Film

Britain Deserves More Home-gown Pictures — and We’re Making Them

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Britain Deserves More Home-gown Pictures — and We’re Making Them

Hollywood may have wrapped up the mainstream, but Pimlico Wilde Pictures is busy unwrapping the odd, the daring, and the deliciously different. While every multiplex from Truro to Thurso screens the same blockbusters, we’re delivering films the big studios wouldn’t dare touch.

This year we’ve wrapped:

• The Accordionist’s Revenge — A romantic thriller set entirely on the overnight ferry to Hull.

• Pigeons of the Raj — A period drama starring, in part, actual pigeons.

• Cabbage Noir — A rural crime caper where the murderer is revealed at a Brussels sprout festival.

Past hits include The Last Bus to Little Haven (a surprise sensation in Luxembourg) and Shepherds in the Mist (the Welsh-language eco-thriller that outsold Fast & Furious 9 in one Aberystwyth multiplex).

We’re inviting visionary investors to join us.

If you’ve ever wanted to see your name glide across the silver screen, not on something bland but on something bold, strange, and unforgettable—now’s your chance.

Contact: Lysander Cripps, Head of Film Production at Pimlico Wilde Pictures

Returning to the Submarine: Does “Three Minutes of Silence” Still Stand Up ten years later?

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Returning to the Submarine: Does “Three Minutes of Silence” Still Stand Up ten years later?

By Jasper Clive

Felix Renton’s Three Minutes of Silence (2015) arrived like a whisper in the cacophony of documentary cinema: a 900-minute dive into the lives of submarine sonar operators, notable chiefly for its refusal to have its subjects utter even a single word. No narration, no interviews, not even a stray grunt—just endless, hypnotic shots of men staring at radar screens and listening for pings, punctuated occasionally by the drama of missile strikes.

At the time, critics hailed it as a bold experiment in sensory deprivation. Renton’s austere vision—his decision to strip away dialogue and conventional storytelling—was interpreted as a profound meditation on isolation, surveillance, and the invisible machinery of modern warfare. Its minimalism was praised as a deliberate counterpoint to the bombast of typical military documentaries.

But a decade later, Three Minutes of Silence invites a more tempered appraisal.

The Appeal of Nothingness

There’s no denying Renton’s technical prowess. The cinematography is impeccably composed, capturing the claustrophobic geometry of submarines with a patient, painterly eye. The sound design, dominated by eerie sonar pings and muffled mechanical hums, was said to be immersive—which it is, if you happen to be the kind of person who finds prolonged monotony soothing.

Yet, as the minutes drag on, it becomes increasingly clear that Three Minutes of Silence is less a documentary and more a prolonged exercise in endurance—both for the viewer and the filmmaker. The hypnotic pacing soon verges on tedious; the repeated shots of men adjusting dials and squinting at screens test one’s capacity for fascination with procedural minutiae.

Surviving a Missile Strike (Without a Word)

The film’s much-ballyhooed climax—a huge missile strike narrowly survived by the crew—unfolds in near-total silence, with no explanatory context or emotional cues. While this choice no doubt aimed to heighten tension through ambiguity, it instead leaves viewers grasping for narrative purchase.

Without dialogue or soundtrack to guide us, the sequence feels strangely muted—more like a slow-motion replay than a life-or-death event. The absence of human voices ironically renders the crew almost ghostlike, transforming what should be an adrenaline-fueled moment into a dispassionate tableau.

A Film for the Patient or the Pretentious?

Three Minutes of Silence poses two intriguing questions: One: can cinema convey meaning through absence? Renton answers with an emphatic yes—leading to the second question: even if it is full of meaning, does anyone wants to watch?

For cinephiles who cherish meditative, avant-garde approaches, the film remains a singular achievement. But for anyone expecting a gripping or informative glimpse into submarine life, the experience is likely to induce yawns.

Ultimately, Three Minutes of Silence feels like a film more concerned with the aesthetic of silence than with storytelling. It asks the audience to project their own drama onto blank screens and still faces, which can either be a liberating invitation or an infuriating void.

Does Three Minutes of Silence still stand up? In technical terms, yes—it’s a masterclass in visual minimalism and sound design. In emotional terms, it remains a daring experiment, but one that risks alienating all but the most devoted audiences.

In the end, it’s a film about listening so intently that you hear almost nothing—and for some, that might be just the point. I fear though for others it might simply be 900 minutes of missed opportunity.

