surrealism
Graham Fuller
Like her first two features, Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Earwig is an oneiric coming-of-age drama that uses body horror imagery as a metaphor for the daunting unknowns – sexual and emotional – to be encountered in adulthood.Eschewing narrative logic, which some viewers will find frustrating, it depicts the ordeal of a little girl who has failed to develop secondary teeth. The unexplained involvement of her protector with a waitress, which is limned with erotic violence, intersects with the girl’s story. It dilutes the maturation theme, but amps up the movie’s power by adding layers of Read more ...
mark.hudson
Cecelia Alemani's vision for The Milk of Dreams, the International Exhibition at the Venice Biennale 2022 had me excited – and perplexed – from the moment I heard about it.Never mind the national pavilions which tend to dominate coverage of the world’s biggest and oldest art festival, the International Exhibition is the central event at any Venice Biennale: the chance for a single curator to stamp their vision on the culture of their time in a truly epic exhibition traversing two colossal venues. The Milk of Dreams features works by 213 artists from 58 countries Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is at its most radical and corporate here; maybe decadent is the word. We start with surgeon turned sorcerer Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) threatened then slaughtered in a cosmic chase sequence. It’s just a dream, then it isn’t, and so is/isn’t pretty much everything that follows. For a film due to be a huge mainstream hit, Doctor Strange in The Multiverse Of Madness is narratively anarchic, and dependent on degree-level knowledge of MCU arcana, clearly feeling, as this franchise invincibly warps and morphs, that we’ll take anything now.When the Doc wakes Read more ...
Izzy Smith
For most of us, fluttering our eyelids to convince a loved one to cook dinner is harmless meddling. Complimenting our boss on their new coat before asking for a promotion is necessary cunning. For the characters in Lucie Elven’s debut novel The Weak Spot, however, small moments of manipulation amount to something rather more sinister.Insecurities, penchants and fears become means of exploitation in a novel that uncovers what it is to have our "weak spot" used against us. Delightfully equivocal and quietly unnerving, the book offers a striking allegory of the power of information in the modern Read more ...
David Nice
Just when you thought you couldn’t take any more one- or two-handers, online or in the theatre, along comes the supreme masterpiece to jolt you out of any fatigue. Every line counts as Winnie, buried up to her waist and then up to her neck, determines that words will never fail her. And what poetry there is in even the most banal observation, the endless repetition. I could probably watch a different actor in the role every month, and still find riches and unexpected insights in Beckett’s great play, which hasn’t dated in any way. Juliet Stevenson at the Young Vic gave us a quirky Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Eileen Agar was the only woman included in the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, which introduced London to artists like Salvador Dali and Max Ernst. The Surrealists were exploring the creative potential of chance, chaos and the irrational which they saw as the feminine principle, yet they didn’t welcome women artists into their group.Agar wasn’t easily discouraged, though. At the tender age of six, she’d been sent away to boarding school, an experience that made her fiercely independent. Later she studied at the Slade, but rebelled against the art school’s academic approach. A Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Trilogies (it is noted, in the term’s Wikipedia entry) “are common in speculative fiction”. They are found in those works with elements “non-existent in reality”, which cover various themes “in the context of the supernatural, futuristic, and many other imaginative topics”. All of these apply in some sense to The Things We’ve Seen, the latest novel from Spanish writer Agustín Fernández Mallo. The title owes itself to a line by the poet Carlos Oroza; the full version (“It’s a mistake to take the things we’ve seen as a given”) is one of a number of cut-phrases that loop and reverberate at Read more ...
Lydia Bunt
“Burglar alarms jangled through the empty hallways of Paradise Block.” In this ramshackle, lonely tenement, such alarms might be one’s only company. Yet, in this intricate collection of short stories, the inhabitants’ lives intertwine. Alice Ash’s debut collection steadily follows the tropes typical of the short story, but the tales overlap, creating a compendium that almost morphs into a novel but retains the unsettling gaps crucial to the genre.Of course, stories collated together in one place often share themes or ideas, but Ash takes this further, picking up characters and motifs from one Read more ...
India Lewis
Jenny Hval’s Girls Against God covers every angsty young woman’s favourite subjects. Witchcraft, heavy metal, viscera, and hatred. It’s a book in the grand tradition of Kathy Acker and women surrealists everywhere, dancing through space and time into different dimensions.Girls Against God isn’t particularly gripping, and it is confusing at times, but the sense of being unmoored feels very intentional. Its story appears to begin fairly normally, its narrator describing their life in small-town southern Norway in the 1990s, and their overwhelming feeling of hatred, directed towards their Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Shot across a period of five years, David Lynch’s creepy debut feature Eraserhead (1977) follows the story of Henry Spencer, played by Jack Nance, an employee at a print factory in a quiet, unnamed town. Henry arrives home one evening to a missed telephone call from a woman named Mary (Charlotte Stewart), inviting him to dinner at her parents’ house. Once he arrives, Mary’s mother breaks the news that her daughter has given birth to a baby, and Henry is the father.“They’re still not sure it is a baby!” If the premise sounds innocuous enough, Mary’s tortured reply sets the Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
It’s fair to say that the idiosyncratic, surrealist films of Roy Andersson are not everyone’s cup of tea. Whether you find his films impregnable or incisive, it’s impossible to argue with the artistic imprint the Swedish auteur has had on European cinema. Now at the age of 77, he has made his last film, About Endlessness. Accompanying this apparent final feature is an insightful documentary from Fred Scott, which examines the artistic process of the director as he moves towards retirement. The danger of such projects is that they can feel like a tagged-on "making-of’" featurette. This is Read more ...
Owen Richards
Barring a few outliers, British indies tend to follow the same formula: serious subjects told seriously. Whether it’s a council estate, a rural farm, or a seaside town, you can always rely on that trademark tension and realism we Brits do so well. What a shock to the system Eternal Beauty is then, filled with more imagination than almost anything else out this year.Sally Hawkins stars as Jane, a woman struggling to keep a grasp of her mental health. Her issues are compounded by her sociopathic mother (Penelope Wilton), narcissistic sister (Billie Piper), and a fiancée that dumped her at the Read more ...