Buffet Froid | Bertrand Blier, 1979

Buffet Froid | Bertrand Blier, 1979

Thick Skinned | Patricia Mazuy, 1989

Thick Skinned | Patricia Mazuy, 1989

I Saw The TV Glow | Jane Schoenbrun, 2024

I Saw The TV Glow | Jane Schoenbrun, 2024

One of the first images in Jane Schoenbrun’s second film is of a young boy walking beneath a billowing, multi-coloured parachute in a school hall. A film of vivid interiors, in which the light from outside changes the shape of the inside. A cult late-night TV show leaves an indelible mark on those who find it, and its images linger even as life moves on. TV offers a way to escape reality, but its glow illuminates parts of yourself that would otherwise remain unknowable. Time passes, the show becomes a memory, and the once-vibrant interiors become confusing and oppressive. The softness of the sun-kissed parachute gives way to the harsh neon lights of an arcade as it becomes clear that running away from the things you were once afraid of may have been a mistake. Now, there’s no monster of the week, nothing left to fight. It’s all been buried and lost to time. But the emptiness remains. The sadness, the fear, the discomfort in your own skin. And now it’s too late to change it.

Good One | India Donaldson, 2024

Good One | India Donaldson, 2024

The tide is always going out. A tranquil surface receding to reveal sharp and jagged rocks just beneath. Unspoken pains and anxieties waiting for a moment to surface, but they never do. The subject changes, the conversation is interrupted. Everyone is left alone together, walking silently through the woods. That is, until a single sentence breaks through, and poisons everything. A film about men who let you down, and women forced to endure those letdowns. A teenage girl, silenced and disappointed by two pathetic men, finds quiet ways to rebel against them, while the men shrink in contrition, as if their meekness might absolve them. But nothing can balance the scales, and so her pain remains. "Will you please drive?"

Tokyo Drifter | Seijun Suzuki, 1966

Tokyo Drifter | Seijun Suzuki, 1966

Illusions of freedom. Narrow paths for drifters to prowl as they're dragged back into the old ways, or behind bars or fences or glass. Confusing and meaningless conflicts are fought out of tired obligation more than anything else, with no way out and no way back. As the battlegrounds become more abstract, the stakes become more psychological. Battles for the soul: money and power, or honour and freedom. A man walks alone into a shadowy unknown, with no idea how narrow the path ahead may be.

In The Shadows | Thomas Arslan, 2010

In The Shadows | Thomas Arslan, 2010

All cars, no public transport. Everyone is in their own space, separated from the world by glass and metal, fully in control but reliant on things running smoothly out of it. Bad traffic, other drivers, closed roads. You can’t account for everything. Best laid plans can be uprooted by the unforeseeable. And so it goes, with a heist, planned and executed meticulously, silently co-opted from the shadows by external forces beyond anyone’s control. The camera jumps from first to third person. The hunter becomes the hunted.

Kitano on Kitano

Following a wildly successful run of distinctive, genre-bending films, stretching from the late-eighties into the early-2000s, Takeshi Kitano turned his camera inwards with a trilogy of semi-autobiographical metadramas designed to interrogate his work, his life, and his public persona. I’ve long been a fan of Kitano, but I’ve never, for whatever reason, been able to muster much enthusiasm to seek these ones out. Having recently watched Broken Rage, a film that riffs on Kitano’s history in gritty crime dramas and slapstick comedies, it feels as if now is a good time to look back at the films he made about himself, or at least a version of himself, and try to make sense of them. As always with Kitano, it’s impossible to know who or what you’re going to get.

