The House of Him - Glasgow Film Festival review

The House of Him
Director: Robert Florence
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Writer and comedian Robert Florence pulls off an astonishing sleight of hand with his debut feature, The House of Him, an eviscerating commentary on the scourge of domestic violence disguised as a slasher movie.

Filmed entirely in his mother's Glasgow home for £900, it may be confined and small of scale, but that lack of expansiveness is more than made up for with the thematic ambition and depth brought to it by Florence’s impassioned script.

It’s the house of a serial killer (Richard Rankin) who has been murdering young women there for years, and has just lured his latest victims, Sophie (Kirsty Strain) and Anna (Louise Stewart). At first it seems as though Anna will be the conventional “final girl”, chased around the house by Him. But it quickly becomes clear Florence has more on his mind.

Leaving the slasher antics aside for long spells, it becomes essentially a two-hander as the pair talk of Anna’s powerlessness to escape her plight. The analogy is a potent one, as their conversations delve into all the insidious ways abusers operate.

And in case you think this might sound preachy, it also works just fine as a horror film. The location never becomes limiting, imaginative and atmospheric ways are found to film it, and there are a bunch of decent jolts. A terrific, Carpenter-infused score helps considerably too.

The actors are assured and controlled, even overcoming that thing where hearing Scottish accents on screen can be like getting slapped on the ear. Rankin oozes quiet menace, while Stewart gets to display a wide emotional range, and their interactions never fail to compel.

As the film progresses, radio reports suggest what's going inside this house is happening the world over. Secret things, bad things in all the houses. And that plague is men. It's a pungent metaphor that entreats us to wake up to everyday misogyny and make us look long and accusingly at a world full of monsters.

World War Z review

World War Z (15/PG-13, 116 mins)
Director: Marc Forster
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

It was almost two years ago now that the centre of Glasgow was taken over by Hollywood, as George Square and the surrounding streets were transformed into Philadelphia for Brad Pitt’s zombie-apocalypse epic World War Z.

Since then rewrites and reshoots have tarnished its reputation somewhat, to the extent that serious questions are being asked about the wisdom of spending $170m on a zombie movie, a genre that flourished in low budget, almost underground circles.

As it turns out it’s neither disaster nor total triumph, but a solidly put together thriller with plenty of entertaining scenes. And while Glasgow isn’t exactly blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, if you miss the first ten minutes, you’ll miss Glasgow.

It’s where we meet Pitt, his wife and two young daughters, stuck in Philly traffic. We’ve been hearing news reports of trouble around the world and disease outbreaks, when suddenly all hell breaks loose around them. There’s panic in the streets and people attacking each other, attacks that are close up and frantically edited to the point of confusion, compensated for by their intensity, with the sense of fear and danger real enough.

Barely escaping with their lives, the family makes it to an aircraft carrier, where it’s soon revealed that they're in the middle of a worldwide zombie infestation. Zombification is almost instantaneous, the walking dead are fast, savage and abundant, and the sustained threat in the early stages is palpable.

As a former United Nations investigator, Pitt is needed to go back into the mix with a scientist to try to find a cure or a way to stop the outbreak. This takes us to Korea for a gloomy and hard to follow sequence that’s just a stepping stone to get us to Israel.

This is where the movie really starts to gain traction. For a start everything there happens in daylight, and gives us a proper sense of the scale of the devastation. But the eye-catcher is the sheer number of zombies attacking a walled Jerusalem, and they're working together, forming undead pyramids to great effect, in those spectacular shots from the trailer.

Based on a novel by Max Brooks, World War Z is a reasonably original take on the zombie movie, focussing on the people actively fighting against the hordes, rather than just trying to survive or avoid them. There are some thrills, some tension, and a lot of impressive sights, though Pitt's family become something of an afterthought once they're separated, so emotional investment is limited.

He makes very interesting films, but this is only time outwith Troy that Pitt has been the solo anchor of a summer blockbuster. He’s fine in the lead, neither out of his depth nor particularly dynamic. His character is not a man of action, instead using his smarts to pick up clues, and this is a refreshing change.

Things grinds to a halt at the beginning of a third act that brings us back to the UK, before picking up significantly for a well-realised climax, then turning lazy again for an uninspired final outcome. It’s a pedestrian end to a patchy action horror that more or less delivers on what it set out to do.

The Angels’ Share review

The Angels’ Share (15, 101 mins)
Director: Ken Loach
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Fresh from picking up one of the top prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, Ken Loach’s latest collaboration with Scottish screenwriter Paul Laverty is a raw, sparky and grimly funny comedy drama filmed and set in Glasgow.

It opens with a variety of reprobates up in court being sentenced, who are then brought together to paint halls and clean up graveyards as part of their community payback. One young man, Robbie (Paul Brannigan), has been spared jail by the skin of his teeth, and is required to do 300 hours of service.

He’s also about to become a father, though his girlfriend’s father has other ideas about his involvement, her family of thugs making it clear they want Robbie to have nothing to do with the baby.

We’re presented with an intriguing character in Robbie, one whom we’re asked to side with despite his criminal past. His violent temper is something he needs to learn to control, and in one particularly harrowing scene he’s shown the consequences of his actions, as the victim he assaulted describes the senseless attack.

It could have been easy for the audience to lose its sympathy for Robbie at this point, but this is a film about first impressions and second chances, and that chance is given to Robbie by Harry (John Henshaw), his community service coordinator.

Harry is mad keen on whisky, and when Robbie demonstrates a quick knack and knowledge for the water of life, Harry takes him and his pals on a tour of a distillery, the movie’s title referring to the amount of spirit, about 2%, that evaporates each year from the casks.

With fatherhood offering Robbie his last chance to pull his life together, the question is whether he can he use his whisky skills to make a better life for himself and his new family, or if his past will catch up to him.

Though it can sometimes seem like two different films, the chummy whisky comedy on one hand, and a dark and dangerous life of violence on the other, both elements come together successfully thanks to Laverty’s trademark salty and realistic dialogue that pulls no punches with its language, and Loach’s unfussy direction that allows the action to flow freely and naturally.

The authenticity of his casting also helps, with the roles filled largely by newcomers with lived-in faces. Truth be told, some of the actors do more convincing work when they're being asked to be their rough and ready selves, than when they're given lines of plot to recite, but for the most part everyone impresses.

The result is many fine moments, but perhaps just a hint of corner-cutting in the writing. It’s a bit of a leap for Robbie to go from ned to whisky loving expert, and it all gets wrapped up a bit too neatly and conveniently, which might be a problem if this were one of Loach’s more gritty dramas.

But it’s essentially a fairytale, a rather fanciful blend that succeeds partly because it’s so funny, but mostly because of the filmmaking skill brought to it by its director and writer.