Our writers share their thoughts on this year’s Whānau Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival selections.
This year’s festival features plenty of gems (even if they might not all be available throughout Aotearoa). Our team of keen reviewers has been busy watching, and rendering their verdicts.
All 2022 mini-reviews:
Latest reviews | A – E | F – L | M – R | S – Z
Shut Eye
Shut Eye is a vivid portrait of intimacy and grief. The potential voyeurism of ASMR is used to explore the particular brand of loneliness that comes with your early twenties. Lush colours and dreamlike pacing create a subtle surrealism that makes the familiar location of Tāmaki Makaurau unsettling and strange. A moving debut from writer-director Tom Levesque. RACHEL ASHBY
Sick of Myself
Featuring two of the foulest characters you will see on-screen this year, Kristoffer Borgli’s venomously funny sickie takes the toxic culture of media-obsessed self-absorption into compellingly cringey extremes. Almost horrifically ruthless—it’s perhaps the most repulsive non-horror body horror comedy since Wetlands. But we still laugh because under every retch-inducing moment the film hurls at us, we recognize the awful humanity of it all. AARON YAP
From Kristoffer Borgli, Norwegian creator of dark comedy The Worst Person in the World, comes an even bleaker satire. Signe (the excellent Kristine Kujath Thorp) is a self-obsessed and downright cruel narcissist, in a tale so pitch black and bursting with bodily fluids, it’s worthy of early David Cronenberg body horrors. The ending may jar, but on reflection, it’s an apt way to close a stimulating tale of disease, dire cruelty, and demented self-obsession. ADAM FRESCO
Petty resentment gets dialled up to the nth degree in this extreeeemely dark Norwegian comedy which seems like it wants to show us what the worst person in the world would really look like (and shares producers with that highly debatable pic). Privilege and self-absorption abound in this laugh-out-loud uncomfortable tale of a toxic relationship and a woman so eager for attention it’s confronting and disturbing. You can’t look away (sort of giving her exactly what she’d want) through the shocks and savage comedy—and that’s a recommendation. STEVE NEWALL
Smoking Causes Coughing
Quentin Dupieux! An undeniable multimedia talent, but one whose only true feature-length gem as director (don’t @ me, Flicks contrib. M. Crawley) is 2019’s incredible Le Daim (Deerskin), has now found the ideal home for their stylistically rich, Eerie, Indiana/Tales from the Crypt style ideas: a tokusatsu portmanteau pic. Let the ‘Tobacco Force Five’ take you on a journey of pure-Dupieux campfire stories – in between fighting rubber kaiju and lusting after randy boss rats, of course. (Sidenote: beyond pleased to see Dupieux, a.k.a. French touch electro artist Mr. Oizo, make a return to puppetry.) Gory, oozy, silly, grand fun. SARAH THOMSON
Bonkers NZIFF Incredibly Strange regular contributor Quentin Dupieux is a French director notorious for his surreal tales, ranging from a sociopathic car tyre, to a hero obsessed with a deerskin jacket. This nutzoid piece concerns Tobacco Force, a group of Power Ranger-style superheroes. From wobbly special effects, to outlandish plotting, it feels more like a series of absurdist comedy skits than a fully-realized narrative, but as an often silly, blood-splashed distraction, it’s always absurdist fun. ADAM FRESCO
Between its wonky Power Rangers-like team of heroes and their slime-drooling rat boss straight out of Meet the Feebles, offbeat director Quentin Dupieux’s latest might resonate with Kiwis more than he realises. Not to say this isn’t French as all hell, however, a portmanteau pic framed around the famous, world-protecting Tobacco Force that features trademark weirdness, plenty of gore and a healthy serving of comic Gallic disdain before its (too?) abrupt ending. STEVE NEWALL
Of the two Dupieux films at this year’s festival, this is the one to go and check out. Totally goofy and very gross—it leans into the silliness and revels in the random. There’s a touch of the philosophical, but not enough to take itself at all seriously. This one is for the folks who like horny puppets, ropey Power Rangers, talking fish and blood that looks like raspberry jam. RACHEL ASHBY
Speak No Evil
Setting up a relatably unfortunate situation and taking it to the absolute worst place it could possibly go, this is the kind of grisly horror thriller that genre fans will love and just about everyone else will hate. Reminiscent of everything from Funny Games to Coming Home in the Dark to The Strangers, with a winkingly over-the-top orchestral score and undercurrent of pitch-black humour running throughout, director Christian Tafdrup has his own brand of bad vibes to bring to the table, and a destination in mind that few would (at least initially) predict. Brimming with delicious, sickening dread, the slow march towards its inescapable (and unspeakable) conclusion is as hypnotic as it is squirm-inducing. I loved this sharp, nasty little film—but, obviously, it’s not for the faint of heart. KATIE PARKER
The gnawing cognitive dissonance of the upper-middle classes goes on holiday here, in a truly uncomfortable film about privilege, performance, and fear. Anchored by four outstanding performances (Morten Burian & Sidsel Siem Koch; Fedja van Huêt & Karina Smulders), non-Euro-continent audiences may lose some of the contextual subtleties in the script, but none of the film’s woozy slow-building terror. The less you know going in, the better. Then, afterwards, how ’bout you take a good long look in the mirror? SARAH THOMSON
There’s no denying the punch this film packs in its last act, or the potency of a cinema crowd all reaching the same sickening conclusion at once. But I confess I preferred the parts that lingered closer to a dark comedy of manners, before the s really hits the f. Director Christian Tafdrup luxuriates in awkward ambiguity for so long that when the penny drops it feels slightly disappointing—still, that doesn’t detract from a wonderfully tense build-up, and if the ultimate goal is to upset, then mission accomplished. TONY STAMP
