Workers’ Playtime

In December I read (or finished)

Harlan Ellison, Greatest Hits
Is “‘Repent, Harlequin,’ Said the Ticktockman” in there? Yes. “Shatterday”? Yup. “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”? Of course. “The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World”? Certainly. “Shattered Like a Glass Goblin”? Er, no actually; perhaps it didn’t win anything (the Contents page scrupulously lists which awards different stories won in what year – and it is quite a range of years). But most of the big hits are here; even the lightly fictionalised memoir “All The Lies That Are My Life”, if you like that sort of thing, which I don’t particularly. I do like a good sf short story, though, and Harlan Ellison was a great writer of sf short stories – bearing in mind that (a) quite a lot of his greatness was down to uniqueness, so there is an element of winning at a game he’d invented, and (b) in any case, he was nowhere near as great as he thought he was. Or, indeed, as his admirers think he was. This book comes with three separate introductions – by the book’s editor Michael Straczynski, Cassandra Khaw, but Neil Gaiman – and several pages of endorsements; read it all and you’ll see the same stories about Ellison’s feminist and anti-racist credentials three times. But there’s no denying that some of the stories are terrific.

Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions For You
“Academic returns to school where she’d studied to teach a class, and successfully reopens the case of a girl in her class who was murdered, aged 16.” All the reviews I’ve seen seem to be reviewing that book – and it’s an interesting book, with lots to be said about it. (The recurring riff on news stories about women’s rape and murder – it was the one where she…; it was the one where she…; it was the one where she… – is horribly effective.) But Makkai’s actually doing something rather different. It’s not irrelevant that the narrator’s a successful podcaster (!) as well as an academic, that she’s been invited to teach a class in podcasting, and that she puts some of her 16-year-old podcasting students on the case; the wild volatility and voluntarism of social media play into how the story unwinds. In fact it’s more like “podcaster obsessively pursues a former teacher whom she blames for the murder of a classmate, enlisting podcasting students in her support”. While she’s at the school her ex-husband, coincidentally, gets “MeToo’d”; she thinks the charges are ludicrous, but her attempts to point this out to the good folk of Twitter dot com do not go well (an entertaining and horribly believable passage). Repercussions from the ensuing social media firestorm and from her attempts to reopen the case end up costing her her boyfriend, her main source of income and her health; meanwhile, her contract at the school’s coming to an end. End of part 1.

At the beginning of part 2, a few years have passed and all of this has gone away – the pile-on, the obsessive fugue and their real-world consequences. Not only that, the schoolkid podcasters have grown up to be student podcasters and the case has been reopened. Not only that, but it’s been established that the teacher the narrator’s been obsessing over – and intermittently addressing throughout the book, hence the ‘you’ of the title – wasn’t the killer, although he was sleeping with the victim. At the end of the book the narrator’s undaunted in her pursuit of the teacher, who was clearly an abuser – and who she still blames, indirectly, for her classmate’s murder. Her conviction that she needs to track him down and denounce him is unchanged; it’s certainly untouched by any reflection on her earlier conviction that he was the killer. In short, the book begins as a heroic story about using online media to take on male violence, then turns into a horror story about what the consequences of doing so might be – but then turns back into the heroic story. It’s either much more complex and self-ironising than the book I’ve seen reviewed or much less successful – possibly both.

Randall Munroe, What If?
I picked up both What If? books in a local charity shop a while back, and have been reading them last thing at night. If you know What If?, and xkcd more generally, it’ll need no introduction. If you don’t, you probably should. Let’s just say that the “what if”s Randall specialises in aren’t of the “what if inflation went above 5%?” or “what if Netflix bought WB?” variety; a more typical example is “What if the entire continental US was on a decreasing slope from West to East. How steep would the slope have to be to sustain the momentum needed to ride a bicycle the entire distance without pedaling?”.

Jane Gardam, A Long Way From Verona
The story of Jessica Vye, who is in her early teens in the early 40s (Gardam was born in 1928), and in her own words “[is] not quite normal, having had a violent experience at the age of nine”. She’s something of an outsider at school; she’s introverted and unconventional, has violent mood swings, and believes herself to be different from most people (able to ‘read’ other people’s emotions, unable to tell a lie). She’s a bright 14-year-old, in other words. Her ‘violent experience’, I should say, was hearing a writer who visited her school; he agreed to read her writing and later wrote back to her, “JESSICA VYE YOU ARE A WRITER BEYOND ALL POSSIBLE DOUBT!” (“This experience changed me utterly”).

And then, and then… It’s hard to write about this book briefly, or without quoting chunks of it. One key event is Jessica’s chance encounter with an escaped Italian POW (the girls have been warned that there is a ‘maniac’ on the loose). He doesn’t assault her but does give her a look “that I had absolutely never seen before, or not in faces looking at me. It was a liking sort of look but a queer liking-look … sort of excited, as if he had found something.” Later, just after narrowly escaping death in a bombing, she writes a long poem called “The Maniac” and knows at once, and for the first time, that she has written something good. (Gardam, wisely, doesn’t quote from the poem.) Like that “sort of excited” expression, the events of the book combine great intensity with an odd kind of innocence; we feel that much stronger emotions are at work than Jessica realises, but also that they are going to need to stay repressed if Jessica is to get through either adolescence or the war.