Takeshis' | 2005

A successful actor and a failed one, doppelgängers of one another, briefly come face-to-face in the back room of a TV studio before parting ways. Noting the similarity, they each imagine the life of the other to such an extent that reality folds in on itself. Scenes are repeated in new contexts, actors appear in different roles, and the same images return again and again as these two lives start to converge: a sad clown, a bloodied gangster, a caterpillar in a bouquet of flowers. Each man dreams of the other, and then the dreams dream too. But they all end in disappointment. Kitano uses this dovetailing structure to imagine another life, free of the violence that made his name, but it always manages to creep back in. He's a product of that violence and cannot imagine a world without it, as much as he wants to escape from it. A film of artistic exhaustion from a filmmaker in crisis. An attempt by Kitano to make sense of it all by plunging into himself and bouncing back out again. And so, it starts and ends with a gunfight. 

Glory To The Filmmaker! | 2007

Anything but glory. An imagined Kitano, dragging around a perpetually arch-browed dummy of himself, is scrambling for ideas for what to do next: Ozu sells, so let’s do that. Or J-horror, or science-fiction, or martial arts, or a nostalgic ode to childhood. Anything for the market, just not the gangster films he’s vowed to leave behind. He’s good at that. He’s done it for years, and audiences want to see them. Kitano presents fragments of these films and they all feel somehow wrong. Parodic. Insincere. Tired. Nothing works. He fails, again and again, struggling to connect to material that doesn’t suit him. And so, in exasperation, he throws everything into a bizarre, high-concept slapstick comedy that blends it all into one movie. That movie, in the end, is this one. An absurd, freewheeling work of self-deprecation and frustration, but equally a film in which an artist eventually stops aiming for success and follows his instincts, just to see what happens. And if what happens is anything to go by, filmmaking for Kitano is an act of total madness. At the film’s end, he asks his doctor how his brain is. The doctor simply replies: “Broken.”

Achilles and the Tortoise | 2008

At first, a simple portrait of the artist as a young man, with tragedy and adversity forging in him a resolute commitment to art as a means of survival. And all signs point to a major talent on the verge of breaking through. Time passes. He keeps painting, but nothing changes. His work doesn’t sell. He tries again, and that doesn’t sell either. Again and again. Kitano, whose own paintings are used in the film, frames this Sisyphean pursuit of financial success as an increasingly desperate and destructive one. The more he studies art, the further he gets from it, and the more he listens to the critiques of an art dealer, the more derivative his work becomes. Even as his failures tear his family apart, he keeps trying. The next one will be the big one, and then all of this neglect will have been worth it. A film about escaping reality while striving to capture it in art, as well as a lacerating portrait of a man who can no longer tell the difference between artistic expression and the ephemeral whims of the market.

Letterboxd Reviews #4

It’s been a while since I published a compendium of Letterboxd reviews so, of course, here are two at once. In the past couple of years, I’ve been writing more and more on Letterboxd, Mostly just brief snippets and short texts, but I like them all, however small, however fragmented they may be, and I’m keen to keep a record of them here. So here we go. Part two of a bumper crop. In case you missed it, here's part one. The texts in this post were written between September 2024 and February 2025, and are presented in alphabetical order. I hope you enjoy reading them. 

Bad Day at Black Rock | John Sturges, 1955

A nation scarred by war: the men who fight come back with a pain that drives compassion; the men who can't are left with nothing but hate and anger, and nowhere to aim but home. Flowers grow through the dust of the desert from unmarked graves, but nobody picks them. There's no place for beauty in Black Rock, but there can be. A film about rebuilding America by rooting out the darkness. The flowers are there, it's just a matter of finding them.

The Conformist | Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970

A man trying again and again to assimilate into whichever crowd will have him, only he doesn't fit anywhere, never able to flow with the currents of anything beyond self-preservation and stuck in a spiral of people dancing around him, enjoying a rhythm he can't find. A spare part of a man at best, and, when it comes down to it, an impotent one. Lacerating in its depiction of how fascism serves as the most appealing shortcut to power for worthless men like this, men who crave a feeling of importance without having to do anything to earn it. Men who have meetings in large offices in marble buildings, their voices reverberating loudly to no one. It's so easy to sound important in a cavernously empty room.