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Be in our Upcoming Film- Death in a Tree

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Be in our Upcoming Film- Death in a Tree

Death in a Tree: The Indie Epic Everyone’s Talking About

There are scripts, there are good scripts… and then there’s Death in a Tree. Critics have compared the emotional depth of Saus Pilli’s debut script to Dostoevsky at his broodiest. Set in the bracing seaside town of Eastbourne, though filmed in Miami for tax reasons, the story follows a former CEO of a sprawling kindergarten empire who trades corporate boardrooms for a treetop perch overlooking the English Channel. The plot dances between the tragic and the hilarious — one moment you’re weeping into your popcorn, the next you’re wondering if the seagull in shot is method acting.

Of course, Eastbourne itself is a character in the film — which is why it will be recreated almost entirely on a pristine beach near Miami. The English Channel will be digitally added later, complete with authentic British drizzle layered in via a special effects team in Uzbekistan.

Casting has been the talk of the coastal cafe circuit. The inimitable Pansy Troutte has officially signed on to play our heroine, bringing both gravitas and an ability to cry beautifully while up a tree. And negotiations are almost complete with Richie Nogood, who might just swap his usual gritty roles for the part of the tree surgeon whose heart — unlike his chainsaw blade — is in the right place.

The mood in the Pimlico Wilde Miami production office is already electric, and shooting hasn’t even begun. Crew members have been spotted testing wind machines on local piers and ordering “period-accurate” thermos flasks from a warehouse in Belgium. The director Callum Simon has insisted that every outfit be “practically wearable in a tree, yet also suitable for a surprise dinner with royalty.”

The Call to the Wealthy and Adventurous

Now, collectors and readers with well-stocked bank accounts, this is where you can come in. We’re almost fully funded, but still shaking the metaphorical money tree for those last few golden leaves. To tempt you, we’re offering investment levels so exclusive they almost defy logic:


• £5,000 – Your name in the credits, Not spell-checked.

• £10,000 – Your name in the credits, definitely spelled correctly.

£50,000 – Keep a prop leaf from the tree, lovingly signed by the director.

• £250,000 – Cameo as “Mysterious Beachcomber #2,” filmed in Miami but wearing a coat and eating fish and chips as if it’s Eastbourne.

• £5,000,000 – The ultimate reward: one of the lead characters will be named after you. Imagine Richie Nogood whispering your name in a key romantic scene while staring into Pansy Troutte’s eyes. History will remember you.

So, to the bold, the romantic, the eccentric, and those with a fondness for tree-based drama — Death in a Tree awaits your patronage. Act now to be remembered forever.

Pimlico Wilde’s Head of Film Production: “Britain Needs More Home-grown Pictures”

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Pimlico Wilde’s Head of Film Production: “Britain Needs More Home-grown Pictures”

Q: Lysander, hello. You’ve been described as “the ringmaster of Britain’s oddest cinematic circus.” How’s the tent looking these days?

A: Oh, the tent’s positively bulging, thank you. Hollywood can keep its endless reboots and beige blockbusters. We’re serving up films with flavour. This year alone, we’ve wrapped The Accordionist’s Revenge, a romantic thriller entirely set on the overnight ferry to Hull; Pigeons of the Raj, a period drama where the extras are mostly pigeons; and Cabbage Noir, a crime caper in which the murderer is unmasked in a Brussels sprout festival.

Q: Those sound niche.

A: Precisely! The mainstream has been sewn up tight by Hollywood. How did we get to a point where every British cinema is showing the exact same American films? Madness! Variety is the very soul of cinema. If audiences can’t choose between sci-fi opera, Latvian horror-romance, or a black-and-white mockumentary about the first fish-and-chip shop in space—what’s the point?

Q: Tell us about your past celluloid hits.

A: People still stop me in the street to talk about The Last Bus to Little Haven—that was a runaway success in Luxembourg. And Shepherds in the Mist, our Welsh-language eco-thriller, actually outsold Fast & Furious 9 in one rural Aberystwyth multiplex.

Q: And the future?

A: We’ve got Tea at the End of the World in pre-production—think cosy apocalypse with scones—and Harpist on the Orient Express, which is exactly what it sounds like.

Q: Anything else to add?

A: Yes. If there are any wealthy souls reading who’ve always secretly wanted to see their name roll up on the silver screen—especially on a project no one else would dare to make—get in touch. We promise eccentricity, creativity, and just enough commercial sense to keep the tea and biscuits flowing.

