exp. Is generally intended to be a video game website, but I like writing about film as well, so I think I can get away with celebrating my year in culture in general. Which I suppose makes it sound like I’m going to be sharing books and art shows I went to, but it’s just music and films and that, innit. I mean this is a video game website.
Single Of The Year: Hayley Williams – True Believer
Edge case here as this was, along with every other song on Hayley William’s Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party, originally put online as a “single” but isn’t actually classed as a single on things like Wikipedia. But of course, such distinction is kind of meaningless these days. As I said on Bluesky, there are echoes of Chino Moreno’s ††† here, and I can’t help but loop it.
Album Of The Year: Deafheaven – Lonely People with Power
Probably wasn’t going to be anything else. I was shocked when I heard Deafhaven’s Infinite Granite, concerned they were making a full shift towards shoegaze the kind of which put me right off Alcest, but I’ll admit that album has grown on me. It almost makes me feel bad that I think of Lonely People With Power in that cliche fashion as “a return to form” but, well, it is.
“Evil Puddle argues … that community is very, very real, in both narrative and form.”
Interesting year for film. So many of the big award films this year were, frankly, absolute slogs, the worst kind of eating your greens. And here’s the bold Matt Farley embarrassing them with a shoestring budget and non-actors.
“War 2 is the realest fucking movie out there. And if you disagree? You’re a fucking idiot.”
Yes, Sinners is good–excellent, in fact–and probably what I’d go for if I was looking for the “mainstream pick.” But it’s still a pretender to the masala throne; better to go straight to the source. There was no bigger or better movie for me this year than War 2.
(Note: if this trailer autoplays with a terrible English dub, please click through and change it to Hindi. Please.)
TV Of The Year (Runner Up): The Rehearsal Season 2
I was a latecomer to Nathan Fielder, but I think he’s probably this century’s greatest artist (at least so far) and I already believed that before seeing the second season of The Rehearsal. I saw some complaints that the first season was him repeating himself (Nathan For You’s Smokers Allowed/Finding Francis) but I think that was uncharitable: Fielder has been able to drill down on his artistic process (thanks, unrealistically huge amounts of money from HBO) and create the kind of work that changes the way people see the world. Simultaneously, there are things in this that are so funny it’s actually painful. I am in awe.
TV Of The Year: Andor Season 2
It was a close run thing, but Tony Gilroy’s ability to take Star Wars, probably the world’s biggest “IP” and owned by the most overpowering and surely risk-adverse cultural force today (Disney) and turn it into a genuinely meaningful examination of what it means to live under fascism? A show that’s willing to say the word genocide? Much like Twin Peaks: The Return, this was a TV experience of the likes I don’t think I’ll ever experience again, one which will stay with me forever.
In Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, Sam Rockwell stars as a man who claims to be from a future where AI has wiped out half the population and the other half live unable to escape their personal “perfect” AI realities. He takes a NORMS hostage with the belief that some combination of the restaurant’s diners will be able to reach the creator of the AI so they can install safeguards before it’s too late (the film, intelligently, accepts the inevitability of AI and has a sensibly scaled goal as a result.)
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die–immediately–takes aim at our modern affliction: that we’re all looking at our phones, all the time. The satire feels a bit broad, with entire classrooms of students all just trapped in an endless scroll, and I’ve seen more than one sneery “ok boomer” take on this.
But.
Last year I worked background for a while on a TV show, which is a job I rather like; there’s a lot of downtime where you can do things like finishing editing that zine you were working on. I haven’t done it in years, and the one huge thing I noticed was that while there was still a small contingent of people who brought books, or wanted to chat with whoever they were sitting next to (whether they wanted to or not…) the largest cohort of people—who were of all ages—just looked at their phone. Now, I look at my phone a lot too, but I was taken by how the majority of them used it: on Instagram or Tiktok, scrolling at high speed, endlessly. Like they weren’t actually seeing anything. Just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. For hours.
It looked exactly like it does in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.
“Natasha Dow Schüll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the ‘machine zone,’ in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for as long as possible—even at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion.”
Social media, as it currently exists, has been designed in exactly the same way slot machines have. It has been continuously and intentionally evolved, using every trick gambling designers have come up with (and more) to make sure people pick up their phone at the merest hint of boredom or discomfort. And now AI is here to make the skinner box even more personalised than the algorithm has already managed, with the ultimate goal that, eventually, you don’t put the phone down. Ever.
A perfect smooth-brained populace, circuses so good they don’t realise there’s no bread.
You might think I’m being histrionic, but addiction is a disease, and we now live in a climate of a designed disease. We’re all addicted—to varying levels—and we need to start treating it the same way we should be treating any addiction: by being hard on those who peddle the addictive substance, and treating the addicted with care and respect rather than punitive measures. And we need to wake up to this now, before it’s too late.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die get it.
It feels absurd for a Gore Verbinski movie to be the first thing I’ve seen outside of Adam Curtis documentaries to get it, but welcome to the resistance, I guess?
Don’t get me wrong. This is a big, fun, silly film. It’s trying to make its point by being entertaining, not preachy, and here’s none of the nihilism of a Black Mirror. It embarrasses Edgar Wright’s The Running Man, a movie that seems like it’s trying to say something angry and real about the world we live in and manages to say nothing at all. And not only is it not a sequel, remake, or part of a franchise, it’s also not “new IP.” It’s just a movie, which is almost the most subversive thing about it.
It’s a little scattershot, could be a little shorter, Asim Chaudry’s accent is… not good. But it refuses to fall into some traps that might blunt it (there’s no “AI can be good if we just use it correctly” here) and frankly, I’d follow Sam Rockwell anywhere.