Cloud | Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024

An online world of slippery motivations and directionless anger brought into reality by the shattering of the illusion of anonymity. A lack of culpability dragging everyone closer to hell. Kurosawa fills it with frosted glass, dirty polythene, tattered curtains; obscured windows into other worlds. Usernames and aliases, lies and scams. The shift to violence comes when the fog clears and the masks slip, and one true fact brings the whole thing down. All that's left is a void of money where love used to be, and the only thing that sparks a smile is a symbol on a screen changing from "for sale" to "sold".

Golem | Piotr Szulkin, 1979

Shadows and blindness, and a total lack of information. A fake man's desire to understand a world in which everyone knows more than he does, as he's pushed deeper into a maze by the lure of learning something. Fix this watch, carry this oven, poison those birds. But no questions, just demands. No choices, no alternatives. A lot of narrow staircases, thin corridors, grey concrete streets. One path laid out for him. Blunt, bleak, crushing. Everyone has cataracts but the eye doctor is dead.

Hard Truths | Mike Leigh, 2024

Leigh has always had a thing about potted plants, and flowers in vases, and here they are again. Life without life, separated from nature and reliant on human care and attention. A big, empty house, all light but no air, and no decoration. Just sanitised surfaces and people tiptoeing between them, scared to leave a mark or make a sound. Everyone exists in the orbit of Pansy (another flower). Her defeated husband, who fixes radiators in other people’s homes, and her son, always wearing headphones, who wants to fly. Elsewhere, her sister and her nieces are always warm, always out in the world, enjoying life. For Leigh, it’s impossible to be happy without letting life in. When Moses buys his mother flowers, she anxiously puts them in a vase, only for Curtley to throw them into the overgrown garden when she leaves the room. This home is no place for flowers. And so it goes on.

In The Wake | Takahisa Zeze, 2021

A police procedural, with a murder investigation framed as a search for justice of a different kind. Zeze spends very little time on the police work, focusing instead on building all these characters from the horrors of the 2011 tsunami, and the pain they have had to endure in the nine years after. Everyone has lost something, and so everyone understands the impulses that drive such murders. Choices in context, and Zeze exhaustively draws that context for everyone involved. A bit too contrived in its linking of all these people, but an immensely powerful study of corruption and inhumanity all the same — visualised beautifully by the fully dressed but faceless mannequin decorating the office of a politician running for office on a ticket of welfare reform.

Pale Flower | Masahiro Shinoda, 1964

Blank faces, slumped shoulders. Life as a succession of larger and larger bets, and searching for thrills within the rigid systems and protocols of high-stakes card games and yakuza turf wars. A film about playing games to feel alive, and playing with nothing to lose. Prison is just time spent somewhere else. Financial losses mean nothing. And so everyone hurtles towards oblivion, trying to feel something in the process before there's nothing left to feel.

Rancho Notorious | Fritz Lang, 1952

A quest for revenge borne from tragedy. A film that opens with a kiss and ends with a death, all loaded with emotion, but Lang muddies the waters by having it all play out under the fake skies of a different kind of world. Corrupt politicians held in custody on election day by the men set to take their place. A rigged game in a makeshift casino designed to make winners feel lucky. Everything is predetermined. Even this man's revenge becomes an obligation, something that he will achieve simply because he has nothing else to do but achieve it. And so the seasons pass. Summer comes round again and the chase continues in perpetuity. He thinks he's acting out of love but that's long since rotted away. He can only gesture towards it, faking and weaponising it as he moves further and further away from the man he used to be. His only propulsion is revenge. And once that's gone, there's nowhere left to go.