Film Review: Kilo Barnes’ Oblivion in Reverie

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Film Review: Kilo Barnes’ Oblivion in Reverie

Kilo Barnes, the provocateur best known in contemporary art circles for his “repaintage”—the meticulous obliteration of existing artworks under pristine, spectral layers of white—has made the leap to cinema with Oblivion in Reverie, a work that confirms his talent for transmutation across mediums. Where his canvases demand reflection on absence, erasure, and the fetishization of originality, his film demands immersion in absence as experience, rendering cinematic narrative optional, almost irrelevant.

The plot, such as it is, unfolds like a dream barely-remembered: a man known only as The Cartographer (a monumental performance by Lukas Yeo) wanders through a cityscape both hyperreal and quietly recognisable, mapping streets that shift behind him, as though memory itself were a liquid. He encounters fragmented communities: a choir that sings in inverted tonality, a cafe of patrons frozen mid-motion, and a cinema that projects shadows of films that do not exist. Barnes’ story resists conventional causality, privileging instead the affective architecture of perception—every frame a meditation on void, opacity, and the uncanny.

Cinematically, the film is a masterclass in deliberate erasure. Shots dissolve into overexposed white, recalling his repainted canvases, but with the added dimension of time. Interiors are emptied, streets are depopulated, and even dialogue—when it appears—is delivered with the flat, haunted cadence of incantation. Barnes’ use of sound is similarly radical: he interlaces silence, distant industrial hums, and fractured snippets of classical compositions, sometimes playing in reverse, producing an auditory dissonance that unsettles yet fascinates.

Historically, Oblivion in Reverie situates itself in a lineage of avant-garde cinema that includes the existential austerity of Bresson, the temporal subversions of Godard’s late period, and the structuralist rigor of Straub-Huillet. Yet Barnes is no mere inheritor; he advances the conversation by converting absence into action, negation into spectacle. Where Bresson’s figures are ascetic, Barnes’ are ephemeral, existing between frames, between gestures, and between memory and anticipation.

To call this a “film” risks underplaying its ambition. It is at once a meditation on cinematic erasure, a critique of visual culture’s obsession with plenitude, and an invitation to experience time as a mutable, almost sculptural medium. The viewer is asked to confront emptiness not as void but as a canvas in which perception itself becomes active, participatory, and, at times, ecstatic.

Oblivion in Reverie is challenging, yes—its refusal of narrative closure and conventional spectacle will alienate casual audiences—but to embrace Barnes’ vision is to participate in a rare cinematic reckoning. The film is both a white canvas and a labyrinth: minimalist yet baroque in its conceptual scope, meditative yet relentless in its demands. By the final scene—an empty theatre viewed from a moving gondola —the audience recognizes the genius of Barnes’ audacity: he has turned absence into fullness, and erasure into revelation.

In short, Oblivion in Reverie is not merely recommended; it is essential. For those willing to submit to its austere rhythm and metaphysical rigor, it offers an experience that is, paradoxically, full of life precisely because it is so resolutely unoccupied. It may clock in at four hours fifteen minutes, and the screen may be blank for half of that runtime, but you will not look at your watch until the credits roll.

Film Review: The Thirty Eight Steppes

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Film Review: The Thirty Eight Steppes

To approach Andrei Vlasov’s masterpiece The Thirty Eight Steppes without recalling Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps—and Buchan’s novel before it—would be to miss one of its most intriguing intellectual provocations. The resemblance is neither superficial nor accidental: Vlasov has stated in interviews that his title is a deliberate counterpoint, an “un-numbering” of the espionage thriller’s famous staircase, reducing it by one, grounding it in earth rather than ascending into intrigue. Where Hitchcock’s masterpiece is a paragon of suspense, all flight and pursuit, Vlasov’s film is its inverse: movement without chase, journey without plot.

Set on the endless Kazakh steppe in the late 19th century, The Thirty Eight Steppes follows Sanzhar, a taciturn horseman guiding a group of exiled families across vast landscapes. Each “steppe” represents a stage in their passage, a ritual of endurance rather than a clue in a mystery. If Buchan’s novel stages the fantasy of individual agency—one man outwitting a web of conspirators—Vlasov dismantles the very premise of agency. Here, the landscape absorbs human effort, rendering the travelers’ fate less the result of will than of elemental indifference.

