Raindance: Find your family

The 33rd Raindance Film Festival continues in central London, with a programme of amazing independent films that you're unlikely to see anywhere else. There's also a chance to mix with the filmmakers in ways that are far more relaxed than most festivals, including workshops and panel discussions at the festival's super-cool headquarters right next to Bafta on Piccadilly. Here are comments about three properly chilling movies I've seen over the past couple of days. More to come...

Dirty Boy
dir-scr Doug Rao; with Stan Steinbichler, Graham McTavish 24/UK ***.
Dark and brooding, this shadowy thriller opens with glimpses of nutty, violent religious rituals as seen through the eyes of a young man who knows he's unhinged. Writer-director Doug Rao makes clever use of effects to add freak-out flourishes alongside glorious Austrian landscapes that echo with The Sound of Music. All of this plays out in a way that's over-serious and sometimes ponderous. But it's impossible to look away.

Our Happy Place
dir-scr Paul Bickel; with Raya Miles, Paul Bickel 24/US ****
Opening with an intense swirl of home-movie clips, this increasingly gruesome horror is assembled with remarkable skill, making terrific use of Californian mountain locations. Along with the spurts of jarring editing, actor-filmmaker Paul Bickel also grounds everything in an eerie emotional honesty regarding love and mortality. So as the film encompasses elements of ghost stories and slasher movies, it also becomes a staggeringly twisted exploration of subconscious fears... FULL REVIEW >

Row
dir Matthew Losasso; with Bella Dayne, Sophie Skelton 25/UK ***
With visceral cinematography by Zoran Veljkovic, this hushed thriller skilfully pulls the audience into its chilly, windswept North Atlantic locations. Even with the fragmented, out-of-sequence editing, director Matthew Losasso manages to build a creeping sense of dread by revealing that this story will turn very grisly along the way. There are logic and point-of-view problems in the indulgently overlong running time, but the unfolding central mystery remains compelling.

Full reviews of festival films will be linked here in due course: SHADOWS @ RAINDANCE >