Double Fixation | Yonfan, 1987

Double Fixation | Yonfan, 1987

A Traveler's Needs | Hong Sang-soo, 2024

A Traveler's Needs | Hong Sang-soo, 2024

Another puzzle-box of a movie, in which a French woman in sandals and a lime green cardigan, spends her days wandering around Seoul, teaching French with a method she devised herself, drinking makgeolli, flirting, paddling her feet in a pond, and eating bibimbap. A tourist, to be sure, but with a mysterious background. Nobody knows who she is, or why she’s in Korea, or how long she’s been here. She just exists here, now. She doesn’t speak Korean, and her students speak no French, so they communicate in a shared second language of English, awkward English. Hong lets these semi-conversations play out at length, in all their imprecision and frustration, in long single-takes, making literal the gaps between what they can and can’t say to one another. There’s no space for genuine connection, it seems, and all these conversations play as polite chatter to pass the time, to fill the silence. Perhaps that’s why she wants to teach French, to have a means of connecting to this foreign place she finds herself in. Maybe she just needs to make some money. This being Hong Sang-soo, nothing is ever clarified, and nor does it need to be. Things just happen, sometimes two or three times over, and life goes on. That’s what makes Hong’s cinema, at least this mode of it, so enchanting to me. The ambiguity of it all, the inscrutability, but worn lightly, never straining for significance. An interest in the mysteries and contradictions and beauty of life. If he wants to watch Isabelle Huppert waste some time by walking in circles on a rooftop then so be it. 

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I found this short review, written on my flight home from the Berlin Film Festival in 2024, while tidying up my Google Drive this morning. I'd completely forgotten about it. It was part of a planned longer piece about the festival that year that I ended up abandoning for obvious reasons, and this was the only element of it that I finished. I've never really written much about Hong, one of my favourite filmmakers, so I'm happy to have another piece, however short, to add to the archive.

The Odyssey | Christopher Nolan, 2026

The Odyssey | Christopher Nolan, 2026

Nobody cuts between different times and different spaces quite like Nolan, and the qualities of his 2020s work stem almost entirely from his desire to build bridges between seemingly irresolvable planes of existence. The structure of The Odyssey, filled with rumours and memories and stories, is the perfect vessel for this, with the myth of Odysseus keeping him alive in the hearts and minds of those who love him while he battles his way back to a home that is falling apart in his absence. And as these strands slowly converge, wisdom, hard-won from the journey, becomes the deciding factor (illustrated beautifully in a reprise of the siren song in a moment that demands restraint when every bone of his body wants him to give in to his desires). Because, as always with Nolan, there’s no such thing as lost time. There’s just different time, other time, parallel time.

The Green Room | Francois Truffaut, 1978

François Truffaut standing in front of a photograph of Henry James and paying tribute to the author in his 1978 film The Green Room, itself an adaptation of James’s 1895 short story The Altar of the Dead.

Amadeus | Miloš Forman, 1984

Amadeus | Miloš Forman, 1984

It’s the garish displays of wealth that make Miloš Forman’s Amadeus (1984) such a fascinating film. Forman revels in the ornate decadence of Vienna, from the palaces to the costumes to the banquets, relentlessly capturing it all in ostentatious widescreen frames. And right in the middle of it, dwarfed by it, the great artist, Mozart. A man unburdened by the social etiquette of his surroundings, having transcended such formalities through sheer force of talent. But equally a man who cannot carry the weight of its edifice, gradually levered onto his shoulders through the political manoeuvres of Salieri. An obsessively jealous man unable to accept his own mediocrity in the face of genius, with both the means and the desire to bring the whole thing down on top of him. And so these enormous frames become punishing. The weight of an empire bearing down on the man in the middle until, finally, he breaks. The palaces and theatres disappear. So does the king, and the wigs, and the clothes. The social structures, the politics. His family, and his health. Everything stripped away by his refusal to reduce the number of notes, to allow inferior musicians to restrict him. A refusal to compromise. The frames stay wide but there’s less and less to fill them with. All that’s left are debts and talent, and no way of using one to fuel the other. 

