Edinburgh International Film Festival reviews: Sorry, Baby | Islands | After This Death | Redux Redux + more

Sorry, Baby

★★★☆☆

Islands

★★★★☆

After This Death

★★★★☆

Redux Redux

★★★★☆

Zodiac Killer Project

★★★★☆

The Edinburgh International Film Festival gets off to a curious start with Sorry, Baby, a black comedy about a literature professor in her late twenties navigating the aftermath of a sexual assault.

Written, directed by and starring Eva Victor, it’s a film that deftly deals with the darkness of its themes and understands the tonal juggling act required to pull this off with humour, even throwing in a little meta-commentary by having Victor’s character Agnes teach a class on Lolita and the complex interplay that exists between form and content when the subject matter is intentionally uncomfortable.

But acknowledging such things is different from successfully pulling them off and it’s the attempts at comedy that throw the film off balance. This isn’t because the humour is inappropriate, more that it’s so strained and irritating, overly reliant on the sort of cringe comedy that’s surely worn out its welcome by now.

It doesn’t help either that several of the supporting characters border on caricature, perhaps to make Agnes’s own quirky demeanour seem less mannered by comparison.

And yet the moment the film stops trying to land biggish laughs, pivoting instead to what one chapter heading euphemistically calls “the year with the bad thing”, the film really starts to find its feet. Victor doesn’t dramatise the assault; instead the film keeps us outside the scene of the crime as it’s happening, then finds heartbreaking, sardonic, absurd and philosophical ways to return to it as Agnes processes it differently over the ensuing years, refusing to let the assault itself consume her identity or destroy her life.

The more artful the film gets, the better it becomes.

With his cigarette-ravaged voice and going-to-seed looks, Sam Riley makes for a suitably louche gumshoe-in-the-making in Islands, a Canaries-set mystery from German director Jan-Ole Gerster.

Riley plays Tom, an alcoholic tennis coach living an itinerant life on Fuerteventura, spending his days working at a resort hotel teaching tennis to tourists and his nights getting black-out drunk.

This responsibility-free life is disrupted, however, by the arrival of a monied British couple, Anne (Stacy Martin) and Dave (Jack Farthing), and their seven-year-old son Anton (Dylan Torrell). Hired to give the latter lessons, he soon finds himself drawn into their world, not quite sure if he’s met Anne before (she puts his sense of deja vu down to her former career as a minor TV actor), but curious enough about her to become first their de facto tour guide, then Anne’s intermediary with the local police when her husband suddenly disappears.

The film’s mysteries are best left unspoiled, and in fact Gerster never quite reveals them himself, letting us intuit the deeper connections through Tom’s hungover efforts to grapple with who these people actually are.

It’s an approach that Gerster slightly undermines by drawing the film out past its natural end point, yet Riley’s shambling presence, Martin’s icy reserve, and the psychosexual tension between them make this sun-soaked slice of neo-noir intrigue a pleasure to unravel.

There’s plenty to unravel too in After This Death, an even more out-there psychosexual mystery, this time revolving around a pregnant voice-over artist who embarks on a lusty affair with the frontman of an arty synth-rock band and finds herself embroiled in the weird machinations of fandom when his ardent cult following start invading her privacy in creepy and obsessive ways.

Argentine writer/director Lucio Castro takes his time getting to the freakier parts, spending the first hour instead seeding oddball details about his equally enigmatic protagonists and letting their mutual attraction for each other flourish in amusingly frank ways.

Played by Mía Maestro and Lee Pace, their performances certainly help hold this intentionally dream-like film together. Like an Argentine Juliette Binoche, Maestro’s Isabel is full of carnal intrigue and mischief, and she’s got plenty of chemistry with Pace, all rangy and rugged as Elliot, the naturally zealous rock star whose proclivity for living his life as a piece of performance art has transformed him into a reluctant messianic figure, like Eddie Vedder and Trent Reznor crossed with David Bowie and Kate Bush.

It’s weird and wild stuff — and the music and score are suitably strange too.

From Silence of the Lambs to Zodiac to last year’s Nic Cage freak-out Longlegs, serial killer movies remain a fascinating staple of the film industry, often an unexpected source of transgressive and inventive storytelling. Redux Redux and Zodiac Killer Project offer two interesting new spins on the genre, the first a robust piece of sci-fi pulp fiction, the second an experimental documentary that doubles as a sly deconstruction of our fascination with true crime as a whole.

Screening as part of the festival’s Midnight Madness strand, Redux Redux’s irresistible high-concept premise involves a grieving mother hunting her daughter’s killer across the multiverse in the hope of finding a reality in which she’s still alive.

That’s the sort of juicy idea that can sometimes go awry, but US directing siblings Kevin and Matthew McManus keep things elegantly simple, offsetting their indie budget by rooting it in a recognisable world of diners and truck stops, and explaining the existence of the coffin-like box its protagonist, Irene, uses to zip between parallel universes as a bit of underground tech secured on the black market.

We first meet Irene (a forceful turn from the directors’ sister Michaela McManus) in the film’s grizzly cold open, executing her serial killer target with the brutal proficiency of a combat veteran who’s done too many tours of duty. It’s clear she’s already multiple kills in to her inter-dimensional revenge mission and the filmmakers proceed to take macabre pleasure laying out Irene’s Groundhog Day-like purgatory as she encounters the same people again and again in slightly different ways.

But they also smartly up the emotional stakes by having her save another potential victim of her daughter’s killer. What follows is a slick and entertaining old school B-movie that punches far above its weight in both its ambition and execution.

Zodiac Killer Project, meanwhile, playfully exposes the tricks of the true crime documentary boom currently feeding our seemingly insatiable hunger for serial killer content.

It’s the latest from Brit filmmaker Charlie Shackleton, who was, apparently, on the point of making his own entry into this genre with a documentary on former California Highway Patrol officer Lyndon E Lafferty, whose book, The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up, detailed Lafferty’s investigation into the man he believed to be the never-caught Zodiac killer.

After starting pre-production, though, Shackleton lost the rights and, instead of ditching the project, opted to make this film detailing the documentary he would have made — using all the b-roll he’d already filmed, and describing in detail the shots, the approach and the details of Lyndon’s investigation that are already in the public domain.

The end result is like watching a DVD commentary for a never-finished film, which sounds pretty niche, but is oddly illuminating and wryly funny.

Whether or not Shackleton was ever really in the frame to make a straight-up true crime doc is also part of the fun; if you know his work — his excellent teen movie essay film Beyond Clueless, say, or his future “lost film” The Afterlight — a salvaged documentary sounds very on brand. Either way, his fondness for the true crime genre as a whole shines through, even as he’s exposing how cliché-ridden and problematic it has become.

Edinburgh International Film Festival runs until 20 August. For more information and tickets visit: www.edfilmfest.org

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