I don’t know if I’ve conveyed this, but it’s a lovely book: an easy and charming read, but engagingly real and with a powerful emotional undertow. There’s an obvious parallel with I Capture the Castle, but if I had to choose between them I’d take this one; I felt that Jessica Vye was dealing with bigger stuff than Cassandra Mortmain, and cared more about where she ended up.

Michelle Paver, Rainforest
In which a deeply repressed middle-aged man joins an archaeological expedition into the rainforest, hoping to study nothing more emotionally loaded than insects, and becomes embroiled in local belief systems concerning the life and death of trees, animals, people; especially people. Especially people and especially death. Meanwhile he’s reliving his unsuccessful relationship with the much younger Penny, which began as mildly embarrassing and rapidly turned much worse; he stalked her and may have caused her death. The two plot strands develop side by side but don’t really connect, frustratingly. By the end of the book our man has a very different attitude to the rainforest, its people and their beliefs – and has the scars to prove it – but he still seems to believe that “Penelope” was the love of his life and that he was guilty of nothing more than romantic exuberance.

Magnus Mills, Screwtop Thompson
As well as short and oblique novels, Magnus Mills has written short stories; they’re mostly very short and very oblique, bordering on downright unsatisfactory. (One story here goes one better on Andrew Michael Hurley, as it reads like Robert Aickman’s “The Hostel” with all of the eeriness and grotesquerie left out.) The mood is generally sunny and undramatic; there are some very vividly realised characters and incidents, but they don’t really bear retelling (it would be like retelling amusing incidents that happened at work). Mills does in prose something similar to what Morandi did as a painter, paying minute attention to things we only half-remember or half-notice.

Reginald Hill, A Clubbable Woman, An Advancement of Learning, Ruling Passion
Christmas presents, all of which I’d read by the end of the year. These are the first three “Dalziel and Pascoe” novels, dating from the early 1970s. The first book, revolving around a rugby club, is rather grim: Hill is at pains to impress on us that we’re mixing with plain, ordinary, working Northerners, and that plain, ordinary, working Northerners are awful people. “Which of us has our desire or, having it, is gratified?” Nobody here; every male character is having an affair with another man’s wife, or wishes he was, or in some cases both. The plot’s not great, either; Hill succumbs to the temptation, which I’ve lamented here in the context of Sophie Hannah, of setting up a bizarre and improbable murder scene and then explaining it with a bizarre and improbable murder. It’s powerful, though; it’s definitely got something. (Something that makes you want to have a wash afterwards, though.) The second book, set at a teacher-training college, lets Hill indulge a vein of sheer fantasy. The (cold case) murder scene, again, is utterly improbable – whose body was under what? – but the villain is so vividly weird that this seems nothing but appropriate. A charismatic youth who reads Crowley and John Allegro, publicly deflowers virgins and calls all his male friends “love”; as ruthlessly self-seeking as Linus Roache’s cult leader in Mandy, as commanding as Yaxley from The Course of the Heart and as beautiful as Ivor Swann from Ruth Rendell’s No More Dying Then (which came out in the same year as AAoL, so presumably neither of them influenced the other). It’s not how I remember the Students’ Union. The best of these three books, encouragingly, is the third, which begins with Pascoe leaving on holiday a day late after Dalziel insisted he take a look at a series of robberies; he drives to the other end of the country to stay with some friends, only to find three of them dead and the fourth missing. Both cases grow more complicated as Pascoe grows more exhausted and confused, strung out by the demands of his dual role – a detective in Yorkshire, a witness down south. He becomes convinced that the two cases are connected somehow; it’s a mark of Hill’s growing skill that he shows this conviction not to be entirely irrational – but mostly. Sometimes a loose end is just a loose end.

They’re quick reads (evidently); not especially demanding, but engaging enough to keep you going. The characterisation – no-nonsense old-school copper Dalziel, ambitious college-educated Pascoe – is fairly broad-strokes: Dalziel in particular is a comically awful unreconstructed Yorkshireman, who seems to get grosser (physically and in his manners) as these three books go on. Pascoe is a graduate, young and single; as such he has two main character traits, namely using long words and being constantly horny. Like some films shown on Talking Pictures, these books contain “1970s social attitudes”, particularly towards women; at one point Hill also makes Dalziel a howlingly obnoxious racist, but thankfully seems to have decided not to pursue that line of character development. Some of the sexism on display is clearly Reginald Hill’s own, though; there is some really woeful stuff in the second book about women with large breasts, a topic on which he does not appear to agree with Ian Watson. Boys, please!