The film’s relation to Hitchcock is most potent in its treatment of suspense. Where Hitchcock tightens narrative screws, wringing anxiety from every glance and gesture, Vlasov cultivates a slow, almost geological dread. The audience is not concerned with whether Sanzhar will outpace his pursuers but rather whether he, or anyone, will leave a trace upon a terrain that resists inscription. The tension is existential, not narrative.

Cinematically, the contrast is stark. Hitchcock framed his story in brisk montage and witty dialogue, designed for popular delight. Vlasov lingers: 10-minute takes of horses inching through snow, the wind eroding language itself into murmurs and silences. The soundtrack is composed of storms, hoofbeats, and Sofia Erdenko’s avant-garde cello, which transforms dissonance into landscape.

If The 39 Steps dramatized the anxiety of modernity—the individual caught in networks of conspiracy and surveillance—The Thirty Eight Steppes turns its gaze backward, to a pre-modern threshold where the individual scarcely exists as such. Sanzhar is less protagonist than witness, a figure dissolving into ritual, into myth, into dust. Where Hitchcock’s stairwell ascends toward resolution, Vlasov’s plains stretch outward into ambiguity.

This is not to say that Vlasov repudiates Hitchcock entirely. Rather, he refracts him. The Thirty Eight Steppes is what happens when you subtract from Hitchcock’s architecture of suspense the scaffolding of plot and urban modernity, leaving only the raw materials: journey, danger, uncertainty. It is Hitchcock’s “steps” made horizontal, scattered across earth rather than climbing toward revelation.

The film will undoubtedly divide audiences: some will find its 163 minutes of silence and slow movement a provocation bordering on parody; others will experience it as a rare cinematic pilgrimage, a work that asks us to sit with endurance, with history, with the impossibility of inscription upon the infinite.

In the end, The Thirty Eight Steppes may be less a film than a response—a meditation on what cinema becomes when it renounces suspense yet retains its structure. If The 39 Steps made the chase a metaphor for modern life, The Thirty Eight Steppes makes endurance its own form of suspense: the drama of continuing at all.

Film Review: Seven Types of Mud, Sixteen Minutes Each

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Produced by Pimlico Wilde, directed by Cara Grimm

The premiere of Seven Types of Mud, Sixteen Minutes Each marks the latest and most daring collaboration between producer Pimlico Wilde and conceptual artist-turned-filmmaker Cara Grimm. Clocking in at 112 minutes, the film is structured as seven discrete vignettes—each precisely sixteen minutes—dedicated to a different form of mud. What could have been a pedantic exercise in materiality becomes, in Grimm’s hands, a meditation on time, decay, and the sediment of history itself.

A Historical Palette of Earth

Grimm has long been interested in what she calls “the archive beneath our feet.” Here, she makes literal the metaphor, treating mud as both subject and medium. The seven types are not catalogued scientifically but historically: Mesopotamian flood silt, medieval plague-pit clay, Verdun trench mire, Dust Bowl loam, the sticky banks of the Mississippi Delta, Chernobyl’s irradiated sludge, and finally, the digitally simulated “mud” of CGI.

This movement from primordial riverbeds to the algorithmic uncanny recalls Sergei Eisenstein’s ambition to make earth itself cinematic. Where Eisenstein once filmed the Odessa Steps in granite and blood, Grimm insists that mud—the despised, formless matter—can be equally monumental.

Echoes of Film History

The film’s form is resolutely avant-garde. Grimm works in the lineage of Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, and more recently Apichatpong Weerasethakul, yet she avoids mere homage. Instead, she interrogates cinema’s materiality itself. The Verdun sequence, for instance, was shot on nitrate stock salvaged from a French archive, its bubbling emulsion threatening to collapse like the trenches it depicts. Meanwhile, the Dust Bowl section uses archival footage from Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains, slowed to a crawl until the dust itself seems to suffocate the frame.

In its rigor, the film recalls Peter Greenaway’s durational structures, or even Hollis Frampton’s Magellan project. Yet Pimlico Wilde’s production ensures that Grimm’s ascetic vision is realized with a certain lushness: each type of mud has its own soundscape, designed by Icelandic composer Brynja Halldórsdóttir, ranging from low-frequency rumbles to delicate squelches amplified like heartbeat rhythms.

