8 stars

dir: Adrian Chiarella

2026

I’ll be honest, it’s not like there are any parts of the Bible or the Torah that aren’t problematic. If you’re not a godbotherer, the whole book is basically composed of every red flag possible that the patriarchy has to offer. Naming your horror film over the book of the Bible that contains the so-called Holiness Code governing how people of the (Levite) faith should or should not comport themselves sexually, is meant to be a direct provocation. Tell an alleged Christian who’s screaming against “the gays” where Jesus said anything about them or abortion, and invariably they mention “Leviticus!”, as if the rest of us have to take their fantasy book seriously, and Jesus didn’t even write it (probably got AI to write it).

Well, if you make a horror movie about this very idea, then I’m going to have to take it very seriously indeed.

This is an Australian film, which you can tell if you don’t know going into it by the sheer quantity of times that characters, teenage boys, call each other the so-called ‘c’ word. Scots brag about how comfortably they use it but Trainspotting didn’t drop it as many times as it’s dropped here. But it’s not a feature of the film, just a parenthetical bug. The real meat and potatoes of this flick is how scary the happy clappers are, how certain in their actions. The anointed. The chosen. The willingness they possess to torment others in the name of preventing anyone from ever being happy. Allegedly because they imagine an infinite being that’s ever so petty that it would care who rubs what against what, and not whether they had consent or not.

Who is the real villain in this horror film? Well, obviously the true villain is racism, no, wait, it’s not racism, it’s religion-derived homophobia, whether internalised or not. Teenage boys discovering that they have ‘feelings’ for each other can do some terrible things when they don’t want to admit to themselves and each other that they might be gay. This strange town also somehow seems to be in thrall to the local godbotherers, who are a step up from your local Anglicans and even the Catholics don’t go this hard. They seem more like evangelicals / Pentecostals, whose beliefs and actions would seem strange even to the Christian faithful.

dir: Steven Soderbergh

2026

America’s greatest living director makes another pretty good okayish movie in Britain somewhere. Yay!

Yay?

Extra points to all involved for being British. This flick is already turning up on Best of 2026 lists, even though it’s June 2026, because people love writing up Best of lists so much that they’re now resorting to Best of 2026 so far lists, and, like the loyal trained seal that I am, I click on them anyway.

Perceptive enough to see when clickbait is generated – not perceptive enough to stop clicking on it.

The Christophers is unlike the vast majority of flicks that Soderbergh has ever made, but then his oeuvre of flicks has almost no consistency in terms of actors, technique or theme, except for the Ocean’s ones maybe. And with that in mind maybe it’s not beyond the pale to describe this as a very slow version of one of those heist movies.

Although the pleasure in this is not watching how a heist gets pulled off; it’s solely in watching these characters interact, even though that doesn’t feel entirely accurate. There is dialogue in this film, as in, two actors or more talking with each other, responding to each other. Yet large swathes of the flick involve one person pontificating, monologuing, old mansplaining to his heart’s content.

It helps when the monologuist is played by Sir Ian McKellen. The great Sir Ian McKellen. The strange thing for me about Sir Ian McKellen is that he’s played an old man for so long that to me he’s like someone who’s been ancient for the last 40 years, which doesn’t make logical sense.

If the first flick I saw him in that I remember him from is Gods and Monsters from the 90s, where he played the famous director of the original Frankenstein movies James Whale, as an old lion in decline, how is it that 30 years later he’s playing a similar role now? Was he faking it back then? Being old? It’s hard to fake, you’d think, but nothing is beyond a thespian of his salty calibre, surely?

Maybe these days he finds it helpful to play an old man because… he is an old, old salty dusty man now, or always was, and I guess it’s not like he can play a young man instead(?)

Here he plays a celebrated, if not infamous, British artist perhaps in the style of David Hockney or either one of Gilbert and / or George. I say “perhaps” because I’m not going to pretend I am completely up to date on the contemporary art scene, British or otherwise. And additionally I don’t think Julian is in the place Hockney was just before he died last week, in that Hockney was much beloved, certainly hadn’t been ‘cancelled’, and was still producing works that were selling for squillions.

Oh, and, in terms of David Hockney: Rest in Peace, Mr Hockney – no-one will be able to paint a swimming pool for the next 100 years without being accused of ripping you off.

dir: Ian Tuason

2026

There might not be anything scarier than the thought of looking after your parents as they lay dying.

Based on a dedication at the end of the credits, this director spent around three years looking after both of his parents as they slowly declined, in the house the movie is entirely set within, and, yes, it can take a lot out of you, and affect your mind in ways you couldn’t have imagined.

Years after the fact, I sometimes still hear my dad cry out for help in my sleep, and wake up terrified that I’ve let him down again.

So, it would be counterproductive and awfully precious to claim that this film undertone is targeting those members of the audience who’ve had this experience of looking after a parent or loved one as the sands ever so slowly, then abruptly, and then slowly again, run out of their hourglass. The movie takes that as its basis, as in, the experience of going nuts as you’re providing that level of care for someone, too afraid to leave the house in case something happens, desperate to get away to breath, painstakingly doing all the things you can to keep them alive, while wondering how much longer it can possibly take, and smushes it together with a podcast / audio experience from Hell weaving in contemporary ‘true crime’ type tropes and ancient myths.

As if it wasn’t horrifying enough already.

dir: Kane Parsons

2026

This is, thus far at least, one of the best and most successful horror flicks of the year, springing as it does from what I would have thought was one of the less likeliest places to arise from, being a series of Youtube videos that have been watched tens if not hundreds of millions of times.

Though of course there are cute cat videos that have billions of views, so let’s hope they don’t get their own franchise.

Why this all seems so unlikely is that around 4 years ago a sixteen year old kid started making these creepy videos, a mixture of ‘found footage’ stuff filmed with video cameras and 3D stuff made with Blender and Adobe After Effects (and a lot of heavy breathing and someone saying “what the fuck?” every few seconds), and a legend was reborn. I say ‘reborn’ because all of this is dredged from the depths of the internet itself, iterations of iterations, copies of copies, but this version really got a lot of eyeballs and fans, regardless or because of its creepypasta origins.

In what I regard as a curious trajectory, the success of The Backrooms online meant that a studio, being A24, offered this 19-year-old (he’s now 20) ten million dollars to turn this concept into a feature length movie, and a certain percentage of the people who viewed and loved his stuff on Youtube turned out and made this flick a tremendous success.

And the baffling thing (for us oldies) is that all the film references we would make or would think must have been relevant for this director and this production, are not. We are going to mention Kubrick and David Lynch and maybe Tarkovsky or movies like Skinamarink or The Blair Witch Project, or Severance and if Kane Parsons was listening to us, he’d probably tilt his head to the side quizzically as to the references, never having seen or heard of them.

He’s coming from a different place. It resonates with the youngs because it comes from a different place.

You know that I can’t avoid pretentious blather when it seems relevant. So the phrase I’m going to repeat, that has also been used in a million videos, is “liminal spaces”, or a “the fear or the horror of liminal spaces”. In between places. Open plan office spaces. Office spaces in general. Office spaces specifically. Places that seem unnatural even when nothing specifically or obviously creepy is happening.

Spaces painted in colours and patterns no one should ever have agreed to. Hallways and doorways, wherever there is a recess in shadow, meaning there is something always lurking potentially somewhere. And there is, something, somewhere, but even seeing glimpses of things is not as unsettling as these spaces.