2025 in Cinema

I don’t know whether this has been a bad year for cinema, but I do know that I haven’t had much enthusiasm for it. I've ended up with a pretty solid top ten, but I’ve been happy enough to let a lot of the big-hitters pass me by without much interest, and while some of what I have seen has burned bright in the moment, much of it has faded away soon after. A lot of perfectly good movies but very few that have stayed with me. A lot of sixes and very few nines. But then I’ve also not had the chance to see some of the things I’d usually have made time for. I haven’t seen the new Christian Petzold movie, or Bi Gan’s Resurrection, or either of Zhang Lu’s two new movies. And Marty Supreme isn’t out yet. So who knows, maybe this’ll turn out to be a barnstormer of a year, after all, when I do finally catch up with these things and others like them. But all in all, it just doesn’t feel as if very much has been happening.

I've not really done much to make things happen for myself, either, which I’m sure has contributed to this ambivalence. I still managed to get to a few festivals but I keep circling the same ones, and I think I need to be more uncomfortable next year. When I went to Rotterdam in January, for the first time in five years, I got off the train, walked out into the city and felt as if I remembered all of it. The shapes of the buildings, the angles of the roads, the location of my hotel. The same happened in Vienna. I stayed in the same hotel, walked down the same street into town and remembered everything. There’s a warmth in familiarity, but lazy comfort is not a particularly helpful headspace to be in. It’s not one that lends itself well to discovery and it’s not what I want from travel. Most of what I see in a given year is seen at festivals, so I didn’t approach very much of anything this year with the wide-eyed energy of someone lost in a new place, contending with a new lay of the land, and open to whatever possibilities may emerge. Instead, I’ve been drifting around on autopilot, waiting for something to grab me.

Maybe that’s why most of the revelatory viewings I’ve had this year have come at home, during rare bursts of energy. It’s much easier to cater for a sudden jolt of curiosity when you have access to anything you’re in the mood for, rather than awkwardly moulding yourself to the scheduling whims of a film festival. So while I’ve seen fewer films than ever this year, I’ve largely chosen well when I’ve had the choice. The wisest choice I made this year was to dive back in to Inland Empire (2006) in the wake of David Lynch's death in January. I’ve written about my early struggles with Lynch before, but seeing this film for the second (or third) time, on Blu-ray at home in the middle of a wintry Saturday night, was a revelation unlike any I’ve had in recent memory. A whole world, still confusing and frightening, but finally in focus.

So when I look back at 2025, I’m probably going to think of Inland Empire before anything else. Good cinema always finds its way under your skin in one way or another, and I don’t think much of what I've seen from this year has really done that. Perhaps I should be less harsh on myself, then. Maybe I wasn't able to find many films that grabbed me because I didn’t see the right things in the first place, and it’s not so much a matter of passivity than it is a matter of luck. In any case, the year is basically over now and new movies are right around the corner. I hope next year will be a little more exciting.

In alphabetical order:

Avatar: Fire and Ash | James Cameron

The Currents | Milagros Mumenthaler

Die My Love | Lynne Ramsay

Dry Leaf | Alexandre Koberidze

I Dreamed a Dream | Wei Shujun

Kontinental ‘25 | Radu Jude

Short Summer | Nastia Korkia

Silent Friend | Ildikó Enyedi

Sinners | Ryan Coogler

Two Seasons, Two Strangers | Sho Miyake

__________

In spite of the slow year, I’ve managed to write a lot more than usual. I set myself a challenge of writing something about everything I watch on Letterboxd, which I’ve largely done, and my monthly newsletter, Strange Days, is still going strong. I’ve also written a few things for the blog that I’m proud of, including:

- Three festival roundups, from Rotterdam, London, and Vienna

- A look back at Takeshi Kitano’s autobiographical period

- A look back at the films of Sho Miyake

- A look back at the shift from objectivity to subjectivity in The Vanishing

- And an account of my history with Kill Bill

I’m happy to have gotten back into the habit of regular writing over the past couple of years. Long may it continue.

__________

Ten discoveries from a quiet year. I like to go with my instincts when looking for things to watch, without any specific influences besides the intangible things that hang in the air. Looking at this list of movies, every single one of which has moved me greatly, it feels as if I’ve gravitated towards the idea of confronting an absence. A feeling of having something to lose and then losing it, or searching for something to fill a space, or of rebuilding around the spaces where something used to be. I will always find it strange how themes emerge from what feel like random choices. I don’t know what drew me to these films now, in this year of all years, but something did. And that’s an interesting thread to pull on. For now, these are the ten films I liked above all others this year. I wonder what I’ll see next year.

