It's hard to look back over the last half a decade or so and not come to the conclusion that horror is having one hell of a comeback. I mean, in the last 2 years alone we've seen the release of a virtual glut of genuinely great and massively varied horror films - you've got Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room, a grounded, violent and incredibly tense siege thriller; Andy Muschietti's It, which garnered the kind of mainstream attention most films would kill for; Jordan Peele's Get Out, a razor sharp social satire that should've won Best Picture; Robert Eggers' The Witch, which is like nothing else I've ever seen; and even more recently John Krasinski's A Quiet Place, which has been released to both rave reviews and unexpected box office success. Horror seems to be host to a lot of interesting voices at the moment, and they're all doing an incredible amount of work towards helping the genre shed the trashy slasher image that the 80's/90's left it burdened with. But until now, they've almost all been American voices - what happens when the British speak up?
The result is Ghost Stories, a supernatural horror anthology that's both radically different to any of the aforementioned films and, unfortunately, not quite as successful at doing what it sets out to do. Written and directed by Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson, it started life as a stage play in 2010, and follows paranormal investigator/skeptic Professor Phillip Goodman as he is given three cases by ex-skeptic Charles Cameron that supposedly prove the existence of the supernatural. The first of these follows a nightwatchman as he works a graveyard shift in an abandoned asylum for women; the second follows a young man who has been left deeply shaken after his car broke down in the middle of nowhere; the third follows a wealthy businessman forced to spend the night alone in his enormous, isolated house while his pregnant wife is in hospital.
Cinema may be an audiovisual medium, but silence is one of the most effective tools a film-maker has at their disposal. When used well, the absence of any and all noise can draw an audience into a moment like nothing else, instantly ramping up the tension as they tentatively wait to see what might be behind the sudden need for quiet. It's a very primal reaction that films, TV and even video games have been taking advantage of for decades now, and it's one that A Quiet Place uses to great effect, making well-established techniques feel incredibly fresh in the process.
I mean, it's kind of genius really. By setting a horror movie in a world where making any kind of noise is likely to get you killed by a lightning fast and virtually invulnerable alien predator, A Quiet Place finds an in-universe excuse to never allow its audience the release of tension that something as simple as a conversation or the hustle and bustle of normal life often provides. Most of the time, a dead silence in a horror film indicates that something is about to jump out and scare you - here, it's indicative of nothing in particular, offering no clues about if the characters we follow throughout (the Abbotts, a fairly typical American family of 5) are in immediate danger or not, and that can't help but imbue every single scene with a staggering amount of suspense that the film itself doesn't even need to work that hard to maintain. Even the most ordinary of day-to-day tasks to take on extra significance when you know that the smallest of slip ups will have deadly consequences, and that's something that A Quiet Place takes great pleasure in playing with.
It's been the best part of a decade since writer/director Wes Anderson first ventured into the world of stop-motion animation with his wonderful take on Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox, but Isle of Dogs quite handily proves that his time away from the medium has done nothing to lessen his ability to effectively utilise it. It might be a long way from perfect thanks to some story decisions that feel insensitive at best, but between its stunning animation, a stellar voice cast, Alexandre Desplat's gorgeous score and Anderson's unique sensibilities, Isle of Dogs is probably going to end up being both the most charming and the best looking film I'll see this year.
Not that you'd guess that from the film's premise, of course, which in a vaccuum sounds about as far away from "good looking" or "charming" as you could possibly imagine. Set in the wake of fictional Japanese city Megasaki choosing to send all of its dogs to the appropriately named Trash Island after an outbreak of Snout Fever, we follow Atari Kobayashi - the adopted son of Megasaki's ruler, Mayor Kobayashi - as he searches for his guard dog/best friend Spots, who was the first to be deported. While searching for Spots, Atari befriends a pack of five dogs who decide to help him, accompanying him across Trash Island as Mayor Kobayashi attempts to both "rescue" his son and put an end to Snout Fever once and for all.