There’s not a lot of movies where I think “I hope a lot of people see this” but this is one of them, not least because it’s just a straight up enjoyable film. I admit I wrote this to post online, on a social network, but Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die chimed so much with my own experience that I now notice, just a little more, when I pick up my phone for what feels like no reason, and to then try and interrogate it.
Sure, the movie might only be mildly illuminating on the dangers of our encroaching, all encompassing “machine zone”, but sometimes a little extra light on the problem is all you need to actually see it.
I do not think the original Avatar is good, but I’ll be the first to admit that Way of Water had me both hootin’ and hollerin’ as I watched genocidal whiteys get murked, and I remember thinking “oh man, I enjoyed that enough I’d watch it again.”
[Monkey’s paw curls]
Did that mean I wanted to watch the exact same film again, but as a sequel? Because I did not.
Now, before you start quibbling here–there’s the fire Na’vi, multiple(!) whale councils, a fuckton more Spider, the climax which is whales vs. whalers again features more, bigger whales and even some squid too–I think I assumed that this film was going to, you know, not just feature the Sullys mostly hanging around and swimming in the same location of the previous movie. That there’d be some contrived reason for them to end up at a volcano, or among the fire Na’vi, and the film would be a feast of fire and particle effects the way Way of Water was for water physics.
No. In fact, the film does a hilarious thing where the Sullys have their contrived reason to leave the water Na’vi (“Unlike the audience, we don’t want Spider to die!”) and so they leave, get into complications on the way to their original settlement (literally due to the Fire Na’vi!) but within about twenty minutes they’re back with the water Na’vi.
What the hell?
The film does, briefly, go to a volcano so the OG antagonist Quaritch can enjoy a Far Cry 3 cutscene with the leader of the Fire Na’vi Varang, but we never learn anything meaningful about the Fire Na’vi or their motivations, they don’t do anything exciting (one guy Witness Me’s himself, so I thought that might be a thing, but he’s the only one that ever does it, so maybe he was just depressed or something) and Varang has them all move to the evil human settlement so she can be close to her boyfriend? I mean she basically tradwifes herself into irrelevance?
Fire And Ash is just so deeply unrewarding. Look, I’m not exactly hung up on the lore here or anything but the fact that the movie does absolutely nothing to move the overarching story forward feels like… a mistake. If you’re really reaching I guess there are some underwhelming revelations about Kiri and a glimpse of a big white rotating head (???) but I don’t get a sense of where that takes anything. And don’t get me wrong, I could watch whitey get killed in a variety of ways for hours, but it’s mostly the same stuff you’ve seen before, and the one death you’re waiting for–the evil whaling captain–is… nothing. You can’t have him get torn in half or something? At least if you do that he could come back with spider legs (come on, all together now [chanting] Spider legs! Spider legs! Spider legs!)
Speaking of Spiders… what was the deal here? James Cameron made a bet with George Lucas that he could make a human Jar Jar? I’m being unnecessary cruel to Jack Champion (it isn’t his fault) but it’s so weird to make your film about indigenous revolt that’s already about a white saviour end with every Na’vi in I guess all of history crowding round the one white guy that’s cool with them to say “congratulations!” like it’s Evangelion.
I’ve seen a few people say that they like this more than Way of Water, which… I mean, fine, I’d like to agree, but there’s even less narrative drive here. And even if Varang is hot or whatever (where are the thicc Na’vi tho? Am I right, fellas?) the fire dancing and ululation is wildly cringe no matter how desperately we’re all trying to pretend the allegory here has any distance at all.
If you’re “only” going to make five of these, and you’re 71, I don’t think you can piss an entire film and several years away on doing the same thing twice even if it’s still making bank in China and kept a lot of people in New Zealand employed.
*Sigh*
It’s weird that not only do I want these films to be good, I think they should be. “We should brutally kill the people who are making our planet uninhabitable. Like really fucking fuck them up. Real Drive elevator hours” is just the kind of message I can believe in, I guess, even with all this baggage.
Ah well, maybe next time. At least it still looked completely fucking stupid in high frame rate!
Something I’ll say for The Running Man: usually it’s annoying and pointless when a movie gets remade, but considering the original had almost no relation to Stephen King(“Richard Bachman”)’s novel, I can understand why someone might want to make a more faithful adaptation than the Schwarzenegger vehicle from 1987.
I can understand it, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea, and especially not in 2025. Even if The Running Man is completely new to you, in the last decades we’ve had so many variations on the concept, a few of which were legitimate cultural phenomena (The Hunger Games and especially Squid Game.) At this point, The Running Man wasn’t posed to ride the wave but paddle in its trough, and there’s no surprise that it hasn’t been able to keep its head above water.
It’d be nice, then, to say that it’s a great adaptation, has a unique spin, or is even that it’s just really fun and a great time at the movies. It would be nice to say that! But the Running Man offers no reason for its existence beyond the endemic lack of imagination in the executive class, who will dust off any old IP in the hope that it connects with the demographic the research claimed it would. I have a tremendous fondness for Edgar Wright, and I think it’s for that reason that this bummed me out so bad even after being burned by Baby Driver and Last Night in Soho.
