www.list.co.uk/film
DRAMA/THRILLER THE READER (15) 123min ●●●●●
In a West German town at the end of the 1950s, 15-year-old Michael (David Kross) starts a passionate affair with Hanna (Kate Winslet), a tram conductor more than twice his age. The relationship is sweet as well as sexually charged – Michael spends much of his time with Hanna reading aloud to her – but after a few months, Hanna suddenly disappears, and it’s almost a decade before Michael sees her again. By this time, he is a law student and she is standing trial for war crimes. In adapting Bernhard Schlink’s much-loved novel, Stephen Billy Elliot Daldry and David Hare stay largely faithful to their source. The result is almost as subtle, and just as involving and more emotionally restrained than their last collaboration, 2003’s The Hours. Like the novel, the film is a Holocaust story, but the focus is less on the atrocities committed (which never appear on screen) than their emotional fallout and its devastating effect on generations of ordinary Germans. So the central performances hold the film together. Rising German star Kross neatly makes the transition from goofy lovesick teen to troubled law student, and Ralph Fiennes, who plays Michael as an adult, is suitably withdrawn; but it is Winslet who is the dark beating heart of the film. As Hanna, she balances brusque impassivity with desperate, inconsolable sadness, and gives a voice to the question at the heart of the story. When the judge at her trial lists her crimes, she makes no attempt to shy away from them, but instead asks him: ‘What would you have done?’ Blamelessness and the objectification of the guilt have rarely been better essayed. (Alyssa McDonald) ■ General release from Fri 2 Jan.
Reviews Film
HORROR MUM & DAD (18) 85min ●●●●● If you appreciate black humour and have a strong stomach there’s much to be admired in Steven Sheil’s low budget British horror. Exploiting the ongoing trend for torture porn, it transports the sadomasochistic splatter-fest of the Hostel and Saw series from Eastern Europe and urban America to an English working class suburban home on the outskirts of Heathrow airport. Within the confines of this modest two-up, two-down unfortunate Romanian migrant worker Lena (Olga Fedori) discovers just how dysfunctional a family of four can be when she’s lured into a domestic nightmare by chatterbox lavatory cleaner co-worker Birdie (Ainsley Howard) and her mute brother (Toby Alexander) and subsequently serially abused by their Mum (Dido Miles) and Dad (Perry Benson, recently seen in more benign form in Shane Meadows’ Somers Town).
There’s more going on in Mum & Dad than initially meets the eye. Where its American torture porn cousins amount to nothing more than gruesome joyrides, Sheil’s film, while pretty extreme in its own right (the Christmas Day climax shouldn’t be watched while eating turkey), also gives good sardonic commentary on the inherently perverse nature of the family unit. The home-made torture might recall the real-life horror of Josef Fritzl, but it’s the Brothers Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel that’s proper inspiration for this modern fairytale. (Miles Fielder) ■ Cameo, Edinburgh and selected release from Fri 26 Dec.
DRAMA/CRIME TO GET TO HEAVEN FIRST YOU HAVE TO DIE (BIHISHT FAQAT BAROI MURDAGON) (15) 95min ●●●●●
Tajikistani writer/director Jamshed Usmonov’s macho but engaging, quirky and darkly humourous tale of impotence and mafia initiation is his first since 2002’s equally measured and memorable Angel on the Right. Set, like that film, in and around the Asht province of Tajikistan (on the northernmost tip of the northwestern Sughd province), To Get To Heaven... is the story of 20-year-old Kamal (Khurshed Golibekov) whose impotence since marriage has led him on a journey of sorts to the region. With little to do he hangs around the town watching women and attempting to kick start his libido. Then one day he meets Vera (Dinara Drukarova). But with Vera comes her psychotic petty thief husband (Maruf Pulodzoda).
By borrowing many of the conventions of the American b-movie (new boy in town, youthful introversion, initiation into a crime family, casual misogyny towards female sex workers, seductive moll of head gangster etc) and then slowing proceedings down to a snail’s pace, Usmonov creates an odd but likeable ambience. He injects this wandering tale of voyeurism and redemption with sly social commentary and a playful deadpan humour that brings to mind the early films of the great Serbian filmmaker Dusan Makavejev (most notably his debut Man is Not A Bird). As elliptical and fatalistic as you would expect from this filmmaker, To Get To Heaven... does not outstay its welcome or disappoint. (Paul Dale) ■ Filmhouse, Edinburgh from Fri 19–Sun 21 Dec.
FANTASY/THRILLER TWILIGHT (12A) 121min ●●●●●
‘I hope you enjoy disappointment,’ murmurs surly vampire-next door Edward (Robert Pattinson) in Catherine Thirteen Hardwicke’s adaptation of Stephanie Meyer’s vampire-romance novel, but Twilight is likely to be a matter of extreme satisfaction to its target audience: pre-pubescent girls. Set against the permanently overcast skies of backwater town of Forks, Twilight is the coming of age story of Bella Swan (Kirsten Stewart), unhappily decanted from Phoenix, Arizona with her dad Charlie (Billy Burke). Bella’s humdrum existence is transformed when Edward’s vampire superpowers save her from getting squished by a truck. To capture the domestic angst of Bella’s situation, Melissa Rosenberg’s
screenplay dwells heavily on genre staples such as the loneliness of the immortals and chaste, doom-laden romance to the tune of Debussy’s Clair de Lune. The notion that vampires would choose to spend so much of their time bothering with the ephemera of US high-school life is glibly explored, and apart from a baseball-match rumble, there’s little action outside of moody glances across school car-parks and cafeterias. With Hardwicke’s spinning, circling camera in permanent swooning orbit around Edward’s pallid cranium, Twilight offers a lumpen cocktail of muted effects, po-faced dialogue and gloomy pretentiousness; tween audiences seem so hungry for this kind of wish-fulfilment that it doesn’t matter that Twilight never goes for the jugular. (Eddie Harrison) ■ General release from Fri 19 Dec.
11 Dec 2008–8 Jan 2009 THE LIST 53