Also in December, I watched these films:

Knives Out (Rian Johnson 2019), Wake Up, Dead Man (Rian Johnson 2025)
Recent TV adaptations of Agatha Christie often seem to start by throwing out the sexism and racism, then casting around for what else they can throw out – we won’t need all these characters, surely, and nobody will miss that sub-plot – before finding some way to make the Radio Times call them ‘edgy’. You can end up with something that looks like an Agatha Christie but without the tone, the mood or the plot. Compare Knives Out: a pure Agatha Christie whodunnit – an impossible murder, a roster of vividly-drawn suspects with different motives for murder, a flamboyant detective and a satisfying resolution – without the inconvenience of having to be based on an actually-existing Agatha Christie. Wake Up, Dead Man is a return to form after the Avengers-esque detour of Glass Onion; it features an impossible murder, a roster of vividly-drawn suspects with different motives for murder, an ever more flamboyant detective and a satisfying resolution. Also a sketchy but compelling essay on the nature of Christianity, but that’s just the cherry on top.

It Was Just An Accident (Jafar Panahi 2025)
What’s this about? It’s about someone who was tortured in an Iranian prison, later meets his torturer by chance and decides to kidnap him and take his revenge; it’s about what happens next, a picaresque accumulation of episodes (and people) as the main character drives around town, looking for anyone who may be able to confirm or deny that he’s got the right person; and it’s about how that question’s resolved; and what happens after that; and… Some parts are upbeat, almost comical; some grimly satirical; some heartbreaking or horrific. Each successive tonal shift is justified, but the cumulative effect is dizzying, and I’m not sure how well it all fits together. (But maybe that’s just what you get if you try to write seriously about contemporary Iran.) It’s a powerful piece of work, anyway.

Eternity (David Freyne 2025)
This is another film that’s satisfying while you’re watching it but doesn’t quite gel. The setup is that, on dying, you arrive in Heaven physically restored to the age when you were happiest, then have a week to choose in which themed ‘world’ you’ll spend, well, eternity. Which has definite comic potential, in a Loki-ish style; the film-makers get a lot of mileage out of background shots of trade-fair-style booths advertising the different worlds (“Smokers’ World – Because cancer can only kill you once!”). But the question they layer on top of that – what if you knew, with absolute certainty, that the time you were happiest, and/or the time your partner was happiest, was before the two of you had met? – is deadly serious (cf. 45 Years). It boils down to ‘if you had to choose between seeking your own happiness above all else and building a relationship, what would you do?’. In that perspective, it’s a bit of a design flaw that Heaven is built exclusively to prioritise the former.

No One Will Save You (Brian Duffield 2023)
What if what appeared to be a home invasion was actually an alien invasion? What if you went into town and nobody would help, because they’d all been possessed by aliens? And what if nobody would help because they just didn’t like you? An unusual and promising setup, but the film’s a bit underdeveloped, I think partly because of a distinctive but odd stylistic choice. Nobody ever seems to talk to themselves in films, even alone in their house (“now where did I… of course it’s there, I left it there, get a grip Edwards!” – just me then?). The protagonist of this film is no exception – and she spends a lot of time on her own. This seems to have inspired the director to go the whole hog: there are two (2) lines of dialogue in this film, both of them imagined. All actual communication is handled through “oh”s, “uh”s, waves and curls of the lip. An impressive exercise, but it didn’t have any obvious connection with the plot, which I think would have worked a lot better with a few more words on the soundtrack.

A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow 2025)
A nightmare scenario – an ICBM launched at the USA from an unknown source – played out to its nightmarish conclusion, in 19-minute sections covering the same time period in different settings, moving upward from the early-warning radar station to the White House. It’s not clear precisely what’s happened at the end, but it almost certainly isn’t anything good. Idris Elba is the President and plays him as well-intentioned but tired and out of touch – a nod towards Biden, perhaps. So things could be worse – or rather, things are worse.

The Muppet Christmas Carol (Brian Henson 1992)
It was Christmas Eve. We watched The Muppet Christmas Carol; what else were we going to do? It was wonderful; it always is.

The Housemaid (Paul Feig 2025)
A twisty domestic (ho ho) thriller, school of Fatal Attraction or (especially) Single White Female. Can the unknown woman coming into the household be trusted? Is the impossibly glamorous man of the house all that he seems? Is his wife the person she appears to be? Who’s actually in charge here? No, no, no and the answer may surprise you. I’ve got a soft spot for Paul Feig (particularly A Simple Favour, which I genuinely and unironically like a lot). This isn’t one of his best – I mean, it is basically trash – but it is a lot of fun; it hits a distinctive, slightly manic note early on and sticks to it. Don’t be fooled by the BBFC warning of ‘sexualised nudity’, though; this harks back to the 80s & 90s in some ways, but not in treating sex scenes as a way of displaying the lead actress’s body (or, in the case of Working Girl, hoovering scenes). The sex scenes here are frank in what they show but positively demure in how they show it. (It’s almost as if those scenes weren’t being shot as male fantasy any more.)

Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier 2025)
The main character’s a theatre actor; the other main character’s her estranged father, who’s a film director and has just reappeared in her life. He’s making a film about his mother, who committed suicide when he was young, and wants her to play the lead role. She refuses to take the part; her father casts an American actress… There’s more to the setup than this, and at first it seems that the film’s going to be impossibly complicated; it works, though, because of the simplicity and intensity of its themes. It’s about the relationship between the main character and her sister (who acted in one of their father’s films, once); it’s about the father’s attempts to express his feelings, to make amends, to defy the passage of time – attempts which are shown to be well-intentioned but delusional and self-serving, even self-indulgent (shades of Wallis Island). It’s about the past, about family, about how they made us and scarred us, and how we got through. Stellan Skarsgård is great, but both Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas (as the daughters) are amazing; you could be watching two real sisters. A film of the year; strongly recommended – especially for anyone else whose father used to make long, rambling phone calls at inconvenient times. It didn’t get to me like Clare Foy singing “Always on my mind” in All Of Us Strangers – few things have – but the scene in which the father earnestly attempts to make contact with his daughters without actually listening to them (“I know how you feel! You’re creative, like me!”) really reminded me of the old man. (Sorry, Dad. Miss you.)

I’ve fallen a bit behind on my monthly books & films posts, but here’s November 2025.

In November I read the last two books from the £10 Box:

Christopher Priest, An Infinite Summer

C.J. Cherryh, The Faded Sun: Kesrith

Reviews on blog.

I also read (or finished)

Nicci French, The Red Room
A quick, enjoyable read, as I’d expected. I was late to Gerrard/French completism, so I missed out some of their earlier novels and didn’t catch up for a while; this one is the fifth of their 27 novels to date, from 2001. NF don’t exactly write to a formula, but there are certainly recurring elements. The central character here is a woman recovering from trauma; she has a hunch about a murder investigation, and makes a nuisance of herself in trying to get the police to take her seriously; she meets a man who she trusts, but maybe shouldn’t… I mean, stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before. This (early) iteration works pretty well, though; the character of Michael Doll – the sex-starved obsessive stalker who may (or may not) also be a murderer – is particularly strong.

Lynn Steger Strong, Flight
Having been through the awful process of dividing up a dead parent’s possessions with siblings, I expected that a novel about a family gathering to contemplate just that would resonate. It didn’t, really, and by the end I was disengaged and rather bored. For one thing, this is basically a ‘Christmas family reunion’ story – nobody’s too bothered about the division of assets, apart from a dispute about the house itself which people are mostly too polite to raise. There are far too many characters (everyone involved brings along their partners and kids, each with their own back story), and some of the American cultural reference points were surprisingly alien (yes, even in 2025). Every time they had a meal there was at least one dish that baffled me; there’s a scene in a bar where people order a basket of fried cheese, which sounds impractical on more than one level. Oh, and one of them’s an artist who makes wooden birds, and one of them’s a social worker who has a client who has a kid who seems to have run away, hence ‘flight’, you see.

Andrew Michael Hurley, Saltwash
I enjoyed reading this a lot more than the previous book, but it was a much bigger disappointment; it read as if it had started life as a short story and probably should have stayed that way. It was basically Robert Aickman with some, but not all, of the eeriness and grotesquerie left out – in fact to a large extent it was Aickman’s “The Hostel” with, etc. Hurley’s slightest work by some way.

Holly Seddon, 59 Minutes
This is just silly; maybe not quite as silly as the Janice Hallett (see below), but getting there. I’m going to ‘spoil’ this one, because any spoiler-free description is likely to make it sound interesting; it’s for your own good, basically. So, it’s the end of the world: nukes are going to fall, across the south of England, in 59 minutes’ time – that is, 59 minutes and counting! Three parallel narratives, with countdown time stamps, follow different characters, all of whom are running round (as my mother used to say) like little mad things. The separate narratives of Carrie, Frankie and (oddly) Mrs Dabb converge and intersect, and as their clocks all tick down to zero… never mind, it was a false alarm! The early warning system got hacked! As you were, everybody! It also turns out that Mrs D’s seemingly parallel narrative has been in a different timeframe all along: her story’s taking place ten years after the event, and she’s been running around panicking for a completely different reason. Also, she’s one of the main characters from the other two strands (hence the ‘Mrs’ malarkey). Bah, is what I say. Also, what kind of hackers does this world have, if they can not only get a fake nuclear alert sent out but disable all the systems that would have rapidly shown it was false?

Adam Roberts, Lake of Darkness
I know Adam, slightly, mainly through the World Of Blogs. He’s a really interesting writer and thinker, particularly in the short story form, although I haven’t always got on with his novels. (Or with sf novels generally, to be fair; I’ve always felt that sf has a natural affinity with short stories.)

