The Stimming Pool (12A)
Directed by The Neurocultures Collective and Steven Eastwood
★★★★

SET in the south of England, this self-reflexive instance of cinematic “faction” follows five young adults as they travel through an hour-long narrative that offers up visions of what it is like to have autism: how it can motivate thoughts and feelings, inform dreams and creativity, as well as affect interpersonal behaviour and social positioning.

Drawing on pop cultural artefacts such as George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko and Monty Python’s The Ministry of Silly Walks, the film constructs and sustains a mediated air of infoxication (information overload), disconnection and alienation throughout. 

The effect such a stifling atmosphere can have upon the self is exemplified by the introduction of the character of “Shapeshifter,” played by An(dre)a Spisto. Out of place at a desk in their office and, later, out of sync on a treadmill at their gym, Shapeshifter returns to the dark safety of their empty home, wronged and wired. Here they soon morph into their inner spirit animal, crawling, swimming and growling over the floor and furniture, transforming the mundane into something more natural and special, somewhere where they feel they belong.

Indeed, as the film continues to illustrate how social settings and social conformity can overcrowd and overwhelm the sensitivities of those on the autistic spectrum, it gradually becomes reminiscent of the dystopian sci-fi dramas screened by the BBC in the early 1980s. In turn, The Stimming Pool seems to be quite aware that such dramas themselves were influenced by, for example, the post-apocalyptic premises of Chris Marker’s La Jetee and Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner from the 1960s.

Shot on 16mm by Gregory Oke, this film can be understood as a series of intimate performative portraits which bristle with emotional intensity, escapist ideas and aesthetic awkwardness in their surreal exploration and celebration of human difference.

It is highly recommended.
 

Brett Gregory
In cinemas Friday.

Misericordia (15)
Directed by Alain Guiraudie
★★★★

IN the opening shot of Alain Guiraudie’s inside-out murder mystery you drive through expanses of forest in southern France and into the labyrinth of a small village, from the entanglements of which, it seems, there is no escape. This is somewhere where everyone knows everyone else’s business, where the police interrogate you in your sleep and mushrooms betray the shallow grave.

The film is inside-out because the hero is not only the stranger who upsets the social balance with his assortment of fetishes and lusts, but also the murderer. The question is who will help him to get away with it, and why?

This same combination of gay sexuality and woodland violence was a feature of Guiraudie’s previous feature, Stranger by the Lake. There, the camera held back. Here among strangely brilliant performances he takes you up close and personal to follow every lie, every truth and every desire. 

For such a perverse story it is strikingly earthy and convincing, and for sure a fascinating exploration of the nature of mercy. 

Uncomfortable, but masterful.
 

Angus Reid
In cinemas Friday.

La Cocina (The Kitchen) (15)
Directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios
★★★

BASED on the 1957 Arnold Wesker play, The Kitchen, which met exceptional success all over the world, this edition plays out in the kitchen of a New York restaurant.

The leitmotif is a smouldering love affair between a US waitress Julia (a beautifully measured Rooney Mara) and a gifted if volatile Mexican chef Pedro (an excellent Raul Briones).

Alonso Ruizpalacios populates the kitchen with a melange of immigrants, some illegal, and a few native blacks, all desperate to survive in dehumanising work conditions familiar to those working in fast-food outlets today.

An $823.78 missing from the day’s takings, later found to have been misplaced, temporarily sets the management against the workers and ups the tension. 

Pedro’s final orgy of destruction, triggered by personal frustration, has more comedy than apocalyptic pathos. The restaurant owner’s rhetorical bewilderment: “They are employed, get paid, get fed — what else do they want?” remains, however, key to capital and labour interaction.
 

Michal Bonzca
In cinemas Friday.

Irena’s Vow (R)
Directed by Louise Archambault
★★★

IRENA’S VOW is written by Dan Gordon who also wrote the Broadway play of the same title. It stars Sophie Nelisse as Irena, a Polish nurse who helps shelter and protect Jewish people during the occupation by hiding them in the cellar of the home where she’s employed as a housekeeper to a Nazi officer.  

This Canadian-Polish co-production is based on an apparently true story not dissimilar to many others that have been told, of ordinary people revealing their humanity and bravery by risking their own lives to help save the lives of those persecuted by the Nazis. It certainly pulls no punches in revealing Nazi brutality, and it is not surprising that it received Polish government support, as it serves to counteract those stories, denied by nationalist forces in Poland of Polish collaboration with the persecution of Jews. 

Even though it is rather disconcerting to have a film shot in Poland in which everyone, even the Germans, speaks English, it is a moving story, well-acted and beautifully shot in muted colours, but adds little to what we already know about this era.  
 

John Green
In cinemas Friday.

The End (R)
Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer
★

THIS atrocity of a film manages to combine the worst sentimentality of the Hollywood musical with the worst excess of the Hollywood film. It is unwatchable.

Just ask yourself: what would have happened in the saltmines where Nazis hid famous artworks had Adolf and Eva fitted out a nice apartment and had a kid? What kind of perverse mind wants us to sympathise with these architects of apocalypse and watch them gel as a family unit? And whose mad idea was it to have them break into song with full orchestra and expect us to take it seriously?

There’s a layer of eco-waffle standing in for the apocalypse, and a half decent turn by Moses Ingram as the plot device, but when actors are required to do dance moves and sing they forget what to do with their hands and adopt a mannequin-like mid-distance stare, and this absurd mannerism infects everyone in this grotesque, pretentious and ill-conceived film, from Tilda Swinton’s bewigged clothes-hanger to George Mackay’s painfully Maga cry-baby.

Avoid.
 

Angus Reid
In cinemas Friday.