In chronological order:

Stella Dallas | King Vidor, 1937

Unman, Wittering and Zigo | John Mackenzie, 1971

The Pelican | Gérard Blain, 1974

Man on the Roof | Bo Widerberg, 1976

Shanghai Blues | Tsui Hark, 1984

Typhoon Club | Shinji Somai, 1985

Rosa la rose, fille publique | Paul Vecchiali, 1986

Gilsodom | Im Kwon-taek, 1986

The Eel | Shohei Imamura, 1997

The Sweet Hereafter | Atom Egoyan, 1997

__________

I’ve had an unusual year of music discovery, and for the first time in a long time I’ve put a lot more time into new releases than I did into old stuff. It may have been a fairly tired cinematic year, but musically things have been wide awake. 

In alphabetical order:

Addison | Addison Rae

Baby | Dijon

Big City Life | Smerz

Bleeds | Wednesday

Caroline 2 | Caroline

Downpour | Charmer

Essex Honey | Blood Orange

Getting Killed | Geese

Headlights | Alex G

Lifetime | Erika de Casier

In terms of discoveries, I haven't put the same time and energy into excavations as I have in recent years. I listened to a lot of Scott Walker at the start of the year, and a lot of Slowdive at the end of it. Plenty more avenues left to explore next year.

In chronological order:

Climate of Hunter | Scott Walker, 1984

Pod | The Breeders, 1990

Pygmalion | Slowdive, 1995

All Natural Lemon and Lime Flavors | All Natural Lemon and Lime Flavors, 1996

Look Now Look Again | Rainer Maria, 1999

It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water | The Microphones, 2000

Blue Screen Life | Pinback, 2001

Tha Carter | Lil Wayne, 2004

Citrus | Asobi Seksu, 2006

And… Hearing Things | dinner, 2007

__________

A few struggles here and there, but on the whole another good year of reading. I felt the strongest about Paul Auster and Kurt Vonnegut, whose novels below are two of the best I’ve read. I suspect I’ll go harder in 2026.

In chronological order:

Snow Country | Yasunari Kawabata, 1948

Galápagos | Kurt Vonnegut, 1985

Sátántangó | László Krasznahorkai, 1985

An Artist of the Floating World | Kazuo Ishiguro, 1986

The Big Nowhere | James Ellroy, 1988

Leviathan | Paul Auster, 1992

No Country For Old Men | Cormac McCarthy, 2005

The Years | Annie Ernaux, 2008

Frog | Mo Yan, 2009

Earthlings | Sayaka Murata, 2018

__________

A lingering memory from the year. On a flight from London Heathrow to Phoenix Sky Harbour, sometime in the middle of an artificial night, somewhere above the United States of America, listening to Hayley Williams’s Parachute over and over again as I dozed. As we descended, around midday, lights back on, I watched the air temperature gauge tick up beyond anything I’ve ever experienced and listened to it again. Every time I hear it now I’m thrown back to that weird state between time zones, watching a plane glide across a 3D map on a seat-back screen through tired eyes, waiting for the heat to hit me. But at least it’s a dry heat.

__________

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for persevering. I don’t know how you ended up here but I’m glad that, for whatever reason, you were interested enough in what I have to say to do so. So, thank you. It’s been a rough end to the year but I think things are starting to turn around. I hope 2026 is good to all of us.

Kill Bill | Quentin Tarantino, 2003

Kill Bill | Quentin Tarantino, 2003

When Kill Bill first came out, I read about it in a copy of Total Film magazine I bought from Tesco sometime near the end of 2003. I would’ve been twelve then, and obviously far too young to be able to watch it in the cinema, but it was one of the first movies I remember being actively hyped for. I had no idea who Quentin Tarantino was, or what made this movie significant enough to grace the cover of a magazine. But the simple fact that it was on a magazine cover at the exact time I started to read them was more than enough to lure me in. I had to wait until the following August to see it, when my parents got me Volume 2 on DVD for my birthday, and soon after I tried to buy Volume 1 in Woolworths, boldly and incorrectly assuming I could trick the shop assistant into believing that I was actually eighteen, and not thirteen. I didn’t have to wait long to rectify the mistake, when my mum picked up the DVD for me from a different Woolworths a week later. But it did mean that I watched the second part before the first, forever complicating the already non-linear chronology for me. In any case, once I had them both I must’ve watched the entire thing at least twenty times, sometimes together, sometimes separately, sometimes in the wrong order. Despite not knowing anything about Tarantino, or martial arts cinema, or yakuza movies, I was, for a while, utterly obsessed with it.

