Until Dawn (M18)
103 minutes, opens on April 24★★☆☆☆
The story: Clover (Ella Rubin) and her friends (Michael Cimino, Ji-young Yoo, Belmont Cameli and Odessa A’zion) arrive at a remote mountain valley town to search for her sister (Maia Mitchell), who went missing a year earlier. They become trapped in the abandoned visitor centre, attacked by supernatural entities.
Gamer alert: The return of Swedish actor Peter Stormare as therapist Dr Hill is misleading. Until Dawn is a Hollywood adaptation of PlayStation’s popular interactive video game mostly in name. It introduces a new ensemble of photogenic teens, and has the five of them murdered and revived to be killed again and again.
They have to somehow survive until dawn, lest they die for real.
Were this an inventive spin on the mortal time loop such as the combat science-fiction Edge Of Tomorrow (2014) or college whodunit Happy Death Day (2017), or even the original choose-your-own-adventure game, the characters would remake their choices to influence their future.
But logic will not help them when there is none in a story that resets, such that they wake up each fatal night in a different horror movie to a masked psycho slasher out of Halloween (1978), torture porn inspired by Saw (2004), monsters, demonic possession and environmental apocalypse.
Creepy dolls have a cameo, the director-producer being David F. Sandberg of Annabelle: Creation (2017) in his second collaboration with writer Gary Dauberman.
The violent jump scares barely scare. This sandbox of tropes is about nothing more than the film-makers’ love for the genre and their facility with references.
It hurtles along, mindless like a zombie – which will show up too, somewhere between a witch and a mad doctor.
Hot take: Live, die, repeat. This self-amused horror homage gets dead tired.
Above The Dust (M18)
123 minutes, opens on April 24 exclusively at The Projector★★★★☆
The story: Ten-year-old Wo Tu (Ouyang Wenxin) wants a water pistol like his village schoolmates in north-eastern China, circa 2009. His late grandfather (Li Jun) returns as a ghost to grant him his wish on a surreal journey that won the 2024 Golden Horse Awards’ best adapted screenplay.
China’s “Sixth Generation” film-maker Wang Xiaoshuai has, since his earliest work in The Days (1993) and Beijing Bicycle (2001), drawn both universal acclaim and the politburo’s displeasure for his documentations of his country’s social changes.
The writer-director is at risk of another ban for screening Above The Dust internationally without the approval of state censors, who had demanded more than 50 edits to the politically sensitive subject.
In this child’s-eye magic-realist fable shot on location against the terraced hills of Gansu province, the grandfather takes Wo Tu back in time to the multigenerational trauma of the 1950s Great Leap Forward, when family farms were confiscated for communes under Chairman Mao’s calamitous campaign to industrialise the agrarian society.
Wo Tu would witness landowners purged and killed, among them his great-grandfather.
The modernisation drive continues today with little regard for the human toll and all that is lost in pursuit of national progress: homes and, along with them, traditions and values.
Mongolian actress Yong Mei from Wang’s So Long, My Son (2019) is again magnificent as a careworn mother digging for fabled heirlooms under their farmstead that are symbolic of their lost ancestry.
Wo Tu finally gets his toy gun. But there is no one left in the village to play with and soon, the boy with the name meaning “fertile land” and his family, too, will join the urban exodus.
Hot take: Renegade auteur Wang tills blood-stained history for a tragic tale on rural displacement.
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