As with The Thing Itself and Purgatory Mount, I felt that there was a lot going on here; unfortunately, as with Purgatory Mount I wasn’t entirely sure what it all was. I don’t know Gilles Deleuze from a rhizome in the ground (ho ho), so there’s probably a lot in there that I missed. (Many readers didn’t feel they missed so much, or else didn’t worry about what they were missing. I didn’t need to look up any words, I can say that much.) The book’s also narrated (like the ‘frame’ sections of Purgatory Mount) in an oddly arch, “Listen with Mother” voice, supposedly motivated by the sheer alienness of the far-future situation from or in which the story’s being told. It grated on me, as messing with the omniscient narrator tends to do; when I was reading Gravity’s Rainbow I remember at one point flicking ahead to try and establish when the narrative would get back to ‘normal’. I think I just prefer novelistic prose to err on the side of plainness, third-person narration especially. (I’m not – for all Adam’s advocacy – a fan of Anthony Burgess.)

The two central conceits of this novel can (I think) be summed up in two sets of paired assertions:

1. Nothing can possibly continue to exist inside a black hole; certainly not life in any form.
2. Or can it? What does ‘inside’ mean in this context anyway?

and:

1. The people of a post-scarcity utopia would simply play happily forever, like children.
2. Have you spent any time with children? That sounds awful!

To be honest, I don’t have a great deal of time for point 2.; my response to those two rhetorical questions would be “No, it can’t” and “It means ‘beyond the event horizon of the said black hole, as opposed to anywhere else in the rest of the universe’, as you very well know”. So the revelation that something, or someone, could and did exist in there – followed by the revelation that the black hole’s ‘inside’ was in fact always already ‘outside’, because of the effect of Infinite Mass on Space and Time and Topology Itself! – left me a bit on the cold side. I don’t object to people going to place A at time X and encountering an immortal superhuman being which has been confined there since the dawn of time; if it’s good enough for Doctor Who it’s good enough for me (exceptions apply). I do baulk at having them (at time X, at place A) encountering an immortal superhuman being which is immaterial and indifferent to time and space, and which has in fact always been already everywhere – and no amount of Socratic questioning (“ah but when you think about it hasn’t it always already been there, hmm?”) is going to unbaulk me.

I am quite sympathetic towards point b., though – I do think a post-scarcity utopia would, ironically at first sight, leave a lot to be desired. However, the burden of Lake of Darkness seems to be that what a p.-s. u. would lack is hardship and loss, and that this could be remedied by reintroducing conflict (courtesy of the dweller in the black hole). This, as an assertion about post-capitalist society, seems about as wrong as it could be. Conflict per se will never need to be reintroduced, it seems to me: scarcity of some kinds is ineliminable, which in turn means there will always be competition and hence conflict. (Indeed, the narrative includes some interesting speculations about what the denizens of utopia would find to do all day, making it clear that not everything would be possible all the time for everyone: there would be priorities to set, which inevitably means that there would be disagreements over those priorities, hence conflict.) Black Hole Dude, to identify him no more spoilerishly than that, specialises in ego-driven ruptures of communal social accord – and who hasn’t occasionally, self-centredly, found communal accord a bit boring? But there’s nothing stipulating conformity, let alone enforced conformity, in the specs for a post-scarcity utopia: you can always disagree, and disagree again, and at worst you can always walk away. The rupturing moves – selfishness, lies, violence – don’t bring anything to the party; they don’t even make conflict work better. If you could engineer anti-social behaviours out of society – and the wager of utopia is that you could – there’d be no need to reinvent them. What you would need are means and procedures for resolving conflict. What a viable anarchy would (still) need, in other words, is law.

Zooming back out, it is worth lingering for a moment over those two conceits, and just how disparate they are; scratching those two itches in a single narrative is quite something. It’s a really interesting book. Didn’t agree with it, of course, but that in itself is quite an interesting thing to say about a novel.

Janice Hallett, The Examiner
Dreadful. As a recovering academic, I thought a post-graduate course might be an interesting setting for Hallett’s “found documents” approach. It’s not. The course and its students begin by not resembling any I can imagine, and end by revealing themselves to be something else entirely. (No spoilers, it’s really not worth it.) Also, Hallett reuses the “improbable thing hidden improbably inside another improbable thing” plot device from The Christmas Appeal; perhaps she thought nobody would have read it. On the plus side, it only took me an evening to read, and it’s cured me of any wish to read any more of her books. Fool me, er, four and a half times… well, anyway.

Also in November, I watched these films:

Anemone (Ronan Day-Lewis 2025)
A small film, rather stagey in a Sam Shepard style (two men in a room, brooding silences alternating with furious monologues). If this had been directed by Ronan Smith, it almost certainly wouldn’t have been co-written by and starred Daniel Day-Lewis, and it might well not have been made. Which would have been a shame; it works well enough, the acting’s genuinely powerful and there’s some great cinematography. I think the guy’s got a future in the business (as well as a father).