But then I left it behind. I didn’t pull on the threads of Kill Bill when I went to university. I didn’t watch anything by Lau Kar-leung or Kinji Fukasaku, nor did I watch Lady Snowblood or Five Deadly Venoms or The Bride Wore Black. As much as it easily could’ve done, Tarantino’s taste never set the foundation of my cinephilia. I had Fellini and Tarkovsky and Murnau instead, and a fresh copy of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die to work through. Kill Bill just fell by the wayside, a film that I’d already seen in a world of films that I hadn’t, and that was that.

As I write this, I’m a few days removed from seeing Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, my first encounter with the film in any form in more than fifteen years. Both volumes cut into a single, intermission-split, four-and-a-half hour movie, as originally intended, with very few differences aside from a slight shift in the order of information and a few extra minutes of the anime section. But, otherwise, largely the same as it ever was. Seeing it again after all this time, and for the first time in a cinema, was nothing short of extraordinary. So much of it remains seared in my memory. The brutality of the knife fight in the suburbs. The Crazy 88 and everything that happens in Tokyo. The sad inevitability of the wedding flashback. The three-inch punch. The opening of the money-and-snake-filled briefcase in the trailer. And the final showdown with Bill that disappointed me so much as a teenager but feels so vital to the film now. Having seen an astounding number of movies since I last watched this one, it’s so thrilling and so rare to watch a filmmaker as wildly talented, well-funded, and totally brazen as Tarantino just cutting loose and luxuriating in his own cinephilia, throwing everything he’s got at a relatively straightforward revenge story and making it feel enormous. I don’t think Tarantino has ever bettered Kill Bill, and I’d be surprised if he ever did again. 

A part of me wishes that I never left it behind, that I spent my university years unpicking its homages and influences and watching those movies instead of diving headfirst into the canon. But then I wouldn’t have had this experience of rediscovery now, of seeing such a formative film as this one with new eyes and reveling in its thrills once again. I think you need these kinds of revitalising experiences every once in a while, if only to remind yourself of the electrifying power that cinema can have when it means something to you.

The Vanishing | George Sluizer, 1988

The Vanishing | George Sluizer, 1988

Fact and fiction. A woman goes missing in broad daylight at a busy service station. An inexplicable disappearance that is teased for the rest of the film, with Sluizer only alluding to the horrors that seem certain to have occurred. The moment she vanishes is shown from the perspective of her boyfriend, who doesn’t actually see anything, only realising her absence and frantically looking for her. Then, a different man, briefly seen where she disappeared, is shown separately conducting a series of experiments. He encourages his family to scream as loudly as they can in their secluded countryside home and later asks his neighbours if they heard anything. He times with a stopwatch how long different doses of chloroform keep him unconscious. He rehearses conversations designed to encourage women to get into his car, and checks his heart rate after testing them with real people. And then he’s shown at the gas station again. The past catches up with the present. These images are the only objective information Sluizer offers. A woman has disappeared without a trace, and this man has been behaving strangely. 

Years pass, and any hopes of finding her are now remote. Her boyfriend keeps up the search, putting up posters and making public pleas for information on TV. At the same time, the mysterious man still torments him from afar, hiding in plain sight and preying on his desperation. His obsessive need to find out what happened makes him susceptible to anything, and he’s made himself an easy target. And so the two men finally meet, and everything is revealed. But the perspective is no longer objective. It’s a version of events. A version authored and narrated by a man who has thought of every possible angle already, who has considered every variable in great detail. He’s telling a story to a man who wants to believe him, and he could be telling him anything. This might be what actually happened, but then again it might not be, and that’s the horror of The Vanishing. There are no answers that can help this man. No closure, no satisfaction. Just more questions, and dead ends, and lost time. Nothing can alleviate the horrors of the unknown.

Die My Love | Lynne Ramsay, 2025

Die My Love | Lynne Ramsay, 2025

Cages and cages and cages. The opening shot shows dilapidated rooms, overrun by autumn leaves and dirt from outside and decorated with floral wallpaper. Ramsay fills the film with dead images of natural life: jumpers emblazoned with animals, flowers drooping in vases, overflowing fruit bowls. An oppressive environment that gestures towards what the natural should be, not what it actually is. Everything is designed to give an impression of life while maintaining a bubble of domestication. There's nothing natural about small talk to pass the time, or owning a dog, or microwaving powdered mac and cheese. She's told again and again how she should be feeling, but it isn't ever how she really feels, and so she throws herself at the boundaries of an environment that's pinning her in (whether physical, societal, familial, or sexual, and on and on). A film about how frustrating it is to be oppressed by rules that don't make any sense to you, and about how the "solution" is always to be put in another cage, and then another, and another. Anything for other people to maintain a charade of normalcy. But, then, what is normal anyway?

