Past Lives (Celine Song, 2023)

A Korean boy and girl attending the same school are separated when her family emigrates to North America. 12 years later, she finds out he's been trying to track her down and they begin chatting again over the internet. They find they get on just as they did as children and plans are made to visit each other, but life events get in the way, including her getting married to a fellow writer, and it's another 12 years until he finally makes it to New York to see her again.

This is far removed from the conventional love story outline. But then it isn't really about romantic love, more about attachments that never die and how people end up where they are through both choices and circumstances. The director's touch is light and sensitive and the performances of the leads nuanced. No emotional climax is forced through dramatic turns, instead things are just allowed to develop organically. Past Lives is refreshingly free of histrionics and true to real life.

8/10

The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)

Holocaust days are here again, with a largely factual account of the life of the commandant of Auschwitz living with his family in contentment right next to the death camp. Martin Amis's source novel took more liberties with the facts, so Glazer went straight to the documented events. Unlike any previous film tackling the issue, The Zone of Interest shows nothing of the mass extermination going on on the other side of the wall. It's only heard as screams, dogs barking and gunshots, and the implied constant stench of the crematorium. The family, in their ornately flowery garden, are not only unaware of what's actually going on, but uninterested and quite deaf to it. Yes, the eternal banality of evil, but also a study of the evil of materialism and self-interest.

This means virtually nothing of consequence happens on screen, so it's dramatically very flat, but also means it works as a new approach to explaining how the atrocities could keep being committed undisturbed.

7/10

El hoyo 2 (Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, 2024)

With depressing predictability, given the success of The Platform in 2019 and that Gaztelu-Urrutia, as a fledgling director, obviously has no other strings to his bow, a sequel is rolled out that does nothing but regurgitate the plot of the first film. That being prisoners within an underground complex with hundreds of floors, dependent on the fairness of those on the floors above them to leave enough food for them to take as the platform carrying the food descends through the prison. No more religious, social or political ideas are added, but of course the horror quotient is pumped up even more as if that will suffice as compensation, like so many cover singers believing that stretching a single syllable across several notes and increasing the volume to 10 somehow adds soulfulness.

The Platform 2 will only do for hardcore horror fans who haven't seen the inspired first film, but for those who have, it should be avoided at all costs.

5/10