Die My Love (Lynne Ramsay 2025)
Sometimes the opening shots of a film make me think, “It’s OK, we’re in safe hands here”. (Sometimes the feeling’s more intense: the opening shots of Todd Haynes’ Carol made me cry.) I had this feeling – that, whatever else, the film-maker knew what they were doing – watching Sentimental Value, and Conclave, and Anemone, and this film. I’m reluctant to overrule my own gut feeling, but the film actually seemed like a bit of a mess; I wasn’t at all sure what it was doing, or whether it succeeded. Films portraying mental illnesses which seem to be shaped to the demands of the film rub me up the wrong way (Sky Peals, Hard Truths), and this certainly didn’t ring true to me as a portrayal of post-partum depression. It brought out the awful, seductive appeal of dropping out of role and calling out phonies, like a more aggressive Holden Caulfield, and how destructive (and self-destructive) such a move can be. Was that what it was about? Not sure.

And Then There Were None (Peter Collinson 1974)
Rock-solid plot, great cast, beautiful location – what could go wrong? The script (mediocre), the staging (wooden), the editing (alternately under- and overactive) and the acting (woefully under-rehearsed); that’s what. A TV movie, and not one I’ll seek out again.

Ballad of a Small Player (Edward Berger 2025)
What did the director of Conclave do next? He adapted a short novel, by cult author Lawrence Osborne, about “Lord Doyle”, a con man and compulsive gambler who inexorably loses everything in the casinos of Macau; he got Colin Farrell and Tilda Swinton on board, and the film was released through Netflix, less than a year after the release of Conclave. It’s a terrific novel – it steeps you in “Doyle”‘s consciousness, to the point where the urge for another bottle of champagne and another round of baccarat seems entirely reasonable, or at least like one that’s not worth resisting. The film opens it up and builds up several smaller parts, not always successfully. But Colin Farrell is magnificent; you’d give him a very wide berth (for multiple reasons), but he’s magnificent.

Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies 1988)
I’m so glad to have seen this on the big screen, and so sorry not to have seen it before. Astonishing film-making, the kind of thing that lives on in your mind; if Country and Western is “three chords and the truth”, this is the truth on 35mm. People’s lives seen as a passage through spaces articulated over time – it doesn’t sound like much spelt out, but done well it’s amazingly powerful. The long shot of the stairs near the beginning of the first part sums up family life, as parents experience it, better than I’ve ever seen it done.

Keeper (Osgood Perkins 2025)
It’s not on the level of The Monkey – which I described as, among other things, “a treatise on mortality dramatised by Peter Jackson circa Braindead” – but this was a lot of fun. “Hi, I’m your new boyfriend and you can definitely trust me!” is a fine old sub-genre of horror film, as is “Things in the woods? Who told you there were mysterious ancient things in the woods?”. Smoosh them together, add gore and grunge and here we are.

The Ice Tower (Lucile Hadžihalilović 2025)
The films to which Peter Bradshaw and Isaac Feldberg gave their maximum ratings both sound great; they don’t sound like the same film, though, and neither of them sounds like the film I saw. (Feldberg does describe the film as ‘glacially paced’, among other ice-related epithets; I wouldn’t have said that was a good thing, but there you go.) I can’t help feeling a bit “Emperor’s New Clothes” about this one. You can talk about David Lynch and Black Narcissus and use words like ‘oneiric’, or you can say that ‘teenage runaway becomes film extra, talks to star, dreams of stardom’ is pure 50s Hollywood – and the 50s treatment would have fitted in a bit of establishing exposition and wouldn’t have skated so lightly (see what I did there?) over practical questions (were her family looking for her? where did she live while she was an extra, and how?). Meh; all the ‘meh’. (Tout le ‘bof’.)

The Hitcher (Robert Harmon 1986)
We end the month with another old movie making an appearance on Channel 5 or Great! Movies or somewhere – and, unlike Distant Voices, Still Lives, I did see this in the cinema at the time. In a casting decision that will surprise no one, the role of a nameless, motiveless psychopath quietly enjoying the death and destruction he causes is played, rather brilliantly, by Rutger Hauer. It’s great; basically one long car chase, like a shlockier version of Duel.

In September I read – or finished reading – two books from the £10 Box:

Richard H. Francis, Blackpool Vanishes
Terry Carr, Cirque

Reviews here.

I also read (or finished)

Suzanne Collins, Sunrise on the Reaping
The history of Suzanne Collins’s dystopian future America is pretty well mapped out now, from The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes through to Catching Fire. While plenty of people will be happy to spend some more time in Panem, any new story can only really be set in the period between Songbirds and The Hunger Games. Haymitch’s origin story is a natural choice – but it’s also a story that has fairly burdensome conditions attached. Whatever happens, it can’t involve a rebellion – at least, not one that has any effect or is remembered by anyone; by the end of the book, moreover, Haymitch himself needs to be a burnt-out, cynical alcoholic, or heading that way. The action is well handled and there are some interesting sidelights on Hunger Games characters, but the narrative arc is, frankly, a bit of a downer.

