Over the past few years, several boutique labels have brought underseen Italian gialli back to our screens, many lovingly restored to look as good as they ever will. But the well seemed to be running dry. Although nearly 300 films were made during the genre’s heyday, many were cheap cash-ins that lacked originality. It’s generally accepted that classic examples became increasingly rare after 1973. This makes Radiance’s new 2K restoration of The Monster / Il mostro, scanned from the original negative, all the more welcome as an innovative late entry.

This was director Luigi Zampa’s penultimate film, made towards the end of a long career that began with his debut, Awakening of a City (1933). In the post-war reconstruction period, he was associated with Italian neorealism and moved towards its vérité style, often using non-professional actors. Most of his films were politically charged social critiques, though some were marketed as mainstream comedies. The Monster retains those signature elements, but stands out in his career as a genre film. Giallo purists will find themselves pleasantly challenged by this postmodern—perhaps post-giallo—fusion of familiar tropes and acerbic satire. The result is an effective thriller that remains surprisingly relevant half a century later.

From the opening gambit, Zampa knowingly wrong-foots the audience with an almost definitive giallo sequence. An extreme close-up of blue eyes peering through a black ski mask is followed by a glinting knife gripped in a black-gloved hand. A woman screams and backs away from the generic assailant across the shag-pile carpet until she’s pinned to the bed and stabbed to death.

This is the climactic murder from Luciano Ercoli’s Death Walks on High Heels (1971), a giallo many Italian cinema-goers would have recognised. As the house lights come on for the interval, we realise that we’ve been watching a film within the film. Valerio Barigozzi (Johnny Dorelli) and his teenage son, Luca (Enzo Santaniello), decide to leave the cinema, pausing in the stairwell beside a poster for Umberto Lenzi’s Spasmo (1974). Valerio loudly denigrates the plots of such films for making no sense, claiming they’re sold on voyeuristic carnage alone. With this scene, Zampa seems to be telling us: ‘that was fiction and this is now reality’. He draws us into his self-aware meta-giallo while efficiently establishing the characters and their relationship.

Valerio has recently separated from Anna (Angelica Ippolito), who seizes every opportunity to belittle him, clearly disapproving of his influence on their son. His marriage has failed, and he’s also been demoted at work, at a publishing house for periodicals. Moved from the news desk, he now writes under a female pseudonym as the agony aunt for the women’s magazine Tenderness. Among the letters he finds an anonymous note threatening to kill Grandpa Gustavo, a popular children’s television storyteller. It’s signed simply ‘il Mostro’—the Monster.

Valerio reports the threat to the police but isn’t taken seriously. He rushes to the studios and reaches Grandpa Gustavo (Gianrico Tedeschi) just as he dies from a fatal blow to the head. Valerio is detained as a suspect, and the police immediately cover up their inaction. Commissario Pisani (Orazio Orlando) confiscates the letter and denies knowing about Valerio’s earlier phone call. The authoritarian establishment is already manipulating the story to construct what we’d now call ‘fake news’. Valerio Barigozzi isn’t a relic of the past, either. Today, there are many more platforms for similarly unscrupulous, egotistical ‘influencers’.

When Valerio receives a second letter from the Monster, threatening the life of a famous footballer, he keeps it to himself and turns up at the training pitch with his camera. He callously documents the footballer’s final moments and the bloody aftermath of his murder. Questioned by the police again, Valerio claims that, on receiving the warning, he rushed to the scene in the hope of preventing a crime. When Pisani admonishes him for not reporting the letter, Valerio cleverly turns the tables: doing so would imply that there had been a previous letter, wouldn’t it? A three-way battle of wits begins between the police, the serial killer and Valerio, who soon becomes the newspaper’s star reporter again, capitalising on his exclusive knowledge of where the killer will strike next.

Valerio is calculating enough to let someone else kill, but he’s also shown to be a coward when a stranger intimidates him in a lift. The stranger turns out to be Baruffi (Renzo Palmer), owner of the cosmetics company that makes the lipstick the Monster uses to mark his victims. Baruffi proposes a sponsorship deal: he’ll pay Valerio for every mention of the brand in his coverage of the murders. He also introduces Valerio to Dina (Sydne Rome), a famous pop star seeking his endorsement for a concept album inspired by the serial killer. It features songs from the perspectives of the Monster and his victims, with lyrics that eroticise murder.

Among a strong cast, Johnny Dorelli’s central performance drives the narrative. He’s angry, bitter and conniving for the most part, but also brings pathos and moments of devastating emotional honesty. That’s all the more impressive given that he was known at the time as a cosy crooner and light-comedy actor.

Screenwriter Sergio Donati, probably better known for writing Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), revisits the world of exploitative media that he explored in Slap the Monster on Page One (1972). That film also revolves around a embittered egotist abusing his editorial position at a major newspaper. Some scenes could easily belong to either film. But although both are cynical, The Monster has a lighter tone, veering towards comedy at times, and follows the whodunnit template more closely, from its opening act to its final frame.

In both films, Donati puts journalism and old-school newspapers at the heart of the drama. Although the technology is now dated, his examination of tangled ethics is even more relevant today. He dissects the relationships between journalism, crime, public opinion, fear and the creation of monsters. Both films feature a murder mystery, elements of police procedural and an amateur sleuth, but their central concern is the commodification of murder. Crime generates headlines; headlines shape public opinion; and public opinion becomes a tool—of political power in Slap the Monster on Page One, and commercial profit in The Monster. Both stories are also driven by a man’s need for power and personal validation. Each film invites more than one interpretation of who, or what, the monster is.

Donati’s scripts are sceptical of institutions and acutely aware of how narratives are manufactured. Despite their many similarities, the films are markedly different in the hands of their directors.

In Slap the Monster on Page One, Marco Bellocchio turns Donati’s original concept into an overtly political work. The newspaper isn’t merely sensationalist; it’s an ideological machine. The editor selects and manipulates facts, invents connections and directs public anger towards a convenient scapegoat to advance conservative political interests before an election. The whodunnit subplot is almost incidental. Bellocchio is interested in propaganda, power gradients and collusion between the press, the police and political leaders.

Zampa approaches very similar material with irony and a more human-scale story. Valerio isn’t a powerful editor, but a frustrated nobody prepared to risk other people’s lives and exploit murder to advance his career. He’s a loser in a world where a man’s worth is measured by professional standing and material wealth. He isn’t driven by ideology; he’s simply ambitious, resentful, unscrupulous, morally pliable and hungry for success. Nor is he alone: he faces stiff competition from Giorgio Mesca (Yves Beneyton), the purely profit-driven son of the domineering newspaper magnate Nicola Mesca (Henning Schlüter), who still upholds some unfashionable ethics.

As Valerio begins to predict the killer’s next moves, he proves uncannily accurate. He deduces that the victims are selected because of their names and the significance of their locations. He believes the ‘V’ drawn on each victim’s face in lipstick is meaningful. When the first three victims’ names begin with V, E and N, he concludes that the motif stands for ‘V for vendetta’ and that the killer intends to spell out the phrase across the city by drawing a line between each murder scene. One wonders whether Alan Moore, author of the 1980s comic series V for Vendetta, might have seen the film.

Ultimately, The Monster is difficult to pigeonhole. It hovers between intelligent sociopolitical satire and a cleverly constructed murder mystery. There’s also an element of soap-opera drama, with the fractured family unit serving as a microcosm of the state. Unlike most gialli, the film has no overly indulgent stylistic set pieces around the murders. We see what leads up to each killing through a prowling, unclaimed point of view, but never the act itself—only what happens immediately before and after. As a post-giallo, it works perfectly well. And even if you work out the serial killer’s identity in the first act, there are still one or two surprises in store.

ITALY | 1977 | 94 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ITALIAN

Limited Edition Blu-ray Special Features:

• 2K restoration from the original negative by Radiance Films. The colours are warm, and the grey tones lend the image good depth. The clarity is fine, preserving the textures down to the film grain.
• Uncompressed mono PCM audio. This showcases Ennio Morricone’s original score, although some distortion seems to have carried over from the master track. It may well have been deliberate.
• Audio commentary by giallo experts Rachael Nisbet and Peter Jilmstad (2026). A thorough commentary from two insightful, knowledgeable enthusiasts who complement each other throughout. They begin by discussing a range of genre labels before settling into a solid analysis of the central themes and how they’re conveyed. They also make the astute distinction between a film intended to entertain an audience and the audience’s retrospective critical engagement—a very valid point that’s often overlooked in commentaries of this kind. They discuss how the narrative moves from cynical comedy towards ethical debate, noting historical and contextual references and comparing the film with works by other directors, including Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento. Acknowledging that contemporary Italian audiences in the late 1970s would have experienced the film differently from viewers today, they consider its many points of connection with our current mass and social media landscape. It’s a well-balanced analysis of the film’s social critique, the context of its political satire and its success as an entertaining thriller.
• Interviews with stars Sydne Rome, Renato Scarpa, Enzo Santaniello and makeup artist Pierantonio Mecacci (2022, 45 mins.) This collection of insightful interviews is skilfully edited around a series of themes. The contributors begin by recalling their first meetings with Luigi Zampa and the casting process, then share memories of the production, some of which they remember only vaguely. They go on to assess the film in the context of its release and reflect on its legacy. Johnny Dorelli is represented by a clip from a television programme recorded in Milan in 1977. In it, he discusses his new film and the audience response during its initial theatrical run, which he modestly describes as ‘not a huge success, but okay’. Sydne Rome recalls her early career after moving from the US to Rome. She suggests there may have been a slight cultural disconnect between her and Zampa, but remembers the director as kind. The other contributors share that impression, recalling how he balanced businesslike efficiency with a friendly manner, never becoming overbearing or making unreasonable demands. Renato Scarpa remembers little about his two-and-a-half days of filming and has never watched the film since, but he clearly recalls meeting and working with Zampa on other occasions. Enzo Santaniello has vivid memories of making the film and of how well he was treated. He recalls meticulous rehearsals with Johnny Dorelli, from whom he learnt a great deal. He also remembers having to understand his character’s experiences deeply and internalise them, even though they were nothing like his own. Pierantonio Mecacci shares plenty of behind-the-scenes insights and anecdotes. He recalls the early days of prosthetics, when he would bring specialist materials back from trips to the US because none were available in Italy. When those supplies ran out, he had to improvise. He shares a few trade secrets, including the use of butchers’ brown paper and glue to mimic the effects of blows to the skull.
• NEW Interview with Italian cinema expert Richard Dyer (2026, 34 mins.) As knowledgeable as ever, Dyer places the film in its historical and cultural context, referring to real post-war serial killers who were invariably labelled monsters. The most famous was Il Mostro di Firenze. He then offers several equally compelling interpretations of who the titular Monster might be. He also discusses the production in detail, along with its key cast and crew.
• Trailer.
• NEW English subtitle translation.
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow.
• Limited Edition booklet featuring new writing by Roberto Curti, author of Italian Giallo in Film and Television: A Critical History, and archival interviews with Luigi Zampa and Johnny Dorelli. Not available at time of review.
• Limited Edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings.

Cast & Crew

director: Luigi Zampa.
writer: Sergio Donati.
starring: Johnny Dorelli, Sydne Rome, Renzo Palmer, Yves Beneyton, Enzo Santaniello & Henning Schlüter.

The post THE MONSTER (1977) appeared first on Frame Rated.

Opening night. I’m sitting in a capacity crowd of 96, crammed into one of the smaller theatres at my local arthouse cinema. I watch the lovely juxtaposition of balding professors and eager goth kids in the row in front of me. Gregorian chants play through the speakers above, serenading us before the supposedly most blasphemous film on Earth hits the screen.

There’s something electric in the air, something one perverted and shameless reviewer might even describe as cinematically holy: a joyous occasion for horror fiends, anti-censorship activists, midnight-movie lovers and highbrow cineastes alike. In the front row, a couple dressed as a nun and a priest trade their favourite lines, Rocky Horror-style. Somewhere—heaven, hell or oblivion—Ken Russell is smiling.

On its 55th anniversary, Russell’s The Devils is finally being shown in cinemas as he intended: fully intact, revitalised and embraced for both its outrageousness and its power. The new 4K restoration and the inclusion of two long-censored sequences—‘The Rape of Christ’ and ‘The Bone’—are enough to mesmerise.

What once enraged critics, terrified the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) and made the film horror’s greatest forbidden fruit arguably isn’t its shock value. It’s the film’s playful, artful and incendiary contempt for authority—specifically, authoritarianism. A study of religion, politics, repression, madness and human evil, it remains brilliantly timeless despite being firmly rooted in history. Tellingly, it feels more relevant today than it did on its scandalous initial release.

