Abertoir

Latest reviews

• 
  Marama

  Review preview for Marama

  One of the most impressive films of the year to date.

  A young Māori woman travels to Victorian England after receiving a letter promising information about her birth parents. As she peels back the layers of colonial deceit, she is driven to avenge her shattered ancestry.
• 
  Bride Of Frankenstein

  Review preview for Bride Of Frankenstein

  Although there are grand themes at work here, the real power of the piece – as often in the Gothic, comes from the ways in which they clash, rather than from something built out of their unity.

  Doctor Frankenstein's creation persuades him to make him a mate.
• 
  Reflection In A Dead Diamond

  Review preview for Reflection In A Dead Diamond

  For something so lovely, it is hard-edged, and it sparkles with visual wit.

  When the mysterious woman in the room next door disappears, a debonair 70-year-old ex-spy living in a luxury hotel on the Côte d’Azur is confronted by the demons and darlings of a lurid past in which moviemaking, memories and madness collide.
• 
  Queens Of The Dead

  Review preview for Queens Of The Dead

  Tina Romero is in her element.

  On what should be a fun night at a Brooklyn warehouse party, an outbreak of flesh-eating zombies forces a ragtag group of drag queens, partygoers and party-throwers to band together and somehow survive the night.
• 
  Noise

  Review preview for Noise

  The way the sound designer creates a landscape of silence is particularly impressive.

  After the disappearance of her younger sister, a woman with a hearing impediment experiences bizarre happenings and frightening encounters when mysterious noises echo throughout the building.
• 
  Touch Me

  Review preview for Touch Me

  It’s the situation that delivers the strangeness – and charm – mediated by Dudley’s performance as a woman who is self-deprecating and messy but lively enough to root for.

  Two codependent best friends become addicted to the heroin-like touch of an alien narcissist who may or may not be trying to take over the world.
• 
  The Old Dark House

  Review preview for The Old Dark House

  Although Whale is working with clichés, many of them were only established in literary form in 1932, and are presented on film here for the first time in forms that continue to be imitated to this day.

  A couple run into trouble after they are stranded by a storm.
• 
  The Crazies

  Review preview for The Crazies

  The simplicity of the location, with its gentle green hills and thin woodland, makes it feel as if it could be anywhere, yet Romero positions his camera so as to generate maximum tension from it.

  The military attempts to contain a manmade combat virus that causes death and permanent insanity in those infected, as it overtakes a small Pennsylvania town.
• 
  Phenomena

  Review preview for Phenomena

  This rarely seen Argento gem has it all. We're on ground he's covered before, but it's constantly shifting beneath us.

  A girl who has a strange relationship with insects attends boarding school in a small town where a killer is at large.
• 
  Eyes Without A Face

  Review preview for Eyes Without A Face

  Franju is carefully slicing along the line where the concrete rigours of modern science intersect with the abstractions of youth, beauty and ephemerality.

  A surgeon abducts girls - attempting to transplant their faces on to that of his disfigured daughter.

A–Z of Abertoir 2025 reviews →

Features

• From the withered tree
  Taratoa Stappard on colonial hierarchies, Ariana Osborne and Marama
• The dying house
  Taratoa Stappard on colonial horrors and inventing the Maori Gothic with Marama
• Ice cool
  Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani talk Reflection In A Dead Diamond
• The family that slays together
  Tina Romero on her father's legacy, queer community and Queens Of The Dead
• Setting the tone
  Kim Soo-jin on the power of sound, tenderness and Noise