The Running Man’s issue is that it seems to have absolutely no consistent vision, like no one really tried to think what the world of the film is and what it represents, and no willingness to hold a comprehensible political position either. It’s a strange alternate reality where they’ve got drones and self-driving cars and streetlamps smell you but runners still have to… record things to tape and post them in, for the most popular TV show ever that must be incredibly boring to watch (seriously, what do they fill the time with each night? The tedious procedural work of the hunters?) Any attempt at this being a “Verhoeven-like satire” is smashed to pieces because you can’t satirise consumerism with products like “Fun Twinks” while also having product placement all over the film. It’s unbelievably grim to imagine a director who once walked away from Marvel over creative differences giving a thumbs up after shooting the umpteenth take of a Liquid Death commercial he was going to put directly in his film. Eurgh!!!
Everything is just so flat. Glen Powell might play the world’s angriest man, able to withstand a taser out of sheer rage (wish they’d done more with that) but they don’t seem to be able to find anything to do with that, and even cut my favourite humanising factor–that he’s one of the rare people who still likes to read books–so they can jam in more of a reality TV parody that makes no sense because it just looks exactly like normal reality TV and doesn’t seem to have any jokes. His first escape is on the money, but they can’t seem to build on it, and in fact, there’s really not much action at all (concerningly, this lines up quite well with Baby Driver, which similarly runs out of steam.) Michael Cera has a bit of fun (and you know what, I liked the subversion of expectations) but Powell doesn’t even do anything in that scene and the big climax is… a small explosion on a bridge. Thrilling.
The nadir has to be the ending. I think everyone accepts that no studio is going to shoot the ending as written, and to be honest, I’m surprised that Powell’s Ben Richards still holds a woman hostage (it feels very retro, though they speedrun getting her onside so no one has to feel icky for very long.) But the decision to do what they do is so wrong-headed and unsatisfying I almost can’t believe it. This is a movie that has three (three!) separate “you thought this happened but it didn’t” fake-outs, and to end on one is such a complete collapse of the contract between audience and filmmaker you should be able to get a refund, especially because the film tries to have its cake and eat it by offering the expected payback in the coda. The lack of politics really comes to bite the film in the arse. They shed almost all of the climate change stuff from the book, and the main antagonist, despite a game performance from Josh Brolin, has none of the bite of even one of the random people they found on the street to play the billionaire spectators in Squid Game. The film also seems to forget Colman Domingo is playing a baddie, because he escapes thanks to… his contract negotiation? Was something cut earlier in the film that would have had us emotionally invest in his character?
This movie even largely fails on the “it’s nice to look at Glasgow” scale, because while I popped when I saw the back of the Savoy Centre or whatever, most of this film is slathered in so much digital smear that it might as well have been shot in the Volume. I don’t mean to bang on about haptic cinema again but Christ we really need films to look real again.
Developed/Published by: Santa Ragione Released: 02/12/2025 Completed: 04/12/2025 Completion: Finished it.
“Artists must create, critics defend, and democratic people support . . . works so extreme that they become unacceptable even to the broadest minds of the new State.”
–Pier Paolo Pasolini, in a 1974 debate as quoted by Naomi Green in their essay “Salò: Breaking the Rules”.
Horses has been out for exactly a week, and I’m certain that if you’re reading this you’re already sick of the discourse (damn my adherence to schedule!) We actually raced through the talking points in record time, to be honest, it was barely a couple of days before we got the “well, you know, it’s actually not that good/what’s all the fuss about really” essays. Milking horses in real life is impractical and low-yield, and here we’ve reached the point where we’re drawing dust.
However, that doesn’t really change the material facts of the matter: irrespective of quality, Horses is an artistic work that has been de-facto banned from the two major storefronts–due to opaque processes and without recourse. I’ve written about this happening before–in fact this year–when Cara Cadaver’s VILE: Exhumed was banned from Steam (and then released for free) due to what appears to have been a misunderstanding of that game’s use of real footage as pornography and the wider context of morality policing by payment processors.
Interestingly, Santa Ragione are at pains to point out that this ban occurred in June 2023(!) and that it “has nothing to do with the recent restriction on adult content pushed by payment processors.”
There’s an urge to try and uncover the reasoning for the ban, but it’s to stumble about in the dark. Santa Ragione concentrate on–as much of the discourse has–that an unfinished sequence in a version “scrambled together” for early submission featuring a child riding on the back of a naked woman triggered the ban, but after the ban of VILE: Exhumed, I’m not so sure that (even benign) FMV footage or payment processors as a factor can’t entirely be ignored as, at least, a supplemental reason to keep the ban enforced. In particular with the ban from Epic, who didn’t choose to ban the game until December 1st(!) with the stated reason that they don’t sell AO rated games1 (despite Santa Ragione’s protestation that Horses had received PEGI 18 and ERSB M ratings) it smells to me like a simple pre-emptive decision to avoid controversy that could lather up into the kind of issue with payment processors that could affect their bottom line. It’s just easier.
So really, it’s not so much the specific reasoning for the ban that matters2, but the context: that we exist in a world where art not cannot exist without being a commodity–Santa Ragione cannot merely hope that people experience their art, but that they purchase it–and where wide access to that commodity is tied to an oligopoly (if we’re being kind to the Epic Games Store) or monopoly (if we’re not) who have absolute power over the market. It is satisfying to poke at the hypocrisies of a storefront like Steam, but it is, ultimately, a problem of capitalism.
If you’ve read this site for any length of time, you’re probably sick of me saying things are capitalism’s fault. Well, they are, and the interesting thing about Horses is that this issue of commodification under the ultimate power of an opaque system is critiqued by the work itself. And this has echoes with another piece of Italian art which I have seen paid lip-service to in other essays on Horses: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom.
It is not easy to find a usable representative image of Salò, but this will do.
