Thriller

THE UNSEEN

Cert 15 106mins Stars 3

Open your eyes to this intriguing British thriller which plays tricks on our perception.

It holds outlets our attention due to the astutely measured performance of Jasmine Hyde in the central role. As Gemma she’s a married mother who works as voice recording artist who specialises in audio books.

Her well heeled London life is shattered when her young son dies, and she begins to have panic attacks, incurring temporary blindness.

Desperate for respite she and her husband take up the kind offer of accommodation in a guest house in the Lake District.

With Hitchcock undertones full of paranoia, guilt, faith and obsession, there are also shades of 1970’s classic Don’t Look Now, and John Travolta’s 1981 thriller, Blow Out.

The cinematography creates a chilly look and the unsettling score twists the melancholy tone. Full of foreboding and a strong sense of creep though a little lacking in menace, it’s worth getting this seen.

THELMA

Cert 15 116mins Stars 2

Lesbian lust and psychic power are unable to this save this Norwegian horror thriller from it’s self induced torpidity.

Eili Harboe offers a sympathetic fragility as Thelma, a socially anxious first year university student.

She becomes obsessed with the beautiful and popular Anja with whom she begins a tender relationship.

Thelma’s heightened emotional state manifests itself as a supernatural force. This results in her suffering seizures, minor electrical shortages, and the occasional crow colliding with a window.

Snakes make a penetrating appearance in Thelma’s dreams but possess insufficient poison or bite. Weighed down by sincerity and self importance, there’s an absence of camp energy which would make this nonsense fun to swallow.

The virtues of ungodly metropolitan lifestyles are expressed in opposition those of Christian small towns, and pharmaceutical medicine presented as a barrier to female emancipation.

Witchcraft challenges science as reality, flashbacks and fantasy mesh, and as it becomes hard to distinguish one from another, any potential magic is lost.

 

BERLIN SYNDROME

Cert 15 Stars 3

This claustrophobic and dingy thriller preys on the fears of parents who wave their adult children off on holiday,

Teresa Palmer plays an Australian backpacker who has one night stand with Max Riemelt’s hunky German teacher, but the next morning she finds herself a hostage.

It’s an chilly urban nightmare whose best moments of skin itching creepiness and nasty violence arrive early.

Marred by its cramped confines, the story finds it difficult to make room to manoeuvre or build momentum, possibly the reason it made a modest impact at the box office.

THE SNOWMAN

Cert 15 119mins Stars 2

This Scandinavian thriller deserves some sort of award for being the most terrific looking yet listless movie.

Norway is a gorgeously crisp winter wonderland and Christmas card pretty, but watching Michael Fassbender’s grim struggle through thigh–high snowdrifts is a perfect illustration of my viewing experience.

Perhaps the heat of the chase was lost in translation. It’s a Chinese/Sweden/UK co-production adapted from a Norwegian bestseller and stars the German/Irish actor as an alcoholic police detective.

He’s in plodding pursuit of a serial killer whose signature is finding the time to build a coffee bean-decorated snowman at the scene of each grisly murder.

Rebecca Ferguson plays his fellow cop but they don’t generate any heat with which to thaw the chilly, silly and somber storytelling.

The opening scene sets up an intrigue of sex, violence and voyeurism and though there are bloody moments, this is an anaemic exercise as you could possibly wish to avoid.

 

STRATTON

Cert 15 94mins Stars 1

Unintentionally funny and fist-bitingly terrible throughout, this sub-James Bond action thriller featuring the commando Special Boat Service is a washout. It serves to remind us just how excellent the 007 films are.

Director Simon West arms his cast with a laughably wet script, so it’s little wonder so many performances flounder.

As SBS Sergeant Stratton, the unfortunate Dominic Cooper is chasing a terrorist armed with stolen chemical weapons. The British actor was a replacement for Superman’s Henry Cavill, who sensibly dropped out at the last minute.

Connie Nielsen is a treadmill pounding ‘M’ figure with an alarming accent who is concerned about a leak inside MI6 which is gushing information to the other side.

While Gemma Chan who is very good as a robot in TV’s Humans, gives another robotic performance here as a technical geek.

In one scene a group of Italians ignore the gunfight going on outside to focus on the football. Sensible types, those Italians.

 

 

GHOST STORIES

Cert 15 97mins Stars 4

Investigate the paranormal with this devilishly scary supernatural British thriller.

Andy Nyman stars as a TV presenting Professor who is evangelical in his mission to debunk psychics and the existence of the afterlife.

But his faith in science is tested when he is challenged to solve three separate cases of ghostly experience.

As the tremendous trio of Paul Whitehouse, Alex Lawther and Martin Freeman anchor each segment, the spectre of A Christmas Carol haunts the story and Charles Dickens would have appreciated its bleak and dark turns. 

