It’s hard to imag­ine that you could go from lov­ing a per­son deeply to loathing their guts and want­i­ng them dead with­in a mat­ter of sec­onds. Yet that sor­ry notion sits at the core of the new film from Iran­ian writer/​director Saeed Rous­taee in which friends, fam­i­ly mem­bers and lovers sud­den­ly find their var­i­ous rela­tion­ship sta­tus­es flip-reversed as a result of a series of trag­ic and unpre­dictable events.

Though the film draws on the lives and expe­ri­ences of a wide ensem­ble of play­ers, though at the cen­tre of it all is Pari­naz Izadyar’s wid­owed nurse Mah­naz, bring­ing up her two kids with the help of sis­ter Mehri (Soha Niast) while also attempt­ing to bring back some famil­ial sta­bil­i­ty by court­ing the dash­ing and wit­ty para­medic Hamid (Pay­man Maadi).

One big curve­ball in her life is that her son, Ali­yar (Sinan Mohe­bi), is, to quote The Life of Bri­an, a very naughty boy, and when he’s not manip­u­lat­ing fam­i­ly mem­bers out of doing chores, he’s scam­per­ing across rooftops and involved in a school­boy gam­bling cir­cle. He’s exact­ly like Jean-Pierre Léaud in The 400 Blows, a charm­ing, mature-beyond-his-years scamp who always push­es things just a tad too far.

Mah­naz adores him even though her demands and protes­ta­tions nev­er pen­e­trate his psy­che, but she needs to ship him and lit­tle sis Neda (Arshi­da Dorostkar) off to their father-in-laws for a bit while she does a lit­tle bit of manip­u­lat­ing of her own; specif­i­cal­ly, mak­ing it seem as if she only has one child from her pre­vi­ous mar­riage when Hamid’s par­ents come to dis­cuss pos­si­ble wed­ding plans.

Yet this inno­cent scheme goes wrong on every con­ceiv­able lev­el, leav­ing rela­tion­ships in tat­ters and even bod­ies in the ground. Though Mah­naz sad­dles some of the blame for the fall­out, her guilt quick­ly trans­forms into rage and her life duly becomes ded­i­cat­ed to tak­ing down all those she per­ceives to have wronged her, includ­ing her son’s school­mas­ter who she believes is the cause for his errat­ic behaviour.

Rous­taee weaves this com­plex fam­i­ly web with art­ful rigour and skill, and his film makes a sat­is­fy­ing tran­si­tion from a cool­ly-observed fam­i­ly por­trait to a knuck­le-gnaw­ing soap opera at around the half-way point. Indeed, there’s a point where it feels as if the sto­ry here may even be a lit­tle too event­ful, as by the time a char­ac­ter has been able to square their emo­tions away, anoth­er big twist is mak­ing itself felt on the horizon.

Where the film excels, how­ev­er, is in its refusal to paint Mah­naz as the lov­able hero­ine, even if she suf­fers the lion’s share of the indig­ni­ties. Niast’s impres­sive, expres­sive per­for­mance nev­er allows us to pity this set-upon matri­arch, even as she refus­es to give an inch to those who have sud­den­ly become the ene­mies that she must con­quer. The film is shot and edit­ed with styl­ish reserve, and even makes time for the odd visu­al flour­ish, most notably via a bird’s eye shot of the court­yard beneath the fam­i­ly apart­ment where so many key inter­ac­tions take place.

To keep cel­e­brat­ing the craft of film, we have to rely on the sup­port of our mem­bers. Join Club LWLies today and receive access to a host of benefits.