Pasolini is a complicated figure with a huge legacy, though one that has been somewhat narrowed in the popular imagination due to the reputation of Salò (his other transgressive works like Teorema don’t really get a look in) which, unfortunately, I’m not going to help. What’s important here is that Salò existed as a work contemporary to 1970s Italy, an era of intense political turmoil only “post-fascist” in so much that it came after the fall of both Mussolini and the Italian Social Republic (which forms the setting for Salò), and in a period where Pasolini was concerned with the “new facism” of neo-capitalism.
In an era where art is being flattened into a homogenous, global product, it is important to understand Santa Ragione as human creators whose cultural specificity does not necessarily line up with the enforced Western (American) default, and that is reflected in this era also obviously being of great importance to Santa Ragione. Their game Wheels of Aurelia–itself embroiled in a delisting controversy–is set in this period, and movies such as Il Sorpasso (1962) and Rabid Dogs (1974) clearly inspired it. There is no such clean line of inspiration between Salò and Horses but I see a continuation of thought between them.
The thing about Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom is that its reputation precedes it. Portraying, as it does, the the torture, rape and murder of teenage victims by four powerful fascists and their collaborators, it generally features high on not just “most scary” and “most disturbing” lists but “movies you should never watch” lists, and continues to be banned in some countries. But if taken merely as a series of images, in 2025 it really isn’t… that bad. Would it be able to feature on the Criterion Collection if it was? I’m not so sure. Watching it now, you wonder what Pasolini would have made of the internet, and in particular the sea of easily accessible pornography where you can see the participants of things that the fascists of Salò could not perceive. If Salò was to rage against the idea that fascist dehumanisation was being continued via the commodification of the body and ultimately captures the mind, what would he make of the masses willingly3 performing online what was once considered unwatchable? More disturbing things are streamed online from bedrooms in middle America than we ever see in Salò. Indeed, in Salò Pasolini uses a cold, distant gaze to implicate us; could he have perceived a future where not just the camera is drawn so close, but the audience can tip to push things ever further?
But what sets Salò apart is that it is not titillating4. It is not intended to excite, even shock seems like a side-effect. In fact, it was an attempt to create a work that was indigestible.
“I told myself: I have to react and make products that are as inconsumable as possible. I know it’s utopian, because everything ends up being consumed. At the same time, I know that there is something inconsumable in art, and we need to stress the inconsumable quality of art. Therefore, with all my forces, I will try and produce difficult and indigestible works.”
Horses is a cinematic game–in that it directly and intentionally references the form of surrealist cinema (which notably, is distinct from Pasolini’s style.) It’s in black and white; almost completely silent (using intertitles for dialogue) and features the continuous sound of a projector. Combined with the farm setting, the game feels like it is set somewhere within Mussolini’s reign, but like Salò, there are anachronistic elements (though they are more apparent: a VHS tape, for example.)
The player takes the role of Anselmo, sent to spend two weeks at a farm to learn the meaning of work. We know nothing about Anselmo–we don’t even know if he knows what’s going on at the farm before he gets there, though he seems unhappy about the prospect of working there either way. The farm–as you certainly know by now–is run by a disturbed farmer who keeps a group of men and women as “horses” by drugging them and locking horse masks onto them. He is supported in this by his “dog”, Fido, similarly a man in a dog mask, and then you, the player as Anselmo, as you do video game farming tasks for him: picking carrots, feeding the dog, chopping wood, before you become increasingly entwined in the control of the “horses.”
As I said above, I do not believe Salò is intended as a direct inspiration, but there are parallels. The first that will come to mind is a sequence in Salò where the victims are treated as dogs, one of whom is harshly beaten when he does not cooperate (although this is a short, stand-alone sequence rather than the victims’ continual state.) More is the parallel of Salò’s men of power: the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate and the President, who have their parallels in the game’s farmer, businessman, vet and priest. I think it’s unlikely the analogue was intended–the characters are much less deeply intertwined in Horses–but their inclusion as symbols of fascist systems cannot be overlooked.
“This technique is not meant to expel meaning. Rather, it creates a sense of ambiguity in which meaning is not directly signified and is therefore suspended, refusing to provide the viewer with easily digestible symbols … Rather than producing art with the intention of manipulating consumers through predictable emotional patterns and easily understandable symbols, suspended meaning challenges easy digestibility by introducing deliberately indigestible elements to the work.”
Although I think Horses is widely accepted as a narrative game, I think Horses intended “tactic” is to introduce a game with the signifiers and mechanics of the “farming” genre, which runs the breadth of Stardew Valley to Farming Simulator, in order to maximise the impact of its indigestible symbols. The game implies that it has a daily schedule design with tasks to check off, but discards and warps that at will almost immediately, creating something that frustrates and disconcerts as much as the setting.
And Horses does not–cannot–rely on the dispassionate extremity of Salò to be indigestible. If in Salò we must look directly at the human body, abused, in Horses we must look directly at the uncanny valley, itself a desecration of the human form. There’s been criticism of how goofy a game with such heavy themes looks, but the grotesque puppetry of the horses makes a mockery of them and is as symbolic of their devaluation and dehumanisation.
As an indigestible work I think Horses, like Salò, frustrates. Indeed, it makes me question the suitability of linear narrative video games for it unless designers are willing to push the form further. In cinema, the audience is implicated by their gaze; in games, the player is implicated by their play. Even in a film as indigestible as Salò, we debate and try to bargain with it, hopelessly. Why don’t they refuse? Why don’t they rise up? The film’s only glimpse of a kind of resistance that shakes the fascist’s power comes from a collaborator and only after we’ve seen a succession of the weakest characters turn on each other to save their skin–despite the fact that they are living through something unbearable. Film is very good at making us feel helpless, because there, we are. But games are almost all empowerment fantasies, and the ones that try to break us down so often offer us only the alternative of “the only way to win is not to play” rather than make us collaborators so we can continue even if in misery.
