Film Reviews
Robert Eggers :: The Lighthouse
On an unnamed island, two keepers maintain a light whose meaning depends on one man being forbidden to see it. Robert Eggers finds horror in the distance between labour and revelation.
Film Reviews
Cinema seen from the margins — films that share Hwael Mag's interest in landscape, absence, and the uncanny familiar.
Film Reviews
Kaneto Shindō :: Onibaba
A field of reeds that breathes like a body, a pit that guards what's been repressed, a mask fused to the skin like a scar from Hiroshima. Shindō makes horror well up from the soil itself, a jurisdiction older than any shogun.
Film Reviews
Andrej Tarkovskij :: The Mirror
Andrei Tarkovskij rebuilt his childhood house in Yuryevets on its exact foundation, resowed the buckwheat field, and filmed his own mother's real reaction to seeing it again. Mirror turns memory into architecture, and a father's real poems into a son's cinema.
Film Reviews
Jaromil Jireš :: Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
Jaromil Jireš adapted Vítězslav Nezval's surrealist novel in 1970, banned soon after by the regime that let it be made. A girl's first week of adulthood dissolves into vampires, priests and a Bohemian village filmed like a fever dream.
Film Reviews
Philip Ridley :: The Reflecting Skin
Every language that has released The Reflecting Skin has translated its title differently — shining in Spanish, mirrored in Russian, a soft shell in Japanese. None mention where the image came from: a real photo of a real child, burned silver by a real bomb.
Film Reviews
Robin Hardy :: The Wicker Man
A sergeant lands on a pagan Scottish island and finds himself not the investigator but the sacrifice. The Wicker Man assembles its folklore from Frazer and Pinner — a film about a body given to the fire that legend says ends buried under a motorway.
Film Reviews
Nicolas Roeg :: Walkabout
Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout (1971) films the Australian outback as a score — every rustle composed, not captured — until the desert becomes a voice. But the land it hands us is beautiful because it's been emptied: the same erasure as colonial landscape painting. Gift and trap in one gesture.
Film Reviews
Peter Weir :: Picnic at Hanging Rock
Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock, revisited through Hwael Mag's lens: absence, pastoral dread, and a mystery that refuses resolution.
Film Reviews
Terrence Malick :: Days of Heaven
Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven exists for only twenty minutes a day — shot in the magic hour, that sliver of light about to go out. Through mono no aware, Tarkovsky and darshan, it becomes a film about transience itself: beauty in the exact measure it is about to fall.