Couple in a Hole (15)
Directed by Tom Geens
4/5
THIS is an impressive feature film debut by writer-director Tom Geens, who has come up with a strange and ultimately deeply unsettling drama which breaks conventions.
Belgian-born Geens’s narrative begins with deceptively peaceful shots of a wood whose sylvan serenity is painfully and lastingly shattered when the bearded John (Paul Higgins) traps a rabbit, shatters its skull against a tree and, in bloody close-up, disembowels it to provide a meal for himself and his wife Karen (Kate Dickie).
From then on a stark story unfolds relentlessly.
The middle-class British couple, ensnared in cancerous grief for the loss of their son after their isolated home burns down, now live a bizarre, feral existence in the eponymous camouflaged hole in a forest in the French Pyrenees.
While Karen looks after their underground home, John hunts for food and strikes up an edgy friendship with a local farmer. But then a poisonous spider bites his wife and the end of their chosen isolation begins.
Higgins and Dickie are mesmerising as the painfully flawed characters and perfectly illustrate Geens’s comment that the film is all about “entrapment.”
He certainly succeeds in trapping you in his raw and chilling celluloid universe.
Review by Alan Frank

Midnight Special (12A)
Directed by Jeff Nichols
3/5
MIDNIGHT Special’s opening sequences grab the attention and promise plenty as members of a bizarre cult and special US government agents relentlessly pursue Roy (Michael Shannon) when he kidnaps his peculiar eight-year-old son and goes on the run accompanied by his friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton).
Unfortunately, after this intriguing start, writer-director Jeff Nichols’s initially intriguing science-fiction thriller loses its singularity along with dramatic momentum as it segues into B-feature territory with clunky references to other genre movies.
Along the way E.T. and The Midwich Cuckoos are less than subtly referenced, making this A-list feature a tad too replete with recognisably second-feature storyline cliches.
The cast works hard — Jaeden Liberher’s “alien” boy and Adam Driver‘s CIA interrogator are particularly effective — and the climactic special effects convince.
But, while never bored, I was ultimately left disappointed.
Review by Alan Frank

Dheepan (15)
Directed by Jacques Audiard
3/5
THREE strangers pretend to be a family in order to escape the civil war in Sri Lanka and seek refuge in France in this powerful and timely drama about immigrants.
Dheepan (Antonythasan Jesuthasan), a former Tamil soldier, his fake wife (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and nine-year-old daughter (Claudine Vinasithamby) end up in a housing project outside Paris where they encounter just as much violence from drugs gangs as they left behind.
Jacques Audiard’s film, which won last year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes, is a heartrending saga about human survival and an intense depiction of the immigrant experience.
It is marked by a remarkable performance by Srinivasan as a young woman who finds herself trapped by her new life and fake family.
Sadly, though, Dheepan may feed into right-wing fears that immigrants seeking refuge aren’t to be trusted.
Review by Maria Duarte