Dear friend,

one more week with a short selection of films, due to travelling and not feeling 100% ready to commit to full-length stories…

Quitter la nuit / Through the Night, written and directed by Delphine Girard, Belgium, 2023 - ⭐⭐⭐

Delphine Girard reworked her Oscar-nominated short film Une sœur, about a woman in danger pretending to call her sister while she’s actually placing an emergency call to the police. With the same cast, the story is expanded to show what happened afterwards and, in flashback, what happened before the call.
As is often the case where a successful short is expanded to a feature-length film, there is a significant difference in effectiveness between the original section and the added material. There is no doubt that the director had many important things to say, but the pacing and the way decisions unfold risk diluting the strength of the message.

８番出口 / Exit 8, directed by Genki Kawamura, co-written with Kentaro Hirase, based on the videogame by Kotake Create, Japan, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐½

I rented this film because I was starved for horror, and it was featured in the rental section of the Sooner catalogue. I saw it had positive reviews, clearly it was a Japanese film, and that’s all I needed to know.
Its videogame origins are quite evident in the simple mechanics of the ‘plot’: a man trapped in the corridors of a metro station needs to follow some rules in order to get out.
It didn’t take long to capture my attention, and I found myself often wondering what I would do if I were the protagonist. I also thought about a story a colleague once told me, of meeting a young woman in a station of the Tokyo metro, desperate because she couldn’t find the exit and no one could understand her requests for help.
Anyway, this film works best when it captures the feeling of being lost and confronted with thoughts of inadequacy, stuck in obsessive thinking and clinging to every sign that things are getting better, until you find yourself back at square one.
When it goes for actual horror imagery, less so, except for the always effective (for me) J-Horror tricks.

F1, directed by Joseph Kosinski, co-written with Ehren Kruger, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐

Listen, I’m happy that Kerry Condon is in two Best Picture-nominated films this year, and that’s all the positive that I can say about this trite, by-the-numbers, celebration of reckless ‘disruptive’ masculinity.