Suzhou River | Lou Ye, 2000

Stories as mythical creatures, their allure stemming from an unquashable mystery. Mermaids probably aren't real, but maybe they are. Maybe doppelgängers are, too. A wounded man tells a story of lost love, first through his own eyes, and then through someone else's. Imagined events, told perhaps as self-deception, perhaps as a way to make a painful reality less banal, or perhaps because this is how things really happened. It’s impossible to know anything with certainty. A glimpse of a mermaid in a muddy river, flowing endlessly past the shells of derelict buildings and seen through the imprecise lens of a handheld camera. Everything is true and nothing is. All there is to do is find a glimmer of something to hold on to in the mystery. And isn’t that why we tell stories?

Tausend Augen | Hans-Christoph Blumenberg, 1984

Surveillance and voyeurism as routes to hell, numbing all feeling from life and pushing people towards a catatonic pursuit of money but nothing to spend it on. Only engaging with the world with curiosity brings happiness, be it watching movies or sketching people or going to zoos or dancing. Also features Jean-Marie Straub delivering a lecture on marine biology, and Wim Wenders stealing a VHS copy of Dr Mabuse the Gambler from a video store. A truly alien object.

Letterboxd Reviews #3

It’s been a while since I published a compendium of Letterboxd reviews so, of course, here are two at once. In the past couple of years, I’ve been writing more and more on Letterboxd, Mostly just brief snippets and short texts, but I like them all, however small, however fragmented they may be, and I’m keen to keep a record of them here. So here we go. Part one of a bumper crop. In case you missed it, here's part two. The texts in this post were written between April 2021 and September 2024, and are presented in alphabetical order. I hope you enjoy reading them. 

The 400 Blows | Francois Truffaut, 1959

A brutal portrait of "adult" life built entirely from inference and assumption. Antoine sets the table for dinner without thinking because he knows what will happen if it's not set. He tells lies, not to avoid responsibility but to buy himself time, to prolong his moments of peace a little longer. A film about crushed hope, and holding on to something as a means of staying alive. The rules are the rules. Nothing will change, and obedience is death, so rebellion is all that's left for a boy who wants to live. And failing that, running. Leaving it all behind in search of something better. Of course he ends up on a beach, both a dream and a prison, offering a world of possible futures without any means of reaching them. Faced with everything and nothing all at once, how do you know where to go?

A.K.A. Serial Killer | Masao Adachi, 1975

A man of Japan. Places and words intertwined to contextualise the biography of a mass-murderer within the spaces he may have inhabited. No attempt to diagnose this man, no speculation or sensationalism. Just the places, as mundane as any others, the facts of this man's life, as they're known, and the four murders he committed, across four cities, with the same gun. Adachi builds an equation and leaves the answer blank but shows his working anyway.

Ambulance | Michael Bay, 2022

An interesting counterpoint to Tony Scott’s Unstoppable, partly in terms of its unwavering commitment to a high-octane, fast-cutting visual style, but specifically in terms of its approach to transportation. As a filmmaker, Scott seems most at home on a train, with everything headed in one direction and geographically mapped from station to station. The dramatic tension stems from an ability to foresee and predict a situation, prepare for it, and deal with it: a steep bend ahead, another train on the track. It's more methodical than Bay, whose approach is almost entirely the opposite. He’s most at home on the road, with infinite moving parts causing chaos. There’s freedom on the highway, so nothing is controllable or predictable. A tyre could blow out, or traffic could build up, along with a million other possibilities. The drama of Bay’s work comes from an ability to react to situations as they happen and maintain that forward momentum at any cost, and his chaotic visuals provide enough of a sense of what's happening. It doesn't matter where you are, just that things are moving forwards. And just as Scott knows the track has to end somewhere, Bay knows that all roads can lead to any destination. Whether you can see it happen or not, one way or another, A will always lead to B in the end.

The Boy And The Heron | Hayao Miyazaki, 2023

Several traumatic experiences befall a young boy in quick succession and he retreats into formalities and silence, rehearsed gestures in public that give the impression of normality while he's lured into a well of sadness, in which a chaotic encounter with a magical world filled with magical creatures threatens to overwhelm him. The boy has to face this world and its bizarre rules and rituals, in all their labyrinthine complications, and by doing so he comes to terms with the fact that controlling this chaos will not save him. The only way to manoeuvre through grief and pain and parakeets is by rolling with the punches and finding a way to live with reality, not as it ought to be but as it really is — and then life can go on.

