Thriller/Suspense

dirs. Madeline Sims-Fewer & Dusty Mancinelli

2026

This film doesn’t feel like it was ‘produced’, or extruded by any kind of machine or blind process: it feels like it was made, created, crafted by people who wanted to carefully put something specific together.

It’s not a feeling I always get when I’m watching movies, because most of them feel and look like everything else you’ve seen before in order to not scare the horses, mostly. And mostly what that results in is movies that go down smooth and easy and are barely memorable afterwards.

Honey Bunch is not one of those movies that I will forget easily. A movie that starts with a song from a weirdo Scottish polymath like Ivor Cutler, called I Worn My Elbows to the Bone, for You, is going to be a memorable entry into a film’s world.

And what a disturbing world it is. We see a man push a wheelchair with his disabled beloved towards the waves, and then carry her into the water, for no good purpose, we imagine, despite the fact that he tells her “I love you” when it looks like he’s going to drown her.

From grim beginnings grim things grow. In sunnier times that same husband, Homer (Ben Petrie) is driving some 70s station wagon to some country place. His wife Diana (Grace Glowicki) wakes in the passenger seat, unsure of what’s going on, which will persist for about the next hour.

There is reference made to an accident, there are hopes expressed about someone finally being able to help her with her issues, and all of it seems like the creepy set up to countless horror flicks where someone tries to do something terrible to a woman.

When they meet the main person who seems to run the show, called Farah (Kate Dickie), things only seem to become even more ominous, because, well, if you’ve seen Kate Dickie in stuff before, her appearance is always a cause for concern.

Kate Dickie has been in a million things, but for me when she played Lysa Arryn way back in the day, in Game of Thrones, it sealed the deal for me for a certain type of typecasting that meant whenever I am to see her pop up in something again, I’m naturally going to think she’s up to terrible, terrible things. It’s not Kate Dickie’s fault that Lysa Arryn’s actions in that show caused every action that followed, eight years of butchery and misery for hundreds of thousands of people, but it’s not something easy to forget, just like the image of her breastfeeding her appalling teenaged son.

dir: Steven Soderbergh

2024

America’s most reliably competent director is back with another reliably competent movie / genre exercise. It’s too much of an experiment to just consider it as a straight haunted house / ghost story flick, but it’s one that aims to tell its story somewhat uniquely, rather than just deliver thrills and/or chills.

Soderbergh has long been his own cinematographer, under the fake name of Peter Andrews this time, which means he’s the one holding the camera during these long, choreographed takes. The slight difference here, is that the ‘camera’ is the ‘presence’ of the title, a presence that observes what’s happening (which is why we get to see it), but is also occasionally sensed by some of the characters.

Nothing indicates why the presence, or ghost, is where it is. It roams through the empty house and settles back into a closet, before doing it all again as a realtor shows a family through the house. The teenage girl of the family is the only one who feels that there’s something wrong, some ‘thing’ floating around observing her, being the camera/ghost. It’s weird.

It’s weird on a number of levels. It’s weird in the sense that she sense’s there’s a supernatural presence there. It’s weird because she’s directing her attention towards the camera, something that never happens in 99 per cent of movies, whereby the unspoken rule is “never look at the camera, and never make eye contact with Tom Cruise”. It’s weird on a third level because it’s almost (at least for me) like she’s detecting that we, as in the audience, are watching her. Like she knows we’re there, and she’s uncomfortable about it, which kinda makes me feel voyeuristic and uncomfortable about it, too.

dir: Christopher Landon

2025

There’s something a bit brave about making a flick dependent on some fad app that is already forgotten by the time audiences get to watch the flick. If there is an app that insists, that allows random fuckheads to force you to download it in order to receive messages which disappear after you look at them, I don’t know about it, but I am aware that people can “drop” messages or photos to each other using a panoply of apps, but it’s already wronger than wrong.

And I don’t care. This story is entirely dependent on these apps to maintain tension or a sense of being surveilled at all times, but it’s bullshit, and it doesn’t matter in the end. The point of the premise is that it’s a thriller premise, and a woman at one location, being a fancy restaurant, is being watched constantly by someone in the restaurant, who forces her to do things because, back at home, her son and sister are being menaced by some jerk with a gun, which she can also see via her phone.

Depending on who you believe, almost everyone in America is either being menaced with a gun in their homes or is doing the menacing themselves at any given moment. The strength or failure of such a premise is entirely dependent on whether we think it’s believable for someone to be trapped in such a way, and to go along with what her antagonists want, until she finds a heroic solution to all her problems. If you buy it, then this flick becomes an exciting thrill ride as a young widow chooses to either go along with or reject the dictates of what the unknown psycho pestering her through her phone is forcing her to do.

I can’t think of many flicks like this, but I’m sure there are a bunch of them. There are plenty of flicks where someone forces the protagonist to do whatever under threat of something worse happening, but I can’t think of too many where someone is restricted to one location and observed from every possible angle which the protagonist can’t figure out for most of the plot.

dir: Zoë Kravitz

2024

It’s not enough that her parents are Lisa Bonet and Lenny Kravitz who are, if nothing else, two of the most supernaturally attractive people on the planet. It’s not enough that her parents are incredibly talented and successful as well in their respective fields. It’s not enough that Ms Kravitz is immensely talented and successful herself, and that she’s been great in most of the performances I’ve ever seen her give, in films as different as The Batman and, a film I actually liked, being Kimi or that remake series of High Fidelity.

Now she wants to successfully direct movies as well. Goddamn talented nepo babies: a leg up and a foot through the door, and so much more.

Also, as if to emphasise what a nepo baby experience this all is, a child of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman is in this, but no, it’s not Maya – it’s their son Levon, who plays a complete nothing of a character. He is there just to remind us what the untalented nepo babies are up to.

Plus, Ms Kravitz also hires her fiancé, who’s clearly hurting for work, being Channing Tatum, to play one of the main roles here: that of a tech billionaire who’s always vaping.

If only that was the worst of his crimes. This is one of those movies where someone accidentally or unintentionally gets trapped in a place where they might get hunted or murdered or worse. You know, like those films where rich people hunt poor people for their selfish amusement.

The twist in the tail here is that the rich tech bros led by Slater King, which is a name so terrible it could only be the name of a vile tech bro who rubs shoulders with the likes of Elmo Husk or Peter Thiel, have it all figured out. He and his other monsters are monstrous predators, but they are comfortable ones.

The thing is, right from the start, we know something odd is going on, and that’s a good place to start from.