The Devils follows the 17th-century Loudun possessions, in which Urbain Grandier, a charismatic, politically outspoken local priest, was accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake on the testimony of a supposedly possessed Ursuline convent. Russell drew some inspiration from John Whiting’s play of the same name, written in 1961, cherry-picking dialogue while rejecting its more brooding, melodramatic, Crucible-wannabe elements.

The heart of the film, though, belongs to Aldous Huxley’s 1952 account,The Devils of Loudun. Russell cites Huxley’s description of exorcists at work on the bewitched nuns—like ‘rape in a public lavatory’—as a kind of epiphany that showed him how to make the film. That’s exactly the vibe: mixed, of course, with the auteur’s signature blend of Stanley Kubrick and Monty Python.

If any director and actor were made for each other—beyond Kurosawa and Mifune, or Scorsese and De Niro—it’s Ken Russell and Oliver Reed. Reed brings all his Shakespearean magnetism and hell-raiser humour to Grandier, giving us a figure who’s rascally yet reverent, and who commands every frame of celluloid he’s given. Pompous, vain and philandering, yet compassionate, rebellious and steeped in humanism, his Grandier—like the historical one—is far from an easy saint, and all the more compelling for it.

Like the nuns who itch to sleep with him, we’re drawn in by that curled Van Dyke moustache and those haunting blue eyes. He’s a rock-star priest who speaks freely and eloquently, even when he’s being a bit of an arsehole. When Grandier isn’t running from his pregnant mistress, Philippe (Georgina Hale), battling her father (John Woodvine) with a dead crocodile as a shield, or scoffing at the superstition inherent in the science of his day and in his own religion, there’s something deeper at work.

Reed brings out his character’s storminess, portraying a flawed man of conscience who stands against the nationalist takeover of Loudun by the Catholic Church and the French state. At the same time, Grandier tries to live more altruistically: as a disciple of his God, as a husband to the more traditionally saintly Madeleine (Gemma Jones) and as a caretaker of his community.

Russell leaves little ambiguity about who the titular devils are. There’s no mythical Satan here, no otherworldly demons corrupting the innocent. The film’s gargantuan, blood-red title card appears over King Louis XIII (Graham Armitage) kissing Cardinal Richelieu’s ring (Christopher Logue), sealing an agreement to consolidate their power and become an unstoppable autocratic force.

When this abominable pair of hypocrites aren’t limply shooting Protestant prisoners dressed as crows or being wheeled around by their nun servants, they’re plotting how best to undermine their political opponents and crush any resistance, with Grandier chief among their targets. Their view of society is cynical but, as it turns out, tragically accurate.

Russell himself described The Devils s a tale of brainwashing. The film reaches something more visceral and unsettling, however. Russell agrees with Huxley about the parallels between Loudun and the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, but offers a harsher, more human assessment of motivation and behaviour.

Absolute control, then or now, begins at the top, serving the interests and greed of a ruthless few. But it must filter down to the people through bureaucratic cooperation and various methods of manipulation. Loudun’s massive walls are a literal fortification, but Russell also uses them as a central psychological motif. Sexual repression, personal animosities, base impulses, an outbreak of plague and lifelong social conditioning by the Church have already left the city’s population clawing at the walls from within when corrupt authority arrives with a wrecking ball. Some capitulate through propaganda and groupthink; others do so under threat of ostracism, torture or murder. But most embrace the new system willingly, revelling in its sadism and self-destruction.

As remarkable as Reed is as Grandier, the film’s most intriguing character and performance belong to his accuser, Sister Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave). With the crooked physique of a living Catholic icon and a jeering cackle that’s infectious—and historically accurate—Sister Jeanne is the film’s thematic linchpin: both aggressor and victim in the machinations of Church and state.

Redgrave pours every ounce of herself into the bent-neck nun, capturing how the denial of her humanity festers into obsession, spite and violence. As Sister Jeanne fantasises about Grandier from behind the convent bars that forever frame her, melding him with Christ in vivid hallucinations, we feel tremendous empathy for her.

The dream world she masturbates to—licking Christ-like Grandier’s abdominal wound like a vagina while imagining herself statuesque—always ends in a rude awakening: the return of her hunched back, a rosary’s crucifix digging into her palm, and self-flagellation for her desires. The monotony and cruelty of the real world leave her jaded, bored and resentful. Redgrave gives that gnarled perspective, and Sister Jeanne’s explosive giggle at the innocence or sincerity of others, a vileness that’s relatable and initially hilarious.

When Sister Jeanne hears of Grandier’s marriage to goody-two-shoes Madeleine and his refusal to serve as the convent’s confessor, she makes the fatal decision to cry ‘Devil’ and accuse him as an act of vengeance, unwittingly opening Pandora’s box for them both.

Russell’s script builds tension superbly, following Grandier, Sister Jeanne and the Church-state conspiracy separately before bringing all three threads together in the Boschian final acts. The scenes seem to speak to one another throughout: smash cuts link political celebration to a maggot-ridden corpse strapped to a wheel; Louis XIII’s laughter echoes Sister Jeanne’s; and sacred and profane moments are layered together.

This reaches its zenith in the film’s most notorious and memorable sequence. Finally presented uncut, in all its demented glory, ‘The Rape of Christ’ is a fever dream only Ken Russell could have devised.

Cardinal Richelieu’s hatchet men have already subjected Sister Jeanne to rigorous questioning, torment and ‘exorcisms’ in the form of sexual assault, gratifying their own lust for barbarity even as she accuses Grandier without resistance. When her fellow nuns loyally defend her, attacking the priests and inviting accusations of possession—and almost certain execution—the tribunal’s most fanatical (and kinky) member, the deliciously unhinged Father Barre (Michael Gothard), wearing John Lennon-style glasses, seizes the opportunity to stage a mass-exorcism orgy. The nuns must either join Jeanne in the ruse or be killed. They choose the former.

What follows is a frenzy of flesh, satire and phantasmagoria: liberating or sacrilegious, hysterical or punk, depending on your point of view. Nuns dance naked through the church, wearing S&M dog collars, painting crosses on their faces, masturbating with candles, getting the better of Father Barre and taking down an enormous crucifix, which they proceed to mount and ride rodeo-style.

Meanwhile, the weak and weaselly Father Mignon (Murray Melvin) climbs a surreal ladder to escape the chaos, only to gaze down at it and reach beneath his holy robe. The camera crash-zooms in and out like a bad acid trip, amid a choir of sounds like hyenas laughing and pigs being slaughtered. A masked nobleman, who may or may not be Louis XIII, crashes the party to mock the nuns’ superstition. Sister Jeanne is force-fed a liquid resembling semen—Heinz soup, according to Vanessa Redgrave. At the left of the frame, a cocker spaniel, for whom I feel the most distress, is caught in the middle of the fuck-and-frolic bacchanalia. It’s all pure cinematic insanity.

Russell cuts between this and Grandier taking the sacrament in peace, far away on a beach. Critic and The Devilschampion and re-releaser Mark Kermode considers the contrast essential to the film’s message, and it’s what makes the scene unforgettable. Unaware of the mayhem he’s about to return to in Loudun, Grandier reaches a moment of transcendence and bliss just as the city prepares to annihilate him and itself. In this scene, Russell brings together humanity’s capacity for love and nihilism.

The pent-up sexual lust quickly gives way to bloodlust when Grandier is arrested. Just as Oliver Reed proclaims, in a very proto-Matt Berry way, that “Satan’s boy I….could never be”, Russell strips away the film’s humour. Grandier is tortured, tried in a kangaroo court by stiff judges dressed in Ku Klux Klan-like robes, and sentenced to death. Reed is breathtaking in the finale, conveying Grandier’s suffering and resolve in a moving, but far from saintly, way. Grandier is besieged by pain, doubt and fear, yet still refuses to put his name to a political execution built on a sectarian lie.

During the burning, Russell puts us in Grandier’s perspective, framing the callous, laughing faces of the crowd—and the frustrated to mortified expressions of his accusers—against deep, hellish flames. It’s chilling, and creates such disgust that you’ll want to wash away every trace of our species as soon as you leave the cinema.

But the final note is even more eviscerating. In the second of the two restored sequences, ‘The Bone’, the obscenely pragmatic Baron de Laubardemont (Dudley Sutton) gives Sister Jeanne—now an enthusiastic charlatan performing exorcisms of her own—Grandier’s suggestively shaped femur, which she uses to pleasure herself. A one-shot coda follows: Madeleine, our only source of unalloyed kindness, steps out of a dungeon, walks through Loudun’s devastated streets and shattered walls, and follows a jagged path into uncertainty, surrounded by giant, daisy-like wheels of torture and conformity. It’s an eerie climax, almost unbearable to watch in the political climate of 2026.

Alongside its stellar performances and writing, The Devils showcases extraordinary production design and visual storytelling. Loudun’s provocative sets, conceived and built by a young Derek Jarman on the Pinewood Studios lot, play immensity against confinement. The pristine walls of Loudun contrast with the convent’s oppressively sanitised, claustrophobic spaces. White and black are used to suggest purification, smothering and negation. Meanwhile, Russell, cinematographer David Watkin and editor Michael Bradsell create a rhythm balanced between absurdity and dread: the camera moves through a dazed world of sex, death and pestilence, then rests on the naked expressiveness of the human face.

A masterful blend of comedy and horror, The Devils is finding a wider audience at the perfect time. Now, even more than in 1971, we need to laugh with a film and be broken by it at once. Few filmmakers can make such a personal statement about politics and religion, then have audiences joyfully reciting lines along with it before falling into stunned silence. This is one such event.

Cosplay is strongly encouraged.

Bonus points for Georgina Hale’s comic chemistry with Reed as a bratty version of Philippe, her face inexplicably painted in glam-rock make-up throughout the film to match Huxley’s figurative description of her in his book; for the Grim Reaper-adorned tomb designed by Jarman, which is exactly how I want to be buried; and for discovering Ken Russell’s very Hobbit-like cottage. The latter appears in the documentary Hell on Earth: The Desecration & Resurrection of The Devils (2002), which I highly recommend—as questionable green-screen effects and all—as a supplementary watch.

UK | 1971 | 115 MINUTES | 2.35:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • LATIN

Cast & Crew

director: Ken Russell.
writer: Ken Russell (based on the play by John Whiting, itself based on the 1952 book ‘The Devils of Loudon’ by Aldous Huxley).
starring: Oliver Reed, Vanessa Redgrave, Gemma Jones, Dudley Sutton, Murray Melvin, Michael Gothard, Georgina Hale, Graham Armitage & Christopher Logue.

The post THE DEVILS (1971) appeared first on Frame Rated.

Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House (2018) for Netflix departed about as far as a work can from its literary source while still just about qualifying as an adaptation. In The Fall of the House of Usher (2023)—also for Netflix—he went further still, offering a freewheeling riff on Poe’s greatest hits that bore little resemblance to any one story.

Now, though, with a superb eight-part adaptation of Carrie—remarkably, the first screen serialisation—Flanagan reins in his narrative creativity a little and hews more closely to Stephen King’s original novel. He has also adapted three of King’s other works for the big screen. Of course, King purists will find plenty to object to (though in some respects this version is actually closer to the novel than Brian De Palma’s 1976 film). But King himself likes it, and it’s easy to see why. ‘Reimagining’ is an overused word, but it’s exactly what we have here: a comprehensive, almost entirely convincing expansion of the novel, making full use of the greater scope a series offers over a film. It also takes in contemporary concerns without losing the story’s core: a Carrie for the age of cyberbullying, school shootings and anti-vaxxing.

Comparisons with De Palma’s version—by far the best remembered of the four Carrie films—are inevitable. Flanagan’s take may not have the same long-term cultural impact, but only because it’s more naturalistic, less mannered and less intense. It aims to engage, provoke and even move, rather than shock. De Palma renamed King’s Ewen High School after Norman Bates from Psycho (1960), signalling the film’s lurid intentions; Flanagan returns to King’s original name.

He also takes a much broader view of the novel’s events. De Palma’s Carrie focuses closely on the title character; the other characters matter only in terms of how they affect her. Flanagan’s version, by contrast, is really the story of three women: Carrie White, her mother and her high school nemesis, Chris Hargensen. An outstanding cast and first-rate writing for the smaller roles ensure that many other characters are fully rounded and memorable, too.

I described this version as “almost entirely convincing” because there’s one misstep: an added subplot that takes up little screen time but has major implications. It adds nothing to the powerful main story and is rather obviously designed to set up a second season. That reservation is the only thing keeping Carrie from a five-star rating, because so much else is pure gold.

After her father (Tahmoh Penikett) dies at the construction site where he works, previously home-schooled teenager Carrie White (Summer H. Howell) is forced to attend the local high school so that her mother, Margaret (Samantha Sloyan), can go to work. Here, almost as soon as the story begins, Flanagan departs from King’s novel for good reason. In the book, Ralph White has been dead for many years and Margaret already works at a laundrette. In the series, Carrie and her mother encounter the world beyond their home in parallel.

