‘It’s more productive than doomscrolling’: film-maker Ben Wheatley on his secret life as musician Dave Welder

While playing with nine-figure Hollywood budgets, the Kill List and Meg 2 director has become a prolific music producer. Next up is his experimental film, Bulk Dave Welder may just be the most prolific musician you’ve never heard of. In a little more than a year, he has released a staggering 26 records spanning electronica, dub, ambient, kosmische and drone. One of these albums, Thunderdrone, is more than four hours long. Based in Brighton and Hove and described as “a rotating group of musicians and artists”, in reality “Dave Welder” is largely the work of one man who, until now, has been operating in secret: film director Ben Wheatley. “I’ve always wanted to make music,” says Wheatley, whose films include the independent movies High-Rise, Kill List and Sightseers, along with big-budget Hollywood flicks such as the shark thriller Meg 2: The Trench. “I wanted to do it for my films but there was a dissonance. Of all the art forms, I couldn’t really understand it. I would dream that I c...

Limbo review – hardbitten outback noir with a compassionate heart

Simon Baker plays a ruined cop investigating a cold-case murder in this tough, sandblasted thriller that coolly lays out the racism and discrimination the Indigenous population face

Indigenous Australian film-maker Ivan Sen brings to Berlin a terrific outback noir, a cold-case crime procedural that he has written and directed – and also shot in a stark monochrome, which makes the vast skies and cratered earth of South Australia’s abandoned opal mines look like another planet.

The setting is the town of Umoona, where a grizzled cop arrives, broodingly listening to a Christian talkshow on the car radio, and checking into a place unsubtly called the Limbo Motel, where his room is a bizarre stone grotto, apparently repurposed from one of the disused mines. This is detective Travis Hurley, played in careworn, weatherbeaten style by Simon Baker – very much resembling Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad. Hurley is a former drug squad officer who has become addicted to heroin; his superiors have quite clearly given him this hopeless job in the middle of nowhere as a means of getting him out of the way. His ostensible task is to reopen a 20-year-old case: the unsolved disappearance of an Indigenous woman. This was casually and incompetently investigated by white officers at the time, who were concerned only in getting a confession from (any) Indigenous man.

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