Viennale 2025

Viennale 2025

In the Café Engländer, a coffee house on the Postgasse, not far from the edge of the Stadtpark in Vienna, you can order a Hurch Kaffee for €7.80. A Hurch Kaffee, named after the late Hans Hurch, artistic director of the Viennale for more than two decades, is a triple espresso, and on the window of the Engländer is a black and white photo of Hurch, standing alongside a waiter, holding several empty mugs by their handles. As much as Vienna is a city proud of its coffee, it’s equally proud of its film festival. The Viennale has built a formidable reputation as one of the finest festivals around, with its focus on artistic value over anything else resulting in a rich, expansive, and rewarding programme of films. This photo of Hurch, and the pride with which it is displayed, says a lot about Vienna as a city, and how the festival is as much a part of its fabric as the Albertina or a Wiener Melange.

This was my third visit to Vienna, and the first in which I’ve given myself the time to relax and enjoy myself. I spent three tired days at the festival in 2022 at the end of a week-long solo trip around Austria, and in 2023, I stayed a little longer and tried to do too much, splitting my time between as many new films as I could see and as much of the Raúl Ruiz retrospective as possible. It’s very easy to burn out at festivals, and the obligation to see as much as possible is a poisonous temptation I have fallen prey to many times before. This time, I saw a relatively modest sixteen films in the five days I was in town. A selection that barely scratched the surface of the programme, but a healthy amount of cinema all the same.

Among them, were two films from Radu Jude, a perennial presence at the festival and director of its trailer last year. I largely enjoyed the exhausting provocations of Dracula, in which a (fictional) filmmaker bereft of ideas haphazardly uses an AI assistant to generate various interpretations of vampiric mythology, reducing it to a series of artless vignettes. For Jude, these ugly images and idiotic ideas are just part of another wave of cultural commodification. There’s no difference between the fact that Vlad the Impaler’s birthplace has been transformed into a tourist restaurant and a montage of AI-generated portraits of the now far-right icon saying “I am Vlad the Impaler, you can all suck my cock” over and over and over again. It’s all born of the same impulse to rewrite the same myths, to spin the same stories in different ways to suit a different purpose. Everything is parasitic.

Jude’s other film from this year, Kontinental ‘25 is comparatively restrained but equally lacerating. Modelled loosely on Roberto Rossellini’s Europa ‘51, the film follows Orsolya, a bailiff whose eviction of a homeless man from the basement of a derelict building recently sold to developers pushes him to suicide. She is repeatedly reassured by her superiors that she did everything by the book and that she is not legally culpable for his death, but that doesn’t clear her conscience. Jude fills the film with long, meandering and often very funny conversations in which Orsolya recounts what happened in detail to several people, including her tired husband, a jaded priest, her fiery mother, a former student, and an old friend from law school, none of whose thoughts and opinions seem to help her. At the same time, the story is spun into a scandal by right-wing news outlets, weaponising Orsolya’s Hungarian heritage against her, and adding another poisonous angle to the pile. Like Dracula, the result is a knotty web of competing ideas, each one loudly pushing this woman closer to the edge of exasperation as her moral crisis is met with either morbid curiosity, casual disinterest, or outward contempt. But, tellingly, never compassion. Nobody really cares about this man’s death, or Orsolya’s guilt. They’ve got other things to worry about. And all that matters to the people in charge is that they can move on with their project now that this man is out of their way. It doesn’t matter how. Progress stops for nobody. As if to consolidate this idea, Jude closes the film on a montage of construction sites. 

Similar crises echo through several other films in the programme. In Joel Alfonso Vargas’s Mad Bills To Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo), Rico, an aimless young man who sells homemade alcoholic drinks on a beach in The Bronx, is forced to grow up fast and find a job when his sixteen year-old girlfriend tells him she’s pregnant. He moves her into his cluttered childhood bedroom, filled with Pokémon plushies, baseball caps, and sneaker boxes, and holds onto dreams of better things that sit starkly at odds with his reality. Vargas keeps the camera static for the most part, anchoring Rico’s environment in place as he bounces against its edges, trying to do what he thinks is right while constantly hitting walls. There’s an Ulrich Seidl-like richness to these images, with their stillness underlining the detail hidden within cluttered frames, as well as the horrible sensation of watching a person’s actions inadvertently making their life worse at every turn. But Vargas is a much warmer filmmaker than Seidl, and Mad Bills To Pay builds to a bittersweet moment of reflection, and a hope that Rico can turn things around even if this is not how he imagined his life would be.