For Carrie, Ewen High School is a mixed blessing. She enjoys learning and marvels at the range of books in the school library, having been allowed only the Bible at home. ‘We’re allowed to read all of them?’ she asks incredulously. But she’s different in so many ways—she wears homemade clothes and has no phone—that she soon becomes a target for bullies, particularly the insecure Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton). The bullying escalates when Carrie, completely unaware of menstruation, gets her first period in the school changing room. The second most famous scene in De Palma’s film is far more realistic and nasty here.

Another classmate, Sue Snell (Siena Agudong), feels guilty about her own complicity in the bullying and tries to befriend Carrie. Her teachers are generally sympathetic, too, especially Ms Desjardin (Amber Midthunder). But as Chris’s home life collapses, she seems to redirect all her anger at the world towards tormenting Carrie, largely through social media. Carrie is determined to make the best of high school, but Chris’s campaign continues, culminating in a plan to humiliate her more physically at the prom, with help from her amoral new boyfriend, Billy (Arthur Conti).

The basic outline will be familiar to anyone who’s read or watched another version of Carrie. It’s enriched, rather than weakened, by secondary storylines that intersect in complex ways. Some focus on the teenagers, others on Carrie’s mother or the high school staff. These aren’t minor diversions: they add interest, depth and relatability to a story whose general direction is already so well known. Flanagan sensibly avoids presenting the climactic prom scene and ensuing carnage as surprises. Indeed, for the first few episodes, the series repeatedly cuts to them. Similarly, Carrie’s telekinetic powers are given little emphasis until the prom is near. They appear sporadically from the first episode, but so casually that you could easily miss them. Even when they begin to play a greater role around the middle of the series, they’re never treated overdramatically.

After all, everyone expects them in a Carrie adaptation. What’s much less expected—though there’s arguably an equivalent in the quasi-documentary sections of King’s book—is the way episodes are introduced by accounts of other women with extraordinary powers, from Joan of Arc to Angela Cavallo, who lifted a 3,000-pound car to rescue her son in 1982. These segments feature a narrator whom we eventually learn is Adelaide (Kate Siegel), though her connection to the rest of the story remains unclear for much of the series. At the end of episode one, another character says, “it wasn’t just Carrie”, but what this means remains a mystery until much later.

These sections, along with a briefly developed subplot connected to them and what seem to be interviews with survivors of Carrie’s prom rampage, are the weakest part of Flanagan’s Carrie. They serve an obvious structural purpose: ensuring that the wide-open ending doesn’t come entirely out of the blue. They also lead to one magnificently unexpected surprise. But on their own, they’re more baffling than suspenseful or interesting. Unlike the other subplots, they feel imposed on King’s story rather than growing organically from it.

Much more successful is Flanagan’s update of King’s story for the present day. There’s an active-shooter drill at Ewen High on Carrie’s first day. Chris’s devious use of Instagram propels much of the plot. The students film Carrie’s humiliation in the changing room—and an even greater humiliation at the prom—on their phones. Carrie’s mother is not only the fiercely devout Christian of the novel but also what’s been described as a ‘theological paranoid’: suspicious of contrails and telling her daughter that her classmates ‘aren’t awake’. She dislikes having to sell condoms at the supermarket where she works, and dislikes selling ultra-processed food, too.

Expanding Margaret’s character in this way allows Flanagan’s Carrie to move beyond the high school and show how polarisation and tribalism divide society as a whole, magnified by social media. ‘Everyone in this building has someone they hate,’ says Chris. There’s open conflict among the parents, too, of a kind less familiar in the 1970s. At times, the series risks exaggerating that conflict, but the fact that it remains just about credible shows how normalised hatred has become.

The largely female cast is superb. The only distracting flaw is Rahul Kohli’s English accent as a teacher, which prompts us to wonder about the character’s backstory. Most of the main characters appear in some form in King’s novel, but none feels included out of obligation. They all come across as real people of the 2020s.

As Carrie, Howell is quite different from Sissy Spacek in De Palma’s film: less passive, miserable, strange or frightening. She wants to project happiness in a world full of anger, she tells Sue, and takes relatively innocent pleasure in exercising her telekinetic powers. One of the series’ few humorous moments shows her using them to get ready for the prom. Some of the differences between the performances may be down to the longer running time. We simply see much more of the character, giving Howell greater scope to show Carrie in relatively ordinary moments as she experiences teenage life for the first time. The longer format also makes her relationship with her mother more layered: there’s fear and frustration, but also real closeness.

The opportunities for deeper characterisation are even more obvious in Chris’s case. Thornton portrays her very convincingly. It must be a difficult role to pull off, balancing wickedness with pathos: Chris has to be genuinely unlikeable yet still capable of inspiring some empathy. She pretends to be superficial—she won’t spend time with anyone who doesn’t have enough online likes—but she’s intelligent, too; her plans for college matter to her character arc. Frustrated that she isn’t as powerful as she thinks she should be, she lacks self-control and lashes out at others because she’s emotionally wounded herself. The comparison to Carrie is obvious.

Giving Chris this depth brings a long-standing question in every version of Carrie into focus: who’s culpable, and who’s a victim? Carrie kills hundreds of people (the references at the beginning and end of the series to school shooters are clearly no coincidence), while Chris’s reprehensible behaviour is something thousands of teenagers engage in every day. So why do we tend to see Carrie as ‘good’ and Chris as ‘bad’? If Chris is responsible for her actions, why isn’t Carrie?

This version makes it clearer that both characters are destructive when angry. Carrie’s anger manifests in a way she might not consciously choose, but the same could be said of Chris. It’s unfortunate that, to address this question, Flanagan partly relies on a major change to the implications of the prom sequence, conveyed in a few easily missed lines. Even so, the series approaches the subject with the thoughtfulness it deserves.

Agudong gives a performance every bit as strong as Thornton’s. Sue is a slightly less complex character, but an interesting one: perhaps an example of how Chris might have turned out in different circumstances. After all, Sue comes up with the unpleasant nickname the students give Carrie, though Chris is the one who uses it relentlessly. Yet Sue feels guilty about the bullying, while Chris buries her guilt—and may be all the more vicious for whatever pangs she does feel.

Among the smaller roles, highlights include Joel Oulette as Carrie’s prom date, Tommy, who’s much more fully characterised than in De Palma’s film; Rowan Danielle as Brooklyn, another teenager; and Conti (recently seen in Teenage Sex and Death at Lake Miasma) as Chris’s new boyfriend, Billy. Conti’s character is more rounded and less like a convenient plot device than John Travolta’s was in the 1970s film. A scene on a bridge, where he pushes a half-reluctant, half-excited Chris towards a dangerous act, is among the series’ most affecting moments. Thalia Dudek is also memorable as Emaline, an older girl—seemingly too old for high school?—who befriends Carrie, recognises her powers, encourages her to use them and urges her to declare, ‘I exist’. She may become more prominent if there’s a second season.

Among the adults, who are more significant here than in De Palma’s film and get plenty of screen time of their own, standouts include Midthunder as the PE teacher, Ms Desjardin (returning to King’s name for the character); Tim Bagley as an older gay guidance counsellor at the high school; Matthew Lillard as the principal; Naika Toussaint as a neighbour who sneaks forbidden books to young Carrie; and Gil Bellows as the new partner of Chris’s mother, a man of few words who comes into his own in one speech.

Outshining them all—really a co-star of the series alongside Carrie herself—is the superb Sloyan (also in The Fall of the House of Usher and The Haunting of Hill House) as Margaret. She’s less monstrous than in the first film, more genuinely loving towards Carrie and not entirely unreasonable. The series also implies that her more extreme beliefs largely come from Carrie’s father. Margaret is very intelligent, holding her own in meetings with the school staff, and devious: there’s a nice subplot in which she undermines her new manager at work. Yet you might not dislike her if you met her casually. It’s a long way from Piper Laurie’s Academy Award-nominated performance in De Palma’s Carrie and may be a difficult approach for some viewers to accept, but it adds considerable depth.

The strong writing helps the actors shine. While some viewers will dislike Flanagan’s additions to the story, they almost always work. The Stand (2020), based on a novel seven times as long, still became tedious over nine episodes despite having so much more source material to draw on. Carrie never drags over eight. As Flanagan has said, ‘it’s about the surprises you can weave into how you get there’. It also helps that, although Carrie is set in yet another Maine community, it’s almost entirely free of the sentimental meandering through small-town life that pervades much of Stephen King’s work.

The final episode is the least satisfying, partly because the story is familiar and partly because the tacked-on subplot is so intrusive and perplexing. But the series as a whole isn’t hampered by our knowing roughly what’s coming; at times, it takes advantage of that knowledge, for example by moving quickly through the scene in which Chris and Billy obtain the pig’s blood. The series also makes the relationships clear—for instance, the social pecking order at the high school—without oversimplifying or resorting to stereotypes. It helps that this is the 21st-century, so people talk about these things.

Occasionally, the series is a little obvious. It contrasts an ecstatic Carrie and a miserable Chris returning home from a party, for example, and includes a scene in which Carrie and the guidance counsellor trade favourite lines from books. Carrie says, “you don’t have to understand things for them to be”, quoting Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time.

Even these moments are so nicely done that they’re forgivable. Such overt thematic reminders are more acceptable in a series than in a film, anyway.

The same goes for the visuals. There are a few knowing shots—a knife in Margaret’s hand as early as episode two, and Carrie covered in mud to foreshadow blood—as well as a few nods to De Palma, including at the prom. Generally, though, the story is allowed to speak for itself. Flanagan directed half the episodes, but there are none of the obsessive match cuts of Hill House, for example. The music choices can be blatantly on the nose, as with The Arbor Doves’ ‘I Know Anger’ or Filip Woja and Phenix Brossard’s ‘I Won’t Obey’. But the soundtrack as a whole is well deployed, emphasising particular moments without getting in the way.

Ultimately, there’s only one significant flaw in this Carrie: it sacrifices some coherence to make way for a second season. Without giving too much away, the ending seems to set up either a superhero—or supervillain—origin story, or a move towards the stories of other characters. An unexpected use of the word ‘shine’ also suggests that characters from other King works could appear. A follow-up series to the 2002 made-for-TV film was envisaged but never produced. This is deeply disappointing in an otherwise near-perfect series, though at least the added material is relatively small-scale and largely separate from the main story.

Whether it’s ‘better’ than De Palma’s film is a rather pointless question, given how different the two are. It’s safer to say that this is probably the best King television adaptation to date: gripping, seamless in its shifts between naturalism and the supernatural, and thoroughly believable in its characterisation. It can even be surprisingly sweet at times, as in an inappropriate waltz at the prom.

Perhaps that’s the key to this Carrie’s success: most—nearly all—of its characters are fundamentally good. At different times, we can feel invested in each of them. What we’re watching becomes not just the story of one girl’s humiliation and revenge, but the tragedy of an entire community—and, by implication, a whole culture. As Sue says of Carrie: “She was just kind. Why was that so alien? What the fuck is wrong with us?”

USA | 2026 | 8 EPISODES | 1.78:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

writers: Mike Flanagan, Jamie Flanagan, Elan Gale, Justina Ireland, Rebecca Klingel, Alexandra Magistro, Elizabeth Padden & Dani Parker (based on the novel by Stephen King).
directors: Mike Flanagan, Axelle Carolyn, Hiromi Kamata, Kyra Sedgwick & Kate Siegel.
starring: Summer H. Howell, Samantha Sloyan, Siena Agudong, Alison Thornton & Joel Oulette.

The post CARRIE – Season One (2026) appeared first on Frame Rated.

For Saw II (2005), director Darren Lynn Bousman suggested capturing the Jigsaw killer. For the next film, they should kill him. Spoiler. The question is whether Saw III delivers a “hardcore tragedy” on a par with Titus that still resonates two decades later, after eight more sequels. Yes, there would be more blood. Yes, Tobin Bell would return for all but one of them. And yes, Bousman compared Saw III to Shakespeare, the film opening with “I’ll fucking kill you, you fucking bitch”.

An original script by Bousman, Saw II made for a great sequel. Bousman stayed on, as did writer and actor Leigh Whannell, for two reasons. Producer Greg Hoffman had unexpectedly died between the films, so Saw III was dedicated to him and a character named after him. Whannell also credited Peter Jackson with making trilogies “respectable these days” and decided to try his hand at one.

He was right: Saw III is regarded by its enduring fanbase as an incredible, if premature, swansong. One that mines the emotional depths of two otherwise deplorable murderers. Before the unforgettable finale, the film also generously develops the “gratuitous sequel territory” that both Whannell and James Wan had hoped to leave behind.

