Katie Driscoll

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In this day and age, when streaming services and online pirating are so prevalent, we may have forgotten the illicit thrill of procuring the VHS tape of a banned movie—one that was usually a horror film.
We’re more open about extreme movies now, but back in the day, it wasn’t uncommon for a movie to be deemed “too violent,” “too disturbing,” or “too sick” for the general public.
Banned horror movies are interesting as reflections of their time periods, allowing us gl...

As a part of Sick! Festival’s Mindscapes programme (premiered on YouTube), four filmmakers two from Manchester and two from Rotterdam, revisit the neighbourhoods they grew up in, and through this, explore the dichotomy between the physical reality of places and the temporal space that can linger forever in the mind. Review by Katie Driscoll
The first piece, Lucien a Circel, by Dutch artist Lucien Rentmeester locates the specific within the universal, like how everyone’s origin story is unique...

As cinemas reopen and the COVID-streaming era seemingly ends, we look back at lockdown's most-talked about film
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There were many important films nominated at this year’s Oscars, but perhaps none has had a bigger impact than Promising Young Women. Mentioned in five categories (and winner of one) the film’s bold narrative and willingness to tackle difficult subjects like rape and sexual assault marked it out from the crowd. But what also made it so unique, and has been written about far...

Apocalypse Now showed the stifling oppression of war, how its devastating effects could wreak havoc on the psyche whilst in combat. Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket showed how the harsh regime of training could lead to a mental breakdown. One film, Jacob’s Ladder, provided an insight into PTSD and the aftereffects of war, once you’re home and everything is supposed to be over, except where it lingers in your mind. However, we now have this year’s Cherry (available to stream now on Apple TV+), wher...

There is too much rosé (the Graham Norton brand your mum likes, because all mums love Graham Norton). There is your mum crying while Elvis sways his hips on TV and your dad snoring upstairs, long gone to bed because he thinks you’re both acting too drunk and loutish, screaming at Elvis on the TV and talking about death. Mum cries around this point, because Elvis makes her think of her dead mother and that makes her think of her dead father.
And then there is Top of the Pops, and the stories I...

A
naked light bulb in a dark and ruined room” is how British filmmaker and gay activist Derek Jarman described his mind while his body was decaying from the effects of Aids. It’s a Sin, Russell T Davies’ latest series on Channel 4, keeps that light alive, celebrating the legacy of the people at the frontline of the Aids pandemic – the people who fought and died for the advancements we have today.
In the five-part drama, set between 1981 and 1991, HIV/Aids doesn’t reverberate openly – it is sp...

You’ll likely quiver with envy while watching Pretend It’s a City, Martin Scorsese’s new limited series on Netflix in which the filmmaker follows author and raconteur Fran Lebowitz around New York. The bohemian downtown artist life that it depicts is all but obliterated now, in an age of wellness and constant surveillance and social media influencers – topics Lebowitz takes to with the acerbic energy and fascinating aplomb, as she has done with any venture.
In this followup to 2010’s Public S...

Acceptable Damage is an independent film which tells the story of a teenage girl with Asperger’s who must wrestle with first love, her musical ambitions, a controlling mother and a gang of bullies. Review by Katie Driscoll.
Neurodiversity is rarely shown onscreen – literature and theatre seem to be more daring in this aspect – despite the fact that bullying and discrimination towards autistic and learning-disabled people is still rife in society. Fiona Whitelaw’s Acceptable Damage can pave th...

Katie Driscoll looks below the surface of two television series – ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ and ‘The Haunting of Bly Manor’ and one cult cinema classic, ‘Melancholia ‘– in an examination of the ‘depression genre’.
The artist figure doomed to a life of depression and suffering as the root of their art – has been a trope for as long as we have had poetry and literature. However cinema, especially, seems to relish in perpetuating or subverting the tropes of the black shadow of depression. Sen...

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is an American romance-horror-thriller, described as a ‘hot dose of mental illness horror’, both written and directed by Charlie Kaufman and released on Netflix on 4 September. Review by Katie Driscoll
Charlie Kaufman’s latest psychological drama delves into the mind of Iain Banks from his enigmatic book of the same name, where a maelstrom of internalised anxieties are externalised just as the ‘pathetic fallacy’ of a snow storm swirls around its central character...

With new Netflix series Ratched, the ever-prolific Ryan Murphy – along with newcomer Evan Romansky and Murphy's frequent collaborator Ian Brennan – enacts a world of institutional torture and medicinal control via septic green hospital wards and Douglas Sirkian melodrama. The show's eight hour-long episodes are an ode to cinema – complete with Bernard Herrmann’s Cape Fear score and De Palma’s use of split screens – but also to one of the most reviled villainesses in cinematic history: Nurse R...

A bizarre collaboration of genius is the driving force behind American Valhalla, a documentary-cum-spiritual meditation on the perils of fame and the myth of the now-extinct rockstar. What becomes obvious, only a few minutes in, is that this is a love story. Regal and imposing, like his Norwegian ancestors (or like Odin himself), Joshua Homme, Queens of the Stone Age guitarist and frontman, is a visually arresting counterpart to Iggy Pop’s spritely menace. They stand, holding hands, both the picture of seriousness and farce. The film follows them as they record “Post Pop Depression” in the...

Nick Broomfield’s infamous bumbling gonzo-style takes a backseat in his latest venture, Whitney: Can I Be Me, less of a scathing portrayal of Whitney Houston behind the scenes than a celebration of the Whitney we already know and cherish. It appears that, when it comes to Whitney Houston, everyone else’s voice is redundant except the singer herself. Through archive footage and excerpts from her 1999 tour that proved to be her last successful one, (filmed by Rudi Dolezal for a music video that was shelved) , we are presented with not just one of the most wildly famous singers of our time...

Mitzi Peroine’s Braid is at once a warped candy-coloured nightmare and acid-flavoured Sofia Coppola and Haneke confection, combined with body horror and blood by way of the clinical luxury of Chan-Wook Park’s Stoker and Haneke’s Funny Games.
Friends Petula (Imogen Waterhouse) and Tilda (Sarah Hay) are downtown girls, reaping their rewards from a nefarious drug scheme, looking the picture of sleaze, surrounded by plastic baggies. Suddenly, the cops are at the door. Torpedoed from their Rumble ...

Writer and director Matthew Holness first conjured up Possum as a short story to be included in an anthology on Freud’s Uncanny (Das Unheimlich), the phenomenon described as “strangeness in the ordinary”. A slow and steady swirling, creeping dread envelopes the entire film, just like one of its first defining images: that of black smoke, enveloping children’s balloons - the tainting of innocence.
Philip (Sean Harris) returns to his dilapidated childhood home in a bleak area of Norfolk, greete...