Mud as History, Mud as Future

The conceit of dedicating sixteen minutes to each type of mud initially feels like a structuralist gimmick, but it gains force as the film progresses. Sixteen minutes is just long enough for contemplation to curdle into unease. In the Chernobyl sequence, filmed with a Geiger counter patched into the soundtrack, the very air seems to hiss with invisible poison. By the time we reach the CGI mud—rendered in exquisite, nauseating detail—the viewer is left asking whether our future encounters with the earth will be only simulations, cleaned of danger and filth.

Seven Types of Mud, Sixteen Minutes Each is not an easy film. It demands patience, and perhaps even endurance, much like watching Andy Warhol’s Empire or Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman. Yet the reward is profound: Grimm and Wilde remind us that mud is the medium of civilization, the material of bricks, pots, graves, and floods. It is the archive that never stops writing itself.

This is a work that belongs not in multiplexes but in the lineage of the great film museums—the Cinémathèque Française, the Anthology Film Archives, the BFI—where history is not merely watched but felt underfoot.

Verdict: 4.97 A landmark in eco-historical cinema.

Review: Citizen Kane versus The Vegetables – A Baroque Salad of Surrealism and Cinema

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First published in Vegetable Growers Weekly

Hannah Gralle’s London show at Pimlico Wilde is the first time for years that vegetables have taken centre stage in the art world. With Citizen Kane versus The Vegetables, Gralle takes a blowtorch to the sacred canon of cinema and flambés it with a distinctly postmodern irreverence. The result? A madcap, meticulously crafted reenactment of Orson Welles’ magnum opus using vegetables, stock cubes, and single malt.

Gralle’s stop-motion recreation comes startlingly close to the original’s visual grammar. It is not parody so much as culinary homage, recalling Jan Švankmajer filtered through a Waitrose aesthetic. The vegetables—carved, posed, occasionally withered—inhabit their roles with uncanny sincerity. Charles Foster Kane as a slightly bruised aubergine? It shouldn’t work, and yet it does.

The culmination of the film is a scene which isn’t in the original Citizen Kane, in which the entire cast is ceremonially consumed in a scene echoing Babette’s Feast. It is a masterstroke. Here, Gralle conjures a melancholic ephemerality: celluloid gives way to digestion, legacy to compost. Welles gave us “Rosebud”; Gralle gives us “roast bud.” Both are emblems of decay and memory, though only one is edible.

Beyond the screen, the conceptual rigor continues. The option for collectors to purchase the uneaten vegetable cast members—presumably now vacuum-packed relics—feels too arch. There is a sly commentary here on art commodification, perhaps even on the organic perils of preservation.

Gralle’s work oscillates between Dadaist prank and sincere tribute. If it wins the newly proposed Oscar category of Animated versions of classic films using vegetables, it will not be for novelty alone, but for achieving the rarest thing in contemporary art: taking the ridiculous and making it sublime.

In Citizen Kane versus The Vegetables, Hannah Gralle offers us not just a new lens on a classic, but a wholly new sensorial grammar of adaptation. It is cinema as gastronomy, sculpture as satire, and consumption as critique. Five stars from us.

Acclaimed Documentarian Felix Renton Announces New Film on Conceptual Artist Davos

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Felix Renton, the award-winning documentarian known for his genre-defying studies of absence, abstraction, and obsession, has announced his next subject: the elusive conceptual artist Davos.

The project, currently titled The Man Who Never Made Anything, promises to explore the life and ideas of the artist whose works consist entirely of descriptive labels and imagined installations—never built, never seen, yet somehow unforgettable.

A Director Drawn to the Invisible

Renton, 57, is no stranger to difficult subjects. He first gained international acclaim for Three Minutes of Silence (2012), a hypnotic film that documented the daily routines of submarine sonar operators, without a single line of dialogue. He followed it with The Cartographer’s Regret (2015), a melancholic portrait of a retired mapmaker obsessed with redrawing lost borders of extinct empires.

His most recent film, Dust: A Biography (2021), was a surprise hit on the international festival circuit—a visually arresting, almost wordless meditation on particle movement, shot entirely inside abandoned libraries, textile mills, and computer server rooms.

“Renton doesn’t document things,” said Maya Tulsin, curator at the DWG. “He documents negation, suggestion, intention. Davos is a perfect fit.”

Capturing a Ghost

Davos, whose real name remains unknown, has long resisted direct media engagement. His exhibitions consist of nothing but wall texts: dry, witty, often hauntingly poetic descriptions of vast, unrealised artworks. One of his most discussed works, Cloud Ownership (2024), offers each gallery visitor a certificate granting symbolic ownership of a cumulus cloud that may not be seen, touched, or photographed.