Saw III builds on the melodramatic serialisation by starting exactly where the previous film ended. Detective Matthews, the lead in Saw II, is still alive and still played by Donnie Wahlberg. That was a shock at the time, when rumours circulated that Wahlberg was desperate for a new gig to avoid the sequel, bolstered by his own press release denying his return. Lionsgate knew Saw was a big deal and orchestrated the whole thing to set up twists from the very start.

Matthews continues the unexpected by immediately solving the bathroom trap. Who needs a saw when the cistern lid can crush an ankle through the chains? None of this pays off: Matthews reappears only briefly and has no real bearing on the plot.

His absence continues the ever-expanding police procedural involving Kerry (Dina Meyer), Rigg (Lyriq Bent) and Hoffman (Costas Mandylor). None of these characters matter to Saw III, either. The first real “game” arrives quickly: a random man (J. Larose) with no good reason to be blown apart. But wait—the clues lead Kerry to realise it was impossible to escape. It still isn’t the first “real” game.

It’s odd to reach an age—or a maturity?—when you find yourself waiting for the horror scenes to end. It’s like watching pornography for the plot. Saw is still exciting, and there are tremendous sequences later on, so the problem isn’t too much blood. Rather, the pacing is arbitrary. As with the Friday the 13th (1980) sequels, the producers seem to assume—and inadvertently judge—their target audience to be impatient gorehounds. Quantity over quality means the violence is rushed, with diminishing morbid curiosity. Audiences aren’t given time to wonder how they’d cope, and neither is the victim. Watching a man tear metal from flesh when there’s no clever alternative is boring.

Kerry’s death has long sat wrong with fans, and not because she was cheated. It simply makes no sense that she was tested in the first place. She’s a dedicated cop, smart, and naturally emotional about Matthews’s kidnapping. She still spots vital evidence at a crime scene through her tears. We wouldn’t learn until Saw IV (2007) that the goody-two-shoes was informing the FBI while ignoring corruption in her own precinct. But no: armchair psychologist John “Jigsaw” Kramer (Bell) blathers about her wanting to join the dead, despite there being zero indication of suicidal ideation. They could have suggested she was close to catching them as to why Amanda (Shawnee Smith) rigged her trap—but no. She died because ACAB. Even then, “the acid will dissolve the key in a matter of seconds”, and said key has been sitting there while Jigsaw yaps on his tape.

It takes 17 minutes to introduce one of the two main subjects, nearly 30 for the other to wake up, and more than 40 for him to start the “main” game. I miss the days when Saw (2004) opened in the bathroom.

Dr Lynn Denlon (Bahar Soomekh) takes pills, then performs a risky but correct emergency operation on a child. Whether she was right to make the call while impaired is an example of debatable ethics. Between malpractice, infidelity and problems with her own child, this seems like Whannell’s mulligan for how unfairly Gordon (Cary Elwes) was treated in Saw.

“Lionsgate, who distributed Crash, they wanted me to get involved with one of their next films. I was one of those dorks that couldn’t even look at the poster without having a heart attack. they sent me the script and I was hysterically crying, 2 o’clock in the morning.”—Bahar Soomekh, actor (Lynn Denlon) in Saw III.

Saw III came out 20 years ago; 9/11 was 25 years ago. Bahar Soomekh is Iranian-American and put her acting career on hold from 2014 until this year because, “I can’t tell you how many terrorist parts I got. The wife of a terrorist, the suicide bomber.” If Jigsaw wipes out half the police department, he’s hardly apolitical. Forcing a Middle Eastern woman to wear explosives in a suicide pact makes for scorching-hot-button optics. One has to wonder whether Bousman and Whannell intended to tackle such weighty issues, and whether critics and audiences were too distracted by the rending of body parts to notice.

Either that, or John Kramer is an unbelievably selfish egotist. Saw VI (2009) is often celebrated for punishing insurance policymakers. You could argue that there’s no room for subtlety in Saw, or that its contradictory messages dilute the righteous retribution. He saves an innocent child from unrepentant evildoers in Saw X (2023), despite the first three films all showing him kidnapping children.

Critic Marcus Gorman skewers the hypocrisy of Jigsaw making an “all lives matter” move by tying his life to Lynn’s when his ‘equality’ means “Lynn only gets to live if Jigsaw lives. That’s absolutely Jigsaw’s ‘privilege’ speaking”.

That privilege is a quote from the ever-rocky “sins” Jigsaw judges people for. With its matryoshka-doll narrative, the film invites audiences to scrutinise first impressions. Lynn ignores talk of divorce while taking antidepressants before work. Saw III examines her response to losing a child in a hit-and-run and, metaphorically, losing a husband to alcoholic rage. Her privilege is then revealed to be neglecting her living child while grieving the dead one. Jigsaw has no sympathy for people who can’t move on.

Saw aggressively crushes all nuance into the question of whether these poor people deserve to live. Lynn is admonished for sleepwalking through cutting into a child—a literal life-or-death decision. In Saw II, John removes the pig’s head to open communication with a cop who doesn’t see criminals as people. Saw III quite literally opens his mind to remind a doctor that her patients have a stronger will to live than she does.

Another strong candidate for a Jigsaw trial is Jeff (Angus Macfadyen), the grieving father who puts a gun in his mouth in his dead child’s bedroom. Ignore how Jigsaw would know that. Jeff’s ordeal mirrors his wife’s—their marriage is one of several twists—and he must forgive those involved in his child’s death by saving them from their traps. The word “child” gets used a lot, but their son’s name is uttered exactly once: Dylan.

A line from John becomes the tagline: ‘Suffering, You Haven’t Seen Anything Yet.’ This is where I tune out. There isn’t much of a trick to these games: get the key or don’t. It’s clear why Jeff might not, with each victim having turned a blind eye to the tragic hit-and-run. Can the gun-coddling Jeff stomach the chance to get revenge?

In the last two films, inaction was tantamount to suicide. Saw III turns the franchise into a game in which a lead subject navigates stages of physical torment to save lives. Is it hypocritical to quote Jigsaw—”live or die, make your choice”—when he takes the choices out of his victims’ hands? John could argue that this is no different from the choices they made about the life of a little boy.

Still, I sit patiently while editor Kevin Greutert can inject only so much implied action through frenetic montages of Jeff looking away and grimacing. Only once is Jeff offered a meaningful sacrifice: burning his son’s belongings. It’s clear the filmmakers added a scene of him bullying his other child over them; otherwise, the moment is downright cruel. John does pose Billy the Puppet and his tricycle to evoke the hit-and-run, so we know he’s an asshole. With the first victim, Jeff waits until she’s frozen solid before damaging his face as he reaches for the key. Immediate penance? He still hesitates with the next two. This monotony inspired the much-contested fandom nickname “slow ass motherfuckin’ Jeff”.

Bousman and Whannell can’t spend too much time on the games because the clear focus is John Kramer on his deathbed. As if that weren’t enough of a character study, Saw III is also The Amanda Show. Shawnee Smith gives a career-best performance, ludicrous flashback wigs notwithstanding. An actor who’s four months pregnant and being thrown into a needle pit is going to commit when given centre stage.

“There was talk when we were doing press for 2. Leigh Whannell and I sat down and threw around different concepts, a few that included me and a couple that didn’t. We had like 3 weeks to write part 3. It was clear that a lot was going to hinge on buying the relationship between Jigsaw and Amanda in a substantial way, not just the cliché of master/apprentice.”—Shawnee Smith, actress (Amanda Young) in Saw III.

Amanda spits “stupid cunt” at Lynn while John side-eyes her for the umpteenth time. The question of who’s in control of the game is constantly tested. At other times, Amanda dutifully holds a cup of water steady while her mentor drinks through a straw. He isn’t demanding menial labour; she understands her role as a servant in the religious sense. Smith herself recognised Amanda’s “strength to serve and sacrifice for another human being. Now that’s rare and it takes strength, courage, practice, diligence, and a fearlessness to build that”.

Bell and Smith spent weeks together so their relationship would feel genuine. They elevate the material, holding entire conversations through eye contact. Their connection is “a love story and a tragedy”, as Shawnee puts it: a yearning not just for life or death, but for the alternate lives that might have been. One of the alternative taglines is ‘Like Father, Like Daughter’, and the actors approach that idea with complete sincerity.

The flashbacks never feel quite as pointless as they do in later entries, where they fill in the gaps. John setting up Amanda’s test may bloat the film’s nearly two-hour runtime, but John preparing for the bathroom test reveals nuances in Smith’s performance. She plays a person devoted to the idea of Jigsaw but struggling with the burden of letting the test play out, especially when it means allowing John to put himself in danger.

As with all Jigsaw games, things fall apart because the participants can’t work together under pressure. Amanda makes her feelings clear but leaves the problems muddled: is Lynn trying to escape by avoiding the operation, or is Amanda? When John starts seizing and Lynn rushes in while Amanda regresses into a wide-eyed child, the helplessness of watching a loved one suffer evokes the same sympathy that Saw X so effectively did. Amanda values lives unequally and cares only for John, yet cries when Jeff fails to save someone. John promises, “you’re stronger now,” but is she?

In one of the toughest scenes to watch, Amanda carves into her inner thigh as a momentary distraction. A franchise built on self-harm shouldn’t feel so real. Audiences weren’t alone in finding it hard to watch: “people had to leave the set that never left a set in all the traps.” Smith “had an intuition that she’s a cutter”, and Bousman fought for her scene, which wasn’t “connected to the plot in any way”, even though it revealed an uneasy vulnerability beneath the judgemental games. Amanda’s bloodletting as penance is overwhelming in its meaning. It speaks to her insecurity about living up to expectations—Matthews yelling “you’re not Jigsaw!” is a wonderfully random insult—and to her mercy-killing subjects to spare them the agonising failures of a second chance at life.

This leads down an ethical rabbit hole that could leave attentive audiences cross-eyed. Bousman corrects people who say that “Jigsaw didn’t do that”, while Jeff’s games also involved people with no way to free themselves. But that’s the whole elaborate point: they have to spare others to save themselves. Except if John set up this game for someone who rigs games, hasn’t he stacked the deck against everyone in danger, himself included? Hindsight also complicates matters: he would have been too frail to undo Amanda’s meddling, but he had another apprentice, Hoffman, who could have intervened. We’ll learn that he made this whole situation worse because of John’s god-awful employment record. That’s a different sequel—and a different headache.

All of which is to say, Jeff and Lynn had no chance of reconciling their marriage because John struggled to control his own “child”. If he truly does “despise murderers”, he seems to “condone murder” by letting Amanda off the hook if she passes the test.

This is the first Saw film to give Bell top billing, and he deserves it for carrying the franchise on his back. Even when he spends this entire runtime lying on it—as he laid on his front for the whole first film. Bousman believes that John “begins to question because he’s near the very end”, which leads to a tearful confession. Bell, whose authority over the character had grown, vetoed the scene. It was an incisive choice, preserving the pleasure of critical engagement for the audience.

“We got inklings of stuff, and you’re still getting inklings. You’re not ever going to get the whole thing right there, because (1) I don’t think they know, and (2) it’s not fun that way. What’s fun is what captures the imagination of Saw fans. They want to know more, it’s nice for them that it keeps moving along.”—Tobin Bell, actor (John Kramer) in Saw III.

He’s evil, conniving and entirely untrustworthy. So how is his brain surgery one of the most suspenseful scenes in the franchise? He couldn’t possibly die halfway through the film and take one of the protagonists with him! David A. Armstrong’s cinematography leaves no room to look away: the scalp is pulled back to expose the skull, and the membrane over the brain is peeled away. Closing your eyes won’t shield you from the drilling into bone, the whining saws or the knife-like punctuation of the heart-rate monitor.

The MPAA required no cuts because of the medical nature of the scene, but it would have been another fight for Bousman, since “the operation meant everything”. As with the previous two games, the potential price of failure could be John’s life. He strongly suggests that his death is inevitable, even if Amanda refuses to accept it. John demonstrates that “he was willing to put himself through an excruciating amount of torture to still teach Amanda a lesson”.

It’s a slippery slope towards advocating his philosophy, but what he fails to reconcile reveals the two-sided nature of Jigsaw. Seen in retrospect, this film laid the groundwork for the domestic drama of Saw VI. Some of its distasteful themes begin here. In the film that introduces Jill Tuck (Betsy Russell), John chastises a bereaved mother for being someone who “turns their back on their husband”. Is he taking out his resentment towards his wife, who miscarried, on another woman?

John wants Lynn to live, but he also ties his life and her husband’s choices to hers, just as he would with his own wife. Saw III leaves this ambiguous, but Occam’s razor suggests that he lost his wife—not that she divorced him, kept his serial killing secret, begged him to stop, and was still ignored while he passed up the chance of a normal life to build death traps.

He also delivers one final fuck-you by dying with the location of the daughter he kidnapped. Gorman describes the move as “the need to be crystal clear that Saw IV was on the horizon”. But, given only the context of this ending, with everyone dead, nobody is left to save the little girl trapped in a dark prison cell. That’s pretty brutal, Jigsaw!