As Anselmo, we must play along whether we want to or not. Every player certainly thinks “well, I’d just leave” but… they can’t. The gate is closed, and there is no escape. Whether or not the stakes for Anselmo exist, at first we don’t feel them without the ability to truly test them. If Anselmo isn’t allowed to escape, let me try. I’ll reload. If Anselmo can walk off the farm whenever he likes, let him. I’ll do it. Make me collaborate, don’t force me to.
The strange thing is, at its best, Horses does engage with this issue head on. Later in the game, your position as collaborator cemented, a horse will not cooperate. The farmer’s dog gives you an option of how to deal with the horse: to offer, as the cliché goes, the carrot or the stick. Each carrot you offer returns no cooperation and leads to the stick becoming bigger and more dangerous, and the dog angrier. I found myself pleading for the horse to just cooperate, because I knew the next thing I would have to do was beat it.
Whether or not I truly had a choice over that doesn’t matter, because I willingly gave those carrots. Horses made me not just perform the act of collaboration, but embody it, and it made me feel shame in a way the early game’s railroading does not.
The scene that has received the most commentary however is the scene that Santa Ragione believes caused all the trouble and where Horses shows its hand: when the businessman’s5 daughter makes it clear that no one is under any illusions about what the horses are, and that the horses are people who represent a threat to the system.
I think you could argue that this represents a flaw in my argument that Horses is indigestible art; after all, if you spell it out this clearly, isn’t that quite… understandable? But under that criteria, Salò would also fail for making its setting explicit. Even in Salò the victims are not random (one is notably called out as from a “family of subversives.”) But to return to Schalk: “the technique is not meant to expel meaning.”
The difficulty of a work like Horses–if we accept my hypothesis that it exists in the spectrum of indigestible art–is that it is not a work about the horses, what happens to them, or Anselmo’s journey. It’s existence is, like Salò, a political act, to stand in opposition to the inauthentic, easily digestible product that floods our culture.
I chafe at every mention that Horses is “like an A24 horror” considering the formulaic nature of “elevated horror.” I wrote earlier that I wondered what Pasolini would make of modern pornography; I don’t need to wonder what he would think of the Netflixication of cinema, work designed to go down so smoothly you don’t have to engage with it at all. We seemed to have crossed a rubicon where it’s not even that mass culture is inauthentic; it no longer seems to actually exist. The audience is so captured by capital they create viewing numbers to maintain a stock price while themselves receiving no value; a subscription to white noise to fold laundry to.
In this sphere, the value of Horses is that it must be engaged with, and it is ultimately that which makes it a threat to the hegemony of capital. At its best it does not just see the danger of commodification on our body and mind: it makes us feel it, perform it, and, ashamed, intend to refuse it.
Salò was not banned because of shock value alone. It may be an extreme example, but it suffered extra scrutiny for the same reason works as benign as To Kill A Mockingbird: an audience roused out of its slumber is a dangerous one. In 1975 Pasolini saw a world where the audience had to choke on the indigestible to wake. Horses may be more obvious, more on-the-nose in narrative by interactivity, but in doing so it takes the indigestible and asks the audience to not just wake from choking on it, but to spit it out.
You may think I’m giving Horses too much credit here–or implying conspiracy in its banning. But the same way that audiences are enveloped by the miasma of capitalism, companies like Steam and Epic are unconsciously risk averse in protection of the numbers. Santa Ragione focuses on the possibility that a little girl riding a naked woman was the reason for the ban; but I wonder if they’ve considered it was what she said that was. That she gave the game away.
“Each of us is a cog in the machine; we must all do our duty so society can function properly. So dangerous ideas are a concern for everyone.”
Will I ever play it again? I’ve already spit it out.
Final Thought: If I find one flaw in my argument, it is that Horses ultimately concludes in a very “video gamey” way. Pasolini famously struggled with the ending of Salò, ending on an abrupt non sequitur after taking things as far as they can go. Horses instead asks the player to engage with an actual puzzle (which comes as a surprise; the solution is also a little vague in game, meaning I can imagine a lot of players get stuck here, and I personally found it annoying to the point of it breaking immersion). It leads to heroic rescue and ultimately escape–one which implies reclamation and reconciliation. Depending on your viewpoint, this hopeful ending either continues the themes as a call to action for the awakened viewer or the kind of satisfying resolution that allows a return to slumber; the indigestible made digestible. The question is, I suppose, as always, what you are willing to swallow.
It has been mocked elsewhere but that this rule has an explicit carve out for crypto (“the only exception is for products in cases where an AO rating was applied solely due to the usage of blockchain or NFT technology”) is toe-curlingly embarrassing. ↩︎
Although after saying all of that I have to also attach Paolo Pedercini’s idea that it might relate to the fact that by just being called “Horses” it contaminates searches to a genre that horse-mad weans would be looking up, like if you called a game “tractors” and it was all about tractors with big floppy dongs flopping about. Hang on, let me get on the asset store… ↩︎
I should say supposedly willing here to be specific, but I don’t want to get too far afield of my main point in the moment. I touch on this in my essay on VILE: Exhumed, but there is an irony in that in Salò we can see a crying victim be debased with awareness that the shoot was actually pretty jolly, full of football games and risotto meals, but you really have no way to judge if in even vanilla pornography the performers are willing participants, as capitalism is always a coercive element. ↩︎
I would argue it is titillating, intentionally, until the rules are inverted at the villa, but again, I’m in danger of getting lost in the weeds here. ↩︎
This character is never referred to as such, and is a designation I’ve made on the statements of his daughter: “My father makes sure that [the farmer’s] business opportunities keep growing.” ↩︎
All of Powell and Pressburger’s films are, in my opinion, quite strange to modern eyes (even compared to their contemporaries) with unusual tones and pacing, but for me this is absolutely the strangest yet (and that’s including A Matter Of Life And Death, which is completely bonkers.)
