Ride the Snake review – low-budget home-invasion horror offers transgressive free-for-all

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After a car accident kills her husband, Harper and her daughter kidnap the driver responsible to serve their own kind of justice – but he may not be everything he first seems Quoting the classics can be a dangerous game for a film – one liable to highlight your shortcomings. When two Gypsies-cum-demons chant Leaning on the Everlasting Arms , Robert Mitchum’s ditty from Night of the Hunter, not to mention bearing love-hate tattoos on their knuckles, it indicates that this low-budget British home-invasion horror is missing the same fairytale concision. Which is a shame, as this messy but entrancing, faintly surrealist feature by Shani Grewal has entirely different qualities of its own. Blinded in a car accident that killed her husband, Harper (Suzanna Hamilton) has lived alone for several years; until recently that is, as stepson Taran (Viraj Juneja) returns home to find that his mother and sister Megan (Francesca Baker) have kidnapped the drunk driver responsible and shackled him in a...
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Mami Wata review – arresting, stripped-down Nigerian parable of of water and power

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Discontent stirs in a village that has rejected modern life to follow a faith healer said to be the representative of the title’s water spirit

This visually beautiful and charismatically acted film is a fierce expressionist reverie or parable of power, shot in a lustrous, high-contrast black-and-white by cinematographer Lílis Soares. It is the work of Nigerian director CJ “Fiery” Obasi, whose nickname makes an interesting elemental contrast to his movie’s watery theme. His storytelling urgency and stripped-down minimalism reminded me at various stages of George Orwell and Julie Dash.

We are in a west African village called Iyi, which has ignored the modern world of science and technology in favour of worshipping the traditional water spirit Mami Wata, through her intermediary and representative on Earth, faith-healer Mama Efe (Rita Edochie), to whom tributes of food and money must be paid. But Efe’s daughter Zinwe (Uzoamaka Aniunoh) is furious with her when she appears unwilling or unable to cure a local child, and there are rumblings of dissatisfaction with her power. Mama Efe’s other daughter Prisca (Evelyne Ily Juhen) is less critical; she is adopted, and is grateful to Efe for saving her from penury and death.

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