Bernard C. Blake, At the Change of the Moon
At the Change of the Moon, discovered (in the British Library) and reprinted by horror writer and editor Johnny Mains, was one of a handful of books by Bernard C. Blake (1882-1918). Blake wrote this when he was 19; he seems to have given up writing in his mid-20s. In form it’s a linked anthology: confined to their hotel by a storm, two men vie with each other in telling tales of insane people they have known. It’s an odd choice of theme, and not entirely successful: it makes for narratives that are weird and unsettling without being eerie or otherworldly. In other words, we’re never in any doubt that the deranged logic of the accounts we are reading is the product of a deranged mind; this is a security we rarely have when reading Robert Aickman or Arthur Machen. The book itself is very short, but it’s supplemented with other writings by Blake as well as pictures of Blake and a lengthy introduction. It’s clear that this was a labour of love for Mains, in bad as well as good ways; there were a few places where I thought the book could have done with another pair of eyes. It’s a fascinating rediscovery, though; I wish Mislaid Books every success.

(Only four books completed in September! A lot of my reading time was taken up with something I didn’t finish until October.)

Also in September, I watched these films:

The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (Jorge Grau 1974)
“Contains nudity,” warned Talking Pictures TV. True: during the opening montage of 1970s central Manchester (fascinating in itself) a woman in a long coat, waiting to cross the road, throws off her coat and runs naked through the traffic. (She’s never seen again, nor does anyone else strip off.) It’s an Italian production, with dialogue added in post-production; this and the highly approximate geography give the film an additional layer of weirdness. The main action is set somewhere out in the country, and follows the Night of the Living Dead template: zombies are killing people, but the local police are more suspicious of the scruffy hippies who try to report them. The discovery of what’s creating the zombies gives the story a nice ‘green’ twist, while the ending is, if anything, even more downbeat than that of NOTLD. It’s not, however, set in Manchester (the opening sequence apart) – or indeed in a morgue. (It also went out as Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, Breakfast at the Manchester Morgue and Don’t Open the Window. No one in the film ever opens a window, or gets advised not to.)

Eddington (Ari Aster 2025)
A town divided against itself during the pandemic – divided to the point of civil war! It sounds like it could make an interesting film – darkly satirical, cranking up the tension, showing up stupidity and pig-headedness of all kinds while retaining sympathy for the human beings involved… a Britannia Hospital for the pandemic. The trouble is, a film like that wouldn’t spare anyone or anything, on either side – and it’s far too soon to both-sides Covid. (My internal monologue, in at least one scene, was “Put the mask on. Put the mask on. Put the bloody mask on.”) Moreover, while Britannia Hospital shows that it’s possible to take a tous azimuts approach to satire, it also shows its cost: the need to take on everything results in a film that’s bleak to the point of despair and structurally disjointed (just ask Mick Travis). In any case, in this film Ari Aster isn’t just taking on his audience’s beliefs; he’s taking on every assumption we bring to the film, including assumptions about pacing, tension and narrative coherence. Eddington wrong-foots us so often, and to so little constructive effect, that I’ve got to assume it was deliberate; what Ari Aster was trying to achieve is another question.

Caught Stealing (Darren Aronofsky 2025)
A fast-moving, enjoyable heist/double-cross movie; very post-Coen Brothers in its pacing and editing, and in the way it always seems on the point of tipping into absurdity (the Orthodox Jewish gangster brothers come very close). Austin Butler’s central character frequently gets beaten up, and the violence generally is rather crunchy and unpleasant; given that the film overall is about as serious and grown-up as The Double Deckers, this gives it an odd, slightly fetishistic quality. But it’s never less than watchable; Butler (who appears in Eddington as an annoying Youtube personality) makes a likeable – and very watchable – amiable shlub, while Mat Smith plays a lowlife punk with a lowlife Mohican (and, oddly, a rather unconvincing British accent). The titular ‘stealing’ is nothing to do with theft – it’s a baseball reference (and there’s more baseball in the film than I really needed). Still: overall, good stupid fun.

The Thursday Murder Club (Chris Columbus 2025)
I’ve read The Thursday Murder Club, obviously; my weakness for the less serious fringes of crime fiction has been well documented here. It’s not gritty; it’s not harrowing; it’s not gruesome; it does not abound in heart-stopping narrative tension or savage authorial anger. In short, it doesn’t have any sharp edges. Or so I thought – but Chris Columbus has evidently found some, and he’s filed them right down. As well as almost everything being wrong – the location, the casting, the plot, the dialogue – the film is cosier and more fluffy than you could imagine. I don’t give up on films, but in this case I was sorely tempted. To be fair, it is worth hanging on to see Richard E. Grant, who seems to be visiting from a different film. I imagine his audition went something like this:

REG: …who’s witnessed horrors, and he’s shut his eyes to them so as to survive, but he’s also shut down the core of his being – his heart if you will – and he’s slowly becoming ever more aware of the unbearable cost of doing so… I don’t know, I’m just throwing out ideas…
CC: Sure. And you’re cutting roses all through the scene. When can you be off book?