If Vargas’s film captures a sudden arrival at adulthood, then Nastia Korkia’s Short Summer is very much about the loss of childhood. The film opens oddly, with two children stopping a car on a country road, checking it for bombs and demanding its inhabitants pay up in order to pass through. The car doesn’t contain explosives, only a young girl and her parents, who are dropping her off to stay with her grandparents for the summer. She spends her days playing games and having fun with local kids, while, unbeknownst to them, the Second Chechen War is being fought nearby. Korkia contrasts the innocence of childhood with the horror of war, which is happening right on the edge of this girl’s perception. Fragments of news bulletins are overheard on the radio, injured soldiers roam around the town, and, in one extraordinary moment, a seemingly endless freight train, carrying tanks and weapons to the front line, passes through, dwarfing the kids as they play football beneath it. Korkia creates an uneasy tension between the war and this picture-perfect summer, slowly building a suffocating sense of how insidiously the world’s horrors can bleed into the innocence of a child.

Sho Miyake’s Two Seasons, Two Strangers, which won the top prize in Locarno this year, similarly situates a crisis in a backdrop of natural beauty, though in a more personal register. The film follows the creative stagnation of Li, a Korean screenwriter based in Japan, and continues Miyake’s long-held interest in people battling to become active participants in their own lives. In the first of two distinct parts, a lonely young woman visits a beautiful coastal town and meets a local man on a beach, and they spend a few long summer days together, before she has to go home. They walk around town, visit a museum, and swim in the ocean in a storm, until, suddenly, these images are revealed to be part of a screening of one of Li’s films. She and its director are taking part in a Q&A at a university, and when an old professor asks about her next project, she reveals that she’s struggling to make any headway with it. In Miyake’s cinema, the path forward is never where his characters are. There’s no point in standing still, waiting for something to change. It’s a matter of doing something to change things. And so, Li is inspired to take a wintry train-trip with her camera to a hot spring town in the north of Japan, where she drags herself through deep snow and ice and finds herself at an empty, run-down inn in the mountains. This journey echoes that of the female character in her own film, a film she wrote when she first moved to Japan, only now it’s a different season. Time has passed, but the impulse for new surroundings and new experiences remains. A change of scenery is sometimes all that it takes.

But not always. In the opening moments of Milagros Mumenthaler’s The Currents, Lina, an Argentinian woman in her early thirties, collects an award in Geneva, throws it into a bathroom bin, silently walks around a city, and jumps off a bridge into a freezing river. After she washes up on the shore, she returns to her husband and young daughter in Buenos Aires, neither of whom know that anything is amiss, and tries to go back to normal, only now with a debilitating fear of water and an emotional distance that seems not to have been present before. Mumenthaler isn’t interested in diagnosing what has happened to Lina, or what precipitated this sudden change, but rather in observing how she has to adapt her routine around it to maintain a facade of normalcy. She can no longer wash her hair, so to avoid awkward questions she asks a hairdresser friend to sedate her and wash it while she’s unconscious. She can’t empty the water from her daughter’s bath, so she pretends that she forgot to do it when her husband comes home. It takes more effort for Lina to do these once mundane things, and the toll of this effort threatens to unbalance her further. Imagined scenarios start to sneak into her perception. The deafening roar of traffic and power-drills from outside starts to overwhelm the soundtrack, and she sees her assistant jumping out a high window, only to realise that she’s been sitting right next to her the whole time. These breaks with reality never really go away, and culminate in a stunning moment in which Lina finds herself at the top of a lighthouse, imagining the lives of three women she knows as the light rotates around her. She isn’t as close to these women as these images suggest, so this sequence gives the impression of a projection on Lina’s part. How would she live if she lived as these women? And would her life be better if she was someone else?

The Currents is a film that asks more questions than it answers, and more and more this is the kind of cinema that I long to find at festivals. This sense of curiosity isn’t necessarily unique to the Viennale, but it’s a massive part of its success. In her introduction to the film, Mumenthaler said that this was a festival that filmmakers love to take their films to, and it’s easy to see why. You only need to look around after a screening, day or night, in the smoking areas outside the Metro or Gartenbaukino, or the cafés at Stadtkino or Urania, or the entrance of the Filmmuseum, just beneath the Albertina. People are always milling around, talking passionately about what they’ve just seen. And you can’t really ask for much more than that.