Thanks to the evergreen excuse that it’s fiction, Jigsaw is always right about his clairvoyant coincidences. But wait: can John really be right if he bets on every outcome? The man argues, “If you fail, we all fail”, when everyone is there because of the game he orchestrated. He pleads with his accomplice not to murder someone and refuses to offer an easy answer based on self-preservation. The test must be about giving people the chance to live. But he takes no responsibility for failing to recognise the obvious outcome, even as he smirks when Jeff picks up a circular saw, knowing that his own imminent death will cause Lynn’s. Petty revenge for Jeff shooting Amanda.

Saw III can feel petty, bleak and vindictive. But that’s Saw. Moments later, in the film’s chronology, Jeff is unceremoniously shot. He’s never mentioned again, despite holding the record for killing two Jigsaws. Shakespeare tended to kill off the casts of his tragedies. He didn’t usually write sequels. Greutert admitted in 2023 that “it would just be a lot easier to make these films if that hadn’t happened”.

With Saw XI recently announced, not one sequel in two decades has topped this film’s box office gross of $164.9M. That was enough for Lionsgate to give the franchise an almost perpetual blank cheque, even if the critical reception was poor. Saw X surprised everyone with an 81% score on Rotten Tomatoes, but that film capitalised on the relationship established here. Saw III sits in seventh place, with 28%.

One interview at the time concluded, “the actress is now happy to promote what is likely to be her final Saw“. Both actors would appear in almost every sequel. This was Whannell’s last direct contribution, as he and James Wan were “determined not to be the Saw guys” and went on to make Dead Silence (2007) and Insidious (2010). Whannell later relented: “I would be fine with that being my epitaph, the Saw guy”. And no discussion of Saw III is complete without his incredible tweet from 2017:

“To be honest, I think they should have ended it at 3. I’ll admit it, I haven’t even seen Saw 5 or 6. People ask me questions about “Detective Hoffman” and I don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.”

CANADA • USA | 2006 | 108 MINUTES • 114 MINUTES (UNRATED CUT) • 121 MINUTES (DIRECTOR’S CUT) | 1.85 : 1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Darren Lynn Bousman.
writer: Leigh Whannell (story by Leigh Whannell & James Wan).
starring: Tobin Bell, Shawnee Smith, Bahar Soomekh, Angus Macfadyen, Donnie Wahlberg, Dina Meyer, Lyriq Bent, Costas Mandylor, Mpho Koaho, Barry Flatman, Debra Lynne McCabe, J. Larose, Betsy Russell, Stefan Georgiou, Niamh Wilson & Leigh Whannell.

The post SAW III (2006) appeared first on Frame Rated.

Button House is a haunted estate set on acres of land steeped in history. It’s home to a coterie of ghosts whose deaths have intersected with the estate in various ways. Bound by the grounds’ perimeter, these spirits include Kitty Higham (Lolly Adefope), a childlike aristocrat; Thomas Thorne (Mathew Baynton), a tortured Romantic poet; Julian Fawcett (Simon Farnaby), a corrupt MP who died with his trousers down, so to speak; Lady Fanny Button (Martha Howe-Douglas), a wronged gentlewoman—yes, yes, ‘Fanny Button’, like a clitoris; grow up—Pat Butcher (Jim Howick), an unfortunate Scout leader who died on the archery range; Robin (Laurence Rickard), a caveman from before modern housing was even a thing; and the Captain (Ben Willbond), whose rugged masculinity, he likes to think, conceals the love that dared not speak its name.

This cast of characters collides with another, more mortal group: a bunch of teenagers with an interest in the occult. (Keeps them off their phones and off the dope, I guess.) Jack Marsh (Scott Ellis Watson) is a foster child who feels adrift after a séance with his friends at Button House leaves him possessed. The two groups must work out how to put things right while also keeping developers off the ghosts’ land. MP Richard Move (Rufus Jones)—Dick Move, geddit?—plans to infiltrate a protest group and claim Button House for his own nefarious ends…

Ghosts: The Possession of Button House is a sunny, warm-hearted, old-fashioned Halloween comedy—in the best sense of the word. It isn’t retrograde or pandering, and feels like a modern film for 2026. It is, however, committed to traditional plotting and classic British character humour. The film draws on a tradition of genre storytelling built around the interplay of character types, class and gender assumptions, gentle political satire, and sentiment tempered by a healthy dose of wit. In other words, it has all the best ingredients, cooked well.

Given the story and characters outlined above, you’d be forgiven for thinking this sounds like a nightmarish jumble of too many characters and plot strands. I haven’t even mentioned Alison (Charlotte Ritchie) and Mike Cooper (Kiell Smith-Bynoe), new parents who once lived at Button House and are now enlisted to save the ghosts’ home. Apart from the children, I think, all of this is lifted straight from Ghosts, the BBC TV sitcom on which the film is based. At times, it isn’t especially kind to newcomers. They might wonder, for instance, who the alternative versions of the ghosts in Button House’s cellar are.

The project’s cheer and confidence not only keep it afloat but somehow redeem elements that would feel smug and boring in many other films. It calls to mind Ealing comedies such as Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and The Ladykillers (1955). The tangle of cast and characters never feels burdensome; it stays as light as a balloon drifting just ahead of you.

Other films it brought to mind include the family comedies Casper (1995), Brad Silberling’s film based on the TV and comic-book character, and Dark Shadows (2012), Tim Burton’s adaptation of a 1970s Gothic soap opera. Dark Shadows went largely unloved in 2012, but might fare better today if viewed as a comedy with Gothic themes, rather than a straight horror film. The same goes for Casper and Ghosts.

Ghosts may have an advantage over Dark Shadows: it’s based on a television series that ended only recently, in 2023, and brings together the same creative team. It was directed by Simon Hynd, with a screenplay by all the main cast members of Ghosts except Adefope. The other six are part of the theatre collective Them There, which first created these ghostly characters.

Their theatrical roots probably help the writers keep the pace brisk, without lingering too long or getting bogged down in tortuous plot contortions. Each plot point—and there are many—is delivered with a joke or a revealing character detail, so the story always feels alive rather than as though it’s simply explaining itself. I even felt a little moved by the sentiment towards the end. The emotion is predictable, but it’s delivered with such energy, wit and authenticity that it still brought a touch of water to my eyes.

Part of what makes it all work, I think—and brings us back to its traditional approach—is how well it understands British caricatures and how to play with them. Take the old soldier, reimagined as a gay man. The film pokes fun at military stereotypes while enjoying queer humour that alienates neither gay nor straight viewers.

Similarly, Julian looks as if he’s stepped straight out of Punch or Private Eye, with his garters and centre parting. He gently pokes fun at the Tories without attacking either conservatives or liberals. This isn’t toothless satire, though. It’s light comedy that knows itself well enough to make fun while bringing people together, if they’re so inclined.

I’m the sort of person who sings the praises of aggressive, nihilistic satires such as Digger (2026). But you can love both kinds of comedy; light-hearted work is just as valuable. Thinking about Ghosts: The Possession of Button House and its excellent use of traditional structures and tropes, I was reminded of a quotation from P.G Wodehouse’s preface to Summer Lightning:

“A certain critic … made the nasty remark that [my novel] contained ‘all the old Wodehouse characters under different names’. He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha … With my superior intelligence, I have outgeneralled the man … by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.”

UK | 2026 | 97 MINUTES | 2.00:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Simon Hynd.
writers: Mathew Baynton, Simon Farnaby, Martha Howe-Douglas, Jim Howick, Laurence Rickard & Ben Willibond (based on characters created by ‘Them There’).
starring: Charlotte Ritchie, Kiell Smith-Bynoe, Lolly Adefope, Mathew Baynton, Simon Farnaby, Martha Howe-Douglas, Jim Howick, Laurence Rickard & Ben Willibond.

The post GHOSTS: THE POSSESSION OF BUTTON HOUSE (2026) appeared first on Frame Rated.

Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) depicted a near future in which a lonely man falls in love with an AI chatbot. Even then, the premise felt far-fetched. What are love and connection without a soul, without genuine emotion? The film has since been oddly vindicated by the intensity with which some people have pursued ‘relationships’ with AI search engines such as ChatGPT.

The science-fiction subgenre about relationships between robots and humans is hardly new. We can go back as far as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to find it on the big screen. But now, as artists grapple with how quickly AI has become part of our lives, the topic has surged in popularity. Filmmakers are exploring AI’s place in society, the dangers of losing our humanity and even the expanding definition of what it means to be human. The result is a near-saturation of the subject, making it increasingly difficult for each new film to stand out.

In Taika Waititi’s latest film, Klara and the Sun, based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel of the same name (Never Let Me Go), we encounter plenty of interesting questions about where the world is heading. But the film arrives at a time when there’s so much noise around these issues that it’s hard to embrace its radiant optimism.

Klara (Jenna Ortega) is an Artificial Friend (AF), but she’s a little odd, even for a robot. She spends her mornings talking to the sun through the shop’s shutters and sometimes stands on one leg like a flamingo. We don’t know how long she’s been waiting for a buyer, but the newest AF models across the street attract plenty of attention while her shop goes day after day without a prospective customer. Then Josie (Mia Tharia), a teenage girl, spots Klara in the window and approaches her. They mime to each other before Josie’s mother, Chrissie (Amy Adams), pulls her away. Luckily, Josie returns the next day to buy Klara and take her home.

Josie and her mum live on a huge plot of land, in a mansion set on a small patch of grass surrounded by wheat fields. Chrissie and their housekeeper, Melania (Rachel House), are deeply distrustful of Klara. But Josie and Klara hit it off immediately. They spend their days messing about, walking through the fields and teaching each other what they’ve learnt. Josie herself is a little unusual. She’s undergone a procedure called ‘lifting’, which maximises her brain activity and makes her something of a superhuman. The procedure hasn’t been without complications: she often faints and suffers intense nightmares. This gives Klara a greater purpose than simply being Josie’s friend: she must keep her alive.

Klara and the Sun feels destined to divide audiences. It’s hard to buy into because the film is told from Klara’s point of view. Rather than simply observing the story, we’re meant to experience it as she does. From the disorienting shots of Klara calibrating to unfamiliar spaces to Michael Giacchino’s playful score, which reflects her inner feelings as she takes in the world around her, the approach is a surprising one. To Waititi’s credit, I like the gamble. If nothing else, it helps us connect with Klara and gives Jenna Ortega room to shine.

Ortega draws on her experience playing the intense, unblinking Wednesday Addams to shape her robotic character. Her performance is reminiscent of Emma Stone’s in the first act of Poor Things (2023): an innocent observer learning what it means to be human. Klara is a guileless creation, looking for the best in the world, and Ortega, a candid cinephile, is fantastic. It’s great to see her in a more demanding role, carrying a film with such poise and holding her own alongside Amy Adams.

Experiencing the film through Klara’s eyes is also where Waititi’s approach falters. Her optimism and naivety are constantly at odds with the serious themes the film touches on. Class is central to many of them. Josie comes from a wealthy family. Chrissie seems to be an interior designer with enough money to maintain the only patch of grass within a two-mile radius, employ a full-time housekeeper, pay for her daughter’s lifting procedure and buy a first-generation AF. Wealth and status are at the heart of the story. The film introduces new threads connected to these themes but never fully explores them.

Josie’s boyfriend, Rick (Aran Murphy), is an ‘unlifted’ boy who’s destined to fall behind her because he hasn’t had the procedure. He’s presented as a nice kid, a complete foil to the ‘a-word holes’ among the other lifted children. Questions of class matter just as much to the human experience as love and connection, themes the film explores through Klara’s relationships with the other characters and the world. But without grappling with class, Klara and the Sun never feels complete.

At one point, Waititi gives in to one of his worst habits: undercutting an emotional moment with a weak joke. It’s a tendency that drew criticism from audiences and critics of Thor: Love and Thunder (2022). Rick tries to talk to Klara about the differences in class and experience between him and Josie, but Klara cuts him off with a joke, and the subject is never raised again. That moment is especially frustrating because the film offers glimpses of the old Taika Waititi. What makes earlier films such as Boy (2010),The Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) and even Jojo Rabbit (2019) so memorable is their juxtaposition of humour and darkness. Waititi knew when to let characters be human and confront their problems without resorting to cheap one-liners. He seems to have lost that instinct along the way.

Klara and the Sun is a dark story, and to his credit, Waititi doesn’t shy away from the darker moments in Ishiguro’s novel. The final act explores them more fully, considering how to respond to grief and the grief that precedes a loss, while making the film’s position clearer: it’s more anti-AI and pro-human connection. But these moments of thematic clarity only make the scenes where comedy takes the lead stand out more. The film ends up feeling overstuffed.