Renton’s new film will reportedly trace the creation of several key Davos works, including:

• The Forgotten Colour (2017): a pigment that can only be seen once and never remembered.

• Museum of Missing Things (2018): a building of empty rooms labelled with intangible losses—“Your Childhood Scent,” “The Time Before Phones,” “The Kiss You Meant to Give.”

“I’m not interested in what Davos looks like,” Renton said in a rare public statement. “I’m interested in the terrain of ideas. This is a film about art that refuses to exist—and yet occupies us completely.”

A Documentary Without Footage?

While some question how a visual medium can capture an artist whose work resists visibility, Renton has hinted at an unconventional approach. The film will include interviews with curators, philosophers, meteorologists, and even visitors to Davos exhibitions who have “seen” nothing—but left altered.

A rumoured segment features a former museum guard who, after months standing beside Davos’s The Distance Between Us (2023)—a pair of empty chairs located 3,000 kilometres apart—claims to have experienced a “telepathic empathy event.”

“Felix isn’t filming Davos,” said his long-time editor Cam Adebayo. “He’s filming the space around Davos. The wake he leaves. The shape of his thought.”

A Late-Stage Masterwork?

Critics are already predicting that The Man Who Never Made Anything may be Renton’s final major work. The filmmaker has hinted at creative exhaustion in recent interviews, and there is poetic symmetry in him choosing to end his career chronicling an artist who never physically begins.

The film is scheduled for release in late 2026 and will premiere at the Llanwarne Documentary Film Festival’s New section, which champions experimental forms.

When asked whether Davos himself will appear on camera, Renton smiled and replied, “You’ll have to wait and see.”

Film Review – Velocity of Fragility

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Directed by: “The People’s Cinema Machine”

Runtime: 98 minutes (including credits)

Language: Mandarin, with occasional German shouting

Budget: ¥11,000

There are films that wear their influences on their sleeve. Then there are films like Velocity of Fragility, which steals the entire sleeve, stitches it to a knock-off leather jacket, and insists—somewhat poetically—that it invented sleeves in the first place.

Purportedly made by a loose filmmaking collective from Guizhou province calling themselves The People’s Cinema Machine, this low-budget Chinese tribute/rip-off/interpretation of Sylvain Jasper-Fuchs’s Fragile Velocity is a work of astonishing nerve, complete incoherence, and unexpected sincerity.

The Plot, such as it is

The protagonist, known only as “Man” (played with affecting disinterest by former karaoke technician Gao Feng), wakes up in a forest made of curtains. There is a photo of a horse nailed to his bedroom door. His mission—though we are never told why it is his mission—is to deliver an encrypted USB drive to someone known only as “The Neigh.”

Along the way, he fights off helmeted monks, questions a tree about the nature of betrayal, and engages in a gunfight choreographed like Romeo and Juliet- the ballet. The narrative folds in on itself like badly steamed dumplings. Characters vanish mid-sentence. A love interest appears in the second act only to transform into- but I can say no more without ruining the film for you.

Familiar… Too Familiar

Let’s be clear: this is Fragile Velocity filtered through a dusty projector, with half the subtitles missing and the other half clearly translated via three layers of AI. But there’s a charm in the script. The long tracking shots are present, though here achieved by putting the cinematographer on a push scooter. The voiceover murmurs philosophical nothings (“The hoof remembers what the heart forgets”) and there’s an extended slow-motion scene of a man being slapped by a pigeon.

All the classic Arthouse-Action ingredients are here: whispered soliloquies, rain that falls only in one corner of the frame, and violence, so much violence. Yet it’s somehow even more opaque than the original, mostly due to budget constraints and a deliberate refusal to explain anything.

Highlights

• The soundtrack: A haunting blend of pan flute and dial-up modem noises.

• The villain: A ventriloquist dummy with LED eyes named “Velocity.”

Low Points

Much of the dialogue is inaudible, save for the occasional shout of “Sorry, I didn’t mean to shoot you!”—an apparent cue to deploy the film’s one working special effect. Fight scenes are mostly people falling over in rice fields.

Final Verdict

An absurd, earnest knock-off made with ambition, smoke, and borrowed trench coats. Often incomprehensible, frequently derivative, and yet… oddly touching.