Lomax343

From the makers of the chilling Talk to Me, Bring her Back is the story of seventeen-year-old Andy (Billy Barratt) and his younger, visually-impaired sister Piper (Sora Wong - who's genuinely visually-impaired) who are orphaned when their father dies suddenly (no mention is ever made of their respective mothers).

Andy wants to become Piper's legal guardian, but can't until he's eighteen, so they're sent to say with a foster carer Laura (Sally Hawkins). On arrival, they discover that she's also fostering a young, mute, and deeply-disturbed boy called Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips - I hope no-one lets him watch the finished film for a few years).

From the moment they arrive, something seems off. Hawkins brilliantly comes over as creepy without quite doing anything you can put your finger on. Oliver's behaviour is outright weird. It transpires that Laura's daughter had died in an accident. On one level it seems she fosters youngsters to fill an emotional void. On the other - her gaslighting behaviour suggests that something deeply disturbing is afoot.

The result is shocking, bloody and packs in a fair few surprises. The cast are all excellent - Hawkins as she loses her last shred of sanity, Barratt as he fears he's losing his, Wong as she feels her way (pun intended) towards the truth.

One minor quibble is the title - which hints at a plot reveal which might otherwise have had more impact.

The makers of this film have said that they were influenced by Dusk til Dawn - a film that morphs from thriller to supernatural halfway through.

Twin brothers, known as Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B Jordan) return to their home in the American South in 1932, having made some decent money in Chicago, courtesy of Al Capone. Their plan is to set up a "Juke Joint" (which was what nightclubs were called, back then, apparently). Most of the action takes place during the course of one day, in which they make arrangements for opening night, including recruiting musicians - a young guitarist Sam (Miles Caton) and a grizzled and alcoholic pianist Slim (Delroy Lindo, who steals the scene every time he's on camera). This opening section, though not without its moments, felt unnecessarily slow - and there were times that I wished that subtitles had been provided for the non-Americans in the audience.

So far so good. Opening night proves a roaring success. In particular, Sam's guitar is revealed to be a magical instrument, leading to a memorably surreal sequence. Then a bunch of vampires show up. The rest of the film is viscerally bloody.

To be honest, this sudden switch struck me as jarring, and left a few loose ends flapping. In particular, I wanted to know more about the native Americans who were introduced in one scene, chasing the chief vampire, but were never seen again.

Still, the music was good, and the action pleasantly gruesome.

There was a scene after the vampires had been dealt with in which some racists got rather more than they deserved - something which didn't really have any place in the narrative; but the film redeemed itself in a post-credits scene set sixty years later, when the now old and grizzled Sam receives an unexpected visit and achieves some sort of closure.

A decent enough film, but not a masterpiece.

Deep beneath a stormy North Sea, three divers (Woody Harrelson, Simu Liu and Finn Cole) set out to do some routine maintenance. Rough weather on the surface and a computer glitch aboard the support vessel lead to one of the three being stranded without air. Heroic efforts are made to rescue him.

It ought to be exciting, it ought to be intensely moving - especially as it's based on a true story. But it isn't.

It seems to follow the tried-and-tested formula: crisis, resolution, crisis, resolution, happy ending - but somehow comes up short. The "work-around" on the ship makes the viewer go "meh" and the scenes on the bridge just seem wooden.

Things are a little better down below, but even here scenes shot in a confined space somehow manage not to be claustrophobic.

There's also the sense that too little material has been stretched out to achieve a realistic running time.

It's not actually bad, but it does make the viewer appreciate films like Apollo 13 and Thirteen Lives that much more.