Klara and the Sun is crammed with ideas. In its 116-minute runtime, it tries to address artificial intelligence, class, grief, what it means to be human and hope for the future. It does so with an optimism that feels unearned because it never takes a firm position on all these themes. Waititi is most interested in family dynamics and human connection, but that comes at the expense of some of the film’s more intriguing questions.

That’s a shame, because the film is a worthy attempt to tackle important subjects, anchored by a great central performance. I just hoped to feel more emotionally connected by the end. Instead, I left underwhelmed and more wary of a future shaped by wealth inequality and dependence on machines. I wish I could share Klara’s wonder at the sun, but the real world carries much more baggage when viewed without the perspective of an artificial intelligence.

USA • UK • NEW ZEALAND | 2026 | 116 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Taika Waititi.
writer: Taika Waititi & Dahvi Waller (based on the 2021 novel by Kazuo Ishiguro).
starring: Jenna Ortega, Amy Adams, Mia Tharia, Aran Murphy, Natasha Lyonne, Steve Buscemi & Rachel House.

The post KLARA AND THE SUN (2026) appeared first on Frame Rated.

Cristian Mungiu (Graduation) brings audiences a thorny, controversial drama with Fjord. The filmmaker holds a mirror up to society, deliberately making viewers uncomfortable. The film caused a stir when it won the Palme d’Or at the 79th Cannes Film Festival. It isn’t as divisive as it seems to want to be, and its message gets lost in a long, languid runtime, but it’s certainly a conversation starter.

Nurse Lisbet (Renate Reinsve) and IT technician Mihai Gheorghiu (Sebastian Stan) have recently moved from Romania to a small, remote Norwegian town. Lisbet is from the region and speaks the language fluently, while Mihai can manage only brief conversations and prefers to speak English. These details matter later in the couple’s story.

The Gheorghius have five children, ranging from a baby to two tearaway teenagers. Their religious upbringing borders on the fanatical, setting them apart from their peers. They don’t listen to modern music, have smartphones or share their classmates’ liberal values. Instead, the family gathers with their church for Bible study and sings hymns around the piano. The parents are strict, believing their children shouldn’t be given the same freedom as their classmates.

The film doesn’t present these religious practices as disruptive; they’re simply part of the family’s daily life. But their new neighbours can’t help looking askance at how the Gheorghius are raising their children. It’s a small community where everyone knows everyone, and the family’s way of life doesn’t quite fit in. This becomes clear when Mihai plays “Amazing Grace” on the piano and one of the teachers, Frida (Lisa Loven Kongsli), reacts as if he’s done something deeply offensive.

One day at school, someone notices bruises on the eldest daughter, Elia (Vanessa Ceban). The film never makes clear how she got them. Were they the result of tough love from her parents, or of her adventures with rebellious teenage neighbour Noora Halberg (Henrikke Lund-Olsen)? The teacher’s report to the authorities sets off a chain reaction among the neighbours and across the town.

Fjord takes its time establishing the characters, the community and the Gheorghius’ way of life. At 146 minutes, be warned: this is a long, slow ride. The film benefits from its extended build-up and exposition-heavy first act, thanks to authentic performances from Stan and Reinsve. Some may argue that it takes too long to reach its inciting incident, but the build-up at least rewards viewers later on.

Suddenly, the family’s way of life comes under scrutiny from the authorities, their neighbours and the court of public opinion. Mihai admits that he sometimes slaps his children as punishment, but says he doesn’t hit them hard enough to cause harm. He considers this normal practice in his native Romania, but in Norway it’s a crime. The film doesn’t distinguish between a slap on the wrist and an actual beating.

At the midway point, Fjord becomes a political and courtroom drama reminiscent of Anatomy of a Fall (2023). The couple must fight the system to get their five children back. The film doesn’t ask viewers to choose a side or judge the couple’s morality. Instead, it asks them to examine the morality of the court system. Audience response will likely be shaped by their own upbringing and experiences. Mungiu’s neutral approach may frustrate some: the film aims to encourage debate, but its stance could be mistaken for right-wing propaganda.

Fjord doesn’t ask whether slapping badly behaved children is wrong. It asks whether outsiders and people with strong religious beliefs are penalised in the modern world. The film assumes that viewers won’t share the family’s Christian beliefs or conservative approach to parenting. Ultimately, though, it asks whether we can still defend—or even consider—the beliefs of someone whose views are diametrically opposed to our own.

Mungiu understands that we live in a world where grey areas seem to have disappeared. People see things in black and white, while politics and religion are polarised on every side. The film comes into its own when it becomes a story about the courts facing off against an angry online mob. It’s a shame it takes so long to get there.

The film would be much drier in the hands of less capable performers. Reinsve brings nuance to Lisbet, a religious nurse who works in end-of-life care and believes her faith comforts people rather than imposing anything uncomfortable on them. Stan disappears into the stoic Mihai. Returning to his Romanian roots, he looks almost unrecognisable with his shaved head and glasses. His rage simmers beneath the surface before he takes his plight online, encouraging Christian hardliners to join the argument. Both actors bring authenticity to the film and keep the script from veering into melodrama.

Fjord is more interesting when revealing problems in its subject matter and stirring viewers’ emotions than when it dwells on the issues themselves. Its length and heavy exposition mean some of its message gets lost in the dense runtime. There are also subplots that add colour to the Gheorghius’ lives and their neighbourhood, but ultimately weigh down the narrative.

The film may seem like a difficult watch, with its dense monologues, tough themes and big questions. But it’s the kind of movie that will spark conversation on the drive home, encourage people to reflect on their own childhoods and parenting, and make them consider the merits of cultural differences. These ideas might have had more impact if Mungiu had tightened and refocused his script.

ROMANIA • FRANCE • NORWAY • DENMARK • FINLAND • SWEDEN | 2026 | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • ROMANIAN • NORWEGIAN • SWEDISH

Cast & Crew

writer & director: Cristian Mungiu.
starring: Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, Lisa Carlehed, Henrikke Lund-Olsen, Vanessa Ceban, Jonathan Ciprian Breauz, Ellen Dorrit Petersen & Lisa Loven Kongsli.

The post FJORD (2026) appeared first on Frame Rated.

Hunky actor Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) has crawled out of Gotham’s most deprived district to become a film star alongside his best friend, Cory Bowers (Joshua James). But a night on the town ends in tragedy when Hagen lets himself be seduced by a gangster’s moll, Mia Torrez (Joana Ribeiro). The next morning, her lover, Markos Szabo (David Dencik), and his goons disfigure him. Hagen’s fall from fame and fortune is precipitous. Then he meets Dr Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), a brilliant scientist with a serum that restores cellular structures, as if remoulding wet clay…

I found Clayface underwhelming. After a point, I struggled to care about Hagen’s plight—specifically, when he kills an old friend whose crime seems to be telling the gangsters threatening them and their family where to find their former classmates. The gangsters could easily have got that information anyway, given that their target was a celebrity. This is the same friend who had tried to warn Hagen against his folly in the first place.

The story might work if Hagen, or Clayface, were an antihero. The film hints at that possibility, but it isn’t really that kind of story: Hagen is ultimately meant to be tragic and relatable. The characterisation isn’t strong enough to support this, however, and the film is short on plot and ideas. Its visuals work, and with a visionary such as David Cronenberg at the helm, the film could have taken off. As it is, it’s mildly engaging.

The gore is the film’s strongest feature. A nightclub scene near the end threatens to be great but never quite achieves lift-off. In the hands of a visionary—or with a team freed from the comic-book studio’s presumably constant, suffocating directives—the body-horror sequences could have been part of a genuinely troubling, thought-provoking narrative, with genuinely grey morals and more emotional and intellectual depth than a fanboy’s perspective.

Director James Watkins and his writers, Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, are capable of making great horror entertainment. The fact that this film got made at all is a testament to them. Comic-book studios rarely let 18-rated horror films with even a little spark get past the starting gate before the men in suits chase them down and beat them into mediocrity. Still, there was never much doubt about who’d win that fight. The film hints at a more interesting story in places, such as when Hagen morphs into a woman and briefly appears in cross-dress.

A character like Clayface could offer a way to explore the elusive boundaries of personal and gender identity. As Cronenberg’s films once did, it could show how technology intersects with human development to create new bodies, behaviours and ways of being. But can you imagine a big-budget comic-book film—with an established character and a ravenous mainstream fanbase—being able, or even wanting, to deal with such themes in anything more than a superficial way?

The acting is good. Watkins’s British perspective is reflected in the number of character actors from UK television and film who appear in a big US production like this. Most notably, Rob Brydon—the Welsh actor and comedian who hosts the panel show Would I Lie to You? and co-starred in Gavin and Stacey (2007-2024)—plays a supercilious talk-show host. In one scene, Hagen uses his persona to address an aspect of himself. Eddie Marsan, a veteran of British crime films such as The Gentlemen (2019) and Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (2023), plays a smarmy lawyer.

Harries is Welsh, but his accent and hunky good looks make him convincingly New York—or Gotham—as if he’s just stepped out of an underwear-modelling contract that helped plaster his face across Times Square. British actor Joshua James also does a good job, though he looks more like a Brit abroad. In fact, he looks as if he’s escaped from The Inbetweeners (2008-2010). Looking at the cast list, I see that most of the actors are British, from Naomi Ackie to Max Minghella, who plays her police-officer boyfriend. Swedish-Danish actor David Dencik adds some European colour as the main antagonist.

The gangster antagonists are fairly standard, though they’re styled distinctly enough to tell apart. In the final confrontation, they seem like a kind of found family, caring for one another a little more than mere goons and co-conspirators would. But there isn’t much to it. I suppose the story, as told here, might work better as a comic book, where the focus can be on the art style and the artist’s voice can come through in images made with paint and ink. A film, I think, needs more insight into its characters, stronger dialogue and a clearer sense of who they are.

Alternatively, it could aim for camp, using extreme stylisation to capture the tone of its source material, as some comic-book films do Clayface falls somewhere between these approaches, aiming for seriousness but occasionally letting a little camp peek through. I wish it had leaned into that more. It could still have been an 18-rated horror film with some humour in the mix. Still, mustn’t grumble. The gore is good and inventive, and although the story felt flat to me, I liked the ending: tragic and a little mind-bending.

UK • USA | 2026 | 108 MINUTES | 2.76:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: James Watkins.
writers: Mike Flanagan & Hossein Amini (story by Mike Flanagan; based on characters from ‘DC’).
starring: Tom Rhys Harries, Naomi Ackie, David Dencik, Max Minghella & Eddie Marsan.

The post CLAYFACE (2026) appeared first on Frame Rated.

The fantastical elements of Wildwood, the latest stop-motion film from acclaimed studio Laika, may sound familiar to fantasy fans. Echoes of The Lord of the Rings (2001-03), The Chronicles of Narnia (2005-2010), Princess Mononoke (1997), and Labyrinth (1986) ring loudly through this adventure. Yet rather than fading into the shadows of the works that came before it, Wildwood rises to the moment and makes a case for itself as a new fantasy classic.

When her parents leave her in charge of her little brother, Mac, Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) takes him to a park in Portland, Oregon, where she runs into her nerdy classmate, Curtis (Jacob Tremblay). But tragedy strikes when a murder of crows kidnaps Mac and flies with him to the mysterious, magical forest outside the city. As Prue and Curtis try to save him, they’re drawn into a wondrous world of talking animals, warring factions and a prophecy that proves much closer to home than Prue could have imagined.

This may be Travis Knight’s second feature film of the year, after his live-action Masters of the Universe (2026) failed to achieve much critical or commercial success. But using his family’s fortune to pursue artistic brilliance is where the nepo baby—famously the son of Nike’s Phil Knight—truly belongs: helming ambitious stop-motion projects. This is Knight’s first animated film as director since the equally stunning and memorable Kubo and the Two Strings (2016). The project began in 2011, just weeks after the publication of the novel of the same name, written by Colin Meloy and illustrated by his wife, Carson Ellis. For the past decade and a half, Knight and the dedicated team at Laika have poured everything into the production. Their painstaking care is evident in every second of this 131-minute feature, the longest stop-motion film of all time.

What stands out most about Wildwood is its breathtaking visual design. Even the opening shot of leaves blowing on a windy evening feels like the filmmakers showing off how seamlessly they’ve constructed the film. Several times, I had to remind myself that I was watching a film made with stop-motion rather than computer-generated imagery. The world of Wildwood is incredibly immersive, full of distinctive locations and characters. From the bustling recreation of Portland to the dark lair of the dowager governess, Alexandra (Carey Mulligan), everything feels alive.

Animated films that run for more than two hours can sometimes feel like a slog. Laika’s production team keeps Wildwood engaging throughout. Caleb Deschanel’s cinematography is fantastic, creating the right energy and lighting for each scene. Dario Marianelli’s score is another highlight. It may not be as iconic as other fantasy scores, such as Howard Shore’s Lord of the Rings compositions, but it gives the film tension and depth. Christopher Murrie’s editing also deserves credit for trimming the fat from each scene. A few moments feel rushed, but most of the film gives its characters the right amount of time to develop.

