Holy Spider

The London Film Festival rolls on. Our latest review round-up covers stories of real life and of people starting to really live, with films from Iran to.

Throw in Tom Burke, in a version of the role he’s played in The Souvenir and True Things — the larger than life character who helps reluctant people live it — and you can’t have many complaints. The added sweetener results in a saccharine aftertaste that’s a touch too much for my taste, though on another day – and with most audiences – will go down smoothly. At moments the score, alongside similarly slick camera moves, feels slightly compensatory for a slight script, but the overall impression is so sweeping it’s hard not to get swept up. Living, however, opts for a straightforward remake of the Kurosawa film, switching Tokyo for London but retaining most else. Taking the ‘carpe diem’ premise, the master of Japanese cinema made it contemporary and relevant to modern audiences. Abbasi’s intent with Holy Spider is to highlight how a patriarchal, theocratic state such as Iran can lead to the dehumanisation of women. This isn’t the sentiment of the illness that befalls Nighy’s bureaucrat in director Oliver Hermanus’ Living. This is a stylistically sparse film with long, simple static shots of the trial, as though ripped from the internal courtroom camera system. His chief protagonist, the fictional journalist Rahimi, is constructed as a way to confront men with a progressive figure that they would rather ignore. Based on a real court case from 2016, which Diop attended, far from abandoning trappings of documentary filmmaking, cinéma vérité is present in Saint Omer in style and content. Believing himself to be on a divine mission from God to cleanse the holy streets of Mashhad from immoral women, Hanaei would pick them up under the pretence of engaging their services, then take them to his home where he would strangle them to death before rolling their bodies in carpet and dumping them in the street. Our latest review round-up covers stories of real life and of people starting to really live, with films from Iran to France and the festival’s home turf: London.