This wasn’t enjoyable for me, and I think that’s the point. Maybe I’m not in the loop with the cultural commentary, but I couldn’t latch onto the Danish characters’ unbreakable tolerance of their dodgy Dutch hosts. I initially took the climax’s bait to say “fuck all of this movie” but the damn thing’s festered in my mind since, getting a little more from it upon reflection. It gives me no pleasure to call this painfully uncomfortable film “thought-provoking cinema.” But it is, goddamn it. LIAM MAGUREN
Stars at Noon
Claire Denis can keep feeding genre cliches through her wonderfully gauzy lens as long as she likes. Sweaty, sultry, so tactile you can almost feel the linen shirts, this is a pseudo-spy thriller that’s also exceptionally horny, and all the better for it. TONY STAMP
Claire Denis’ COVID-era thriller might be set in pandemic-era Nicaragua, but could really be any place and time once-privileged outsiders/white guys in linen suits have gotten down on their luck or on the wrong sides of autocratic military regimes. Yes, it’s all a bit familiar, but Margaret Qualley is as electric as she is desperate, her chemistry with Joe Alwyn is solid, and Stars sells all the sweatiness (tropical, carnal, panicky) it needs to work… as kind of a steamy hangout thriller? STEVE NEWALL
The Stranger
Sean Harris has possibly never been more terrifying—which is saying something—than in this utterly bone-chilling Australian thriller. In a departure from typical true-crime narratives, director Thomas M. Wright ensnares us in the psychology, environment and relationships of his characters before weaving in the procedural elements one might have expected to see from the get-go—which pushes this into no-spoilers territory to preserve the most impact. Suffice to say, The Stranger leaves us as on-edge as the dangerous/endangered men on screen, Harris paired with an on-form Joel Edgerton as Wright holds our grim attention throughout. Hard (if tough going) recommend. STEVE NEWALL
The Territory
Colonialism is captured in real time through this documentary about Brazil’s Indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau and increasing illegal (but tacitly sanctioned) invasions of their sovereign land—coinciding with the election of Jair Bolsanaro, under whose reign Brazil has accelerated the destruction of Indigenous communities and the Amazon rainforest. It’s inspiring in the face of a chilling existential threat to see this Indigenous community rally with diverse skills and tools—bow and arrow, video cameras and media savvy—to protect their way of life threatened by a ‘Brazilian Dream’ calmly and dispassionately articulated by would-be settlers and farmers. STEVE NEWALL
Triangle of Sadness
A gleeful takedown of the uber-wealthy, Force Majeure director Ruben Östlund’s latest plays out something like Carry On Capitalism. Hinging on an explosively lavatorial set-piece that is equal parts disgusting, cathartic, and hilarious, and with a magnetic performance from Woody Harrelson as the Marxist captain of a luxury yacht, ultimately, your enjoyment of Triangle of Sadness is going to come down to whether you find its bitter conclusions on human nature to be incisively satirical or just glibly nihilistic. AMELIA BERRY
Subtlety certainly is an unfair expectation for a film that has a spew- and shit-covered set-piece making full grotesque use of a tiltable luxury ship set built on a mechanical gimbal. There are plenty of laughs to be had, and a welcome skewering of wealth, power and gender roles, but Triangle of Sadness is also far too on-the-nose, long, unfocused and, to be honest, a bit of a surprise that a jury thought it worthy of the Palme d’Or. Good, but not great. STEVE NEWALL
If you’re looking for subtlety, even of the type of squirmingly subtle, class-based creeping wretchedness director Ruben Östlund has been known for in their previous work, perhaps look somewhere else. This satire of societal transaction hits like a relentless projectile of bodily fluids—but, goodness, it’s grand. Niche tip: don’t sweat trying to interpret Brecht’s Mother Courage to a modern world—just watch this stunning piece of ridiculousness instead. SARAH THOMSON
In his early films, Ruben Östlund orchestrated scenarios that laid bare his wealthy characters’ hypocrisies, and let us relish the resulting awkwardness. He now seems happy to have them sliding around in their own bodily waste, as if that amounts to the same thing. People in this movie quote Marx and Reagan at each other. It’s less subtle than a landmine. But is that the point? Are stroke victims really a deserving target for satire?! I’m exhausted. TONY STAMP
Watcher
Chloe Okuno’s assured first feature centres on Julia (superbly played by Maika Monroe), who moves from New York to Bucharest, where she grows convinced she’s being watched. It’s the cinematic theory of “the male gaze” made concrete. Reminiscent of Hitchcock’s fascination with the camera as voyeur, implicating the viewer in peeping at protagonists in their private moments. A slow-burn feminist metaphor, by turns compelling, confronting, thoughtful and thrilling. ADAM FRESCO
A mighty revival of the hibernating paranoia thriller. Maika Monroe’s great as a woman quietly tempering her screaming instincts, a fuse gaslit by the constant presence of a shadowy stalker and those around her saying “But what if it’s not, though?” You could set your watch to some routine story beats, but Chloe Okuno’s ironclad directorial grip paves over such clichés, chiselling out an impressive slab of suspense cinema. LIAM MAGUREN
Woodenhead – Colour Version
Forget Lord of the Hobbits, this fairytale—which sets out in a Northland dump—is the only reminder of Aotearoa’s spooky beauty you need. Twenty years on, this film has lost none of its ability to titillate, perplex, and mind-bend. Florian Habicht’s formerly black-and-white gem has been given a full-colour breath of life for its anniversary, with crossed fingers it finds new audiences to delight and dement. What a treat, too, to catch this on a rainy Sunday night with most of the still-with-us cast and crew on stage to reminisce and reunite. MATTHEW CRAWLEY