Beautifully played and with a theatrical insistence on in-camera special effects, it’s inventive and funny as events become increasingly bonkers.

Asylums, churches, caravan parks and the Yorkshire Moors provide a suitably damp and downbeat environment alongside a more traditional fog-bound forest.

We’re asked to contemplate the emptiness of life without the possibility of an ever-after. And by the time Ghost Stories have scared you to death, you’ll be praying there is.

SLEEPLESS

Cert 15 95mins Stars 2

This run of the mill thriller may offer some respite for sufferers of insomnia.

The stakes are established early and fail to escalate, so we idly watch some decently-staged action scenes and the glossy neon glow of Las Vegas at night.

As a corrupt cop called Vincent, the well fed Jamie Foxx sees his chickens come home to roost when his son is kidnapped by the mob.

These include gangsters, a casino boss, more corrupt cops and Michelle Monaghan’s Internal Affairs police officer, who ambitiously wants to arrest everybody at once.

At the centre of the plot is a bin bag of cocaine who everyone wants to get their hands on.

As the cast chase each other a crowded Las Vegas casino, the cocaine changes hands in the manner of a fizzing bomb in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. By the end I’d forgotten who had it or why I cared.

UNLOCKED

Cert 15 98mins Stars 2

This silly thriller seems designed to unleash a female rival to James Bond on the unsuspecting world of international espionage.

The topical Europe-hopping plot includes a reasonable amount of action. But the film is unevenly paced, predictably plotted and the moments of broad humour dilute the under-powered tension.

Noomi Rapace and Orlando Bloom play a CIA interrogator and a former marine. They’re on the run and have to prevent the detonation of a biological bomb in London.

Michael Douglas and John Malkovich add Hollywood gloss as CIA top brass, with the latter not taking his role with absolute seriousness.

Filming wrapped in January 2015, and since then the movie has collected dust on a shelf. Presumably it’s being released now to cash in on the fact its stars are about to return to cinemas in much bigger films.

Rapace appears next week in Alien: Covenant, the follow up to sci-fi epic, Prometheus.

Meanwhile in two weeks, Bloom attempts to kickstart his stalled career with a return to The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. In the first Pirates film, Bloom was the romantic hero. But Johnny Depp swaggered up as Captain Jack Sparrow and sank Bloom’s career as a leading man.

Bloom has since failed to offer any evidence he’s anything other than a posh pretty boy of reasonable talent and an inoffensive screen presence. He’s astonishingly miscast here in a role more suited to the rough charm of Jason Statham.

And now forty years old, Bloom seems beset by an early mid-life crisis. He’s sporting tattoos, an ill advised haircut and a desire to prove his physical prowess.

This uninvolving mess was directed by Michael Apted, who made 1999’s not great 007 film, The World Is Not Enough. I’m sure any plans for Rapace to make a sequel to this remain locked up and for her eyes only.

 

 

 

THE BELKO EXPERIMENT

Cert 18 89mins Stars 4

A first day at a new job turns out to be a really bad day at the office in this fierce and funny action thriller.

A blood soaked satire on corporate downsizing full of gleeful gore, it deserves to put to the top of your cinema-going in-tray.

Melonie Diaz stars as Dany Wilkins, a US citizen newly employed by recruitment firm, Belko. They’re based in an isolated office block on the outskirts of Bogota, Colombia.

With no warning, the building is sealed by armed guards and the 80 US staff are told by the tannoy announcer they must kill each other in order to survive.

Shock quickly turns to violence as the rationalisation of the workforce begins.

It’s written by James Gunn, the director of upcoming Marvel’s sci-fi romp, Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 2. He sketches the characters with efficiency, and expertly keeps us guessing who will dodge the bullet and who gets the chop.

 

THE HANDMAIDEN

Cert 18 156mins Stars 5

Scheming ambition leads to lust, lunacy and betrayal in this sumptuous erotic thriller.

It’s inspired from the novel Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters, and her Victorian era story makes a remarkably deft transition to Japanese occupied Korea of the early twentieth century.

The Welsh writer also wrote the book which inspired the BBC’s naughty romp, Tipping The Velvet. This is far more explicit.

A pair of con artists conspire to defraud a wealthy Japanese woman. Fujiwara pretends to be an aristocrat to woo the Lady Hideko, while his partner Sook-hee is placed in her household, assuming the position of her handmaiden.

Beginning with Sook-hee, the story unfolds in three parts, presenting the point of view of the leading players in turn.

Writhing with sapphic desire, this exquisitely told tale is ripe with erotic literature, punishment, and torture.

The gorgeous performers embrace their parts while the succulent cinematography makes a fetish of consumption. Indulge yourself.