Drean Scenario, Saltburn and Eileen

 

It's so strange when you are the only one in the cinema. Norwegian writer/director Kristoffer Borgli's drama is about fame and how any of us would cope. It asks what would we do, not what he does. Nicholas Cage is actually at his best (an Oscar awaits?) but the I just could not buy into the concept of the story. The screenplay was fine and it was well filmed, but the ending was so awful. Called a "surreal fantasy satire", but those dream sequences with their underlying threat became increasingly bizarre and horrific. Those who stayed away from Dream Scenario were lucky.

Anton Bitel in Sight and Sound Magazine December 2023: a surreal, ultimately sad satire of 21st-century online exposure.

A type of gothic drama was the latest by writer/director Emerald Fennell. All with added swearing, nudity and death. The story of Saltburn is a bit weird, but the dialogue is as brilliant as ever. Although it is Barry Keoghan that is OK in the lead as creepy Oliver, it's the two parents of his friend who act all the others off the set. Rosamund Pike and Richard E Grant would have to fight each other for best supporting actor. But then there is little known Alison Oliver as their daughter Venetia who might trump them both with that bathtub scene. She's the most vulnerable character in the film.

I loved that first half hour in Oxford, particularly the opening scene as we follow Oliver from behind as he makes his way to college on his first day. The rest takes place at that big country mansion, in real life Drayton House in Northamptonshire. The picture is much squarer than normal, filmed in 1:33:1, standard for tv before widescreen. So there are times when we just see the faces and nothing else. The ending is uncomfortable, deaths being wrapped up clumsily. Not a happy conclusion.

From Sophie Monks Kaufman in Sight and Sound Magazine December 2023: Saltburn feels like it was melted down from a moodboard dotted with images from better films.

I was expecting something a bit different from William Oldroyd's Eileen. The whole film seems squalid, from the ramshackle interiors of the underclass shacks in 1960's snowbound Massachusetts, to washed out colour and the creepy characters who inhabit the jail. These include assistant Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway as the new consultant phycologist. Poles apart in background, they form a surreal partnership that forms the basis of the ending. The directors earlier film from 2016, Lady Macbeth, I called "raw and powerful" and this had the same feel. A fairly claustrophobic small drama with a thriller ending, it relies on the superb performances from the two leads in what is almost a filmed play. 

Cailtlin Quinten in Sight and Sound Magazine December 2023: This neat assertive film .... glimmers and surprises.