If you haven’t lived it, it’s hard to explain, that gnaw­ing dis­com­fort that makes you want to do some­thing cer­ti­fied-cap­i­tal‑C loony-bin-admis­sion Crazy. Walk into traf­fic or throw your body down the stairs or slash up your skin with a razor blade or bite one of your fin­gers off like a baby car­rot. It’s like a lot of things. Like bugs play­ing house under your skin. Like the hum of tele­vi­sion sta­t­ic after pro­gram­ming stops for the night. Like going out of your fuck­ing mind. Times used to be that they’d just call you hys­ter­i­cal and throw you in an insti­tu­tion indef­i­nite­ly; maybe try elec­tro­con­vul­sive ther­a­py or a lobot­o­my to make you more agree­able. (I joke about lobot­o­mies a lot with my oth­er men­tal­ly ill friends. I guess the idea of remov­ing a part of my brain to make me a lit­tle eas­i­er to man­age is pret­ty fun­ny, like that old Wan­da Sykes gag about the detach­able pussy.)

So here are Grace (Jen­nifer Lawrence) and Jack­son (Robert Pat­tin­son), trans­plants from New York who take on the ruin of his uncle’s old prairie home after he shot him­self. He’s a musi­cian, she’s a writer. They’re tru­ly, mad­ly, deeply in love, and soon enough baby makes three: a sweet, chub­by-cheeked lit­tle pop­pet who gur­gles and cries and bab­bles and does all the things babies do. Jack­son goes back out to work, then brings home a dog that barks con­stant­ly and piss­es on the floor. Grace plays with the baby and dances in her under­wear and mas­tur­bates and drinks from sweat­ing bot­tles of Bud­weis­er in the sum­mer heat. And Grace goes out of her fuck­ing mind.

Ari­ana Harwicz’s nov­el ​‘Die, My Love’ is a stream-of-con­scious­ness assault on the sens­es; a name­less woman lives with her hus­band and baby and in-laws in a rur­al French farm­house, and retains a ten­u­ous grasp on real­i­ty. Her thoughts are vio­lent and trag­ic and ani­mal – she fan­ta­sis­es about a neigh­bour with a motor­bike, about the crea­tures in the for­est, about killing and being killed. It’s easy to under­stand why a film­mak­er like Lynne Ram­say might be inter­est­ed in adapt­ing a text as wil­ful­ly off­putting, as trag­ic and com­plex and fer­al as ​‘Die, My Love’. And this filmable script – co-writ­ten with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch – doesn’t always work, cer­tain­ly not with the same heft of Morvern Callar or You Were Nev­er Real­ly Here, fre­net­ic and dis­joint­ed with lots of wrig­gling ten­drils and not much inter­est in explor­ing more than a hand­ful of them. (LaKei­th Stan­field gets short shrift as Grace’s mys­te­ri­ous bik­er neighbour.)

But the cin­e­ma of Lynne Ram­say is cin­e­ma of the sens­es, raw and del­i­cate and alive, like hold­ing a but­ter­fly cupped between your palms and feel­ing its wings beat against your skin. Jen­nifer Lawrence com­plete­ly under­stands this, inhibit­ing Grace with a total lack of van­i­ty as she crawls on all fours, as she vio­lent­ly wrecks a small bath­room, as she tries to come back into com­mune with her body after some­thing as desta­bil­is­ing as bring­ing anoth­er per­son into the world. She’s nev­er been bet­ter, vul­ner­a­ble and ter­ri­ble and total­ly unpre­dictable, matched game­ly by the always com­pelling Robert Pat­tin­son, utilised as a wet, sweaty, semi-use­less man com­plete­ly ill-suit­ed for Grace’s needs. But a clas­sic Wife vs Hus­band melt­down à la Scenes from a Mar­riage or Pos­ses­sion would be too tempt­ing and famil­iar; the heart of Die, My Love is that Grace and Jack­son do love each oth­er, do want each oth­er, under­scored by the use of John Prine and Iris DeMent’s coun­try clas­sic ​‘In Spite Of Our­selves’. Their romance is one of push­ing and pulling, a dance you don’t learn the steps to so much as feel in the geog­ra­phy of your bones. And some­times you go where the oth­er can’t fol­low. Love is its own sort of psychosis.