Prue is an extremely convincing protagonist. She fits the archetypes of the reluctant hero and the ordinary person thrust into the heart of a fantastical conflict. These familiar roles strengthen her characterisation rather than making the plot feel clichéd. She’s grown up and can’t be bothered with magic, but she puts her teenage angst aside for the sake of her deep love for her baby brother. With a terrific vocal performance from Peyton Elizabeth Lee and incredible animation, Prue is a memorable character to follow into the dark forest.

Beyond Prue, Wildwood belongs to two other characters: Curtis and Alexandra. Curtis has no confidence in himself, but must find the courage to stand up for what he believes and help his friend. Alexandra, a grief-stricken mother who’ll use any means necessary to get her son back, is terrifying. Carey Mulligan gives everything to the role, bringing depth to a character who could easily have become a stock evil queen. Tremblay is brilliant, too. It’s exciting to see an actor who broke into the A-list with Room (2015) display such growth and depth.

Wildwood also boasts an impressive voice cast. Angela Bassett plays the majestic general of the forest’s avian species, while Mahershala Ali is terrific as the stoic leader of the bandit resistance. Jake Johnson, Tom Waits and Tantoo Cardinal also have their moments. Unfortunately, some of the other voice performances are less convincing. Awkwafina has been typecast in quirky animated sidekick roles for years. This may be her best work in that vein, but it still feels a little out of place. I’m also unconvinced by Charlie Day as Dmitri, a turncoat coyote.

The film’s biggest disappointment is its thematic development. The character growth works, but the themes explored in the climax don’t land as strongly. Wildwood wants to set Alexandra and Prue up as opposites on either side of a journey towards letting go, but the connection between them doesn’t quite come through. They make a strong protagonist-antagonist pairing, but I didn’t feel emotionally invested in their journeys as foils. The familiar plot threads may also hold the film back. When moments echo other fantasy classics, it takes more work to make a profound impact on the audience.

Still, Wildwood’s greatest emotional impact comes from its artistry as a whole. I left the cinema invigorated by the film’s creation and by the finished work on the big screen. The passion of the people who brought this incredible world to life is evident in every moment. From the small details, such as mountains towering over Portland, to one of the most intense action sequences in animated film, Wildwood shines.

At the start of the film, as Prue cycles through a vividly rendered Portland, she passes an art stall. In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot, the artist—played in a cameo by illustrator Carson Ellis—has a sign that reads: ‘Enjoy Handmade Art Before It’s Gone for Good.’ It’s a cheeky dig at AI and a celebration of the 15 years countless artists spent making the film. It’s also the perfect encapsulation of one of the most gorgeous stop-motion films ever made.

USA • UK • CANADA | 2026 | 130 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Travis Knight.
writer: Chris Butler (based on the 2011 novel by Colin Meloy & Carson Ellis).
voices: Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Jacob Tremblay, Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Awkwafina, Angela Bassett, Jake Johnson, Charlie Day, Amandla Stenberg, Jemaine Clement, Maya Erskine, Tantoo Cardinal, Tom Waits & Richard E. Grant.

The post WILDWOOD (2026) appeared first on Frame Rated.

Following ‘Into the Forest’: Folktales at DEFA (1955–1977), an excellent introductory box set released earlier this year, Eureka presents another beautifully curated selection of fairy tale films made by Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA), East Germany’s state film studio. Alongside the five features is a selection of stop-frame short animations and some high-quality bonus material. These cinematic gems, lovingly restored by the DEFA Foundation and resplendent in all their luscious Agfacolor glory, will delight children of all ages and appeal to anyone with a scholarly interest in folklore and the history of European cinema.

The first of the five features is The Tinderbox (1959), which some may fondly remember from the BBC’s Tales from Europe series, first broadcast in the 1960s and occasionally repeated since. The set also includes Snow White (1961), perhaps the most faithful screen adaptation of the tale; Snow White and Rose Red (1978), featuring a different character of the same name; the inventive fantasy adventure The Frog King (1987); and the once-banned The Robe (1961), which remained unfinished and unseen for three decades…

The Tinderbox (1959)

There lived a soldier. He served the king and is now returning home. Once he met an old witch on the way, who promised him mountains of money in exchange for the fact that he would get her an old tinderbox.

Based on Hans Christian Andersen’s famous story, published in his first collection, Fairy Tales Told for Children, in 1835, The Tinderbox is perhaps the most narratively sophisticated example of the ‘spirit in the blue light’ tale type. Found around the world, though mainly in northern Europe, these tales usually feature a protagonist recently discharged from a position of service: commonly a soldier invalided out of the army or dismissed without pay, sometimes as a scapegoat for a superior’s wrongdoing. The protagonist is then swindled or robbed and trapped somewhere deep and dark, such as a well or cave. There, they find a magical object connected with fire that can summon helper spirits.

This is one of the finest renderings of the well-loved story, which DEFA has shaped into a clear socialist allegory about class division and the unequal distribution of wealth. It’s a simple tale, told effectively under the guidance of dramaturgist Margot Beichler, who also oversaw the scripts for two standout titles in Volume 1: The Singing, Ringing Tree (1957) and Rumpelstiltskin (1960).

The vibrant colours and clarity are immediately striking, belying the print’s 67-year age. We meet our soldier (Rolf Ludwig) striding along a country road, singing and tightening his belt as he eats the last crumbs from his pockets. Clearly, he hasn’t been treated well after fighting for king and country. Director Siegfried Hartmann demonstrates his visual eloquence from the outset, and the opening minutes are rich in folkloric symbolism, with meaningful trees prominently placed. The nameless soldier passes a row of rowan trees, a symbol of protection against enchantment in nearly all European traditions. He then pauses, framed by an oak, a tree with many positive pagan associations, though also one tainted by superstition. On the one hand, it was sacred to the Druids; on the other, the goat of the witches’ sabbath has been depicted crowned with an oak garland. In Germanic tradition, however, the oak represents freedom, bravery and civic duty. Romantic writers and philosophers such as Goethe and Schiller promoted it as a symbol of the authentic German spirit. To this day, oak leaves and acorns appear on many coats of arms and currencies.

So what might the dead, hollow trunk of a great ancient oak represent? As the soldier pauses to ponder it, an old woman (Bella Waldritter) approaches and asks him to climb inside the tree to retrieve her tinderbox. She ties a rope around his waist and promises to help him back up, then whispers something persuasive in his ear. Being trusting, he doesn’t seem to consider that she might be a witch. Of course, the audience has noticed her impossibly hooked nose and will probably be yelling, ‘Don’t go in there!’ at the screen.

The descent into the abyss is a crucial stage in the hero’s cycle, as explained by theorist Joseph Campbell and based on psychologist Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes. It’s the point in a narrative when the protagonist reaches their lowest ebb but returns from a descent into darkness—literal or metaphorical—with something that can ‘heal the world’ and ‘redeem’ them. It usually comes later in a story, but the soldier’s journey is already under way. He has been away, experiencing a war that must have changed him, and now society has abandoned him, hungry and penniless.

The hollow trunk of an ancient oak features in numerous folktales, often representing a portal to another realm. In a cavernous chamber among the roots beneath the tree are three doors. Each opens onto a treasure chest guarded by a giant hound with flashing eyes. The first chest is filled with copper coins, the second with silver and the third with gold. Each fearsome dog—though they’re actually very cute—is larger than the last. Surprisingly, after sizing up the soldier, they step aside and let him fill his satchel with treasure.

This is why the witch needed help: only someone good at heart could survive the test. Weighed down with his newfound wealth, the soldier needs help to haul himself out of the other world. He pauses only to pick up the tinderbox, almost as an afterthought. The witch demands that he throw it to her at once, then cuts the rope. She transforms into a levitating snake and attacks him.

This is when the soldier’s combat training pays off, in the only sequence likely to terrify younger viewers. From here on, the seasoned stage actor Rolf Ludwig maintains a pleasing lightness, at times reminiscent of Tommy Steele in Half a Sixpence (1967), whose character follows a very similar arc.

The soldier walks to the nearest town, where people judge him first by his shabby appearance, then by his spending power. He moves into the best room at the inn, enjoys a lavish feast and orders new boots and a suit. The innkeeper (Fritz Schlegel) goes from surly to obsequious at the first jingle of gold coins. Three dandy opportunists (Heinz Schubert, Rolf Defrank and Hannes Fischer) gather around the soldier, who is generous to a fault. He also sponsors the cobbler in taking on Hans (Detlef Heintze) as a young apprentice. Hans tells him of a good princess (Barbara Mehlan), kept locked away in the palace by the greedy king and queen.

The inn’s decidedly working-class staff fear that the kind soldier is squandering his money on fair-weather friends who’ll desert him as soon as it runs out. That doesn’t take long. But as the soldier settles into his smaller, poorly furnished room, he absent-mindedly plays with the tinderbox. When he strikes a spark, one of the giant fairy dogs magically appears. The live dogs were photographed on wonderful miniature sets to make them look huge. Thanks to DEFA visual-effects maestro Ernst Kunstmann, who worked on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), they blend into the live action as well as any effects from the era. Kunstmann’s involvement in the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will(1935) had also made him infamous. Here, he’s joined by his daughter Vera Kunstmann, to whom he would pass the baton, and assisted by production designer Hans Poppe.

The soldier asks the dog to fetch a bag of coins, and it dutifully obliges. At last, he understands why the witch wanted the humble tinderbox. One night, he asks his helper hounds to fetch the princess from the palace so he can watch her as she sleeps. Romantic—or a little creepy? Impressed by her serene beauty, he ironically calls her a ‘fairy tale princess’ and promises to come and free her. The next morning, she wakes believing she has dreamt of a handsome soldier who will be her saviour.

True to his word, the soldier tries to break into the palace but is captured and sentenced to death. He ends up in a dank, dark dungeon—his second visit to that archetypal abyss. If only he’d thought to bring the tinderbox with him. His fate looks bleak and, without money or magic, what hope is there?

EAST GERMANY | 1959 | 83 MINUTES | 1.37:1 | COLOUR | GERMAN

Snow White (1961)

Hated by her jealous and bloodthirsty stepmother, Snow White flees a murder attempt and seeks shelter in the woods with seven kindly dwarfs.

One of the best-known fairy tales of all time, Snow White may seem familiar to anyone who knows Walt Disney’s pioneering animation, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). But DEFA tells a different story. Although the adaptation serves the studio’s political agenda, it was again supervised by Margot Beichler and remains closer to the original tale collected by the Brothers Grimm and published in their first volume in 1812.

Like classic Disney adaptations of fairy tales, the film opens with a storybook, drawing us into the world of a young queen. After pricking her finger with a sewing needle, she is struck by the stark beauty of her blood against the snow and wishes for a daughter with skin as white as snow and lips as red as blood. The sets, once again designed by Hans Poppe, have a lovely illustrative quality, as if lifted straight from the pages of a picture book.

The story then flashes forward. The queen’s daughter has grown into the beauty her now-departed mother imagined. Young Snow White (Doris Weikow) is introduced as a down-to-earth friend to the working class. She enjoys helping the cook (Fritz Schlegel)—a much nicer character than the innkeeper in The Tinderbox—as the castle kitchens prepare yet another banquet for her stepmother. The new queen (Marianne Christina Schilling), who has already outlived the king, is obsessed with being the most beautiful woman in the land. She regularly seeks confirmation from her magic mirror and can’t bear it when a young prince at the banquet is clearly smitten with Snow White instead.

To eliminate the competition, the queen orders her huntsman (Harry Hindemith) to take Snow White into the woods and kill her. Knowing that the servants like the princess, she tells him to bring back her heart as proof. Instead, the honourable huntsman kills a wild boar and takes its heart, then releases Snow White in the forest. There, she eventually comes across a timber cabin furnished with miniature tables, chairs and beds.

The dwarfs turn out to be genuinely likeable, rather than as annoying as they are in many adaptations. They’re more like the professors in Ball of Fire (1941) than Disney’s schmaltzy caricatures. Given their obvious range of ages, Snow White can be seen as fulfilling several typically female roles: daughter, sister, homemaker and mother. She finds fulfilment in all of them, making her one of the most fully realised female archetypes in fairy tales, while highlighting the Evil Queen’s failure in each of those same roles.

Alas, the magic mirror reveals the huntsman’s deception, and the psychotically insecure queen decides to finish the job herself. Rather than go straight to the poison apple, she tries a few alternatives. Disguised as an itinerant trader, she persuades Snow White to try on a fancy girdle that immediately stops her breathing. Fortunately, the dwarfs return just in time to save her. The queen tries again, then again. This sequence stays closer to the original story, with the final attempt apparently succeeding.