The Fog | John Carpenter, 1980

It’s dangerous to cherry-pick your history. The fog billows in from the ocean as a small coastal town celebrates its centennial. A spectacle first, a glowing freak of nature drifting against the wind, and eventually an inexplicable threat — a brutal reminder of a long-buried past, but the party carries on regardless. The local radio station broadcasts from a secluded lighthouse, but only at night, the soothing voice of host Adrienne Barbeau the perfect soundtrack for rest and relaxation, and an empty church is only ever occupied for business or shelter. The priest's warnings fall on deaf ears. Illumination is an afterthought. Anything unworthy of a party or a statue remains lost to history. Stay asleep.

Interstellar | Christopher Nolan, 2014

Arguably the peak of Nolan's obsession with time as a dramatic device. And it is an obsession. A film about time past and passing, ghosts and echoes, crops and wrinkles. Everything is reduced (or elevated) to seconds, minutes, decades. The dust rolling in over the hills, the waves cresting on the horizon. Getting closer. For Nolan, there is no greater commodity than time and so it hurts like hell to lose it. Recorded messages from children left behind and a flooded engine on a distant planet are one and the same. Painful reminders of all the seconds, minutes and decades that aren't ever coming back.

Labyrinth of Dreams | Gakuryu Ishii, 1997

Routines repeated again and again and so the mind wanders. Images keep coming back: a ticket punch, the passing of clouds, driving rain and steam; and letters of warning based on feelings and vibes linger on the mind, pondered in silence as something to do on a boring day at work. A longing for adventure, for excitement, for the possibility of danger just to break the tedium. Rumours create reality and the truth is decided, not proven. "If only he was a normal person". And maybe he is. A film about the folly of building a house on sand, without ever denying the possibility that all of it may actually be true.

The Last Duel | Ridley Scott, 2021

Blood, metal, sweat and mud, as expected, but far more interestingly a Rashomon-aping structure that allows subtle differences in remembered details (a falling slipper, a kiss, a saved life) to gradually reveal these men to be narcissistic, monstrous and, frankly, deranged. This being Ridley Scott, it's a film about power structures, and each man's account is an attempt to position himself as somehow more worthy of power and adoration than the other. One man assaults the other's wife and it's he who has been wronged. His wife doesn't come into it. It's only in Comer's account of events that we even see her as a person, someone who thinks and feels and exists on her own, and not as an object for a man to valiantly die for or kill for. That this film ends on her perspective and ends as it does is quite damning, I think, of both the systems that serve to provide men the opportunity to act as heroes in the name of justice, but equally that the only justice at all for the survivors of such crimes exists within these same systems. "The truth does not matter. There is only the power of men".

The Life of Jesus | Bruno Dumont, 1997

Bike helmets and roaring engines, the contrast between safety and menace. One minute, a gang of local white boys are thoughtfully counselling a grief-stricken friend or trying to teach a bird to sing, and the next they’re muttering racial slurs in the direction of a family speaking Arabic in a café. In this village, compassion for the community and hatred towards anyone outside of it is totally normal, and there are no consequences for the casual acts of violence that keep perceived outsiders in the margins. Dumont loads the film with accidents waiting to happen (health scares, reckless driving) that never actually come to anything, and these charmed lives give a horrible air of inevitability to how this ultimately comes to an end.