While much will be made of Die, My Love​’s gut-wrench­ing por­tray­al of post­na­tal men­tal ill­ness, a lit­tle-stud­ied and even lit­tler-under­stood con­di­tion that makes witch­es out of women, the expe­ri­ence Ram­say cap­tures in Grace’s sto­ry isn’t unique to those who have chil­dren or are ill in the after­math of their birth. Psy­chosis is much big­ger, much stranger and vicious, and while Grace is a new moth­er, her ill­ness isn’t sole­ly attrib­uted to her son’s arrival. She adores him, even if she looks at him like he’s an alien. And how then, if you are psy­chot­ic, can you divorce your ill­ness from your art? Grace’s hus­band, her moth­er-in-law and her well-mean­ing neigh­bours all keep ask­ing how her writ­ing is going. Grace tells them she’s quit. It’s less trou­ble than try­ing to explain blood comes eas­i­er than ink.

Ram­say artic­u­lates the inar­tic­u­late, here through her sat­u­rat­ed blues, yel­lows, browns and greens, the colours of grief and sick­ness and rot…but also new life, sum­mer skies, and hope. The Acad­e­my ratio is an homage to Repul­sion and Rosemary’s Baby that gives the sen­sa­tion of being boxed in (of climb­ing up the walls) and Sea­mus McGarvey’s cin­e­matog­ra­phy ren­ders the beau­ti­ful ter­ri­ble and vice ver­sa. Ram­say also con­tributes music to the film’s noisy, messy, inten­tion­al­ly unteth­ered score, includ­ing the exquis­ite cov­er of Joy Division’s ​‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ that plays over the film’s cred­its – but Die, My Love isn’t a eulo­gy. It’s a for­est fire, destruc­tive, angry, hot­ter than hell. And when it burns out, some­thing new springs out from the ground.

To keep cel­e­brat­ing the craft of film, we have to rely on the sup­port of our mem­bers. Join Club LWLies today and receive access to a host of benefits.

Up front: I am not the world’s biggest Ari Aster boost­er. You might even say I was a tad Ari-nos­tic about his over-com­mit­ted and insis­tent works that, if noth­ing else, are coloured by the fact that the suc­cess of his 2018 fea­ture debut, Hered­i­tary, has allowed him to work freely from the tra­di­tion­al con­stants of the Hol­ly­wood machine. 

With Edding­ton, it feels a lit­tle like he’s wound his own leash in a tiny bit fol­low­ing the aggres­sive­ly indul­gent, pseu­do-Freudi­an clus­ter­fuck that was 2023’s Beau is Afraid, but this new one comes across as if the film­mak­er is try­ing once more to force a litany of good ideas, sol­id ideas and some bad ideas in a jar that just doesn’t have space to fit them all.

Amer­i­ca was already some way down the road of auto-destruct by the year 2020, with Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump hav­ing already pounced on the con­ve­nient capac­i­ty of elec­tron­ic media to obscure the nature of com­mon-sense truth. In the sleepy town­ship of Edding­ton, New Mex­i­co, sher­iff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) refus­es to employ his state-man­dat­ed pow­ers to enforce mask usage dur­ing the ear­ly days of the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic, see­ing the glob­al pan­dem­ic which laid waste to mil­lions of lives as some­body else’s prob­lem. No-one has it in Edding­ton, so maybe it doesn’t exist?

Incum­bent may­or of Edding­ton, Ted Gar­cia (Pedro Pas­cal), mean­while, demands that Cross put his unhelp­ful per­son­al beliefs aside and pro­mote pub­lic safe­ty dur­ing this unprece­dent­ed moment. Though he may be respon­si­ble for slick, manip­u­la­tive cam­paign videos and seems like an intel­lec­tu­al­ly reli­able and empa­thet­ic polit­i­cal can­di­date, Gar­cia, it tran­spires, is mere­ly a pawn for the wider par­ty, but also for shady big tech inter­ests who want to open a resource-sap­ping serv­er farm on his territory.

