TRAIN TO BUSAN is the best fast-zombie picture since the Dawn Of The Dead remake. It’s also an awful lot of fun. The live-action debut of animator Yeon (The King Of Pigs, Seoul Station), Train To Busan has a particularly high concept: almost the entire film takes place on a speeding train travelling from Seoul to Busan, and its focus is on a handful of passengers trying to survive an outbreak already in progress. (See full Train To Busan review).
Available to watch: Netflix
I DON’T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE stars Melanie Lynskey as Ruth, a nurse who is sick of the indecency she sees all around her. She arrives home to find her house has been ransacked of her anti-depressants, laptop and grandmother’s silverware. The police blame her for leaving the door unlocked, and do little more than make a report. Her sister (Lee Eddy), a married mother with a young daughter, is barely sympathetic. “You have it better than a lot of people,” she says. (See full I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore review).
Available to watch: Netflix
THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS is an engaging mixture of George A. Romero’s Day Of The Dead and Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later…, it’s set in an England overrun by the ravenous victims of a fungal infection. They’re called “hungries,” but potato/potahto: they’re fast zombies. Our hero is Melanie, a little girl being held at a military base with some other children as part of a desperate attempt to find a vaccine for the fungus. Melanie and her schoolmates aren’t mindless beasts, though they’re still capable of feral violence. And when the base falls (in rather spectacular fashion), Melanie, her teacher (Gemma Arterton), a driven scientist (Glenn Close) and a military escort are thrust into a scary new world. (See full The Girl With All The Gifts review).
Available to watch: Netflix
THE WAILING traps us with a group of entirely ordinary people grappling with a force they can’t fully understand. Something is driving their friends and neighbours to murder one another in a particularly brutal manner – but to what end? And in a culture steeped in legends of curses, what have they done to deserve it? (See full The Wailing review).
Available to watch: Netflix
Natasha Lyonne in Antibirth
ANTIBIRTH stars Natasha Lyonne as Lou, a party girl who blacks out one night and wakes up the next morning to find herself inexplicably pregnant… and experiencing some very strange gestational effects. Her immediate response is to get shit-faced again, which is our first clue that this will not be a conventional genre movie. (See full Antibirth review).
Available to watch: Netflix
I AM THE PRETTY THING THAT LIVES IN THE HOUSE is a horror movie that plays as the slowest of burns, following a young woman named Lily (Ruth Wilson, of Luther and The Affair) as she walks around a Massachusetts house for an hour and a half. Lily takes care of the aged author who lives there we await Lily’s death. (See full I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House review).
Available to watch: Netflix
Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out (2017)
GET OUT follows a young man who accompanies his girlfriend home to meet her parents, and finds unimaginable horrors behind the pleasant façade. But this one’s loaded: our hero Chris (Sicario’s Daniel Kaluuya) is Black his girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) and her parents (Bradley Whitford, Catherine Keener) are white, and the rot spreads well beyond one household. (See full Get Out review).
Available to watch: iTunes
SPLIT is a return to self-serious genre storytelling that bears all the hallmarks of M. Night Shyamalan’s defining early films. A minimalist thriller about the battle of wills between a young woman held captive with two classmates by a resourceful, unbalanced tormentor (James McAvoy), Split has an immediate urgency, opening with an abstracted daylight abduction and quickly establishing the stakes. (See full Split review).
Available to watch: iTunes
DON’T BREATHE follows as three directionless young friends break into the home of a blind man after they get a tip that he’s sitting on $300,000. What they don’t know is that the man, an Iraq War vet, is no pushover. Soon they’re the ones being pursued. (See full Don’t Breathe review).
Available to watch: iTunes