On the surface, our Colonel Blimp, Clive Wynne-Candy, reads as hero, played, as he is, by the iconically charming Roger Livesey. But The Life And Death of Colonel Blimp is also a harsh criticism of him–and the actions of the British Empire–when read more deeply and with historical context. It’s asking a lot of the audience to come to the film with that, and what I find most strange about The Life And Death of Colonel Blimp is how much it tries to have its cake and eat it: Candy is a fool, but he is still portrayed as a good person, the protagonist you root for, and the ultimate feeling of the film is one of apologia. I’m not sure that’s fair; or rather, I’m not sure it’s fair that audiences ever walked out feeling sorry for him.
Based on a newspaper cartoon that satirised the reactionary opinions of the British establishment, if you understand background such as the British behaviour in the Second Boer War(!) Candy comes across as not so much foolish as in outright denial even as a young man–he ends up in a duel with a German officer over dastardly Hun propaganda about the existence of concentration camps, which, of course, there were.
He’s also deeply emotionally stunted, and this is shown by him being haunted by the woman he loved and lost like he’s Francesco Dellamorte in Cemetery Man, as she re-appears as every new woman in his life. And each time he struggles, his emotional outlet is murdering exotic animals as some sort of a balm (I’m sorry but if you murder an elephant you’re a grade-A cunt.) I’m not quite able to fully translate the metaphor to the British Empire’s stymied ambitions across the early twentieth century, but it probably works.
If you see Candy as such, the true hero of the film is Candy’s pal, German officer Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff, played by the incredible Anton Walbrook. This must have been an intense role for Walbrook, who himself escaped from the Nazis, and as Kretschmar-Schuldorff he shows the kind of insight–borne from loss–that Candy never seems to attain. The sequence in which he pleads his case as a refugee is undoubtedly one of the greatest in all of cinema, and I understand why his sympathetic portrayal was considered so controversial in the era. It’s too good. The British public might have had their minds opened and the establishment needed to make sure they’d stay snapped shut.
You can also read satire, I think, when Kretschmar-Schuldorff is sat with Candy and the British empire’s regional dictators, all stuffy old white men who swear blind they’ll do the best for Germany while they extract what they can without a care from their own fiefdoms (while, of course, leaving Germany to its ruin.) There’s something very prescient, too, about the way Candy says “I wasn’t in a foreign country, I was in Jamaica”–it reads as patently absurd and paternalistic, even though Jamaica wouldn’t achieve independence until 1962.
This does make The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp sound like a laser-focused, forward-thinking satire, but the film takes a leisurely pace across its nearly three hours, and what’s there is a lot more subtle in context than I make it sound. The moments I have described are just part of a film that otherwise puts a lot of effort into impressing on us that Candy is, in general, a stand-up guy who believes in, and tries to do, what’s right. And the film pushes towards the apparent conclusion that he (and therefore, Britain) are only flawed in so much as they have slowly–stuck in their ways–fallen out of doing what needs to be done. That they’re trying to be too honourable, when they should instead [checks notes] fight the Nazis like… the Nazis would?
This is, in my opinion, a strange conclusion for a film that shows such incredible empathy and understanding via Kretschmar-Schuldorff, and there’s a sour taste to it in the light of the film’s own satire–and ultimately what we know now about the Allies’ conduct during the war (the bombing of Dresden would happen just a couple of years later.)
The thing is, I understand the argument that can be made against what I’ve just written–films are allowed to be complex; even contradictory–people absolutely are (I take some pleasure that The Life And Death of Colonel Blimp’s Criterion essay seems just as confused about the film as I am.) We don’t, and can’t, live only in a world of basic morality tales, of perfect good via evil, and it is a bit sad that our major cinema has so devolved to that. And The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp is a beautiful film, full of every touch we know Powell and Pressburger for, and a performance from Walbrook in particular so good that it makes the Oscars look like a joke because he never received one.
Indeed, I think it’s telling that Churchill–an odious racist who knew everything the British were willing to do–reacted in such fury to this film. He could see what lay beneath the surface. But even with that, I can’t quite square the movie’s apparent understanding that the British Empire was not honourable in the least with the implication that it needed to plunge farther into barbarism. If I’m charitable, maybe it was simply a call for it to stop lying to itself about what it was.
Guillermo del Toro seems like a lovely guy who cares about the craft of cinema, but if it wasn’t clear by now, Frankenstein hammers home once and for all that he has absolutely no sense for story at all. At all!
Even though it’s been adapted so many times before, I’ll give him that Frankenstein is a bit of a weird one to adapt because it has a layered structure to rival Inception, where at one point you’re reading a letter in which a sea captain is explaining the story that Victor Frankenstein told him based on the story that the creature told him. There’s a reason most adaptations don’t bother with this naive storytelling style, and it’s because it’s immediately absurd when a character tells another character their entire life story full of what would (in context) be irrelevant detail, and del Toro doesn’t help himself by picking and choosing when to be faithful to Mary Shelly and when to not. Frankenstein tells his life story to a sea captain? Check. This happens after the creature goes beast mode on the crew like you’re watching a fucking Marvel movie? Uh… check?
