Film reviews: Kenny Dalglish | Bugonia | Relay | Shelby Oaks

Kenny Dalglish (12A) ★★★★

Bugonia (15) ★★★

Relay (15) ★★★★

Shelby Oaks (15) ★★

Asif Kapadia’s new film Kenny Dalglish may focus on a far less controversial figure than the titular subjects of his groundbreaking documentaries Senna, Amy and Diego Maradona, but the remarkable career of the legendary Scotland, Celtic and Liverpool striker (and later Liverpool manager) makes for a compelling film that’s moving in ways that might catch even football agnostics by surprise.

Mixing a wealth of archival footage with new audio interviews, Kapadia tracks Dalglish’s life from his Glasgow childhood to his early success with Celtic to his defining career with Liverpool, where he became the highest paid footballer in England at the time, swiftly justifying his signing fee by helping Liverpool win multiple back-to-back league and European trophies.

But it’s his managerial career, and the way it was bookended by tragedy, that gradually becomes the main thrust of the film. Appointed Liverpool’s player-manager the day after the Heysel Stadium disaster, and presiding over the club until the psychological toll of Hillsborough forced him to step back from the game, Kapadia shows the strength of character it took for Dalglish to restore pride in the club following the former and help heal a broken city following the latter.

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Weaving in trenchant analysis of the socio-economic conditions of the times, Kapadia also contextualises both disasters in terms of Thatcher’s hostility towards Liverpool, especially the way her disdain for the city contributed to the Sun newspaper victim-blaming Liverpool fans for Hillsborough, a smear that took decades to fully overturn.

Through it all, the relentlessly modest Dalglish is a paragon of dignity and decency. He knows that football — to paraphrase fellow Scottish Liverpool manager Bill Shankly — isn’t more important than life or death. For Dalglish, people always come first, which is why he’s still revered in his adopted city and why this film transcends its subject’s sport of choice.

Bugonia finds Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos on typically absurdist form with an apocalyptic parable about extremist ideologies seeding humanity’s destruction. Emma Stone takes the lead as Michelle Fuller, a big pharma CEO kidnapped by Jesse Plemons’ struggling beekeeper Teddy to protest her company’s ecologically unsound practices and products. He also happens to be a basement-dwelling conspiracy theorist who’s convinced himself Michelle is really an alien and it’s one of the sharper jokes in the film that Michelle’s own way of treating her employees gives some credence to his beliefs.

Sadly, as the paranoid Teddy chains Michelle up, smears her in antihistamine cream and shaves her head to stop her communicating with her people, the battle of wills that ensues starts to feel a little empty.

The film may look spectacular (it was shot by Robbie Ryan), and there’s undeniable pleasure in watching Stone and Plemons going toe-to-toe again after last year’s Lanthimos-directed triptych Kinds of Kindness, but it also feels like Lanthimos plundering his own back-catalogue for ideas, juxtaposing moments of absurdity with moments of bloody violence en route to a nihilistic punchline.

Sticking with conspiracy theories, Relay sees David Mackenzie update the paranoid thriller template of the 1970s for an age in which effecting change by exposing corporate malfeasance in the New York Times is — to quote Sam Worthington’s villain in the film — “a liberal fantasy.” Instead we have Riz Ahmed playing a mysterious intermediary who helps potential whistleblowers who’ve lost their nerve return incriminating documents without fear of reprisals, something Ahmed’s character, Ash, guarantees by keeping a copy of the evidence in a safe-house.

This also necessitates him maintaining his own anonymity, which he does by interacting with his clients using a third-party voice-to-text relay system designed to help people who are deaf and hearing impaired receive phone calls. This is just one of several intriguing details Mackenzie (working from a tight script by Justin Piaseki) uses to add texture to an already great concept, one that really starts to take off as Ash breaks protocol and starts getting a little too involved with his latest client, Sarah (Lily James). The resulting film is pleasurably old school in its twists and turns, but in Ahmed’s character it also offers a slyly ironic portrait of the isolation of the digital age: Ash is an analogue guy not because he wants to be, but because he has to be.

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Kicking off like a botched throwback to The Blair Witch Project, YouTube film critic Chris Stuckman’s debut feature Shelby Oaks uses the hokey story of a paranormal investigator who goes missing while making a web series as the starting point for a ham-fisted attempt to blend the found-footage idea with the making of a true-crime doc involving her sister’s ongoing search for answers. Liberally pilfering ideas from genre classics such as The Ring and Rosemary’s Baby with no understanding of what made them great, this fails to be scary at almost every turn.

Kenny Dalglish is in cinemas on 29 and 30 October and is available to stream on Prime Video from 4 November. Bugonia, Relay and Shelby Oaks are in cinemas from 31 October.

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