Tag Archives: Sally Hawkins

449 – Bring Her Back

Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

YouTubers-turned-directors Danny and Michael Philippou demonstrate a real eye for visual design and an ability to create imagery to truly disgusting effect in Bring Her Back, in which Sally Hawkins plays a foster parent whose daughter’s death leads her to search for answers in the occult. The filmmaker twins are 32 years old, which, perhaps unfairly, leads us to ascribe the film’s lack of depth and prioritisation of visual shock to their youth. Bring Her Back shows a certain immaturity, but great potential, and we’re interested to see if the pair’s storytelling and sensitivity to theme improves.

We also discuss child actors in horror, as the film drives Mike to question the ethics of using children as Jonah Wren Phillips is here, both in terms of the desired effect on the audience and the potential unintended effect on the child. Not all unease is good unease, and Bring Her Back makes us ask: what cost is too high for such entertainment?

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

328 – Spencer

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Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

As he did with 2016’s Jackie, director Pablo Larraín explores the life, image, and legacy of a woman publicly struck by tragedy in Spencer, a fabulistic biopic that imagines a Christmas holiday spent with the royal family at Sandringham, during which Princess Diana struggles with the knowledge of her husband’s affair and the watchful eyes of both the royals and the paparazzi.

We discuss our own relationships to both Larraín and Diana, and consider how the film draws on various aspects of the princess’s public image in painting a portrait of a woman losing her mind. The film is set squarely within that mind, and Mike argues that it uses several tropes and techniques common to horror in order to dramatise Diana’s fracturing mental state. José expresses his love for Kristen Stewart’s outstanding lead performance, one that doesn’t impersonate but evokes, and conveys differing stages of psychosis with subtlety.

We don’t agree on everything, and the film isn’t perfect, but Spencer is a really remarkable, expressive exploration of an iconic figure.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

46 – The Shape of Water

22 – Paddington 2

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Paddington returns to cinemas with a whimsical puff of upper middle class smoke from a lovely old warm cosy steam train. How nice. Mike wasn’t really looking forward to this.

So. Did he make it through Paddington 2? What do we make of the vision of Britain it constructs? How does its action outperform Justice League‘s? Is it fair to think of it as just Wes Anderson but somehow even more revoltingly cutesy? Is there anything wrong with outrageous accents? Isn’t Hugh Grant great, honestly?

The podcast can be listened to in the player above or at this link.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.