Jaws (Steven Spielberg 1975)
We saw this at a 50th-anniversary screening; I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it, and it was well worth seeing on the big screen. But it is about a shark. Spielberg had a great cast, and he had the sense to let them stretch out and do a bit of acting; the action scenes are great, too (although it would have been better if we’d never seen the shark full-length). But it’s an adventure story about some guys hunting a shark; that’s what it is, that’s what you get. The difference between this and Jaws 2 is one of quality, not kind.

Babette’s Feast (Gabriel Axel 1987)
“So, half the film is going to consist of some people eating a lovely meal – I mean, a really lovely meal – but only one of them says anything nice about it. The others don’t say anything, but you can see they’re enjoying it despite themselves, and it becomes a life-changing experience. Although they are all very old, so, you know.”
– And…?
“No, that’s pretty much it.”
– OK, what about the other half of the film?
“The other half is everything that leads up to it.”
File under Shouldn’t Work (But Does); a genuinely enchanting film. (In fairness, it is a really lovely meal.)

Steve (Tim Mielants 2025)
It’s the mid-90s, and Steve (Cillian Murphy) is the head teacher at a special school: specifically, a residential school for boys excluded from mainstream education after going through the criminal justice system. It’s not an easy job, and Steve doesn’t get through unscathed. The boys are loud, assertive and unruly, in much the same sense that Niagara Falls is damp: they’re unbearable, and I found myself unable to perceive the good that Steve sees in every one of them. Or rather, I should say – this being a drama rather than a documentary – that the boys are very convincingly unbearable: there’s a stellar cast playing members of staff, but the teenage lads playing the pupils are extraordinary. It’s a bit like The History Boys, if at any time there was always at least one of them breaking stuff, yelling with rage and frustration, attacking somebody or just shouting “Wanker!” to relieve the boredom.

Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos 2009)
Perhaps not the oddest film I’ve ever seen, but well up there. The premise – a couple raise their children to believe that they can’t ever leave their house and garden – is no odder than Room or The Village, but the execution is doggedly, claustrophobically bizarre; in its single-minded conviction and intensity it’s reminiscent of Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End (and that was a musical). An example is the titular “dogtooth”; this refers to canine teeth, and to a key element in the family’s personal mythos. The children will be old enough to venture beyond the garden, the father assures them, when one or other of their (adult) canines drops out; however, it’s not safe to leave except by car, and they won’t be old enough to learn to drive until the missing canine grows back again. “Nothing odd will do long” (Samuel Johnson), and on the evidence of Dogtooth this Lanthimos character certainly isn’t going to have a long career. (Johnson was referring specifically to Tristram Shandy – which, he said, “did not last” – so perhaps this wasn’t his finest critical hour.)

Rogue One (Gareth Edwards 2016)
I watched this years ago and couldn’t remember anything about it, except that it was a Star Wars prequel and had something to do with the Death Star. Then we watched Andor, which is just wonderful; real politics and believable characters in the Star Wars universe, who would have thought it was possible? Having four series concertinaed into the second season is a tragic missed opportunity, on a par with the cancellation of Firefly. Anyway, we watched the final episode of Andor and gradually realised that there wasn’t going to be an ending, as it was setting up for Rogue One to start in medias res. So we watched Rogue One again… and, a month later, I couldn’t tell you anything about it, except that it was a Star Wars prequel and had something to do with the Death Star. It was enjoyable to watch – if you want an action movie with lots of SFX, Gareth Edwards is your director – and Diego Luna was in it, as were Genevieve O’Reilly and Ben Mendelsohn; the gang was all there, but in comparison to Andor they just didn’t have much to do. Maybe one day there’ll be a Star Wars film with the seriousness of Andor; I’ll be right there. (Top tip: fix it so Alex Lawther can come back.)

Islands (Jan-Ole Gerster 2025)
Tom is a tennis coach living on Fuerteventura. Someone asks him where he goes for holidays, but he doesn’t really have holidays; he’s on court all day, and at night he goes to the local club and drinks till he passes out. The way he insinuates himself into the life of a wealthy couple, who have hired him to coach their son, evokes another Tom, but he’s no Ripley: he has no goals, seeming to act entirely on impulse. He sees that there are tensions between the man and the woman – she says that he made her give up work, that he mismanaged her father’s business; he says that he thinks he isn’t the boy’s father. And then the man goes missing. What’s happened? Why is the woman confiding in him? What will happen now? Where next for Tom? The key thing to keep in mind – which Tom fails to do – is that he lives on the island; they’re only there on holiday.