Posts Tagged ‘fantasy thriller’

Myrte and the Demons (1950)

Dir: Paul Bruno Schreiber | Fantasy Drama 82’

Reviewed by Richard Chatten

According to the narrator, this fairy tale with obviously post-synced English dialogue “is the story of little Myrte, just as it actually happened, between midday and sunrise. The story as Myrte lived it herself.”

Described in the opening credits as “A film of the European Art Union”, it was a Dutch-British co-production (shot on the estate of the Huis te Manpad, Heemstede); and anticipates those Eastern European children’s films like ‘The Singing Ringing Tree’ that used to be screened cut up into episodes on BBC1 during the sixties.

It feels like an amateur film – not necessarily a bad thing – and although photographed both prettily and atmospherically by associate producer Bert Haanstra (later a distinguished documentary director) and full of both appealing and surreal images (such as the line-up of enormous, staring-eyed killer guard dolls), the film rambles badly; and Marinus Adam’s score, while attractive, never lets up when a little silence would occasionally be in order to generate a bit of atmosphere.

As played by grotesque puppets (which reminded me of The Telegoons), the demons really resemble trolls or goblins rather than fully-fledged demons; but they certainly look creepy enough to give kids nightmares, and the film carried an ‘A’ certificate when distributed in Britain.

Although their stated objective is to “destroy her soul”, after they’ve turned Myrte’s dog, goat and her dolls to stone they then take on human form (these demons can do this only between midnight and dawn), which makes them look considerably less scary than they did as puppets; and they don’t do anything particularly demoniacal thereafter. Instead they stage a sort of interminable Mad Hatter’s Tea Party which takes up most of the second half of the film; enlivened briefly by two female demons: one who rather resembles the Black Ghost in Edward D.Wood Jr.’s ‘Night of the Ghouls’, who just sits there not saying a word until suddenly snatching up Myrte’s pet white rabbit and attempting to decapitate it; and the other a sort of spider woman with long ugly talons, who abruptly disrupts the tea party by bursting out from under the table, before turning into a ballerina in a tutu. It’s that sort of film.

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The Ice Tower (2025)

Reviewed by Ian Long

Dir: Lucile Hadžihalilović | Fantasy Thriller 2025.

Lucile Hadžihalilović specialises in creating private worlds where strange things happen: interior realms with their own rules and codes, enclosed and off-limits to outsiders.

Her first film, Innocence (2004), was a rite of passage set in a heightened, oneiric girls’ school. It took its characters through various tests, symbolic death, and finally exploded into a joyous rebirth which said everything about the coming of new powers and possibilities. And it proclaimed an exciting new female heir to the legacy of Surrealism.

Hadžihalilović’s two subsequent films were intriguing and beautifully crafted, but I didn’t find them as gripping as her debut. Evolution (2015) was too much a male-centred recapitulation of Innocence, while the lack of narrative interest in the young girl at the centre of the English-language Earwig (2022) added to its general sense of airless impenetrability. The film now feels like a misstep.

My fears that The Ice Tower would be even more abstruse and desiccated than Earwig quickly subsided on viewing the film, which returns Hadžihalilović to her core strength: full and blissful immersion in someone else’s dream. But that’s not to say the story is in any way jolly.

It centres on unhappy teenager Jeanne, who is preoccupied not only by the Snow Queen fairytale she reads to younger sister Rose, but by the forbidding, all-too-real icy mountains which tower over the village where she lives.

Jeanne runs away from home with no apparent plan, taking little except her prized possession, a string of chunky beads whose significance later becomes clear. She steals I.D. papers from Bianca, a glamorous but unfriendly girl she meets at an ice rink and, needing somewhere to sleep, breaks into a mysterious building whose purpose will change her life. It’s a film studio.

Hadžihalilović herself is clearly in love with film, and she likes to drop clues to her cinematic influences. The Ice Tower takes place in a town named Alpenville, calling Jean Luc Godard to mind. At one stage we see a poster for The Red Shoes. And Jeanne’s tumble down a frozen mountainside, in which she hits her head on a rock, is reminiscent of the stony snowball in Les Enfants Terribles (Cocteau’s spirit looms large over the film).

And Hadžihalilović helpfully set out twelve of her cinematic inspirations for The Ice Tower in a Variety interview: a roll-call of landmarks, from The Spirit of the Beehive to The Birds via Veronika Voss and Daughters of Darkness. But more than any of the director’s picks, the film reminded me of Richard Rush’s Stunt Man (1980), where another powerless interloper is drawn into the world of a film shoot and finds the boundaries between reality, dream and fiction fatefully blurred.