Red Eye | Wes Craven, 2005

There's a moment early on in which a young girl travelling alone for the first time flippantly (and awkwardly) tells her coddling mother: "I'm eleven, not nine", and the ghosts of 9/11 really linger all over the film. Craven builds a palpable fear of air-travel even before Murphy starts making threats: bad weather, rude passengers, delays, turbulence; even the mechanical process of shutting the doors and the screeching roar of take-off feel designed to emphasise just how much faith we put into engineering and skilled labour when we step onto a plane. But then this is really all about a lack of control, or specifically how to take back control of a situation in which the deck is stacked against you. For Craven, the scars of the past give resilience in the present, and the persistence of an increasingly resourceful McAdams, in her unshakeable desire to push back against the transparent demands and cat-and-mouse games of an increasingly frantic Murphy, ultimately serves to remove him of all of his charm and menace and control, and transform him into a squeaky-voiced, prat-falling idiot, outwitted, outmatched, and completely out of his depth, laying on the floor as sirens blare in the distance, looking up at her as she stands defiantly over him.

Red Line 7000 | Howard Hawks, 1965

At the track, Hawks shows the commentators, the pit-crew, the drivers, their loved ones, but never the crowd. This isn't racing as spectacle but racing as vocation, as profession; racing as obsession, where the risks are known, winning is the only goal, and other people have to hope they come home. Crash after crash after crash. The odds are against them, and yet they keep racing. A perfunctory funeral, well-trodden and numbed to sentiment. The risks are known. It happens too often. Crash after crash. Women watch through their fingers in the stands, and the men just go home, back to a facade of a normal life at the Holiday Inn, waiting for the next race to start. Neither love nor danger are enough to stop them. And so they keep racing.

Targets | Peter Bogdanovich, 1968

The work of a young man with an old heart. A real death of America movie, in which an aging actor reckons with his status as a relic of a bygone era and plans to leave it all behind, while a young suburban family man suddenly snaps and embarks upon a killing spree. Bogdanovich's suburbs are pristine and empty, all pastel-painted homes, beige chinos and white plimsolls, well-maintained lawns, a facade of peaceful living where everyone has access to guns and ammunition and the birds just keep on singing. As long as the surface is calm the rest can be ignored, left to simmer until it’s too late. And it is too late. The young man, politely and superficially ignored by his family, amasses an arsenal and takes to the streets. Meanwhile, Karloff, an effortlessly charming and melancholic man, reminisces about the good old days with a young director, played by Bogdanovich, and laments what Los Angeles has turned into. He’s a man without a future, too, but at least he has an audience of people willing to listen to him talk about it. Maybe a little too academic for my taste but certainly an effective piece of work, and there are some wonderful moments when Bogdanovich loosens the shackles — particularly Karloff’s magnetic recitation of an old ghost story in defiance of a shock-jock’s inane line of questioning, and the extraordinary sequence at the drive-in, with attendees trying to warn each other about an active shooter without drawing attention to themselves by opening their car doors.

Terrorizers | Edward Yang, 1986

A film about gravity, of sorts, in which the weight of a city pulls everything down into the ground and leaves its inhabitants to fight for their place in the clouds. Pot plants and fish tanks, barriers and veils, lies and tricks. Everything held at a distance to make the inevitable more palatable. Only those at the bottom seem to feel the pain of the crush, and so their climbs of course become more desperate. Blood signifies death, vomit life. Nobody feels anything in the end. A brutal scramble for fluids.

International Film Festival Rotterdam 2025

International Film Festival Rotterdam 2025 | #1

It’s freezing in Rotterdam in January and Albert Serra is feeling it. “It’s so cold, it’s hard for me to go to the cinema,” the Catalan director, draped in a heavy coat, told the sell-out crowd before a Saturday night screening of Afternoons of Solitude. It’s an odd place and an odd time to be watching a film about bullfighting, but this late-winter climate certainly helps to emphasise its position as something of an alien transmission. The film follows Andrés Roca Rey, a superstar matador, and his team as they move from bullfight to bullfight over the course of several months, with long takes observing all the processes and routines that come with it. Serra captures the long car journeys between fights with a camera fixed to the back of a headrest in a Rolls Royce SUV, pointed squarely at Roca Rey as he sits in an awkward closeup with everyone else looming in the background. Elsewhere, a lingering camera emphasises the time he spends getting ready in opulent hotels, underlining the complexity and flamboyance of this clothing and the awkwardness of putting it on and taking it off. And then there are the bullfights themselves, violent, tense, and extremely drawn out so as to make visible every gesture, every sound and every detail, with unblinking ferocity. 

