika Monroe), are setting up home.
He is half-Romanian, speaks the language, and has been posted there by his U.S. marketing company, leaving Julia home alone all day and for a (somewhat unlikely) number of evenings.
When she realises that a man in the building opposite is watching her at night and possibly following her by day, she grows increasingly anxious. Nor are her nerves helped by the news that a serial killer is at large, decapitating young women. In an impressively assured cinematic debut, writer-director Chloe Okuno builds the suspense splendidly and astutely does not subtitle the Romanian language sequences, helping us to identify with Julia’s sense of alienation.
Any resemblance to Hitchcock’s Rear Window ( 1954) is, I suspect, entirely deliberate.
I also enjoyed Enola Holmes 2 ( ★★★☆☆, 12A, 129 mins), newly available on Netflix and squarely aimed at the under-18s.
Millie Bobby Brown again plays Sherlock’s redoubtable detective sister, breaking the fourth wall for all she is worth as she seeks a missing woman in a nicely recreated Victorian London. She has Helena Bonham Carter and Henry Cavill in support and it’s fun. Streaming on the Roku channel, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story ( ★★★☆☆, 108 mins) chronicles the life of the American pop parodist (Daniel Radcliffe), who enjoyed such hits as Like A Surgeon, after Madonna’s Like A Virgin. The joke is that the film itself is a parody of the biopic and it kind of works. Radcliffe, such an awkward actor, for once seems pretty well cast.
Good Night Oppy ( ★★★★☆, PG, 105 mins), in cinemas and arriving this month on Amazon Prime, is a documentary about the robot, Opportunity, sent to Mars in 2003. It was meant to be functional for 90 days, yet ended up exploring the planet for 14 years. Fascinating stuff.