Frankie Freako review – cheap and cheesy comedy horror channels 80s schlock

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Ineffectual office worker Conor calls on the services of a gremlin that looks like someone dipped a Muppet in latex, covered it in caustic soda, and ran a car over it a few times Canadian writer-director Steven Kostanski has been one of the creative forces behind a bunch of silly-sweet horror pictures such as The Void and PG: Psycho Goreman that appear to skew towards a younger demographic. Or perhaps his target audience is really the gen X crowd that never outgrew its affection for 1980s fare such as Critters or Gremlins, cheap and cheesy schlock reliant on practical special effects. Luckily, the latter happens to be Kostanski’s speciality; he’s also worked as a prosthetic FX artist on bigger budget films such as Crimson Peak and the TV series Hannibal. All of that comes together for this daft comedy horror farrago, seemingly set in the 80s, about a nebbishy Canadian office worker called Conor (Conor Sweeney). Conor’s beige jumper alone bespeaks a man deeply risk averse and afraid...
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Best films of 2023 in the UK: No 7 – Saint Omer

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Alice Diop’s award-winning courtroom drama doubles as an unsentimental study in empathy with one of the year’s most mesmerising performances

At this year’s Venice film festival, Alice Diop’s unblinking stunner Saint Omer was handed the prize for best debut film – a reward that would have seemed inadequate if it hadn’t shortly afterwards taken the grand prix in the main competition, and inaccurate under any circumstances. Diop’s film is only a debut if you’re happy to disregard documentary as a lesser branch of cinema that somehow doesn’t count; as her first dramatic feature, Saint Omer merely extends the clear-eyed gaze and burning social interest of her non-fiction work into new narrative terrain, with nary a tremor of uncertainty. Films like We showed Diop has form in braiding truth, storytelling and intense human scrutiny; Saint Omer isn’t so very different.

The surprise is that Diop’s entry into fiction takes the form of a courtroom drama, among the most rigidly procedural and rule-bound genres in the medium – only to strip it of its expected structures and rhythms, centring disordered interior feeling amid unyielding legal process. The case, drawn from a real-life 2016 headline-maker in France, is stark and horrifying: legally straightforward, perhaps, but psychologically tumultuous. Young Senegalese Frenchwoman Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda, often scarcely moving a muscle while giving one of the year’s most mesmerising performances) is accused of murdering her infant daughter. She doesn’t deny the act, but claims sorcery was to blame, sticking calmly to her story over days of frustrating testimony – shot by Claire Mathon with penetrating stillness, allowing the viewer to take in her micro-shifts in expression and intonation, her consistency of comportment, her occasionally lofty turns of phrase, as she repeats her awful confession over and over.

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