A film of interiors, where even an arena in the pouring rain becomes a private space, sealed off from the world, existing only between a man and his art. Much like Howard Hawks did with Red Line 7000, Serra never shows the crowd, keeping their gasps, their cheers, and their boos off-screen. This isn’t about spectacle or entertainment, but a ritualistic study of one man’s obsessive pursuit of perfection, for his own benefit and nobody else’s. Again and again he gets in the ring, goading creatures that could easily kill him (and on multiple occasions, they almost do), only to do it all again the next time, and the next. He’s never happy, constantly critiquing the minutiae of his performance or the length of time it took for a bull to die after his killing blow. But he continues, with help from his sycophantic team, who relentlessly inflate his ego and build his confidence (“what balls you have!”). 

It’s easy to see Serra’s interest in this world. His characters tend to be powerful, regal, and hubristic, but ultimately fragile, and Andrés Roca Rey is certainly of this lineage, much like the aging Casanova of Story of My Death, the bed-ridden king in The Death of Louis XIV, and the increasingly irrelevant De Roller of Pacifiction. The only difference is that while these men are all fading forces, Roca Rey is at the peak of his powers. The best bullfighter in the world. A man of great violence and great fragility, whose artistry requires him to exude arrogance while risking his life. If anything, it’s bullfighting that’s fading around him. A fascinating and barbaric tradition, increasingly out of place in the modern world, but still able to draw an audience. And so, as long as the crowd keeps baying for blood, people like Andrés Roca Rey will continue to refine their art until there’s nobody left to watch it.

The day after seeing Albert Serra’s film, I saw Wei Shujun’s equally sun-drenched I Dreamed A Dream on a night just as cold, or maybe even colder than the last. The film, receiving its world premiere at the festival, follows five rappers pushed together as part of a competitive audition process and left marooned at a beach resort while they wait (and wait) for a mysterious director to arrive to start shooting a film with them. There’s nothing much for them to do, so they just hang out on the beach, working on their tans and watching Wild Strawberries on a laptop, all at the request of the director (named Godod, of course) but communicated to them via his irritable assistant, whose role is to keep them focused and make sure they stick around. As their boredom intensifies, and their wait goes on, they each begin to have dreams that can barely be distinguished from reality. One of the men imagines himself as the director, shooting a scene and impatiently delivering vague notes to his actors. Another has a flirtatious back-and-forth with a woman in a bar in fluent French, while another tries to leave the hotel and go home, in spite of the increasingly desperate and theatrical pleas of the director’s assistant.

Shot quickly as a self-described stop-gap between other projects, I Dreamed A Dream has the feel of being made up on the fly. Time passes, and nothing really happens. Scenes stretch out in long takes, lingering as if waiting for something that never arrives, offering no escape from the monotony. And then, suddenly, another place, another time, another situation to navigate. In this state of suspended animation, stuck on an island, in hotels and on beaches, all these men have is each other, and Wei emphasises this camaraderie throughout, showing them writing songs together, hanging out together, and rallying together to make fun of the director’s assistant. In these long scenes, there’s no fixed point of view. The camera observes the group as if filming a documentary. But in dreams, each of the men has his own perspective. A set of images designed to reveal something personal that isn’t necessarily visible in the collective. Wei offers no interpretation of these dreams. They just drift in and out, much like the rest of it. Time passes, and everything blends together, be it dream and reality, performance and reality, fact and fiction. A beguiling puzzle-box from a fascinating new voice.