When Cross decides that his per­son­al lib­er­ty has been taint­ed to the point of indig­na­tion, he decides on a whim to run a grass­roots cam­paign against Gar­cia, opt­ing to whip up his blind­ly recep­tive online-fol­low­ing with slan­der and back-bit­ing rather than play by the rules. Mean­while, his wid­owed moth­er-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell) has gone full QAnon with her vora­cious inges­tion and par­rot­ing of online con­spir­a­cies, while his clear­ly-truama­tised wife Louise (Emma Stone) is on an anti-pae­dophile jag with the help of Austin Butler’s tattoo’d rightwing svengali.

This is the basic set-up of the film, and across an admirably light-foot­ed 2 hours and 15 min­utes it charts the incre­men­tal (but per­haps inevitable) process of Amer­i­can degra­da­tion via its to-do list of sacred cow tar­gets. These range from fer­vent 2^nd Amend­ment cham­pi­ons, small gov­ern­ment pro­po­nents and shady white suprema­cists to BLM pro­test­ers, White sav­iour com­plex types and even Antifa, who in this world are por­trayed as an elite, well-fund­ed com­man­do unit post­ed by pri­vate jet to take down spe­cif­ic irri­tant tar­gets. With Joe’s spi­ralling, ide­o­log­i­cal­ly-dri­ven antics now receiv­ing nation­al cov­er­age, he duly courts the ire of the Antifa enforcers.

Edding­ton is a deeply cyn­i­cal film for deeply cyn­i­cal times, and if you’re look­ing to find a hero to root for in this fucked-up fres­co, then you need to keep on walk­ing. Per­haps the clos­est we come to a locus for empa­thy is Micheal Ward’s new­ly mint­ed police-sergeant Michael, who is trapped between work­ing for a racist, igno­rant, self-serv­ing men­ace, and his white mil­len­ni­al ex-girl­friend who has at the front of BLM protests and wants him to join the as a Black offi­cer who acknowl­edges the rot in the system. 

This avowed­ly switched-on film is gor­geous­ly shot by the great Dar­ius Khond­ji and packed to the gills with east­er-egg like gags which empha­sise how the col­lec­tive brain-rot that comes from obses­sive post­ing has almost reached Def­con One. The film cer­tain­ly is rare in actu­al­ly offer­ing an authen­tic depic­tion of social media and its nox­ious capa­bil­i­ties, even if its insis­tence on prov­ing there’s no right­eous moral that can’t be swift­ly liq­ui­dat­ed does become a lit­tle tire­some by the home stretch. Phoenix, as ever, com­mits to the bit and then some, and he keeps his gal­lon-hat sport­ing tin­pot dem­a­gogue anchored with enough down­home charm to keep you sec­ond-guess­ing his motives.

I wouldn’t say that Ari Aster has entire­ly won me over with the full buf­fet, amuse bouche, entrées, two deserts, cig­ars, diges­tifs and petit fours that is Edding­ton, but the nee­dle is set clos­er to zero for his next mad­cap, every­thing-and-the-kitchen-sink offer­ing slides down the chute.

To keep cel­e­brat­ing the craft of film, we have to rely on the sup­port of our mem­bers. Join Club LWLies today and receive access to a host of benefits.

Eupho­ria and dev­as­ta­tion are the twin emo­tion­al poles that prop up the lop­sided big top that is Oliv­er Laxe’ Sirât, a film about life, death, and music that’s not made for your ears but for your heart. The film opens with the build­ing of a minia­ture ancient civil­i­sa­tion, the bricks and mor­tar being used are giant speak­ers that are being piled into sky­scraper-like mono­liths in the Moroc­can desert. 

A com­mu­ni­ty of tat­tooed rev­ellers who look like they have been sprung from a Mad Max movie have come to wor­ship at the altar of rave, and the film sets its audio­vi­su­al tem­plate by hav­ing them com­mune with bass-heavy elec­tron­ic music played at ear-split­ting volumes.