There are just so many bizarre and wrong-headed decisions here that it’s hard to know where to start. There’s a lot of waffle in Mary Shelley’s original novel, but Frankenstein at least creates his creature in, like, the fourth chapter. Here, del Toro shuffles all the component parts so he can spend spend literally an hour and a half on a new build-up where Elizabeth is Frankenstein’s brother’s fiance and her father (an invented character, not in the original book) is bankrolling his experiments… for his own nefarious reasons!
Even once the creature shows up, we get more invented scenes where Frankenstein abuses it because [auteur klaxon] del Toro needs to make sure we love the monster. Even though the creature’s already existing story is there to do that!
Del Toro called Frank Darabont’s script for Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation “pretty much perfect”–a version that is far closer to faithful than this, but which is reviled because it’s completely over the top–and considering Darabont has so publicly made a point that Shelley’s original work was “subtle” it’s genuinely hard to understand why del Toro has changed so many things to make them more obvious (I hope you enjoy seeing “Chekhov’s escape flume”) and then thought Oscar Isaac should in turn chew scenery with such gusto and only offer him glasses of milk to wash it down with.1
Look. It’s an adaptation, and del Toro can do what he likes, but I think that ultimately these changes add up to something that at points is so wrong that I’m not sure that del Toro is able to see anything beneath the surface. Del Toro seems determined to make anything that could be subtle unsubtle, anything quiet loud. A character literally tells Frankenstein that (gasp) he is the monster. I hope audiences cheered when that happened.
Maybe it’s just that del Toro falls so in love with the monsters and the set decoration and doing stuff that’s cool in his eyes that he loses sight of honouring the original work. In the original Frankenstein, the creature longs to be accepted but isn’t because of his appearance. He is rejected by Frankenstein, then accepted by the blind patriarch of a family that he hides from while learning from, only to be chased away by the family when they actually see him and are terrified.
Here, instead, we see the creature find the blind father killed by wolves who he then kills in an omg epic fashion before the family find him with the father’s corpse, misunderstanding things and so he has to run off. This is not the same!!!2
It seems like this is all there so [auteur klaxon] it can be clear that the only person who truly sees the monster for who they are is… a beautiful, intelligent, lonely woman. Who could have foreseen this!
I suppose what’s funny about that is the auteur touch doesn’t even really matter, because the whole thing is leading to an ending so unbelievably unearned, so forced that I almost couldn’t believe it. Frankenstein recognises what he means to the creature and they have a meaningful ~father and son~ moment. That doesn’t sound that bad but it plays out only a step below the film ending with them heading up to the ship’s deck to play catch.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand what del Toro is trying to do, but it’s like every instinct he had was wrong, completely blinded by how much he falls in love with his own vision rather than trying to make something that speaks to anyone who isn’t already fully bought into it. His Victor Frankenstein is such a relentless, one-note villain, his creature so over-the-top vicious at points yet infantile and innocent at others, that there’s no ring of truth to it. No meaningful closure. No tragedy.
No tragedy, I guess, other than del Toro believed this to be his dream project, his pinnacle, and then this is what he made.
What is the deal with Oscar Isaac? He’s so good in so many things, but then he shows up in this and things like Moon Knight with absurd, unbalancing energy. Is this what the directors want? If so… why? ↩︎
And while I’m here, and I know this is a personal bugbear, but wolf attacks are historically rare, and it’s so fucking lazy to portray them as insanely dedicated, vicious killers. And it’s especially disgusting to do that so you can show the monster you want to fuck killing them graphically (which would be even worse if it didn’t look so brutally CGI.) You’ve got all this imagination to come up with coffins with face windows and you can’t come up with something better than fucking wolf attacks? ↩︎
[This article includes a major spoiler for Without A Dawn and reference to self-harm. It’s short, so you may wish to play it first, though I will admittedly go on to explain that I don’t recommend you do.]
Vibes.
Horror is so much about vibes.
I know that’s is pretty much baby’s first media literacy, but I was lucky enough to see a work in progress of Joe Meredith’s latest film, Harvest Brood, as part of my buddy Justin Decloux’s 24-Hour Horror Movie Mind Melter, and I’ve been thinking about it because I was so blown away by Meredith’s careful curation of vibe. Despite an obviously low budget, the film uses the SOV (“shot on video”) aesthetic to mix imagery of post-industrial suburban America, “true-crime” documentary talking heads/rostrum camera, and goopy lo-fi gore to create something genuine and unsettling. Something that lingers; a perfect movie to watch in the wee small hours, eyelids drooping, losing connection between what’s real and isn’t. Drifting off, perhaps, into your own reverie of deserted strip malls at dusk, or the feel of damp leaves underfoot as you trudge past suburban homes decked out in Halloween decorations, only to awaken confused or distressed.
This feeling–the space between the real of the awake and the disordered unreality of sleep, is explored in Finnish developer Jesse Makkonen’s visual novel Without A Dawn, and a preoccupation he’s had across his releases in titles such as Silence Of The Sleep and Afterdream. The visuals, however, of Without A Dawn are immediately arresting, with stark, limited palette pixel art filtered to appear as writhing ASCII art, not so much “All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead” as symbolic of the fog of slumber, that our visual processing can be so easily scrambled by our own systems.
But vibes are not visual alone.
