MIFF 2018 - Day 5

Scary Mother

Hard to categorise, but who cares? This is a fascinating and uncomfortable film with a meta narrative around the exploitative nature of writing. But it's also playing with mental illness, patriarchy, exploitation and delusion. It delights in flipping your sympathies and screwing with your understanding of what's going on. Weirdly, it would make an excellent double feature with Bodied.

The First Lap

A young couple reckon with societal expectations and their own fear and confusion in this low key and beautifully observed film. It's a slice of life drama with a keen eye for the trials and joys of the couple. Really lovely.

Ghosthunter

This film was a shock. I'd call it false advertising but that's not entirely fair. What starts out as a study of a guy who hunts ghosts in his spare time quickly becomes about him hunting the ghosts of his past, and it's awful. Just about every kind of abuse you could imagine ends up being part of the subject, and the going becomes really heavy. It's a great film, but just make sure you're ready for it. It wrecked me.

The Cured

The tropiest trope that ever troped. I called the ending straight away, and while it threw out some clever ideas, it did nothing with them and just fell back into lazy tropeland. Really disappointing and just infuriatingly lazy and dumb.