A critique of human disintegration via systemic violence, utilising horror to reveal how monstrosity is socially engineered rather than naturally inherent: The Substance positions the human body as a site where external societal forces relentlessly shape and deform individuals. At its centre lies a profound exploration of violence as a cultural construct, rooted in civilisation's foundational rupture, irreparably fracturing the human subject, rendering individuals as mere byproducts of a perpetuated system. The film, through Kubrickian visual cues and psychoanalytic undertones,…
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Love Lies Bleeding 2024
Love Lies Bleeding is a masterful exploration of the transformative power of love and forgiveness, blending fantastical elements seamlessly with its narrative. The fantastic and the real becomes a plural one, challenging the whole. At its core lies the examination of to which extent individuals go when driven by love and their capacity for forgiveness.
The director’s use of chiaroscuro lighting and ethereal, yet poppy set designs is a deliberate strategy to create a diegetically sound world. Recurrent motifs of…Translated from by
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Evil Does Not Exist 2023
Evil Does Not Exist is a sublime visual exegesis, invoking a phenomenological praxis that resonates profoundly with theoretical strands such as Campt's seminal work, "Listening to Images. Exercise on Counterintuition". Ryusuke's film could thus be seen as such an exercise, meticulously crafted to challenge and subvert conventional epistemologies. It further interrogates the polysemic nature of evil through a balanced series of linear and non-linear vignettes, each posing ontological inquiries. These inquiries culminate in a (non-) synthesis, a fractured piece, a heterogenous…
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La Chimera 2023
La Chimera seems to combine things which could at times be seen as contrary into a heterogeneous amalgam: Enticing, funny, preposterous, melancholic and deeply political. Via meticulously crafted cinematographic concepts, not wasting a single breath of the movie on something unnecessary and thus becoming almost obsessed with a ostensibly perfect and rich shot list, the film manages to shape itself to be the ideal candidate for a future reference point. Using antique myths as fixtures to construct a world that…
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