Enter ambling, wor­ried father Luis (Ser­gi López) and his pre-teen son Este­ban (Bruno Núñez), hand­ing out fly­ers for their miss­ing daughter/​sister, who left six months ago and was said to be at a desert rave like this one. They try not to harsh the oth­er ravers’ mel­low, but are ulti­mate­ly futile in their search. But they do meet Stephy (Ste­fa­nia Gad­da), Josh (Joshua Liam Herder­son), Tonin (Tonin Jan­vi­er), Jade (Jade Oukid) and Bigui (Richard Bel­lamy), who men­tion they’re going to be dri­ving down to anoth­er rave in Mau­ri­ta­nia, and so they fol­low the gang on their long road trip in a dinky peo­ple carrier. 

Laxe is a film­mak­er whose ear­ly work, such as We Are Not Cap­tains and Mimosas, inhab­it­ed a more play­ful metacin­e­mat­ic ter­ri­to­ry, while his most recent Fire Will Come from 2019 saw him erring a lit­tle more towards con­ven­tion­al nar­ra­tive and direct­ly artic­u­lat­ed themes. Sirât is his most expan­sive, unique and trou­bling (in a good way!) film, ini­tial­ly propos­ing some­thing that would seem cosi­ly approach­able – a study of a makeshift fam­i­ly formed around the search for a miss­ing woman – but piv­ots very sud­den­ly into the realms of sym­bol­ic fable, where the base ele­ments that have been served to us are sud­den­ly made to look and sound com­plete­ly different.

Bub­bling in the back­ground of the film is the sug­ges­tion of an apoc­a­lyp­tic soci­etal melt­down, as the first rave we join is even­tu­al­ly raid­ed by the mil­i­tary and every­one is told to dis­band and return to their homes. Our ad-hoc con­voy nev­er receive any direct threats from this omi­nous mil­i­tary pres­ence while on their jour­ney, but the rugged, for­bid­ding land­scape they trav­el across has been beat­en in and manip­u­lat­ed by years of strug­gle and con­flict. They dri­ve over ghosts, his­to­ry, the mem­o­ries of failed attempts to built the type of com­mu­ni­ty which they take for granted.

The gang are very easy­go­ing and chill, and Luis and Este­ban can’t help but form a deep­er bond than one where they’re mere nav­i­ga­tors. The pair are even a lit­tle amused when their gor­geous lit­tle dog Più Più is found con­vuls­ing hav­ing con­sumed a dose of LSD through one of the raver’s night­time shits. Laxe turns cer­tain char­ac­ter stereo­types inside out with these juiced-up ravers being con­sid­er­ate, philo­soph­i­cal, empa­thet­ic, humor­ous and com­plete­ly in tune with other’s needs. It’s a vision of a roughshod utopia, self-built and nes­tled on the out­er fringes of a civil­i­sa­tion that is crum­bling in on itself.

Yet just like puls­ing, repet­i­tive EDM music, the tone, the key, the melody and the BPMs sud­den­ly piv­ot to invite a dif­fer­ent type of dance and a new set of move­ments. Par­adise found is now par­adise lost, as the treach­er­ous route sud­den­ly gets the upper hand and this frag­ile unit begins to dis­in­te­grate. If you’re read­ing any­thing about this film and it starts to go into too much detail about its extra­or­di­nary sec­ond half, then you should stop read­ing instant­ly, as part of the mag­ic of this thrill is the expert way in which evolves into some­thing that is both over­whelm­ing­ly (even com­i­cal­ly) dark, but also offers the same rhap­sod­ic bod­i­ly dis­con­nect that the char­ac­ters them­selves are search­ing for.

Sirât is a tru­ly stag­ger­ing and major film, one that has to be seen to be believed – a mas­ter­ful gam­bit of affec­tion­ate char­ac­ter and com­mu­ni­ty build­ing that mutates into a work that deals with the pri­mal instincts of human sur­vival and the idea that we cre­ate our own gods through the things that we chose to worship.

To keep cel­e­brat­ing the craft of film, we have to rely on the sup­port of our mem­bers. Join Club LWLies today and receive access to a host of benefits.