A short game–I was surprised to find it the shortest I’ve played this year, even when compared to games such as Cyrano–Without A Dawn concentrates on an unnamed character who has cut themselves off and retired to a remote cabin as a form of escape, but finds themselves troubled, unable to sleep, questioning: did I see something? Is something strange happening, or is it all in my head?
There are a variety of styles of visual novels, and Without A Dawn takes the most restrictive path, as a nearly completely linear experience with no major branching. There are only a couple of situations in where you even get a choice that doesn’t lead straight back to the same options if you don’t select the “right” answer, and while I do think it’s intentional–the game is about a creeping inevitability, about the illusion of choice–even in such a short game it’s quickly transparent that your choices are meaningless and it’s immediately unrewarding to even have to do them (real “why bother asking if you know what the answer is?” hours.)
I think it more than edges the game towards problematic, too, because what it treats as inevitable is… suicide. Now, whether or not it is I think you could debate–perhaps it’s no more real than anything else–but I think it’s just as easy to say I’m soft-pedalling here, it reads clearly as such and even goes so far to reward the player with a climax with an abstract beauty, ultimately telling them this was the “right choice”.
It feels dangerous. Even if you retry, the game makes it clear that you will, ultimately, never be able to resist or escape it. The only thing the protagonist is allowed to do is end it.
Like VILE: Exhumed, Without A Dawn struggles with the problem horror often does: what are you actually trying to say? Vibes are not just aesthetic; it is to find a frequency that harmonises with our understanding of the world, and in horror it must find that frequency to create the discord that unsettles us. In Without A Dawn, the inevitability feels false, it feels authored, because it gives the player no real way to fight it. It simply doesn’t ring true, and as a result the game collapses. Particularly disingenuously, as soon as the game ends, the developer appears–still clothed in the game’s creepy aesthetic–to directly ask you if you’ve enjoyed the game and if you’ll give it a review. It’s utterly immersion-smashing, and makes you feel like he hasn’t taken anything he’s shown you seriously. Horror vibes and suicide chic as product, first and foremost, rather than being about anything at all.
When writing about a smaller game, I want to err towards forgiving. But Without A Dawn isn’t merely hollow, or frustratingly uninteractive; it’s ill-considered to the point of negligence.
Will I ever play it again? Absolutely not.
Final Thought: I hope that Meredith will be able to complete and release Harvest Brood soon, a work where vibes are in service of an exploration of a uniquely American decay. I also hope the trailer convinces you to keep it on your radar:
Update (28/10/2025): Harvest Blood is available online now, and you can watch it, in full, on Youtube for free!
Been thinking about this one a lot since I saw it, rolling it around and considering if it’s worth giving my take on it, but I keep coming back to my frustrations with it in the face of what feels like a weirdly universal uncritical praise, so I guess I can’t keep my mouth shut.
The thing I keep thinking about, really, is how incredible the middle of this film is. The entire segment where we see real community action at work, as Benecio Del Toro’s Sergio St. Carlos leads us through their worst case scenario–an aggressive immigration raid–with efficiency, thought and care right down to his interactions with individuals. It is beautiful, moving, a masterful piece of film-making, and I think almost certainly going to be one of the very best things I saw this year.
It’s what makes it so frustrating to me that the rest of the film’s treatment of activism and fascism is so… hacky, and that it’s been given such a pass. Paul Thomas Anderson is a filmmaker who doesn’t mistake setting for story, but here I do think he does our current moment a disservice, whether or not the reflection is mere happenstance.
I feel like Anderson views (for example) the opening sequences of revolutionaries as “inspired by” or within the spectrum of the blaxploitation era, but I find something so… unpleasant about a well-off, successful white man writing black revolutionaries as largely ineffectual thrill-seekers who get off on their notoriety, considering the actual era contained movies of revolutionary power such as The Spook Who Sat By The Door (a movie Anderson must be familiar with.) I’m not offended by the image of him giggling behind his MacBook as he writes out a character called “Junglepussy” but isn’t it just sort of… embarrassing to sit there watching the result, however well made?
Potentially not as embarrassing for all involved as his later treatment of the “revolution”. Look, I know we all hate two-factor authentication but the password stuff has to be some of the direst “student revolutionaries should get a job” hack comedy possible. Absolute fucking baby food for the smug middle-class cunts that are the general audience for a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. And the “Christmas Adventurers Club” stuff isn’t much better. We were all happy to see Kevin Tighe, but abdicating the responsibility for fascism to small groups of white men in hidden backrooms when we know it happens via large groups of white men in front of our fucking eyes sucks. As many people have pointed out, the most chilling character in the movie is the military guy who dispassionately, chillingly dismantles a group of teenagers, and he’s a non-professional actor who was actually in Homeland Security.
[takes breath]
Anyway, while I’m at it, and while you’re potentially rolling your eyes at how humourless I am, facial disfigurement as a punchline can also fuck off. And the ending being our main characters enjoying consumerism and a weak sort of “it’s up to the next generation” beat? What was I saying about baby food for middle-class cunts?
It all, ultimately, makes the claim that this film is some sort of actual political statement feel like wish-casting from both the leftist cinéaste and the right wing chud. It’s the setting for a story about family, and that’s about it. I wish it wasn’t so ironic and detached, but at least it’s not about how much he wanted to fuck his art teacher again.
But as I said, I think about the middle of this movie all the time, and I loved the payoff in the climax (even if I did get a little tired of the undulations, sorry.) I respect the craft, but I guess with PTA for me it always comes down to if I’m buying what he’s selling rather than just appreciating what he’s doing. Here? Not so much.
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