In both films, potentially malign fantasy spills out from the movie set and into the lives and world beyond. And in both, a hapless protagonist falls under the spell of a powerful and charismatic older person. In Stunt Man it’s Peter O’Toole’s megalomaniac director Eli Cross; in The Ice Tower, it’s Cristina (Marion Cotillard), the shimmering, self-involved star of the studio’s current production, whose cold capriciousness makes her perfect casting for the Snow Queen of Jeanne’s imagination.

The Ice Tower begins and ends with another Hadžihalilović hallmark, a screen filled with abstract shapes: in this case, soft-focus, slowly twirling snow crystals. Perhaps the best testament to the spell cast by the film is that, rather than dashing out at the end of the action, most of the case-hardened critics at my screening stayed on through the end titles to catch the last of the icy swirls and to hear the final strains of the glacial music accompanying them. @_I_a_n_l_o_n_g_

THE ICE TOWER | in UK cinemas 21 November 2025

 

Blue Velvet (1986) David Lynch Retrospective

Dir|Writer: David Lynch | Cast: Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Dean Stockwell, Hope Lange, Priscilla Pointer | US | Fantasy thriller | 120min

In the recent eponymous documentary The Artlife, David Lynch talks about unsettling events that took place during his childhood in a small-town American setting, similar to Lumberton where Blue Velvet takes place (although this feels like a larger city given its river and industrial wasteland). One of these incidents involved a naked woman outside his neighbour Dickie’s house. Sitting on a curb, she was crying and bleeding from the mouth – is this Dorothy? Those pivotal moments seem to have sparked a dark introspective quality in Lynch that he can’t talk about, but that later found its way into his films: Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive.

Blue Velvet is a noirish fantasy thriller flecked with irony, and a convincing rites of passage love story. Lynch could easily be Jeffrey Beaumont, the pleasant college boy who returns to the fictitious town of Lumberton to run the family hardware shop, while his father recovers in hospital from an incident involving the garden hose. The discovery of a severed human ear then takes Jeffrey to the local police chief, Detective John Williams, whose daughter Sandy will become Jeffrey’s accomplice in an adventure that leads to sexual awakening – although not with Sandy, at least not in the beginning.

Clearly, both Lynch and Jeffrey Beaumont come from similar loving families, but they also strive for adventure and, particularly, the darker side of life. Not content with running the local hardware store, student Jeffrey turns detective, hatching a plan that dices with danger, based on Sandy’s inside information on the police inquiry. And this involves gaining access to the home of nigh-club singer Dorothy Vallens (Rossellini) who is linked to the case and lives nearby. What Jeffrey discovers next involves a sordid criminal underworld that excites and appals him. Gradually he is drawn into a nefarious web of sexual deviancy, deceit and murder that runs contrary to his simple life in the lumber town where the most dangerous threat is being hit by a falling tree. A place where “a woodchuck actually knows how much wood he can chop” according to the local radio station.

This is a thriller full of contrasts: red roses and white picket fences jossle with a severed human ear and a kidnapped child. Tonally, Lynch lurches successfully from sinister noir to light romance, and dissonant irony, and the dissonance is what makes it all so compelling. Jeffrey and Sandy are squeaky clean (how does the raunchy red décapotable fit in?) – sanitised even, in contrast to Dennis Hopper’s snarlingly vicious sadist and Isabella Rossellini’s battered bunny boiler. The motley crew that hang around in Rossellini’s private life – when she is not crooning on the dance floor of The Slow Club – are truly are a weird mix of depraved old biddies and over the hill hill billies, one of whom is also a convincing crooner in the style of Elvis (Dean Stockwell) . These are surely snatches from a Lynchian teenage dream, and over the years he has successfully channelled this dream life into the world of film.

Back in the day Blue Velvet was quite shocking – the scissor scene is seared to the memory; 30 years later the bizarre and ironic elements come to fore – the opening scene with the garden spray and dog and the final one with the model bird – and it feels almost quaint and Eighties. The score is magnetic and memorable but without the florid colour this could actually be a 1940s film Noir, complete with its functioning factories, Deco diners and even a smaltzy night club. The power of great cinema is its ability to re-invent itself across the generations. MT

NOW AT BFI SOUTHBANK as part of a David Lynch retrospective  

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