With a Hans Christian Andersen story, the odds of a happy or tragic ending are roughly 50/50. But with the Brothers Grimm, evil-doers are almost certain to get their just desserts and the pure of heart to prevail. Besides, we already know how this ends, don’t we?

EAST GERMANY | 1961 | 63 MINUTES | 1.37:1 | COLOUR | GERMAN

Snow White and Rose Red (1978)

Two sisters, Schneeweißchen and Rosenrot, save Princes Michael and Andreas from the evil spells of the Mountain Spirit.

Siegfried Hartmann returns to the director’s chair, bringing the same clarity and pleasingly rounded characterisation as The Tinderbox. Margot Beichler is on script duties once more, adapting another tale collected by the Brothers Grimm and published in the third edition of their collection in 1837.

The change in style and Siegfried Mogel’s location cinematography immediately make it clear that this film was made almost two decades after Snow White. Freeze-frames, accompanied by Peter Gotthardt’s moody, melancholic score, give the opening sequence a poignant, distinctly 1970s nostalgia. The first fifteen minutes could easily lead into a classic folk horror film to rival The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) or The Wicker Man (1973). But although the story could lend itself to that treatment, it develops into a wholesome, family-friendly fantasy adventure.

This Snow White (Julie Jurištová) isn’t a princess but a humble craftswoman who makes children’s toys and puppets. Her sister, Rose Red (Katrin Martin), is a weaver who makes blankets. They live with their mother in an idyllic, fairy tale cottage. Their father died in a mining accident, and the tunnel where it happened is now boarded up and believed to be cursed.

When the sisters sell their wares at market, they attract the attention of two of the king’s huntsmen, Andreas (Bodo Wolf) and Michael (Pavel Trávníček). The huntsmen are fascinated by the sisters and by the story of the disused local mine: they’ve just chased a mysterious figure through the woods, only for it to disappear into a tunnel like the one in the tale. Noticing Snow White’s distress at being torn between her kind nature and her need to earn a living, Andreas buys all her toys and gives them to children who can’t afford them. Michael buys all of Rose Red’s blankets and wraps. This may be a blatant example of hard work paying off and wealth being responsibly redistributed, but it’s also a neat piece of character exposition. It establishes the four-way, gendered dynamic that drives the rest of the story.

While the huntsmen investigate the abandoned mine with Grandfather Matthias (Johannes Wieke), falling rocks injure him, echoing what happened to Snow White and Rose Red’s father. The group escape their archetypal abyss, but after drinking from a spring, the young huntsmen are magically transformed: Andreas becomes a kestrel and Michael a bear. The spell recalls the enchantment placed on the prince in The Singing, Ringing Tree (1957). Here, it’s the work of a mean-spirited dwarf (Hans-Peter Minetti), who uses magic to protect the hoard of jewels hidden in his domain deep within the disused mine.

Like the hollow tree in The Tinderbox, the mine serves as a portal to another realm. For the characters, the forest is also a place of literal transformation. Many such stories recall a time when much of Europe was covered in foreboding forests inhabited by wild beasts. Dark woods also function as psychological terrain, representing the subconscious and offering a space for self-discovery and inner change. Snow White and Rose Red prove far from helpless damsels: they help rescue the honourable huntsmen and defeat the greedy dwarf, who represents the worst traits of a capitalist hoarding wealth instead of redistributing it for society’s benefit.

EAST GERMANY | 1978 | 70 MINUTES | 1.37 : 1 | COLOUR | GERMAN

The Frog King (1987)

A princess fails to keep her promises and is taught a lesson.

For me, this is the most enjoyable of the five films, with humour that still lands well. Once again, the opening sequence has a languorous atmosphere that feels more evocative of the 1970s than the ’80s, making it an excellent follow-on from Snow White and Rose Red. Princess Henriette (Jana Mattukat) is playing gracefully with her ball when she drops it into a well and watches it sink into the depths. Believing it lost, she walks away dejectedly, only to be called back by a stranger’s voice. A large frog has emerged from the well with her toy.

The frog is an excellent combination of stop-frame animation and animatronic puppetry, sharing the frame seamlessly with the live action. It promises to retrieve the ball if Henriette agrees to let it drink from her cup, eat from her plate and sleep on her bed. She readily agrees, but when the frog returns, she simply takes the ball and skips away, with no intention of keeping her promise.

Later, while Henriette is dining with her father, the King (Peter Sodann), and her two older sisters (Franziska Glöss-Ebermann and Susanne Lüning), there’s a knock at the door. The frog has made its way from the well and intends to hold Henriette to her promise. For a king in a DEFA production, he’s unusually sympathetic and honourable. He wisely tells his daughter that a promise must be kept and lets the frog into the dining room. Showing it no respect, Henriette ungraciously tips wine from her cup onto the table for the frog to lap up, then practically hurls her food at it. When she carries the animal to her room at arm’s length, the King follows to stop her throwing it out of the window. Once in her room, she loses her temper and hurls the hapless creature against the wall. The shock transforms it into a handsome young man (Jens-Uwe Bogadtke). Well, that changes things: Henriette is suddenly thrilled at the prospect of sharing her bed with him. But he explains that this is now impossible. Although she sees him as a man, she didn’t willingly keep her promise, so he remains cursed to live a loveless life in his kingdom of desolation. He quickly leaves.

Henriette is consumed with remorse and desperate to make amends. Despite her father ordering a search of the four corners of the world, however, the kingdom can’t be found. Eventually, word of a mystical place in the far north, beyond the four elements, reaches the modest palace, and Henriette sets off.

Jana Mattukat gives an exceptionally strong performance as Henriette develops from an irritating brat into a likeable rogue and, finally, an emotionally mature young woman. Her endearing innocence survives the journey to experience. An extended sequence in which she must persuade each element to grant her passage takes the story into the realm of high fantasy. Eventually, she reaches the cursed king’s citadel, which resembles a drab, stone version of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. But no women are allowed inside. To get past the guards, Henriette disguises herself as a boy and learns how to act like one by imitation as she tries to fulfil her three promises and lift the curse. This opens up a wealth of possibilities for exploring gender dynamics and comedy.

Writer-director Walter Beck develops a cohesive, well-paced narrative, using landscape and set design effectively to reflect the characters’ inner lives. Henriette’s first forest, for example, is a beautiful stand of silver birch. Later, she must cross a barren wasteland of charred tree trunks before eventually returning to where she began, profoundly changed. The citadel is an Escher-like maze of stairways, parapets and catwalks. Christoph Schneider’s impressive set draws on the tradition of German Expressionist cinema. Its oppressive interior reflects the King’s cold, empty heart and the tangled ‘forest’ of his psyche, which Henriette must cleverly navigate.

In the Brothers Grimm collection of folktales, first published in 1812, ‘The Frog Prince’ is traditionally the opening story. Here, the frog prince has been promoted to king. The tale fits neatly into what Bruno Bettelheim calls the ‘animal-groom cycle’ in his seminal work of Freudian fairy tale analysis, The Uses of Enchantment, first published in 1976. Such stories commonly feature a girl on the cusp of womanhood who is both attracted to and repelled by an enchanted beast. Over the course of the story—or in a reveal near the end—the monstrous creature is transformed into a desirable one through true love and acceptance. The best-known example is Barbot de Villeneuve’s Beauty and the Beast, first published anonymously in 1740. We’ve just had a double dose of the motif in Snow White and Rose Redand, of course, The Singing, Ringing Tree from Volume 1.

Bettelheim interpreted stories as a psychoanalyst might interpret dreams, identifying motifs that represent children’s fears about adulthood. The animal’s appearance symbolises a child’s perception of adult sexuality as alien and threatening. As the adolescent learns to see beyond lust and apprehension, the animal aspect gives way to the human. By tempering his basic instincts, the beast becomes gentle, patient and caring. The heroine, meanwhile, must learn to trust and understand him before love can develop and the ‘animal’ becomes a ‘prince’. For Bettelheim, this transformation isn’t literal; it represents a psychological shift in the heroine’s perception. What once seemed frightening becomes desirable through emotional maturity, leading to a mutual, loving bond.

EAST GERMANY | 1987 | 67 MINUTES | 1.37 : 1 | COLOUR | GERMAN

The Robe (1961)

Hans and Kumpan repeatedly try to enter a town surrounded by a tall, impenetrable wall, where everyone is apparently very happy.

Freely adapted from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, published in 1837 as the final instalment of his Fairy Tales Told for Children, The Robe follows two poor travellers, Hans (Horst Drinda) and Kumpan (Werner Lierck). They manage to infiltrate a heavily guarded, walled town where everyone is reputed to be very happy. Instead, they discover a self-contained micro-nation ruled by a vain but apathetic despot. Its officials are constantly afraid for their careers, while the populace is divided into rich businessmen, poor working-class people and mean cats.

Alas, this final offering detracts from an otherwise excellent collection. Its interest lies not in the film itself but in the story behind its 30-year production. Shot in 1961, alongside Snow White, it was left unfinished and shelved. We’re led to believe this was due to the political climate surrounding the division of Berlin, and to content deemed too contentious until after the Wall came down in 1989. The state censors’ decision not to approve the film is well documented, but I suspect the reason may simply have been that it’s a terrible film.

In 1991, the footage was recovered, redubbed with new voice actors where necessary, and edited according to director Konrad Petzold’s original script and notes. Although this amounts to a director’s cut, the narrative feels poorly paced and incomplete. A few incongruous short animations interrupt rather than enhance the story. They have no discernible bearing on the central narrative, apart from adding politically charged allegorical asides. In one, a vain, lipstick-wearing cat is threatened in a sexualised manner by a tomcat whose entitled arrogance parallels that of the town’s dictator. In another, the wind snatches the Emperor’s jacket and carries it through the clouds, leaving it on a scarecrow. What happened to the scarecrow’s original clothes? Or is the jacket all that remains of a similarly pompous victim, dressed in the invisible new clothes of a previous despotic scarecrow? Perhaps we’re reading too much into this, though evidently the state censor did so at the time. Still, there’s a touch of ironic humour, and the animations remain the film’s most memorable elements.

The Kaiser (played by the appropriately named Wolf Kaiser) seems equally bored and paranoid. On his orders, Hans and his companion Kumpan are placed under house arrest and told to produce the most magnificent robe ever seen, though he gives them neither a budget nor any materials. Without Katrin (Eva-Maria Hagen), who brings them food, they’d soon starve. The political metaphor is clear enough, right down to Katrin’s dress in the red, white and blue of the French Tricolour. Hagen was a politically vocal singer-songwriter and popular actress with working-class roots. She was eventually blacklisted, banned from working and, in 1977, stripped of her citizenship. After living in West Germany, she returned to East Germany after the Wall came down, resumed her stage career and also wrote and exhibited her paintings. Wolf Kaiser is good enough in the role, though the character is drawn in broad strokes, with little room for subtlety or nuance. He seems to be deliberately quoting Charlie Chaplin’s performance in The Great Dictator (1940), which I imagine would have been an obscure reference for children at the time.

That said, the cast do a good job with the material they’re given. Unfortunately, the material is neither funny nor exciting, and its poorly delivered satire disguises neither shortcoming. For the film to work, it needs some sense of urgency or peril to hook the viewer. It also needs characters we can love, despise or simply care about. A basic understanding of storytelling structure would help, too—something Egon Günther’s script perversely avoids, even though it’s central to fairy tales. One could argue that the film deliberately subverts fairy tale conventions, but to what end? Defying expectations simply disappoints the audience unless a narrative twist surprises or delights while giving familiar material new meaning. Günther was already known for his political allegories and avant-garde approach, neither of which suits the source material in this monotonous failure. Children of all ages will be very bored.

Ultimately, it’s best to approach The Robe as a brave—or foolhardy—attempt to stretch a slight story into a feature-length narrative. It’s the longest film in the collection, and you’ll feel every minute. Apparently, after the state film board withheld approval, Petzold was advised to shorten it and make it more appealing to children, as the original brief required. He declined. Perhaps intended as a refreshing deconstruction of Andersen’s story, the film instead demonstrates the ‘Emperor’s new clothes’ idiom: a script that thinks it’s clever, but is so blatant that the viewer can see straight through it. No magic, no fun.

However, Michael Brooke’s excellent audio commentary makes The Robe a far more edifying and entertaining experience. The bonus material also includes a puppet animation telling the same story. It’s a far superior version: more faithful to Andersen’s original and, conveniently, much shorter.

EAST GERMANY | 1961 • 1991 (RELEASE) | 93 MINUTES | 2.35:1| COLOUR | GERMAN

3-Disc Limited Edition Blu-ray Box Set Special Features:

• Limited Collector’s Edition Box Set [2000 copies].
• Limited Edition hardbound slipcase featuring new artwork by Carly A-F [2000 copies].
• Limited Edition 60-page book featuring a new essay on the production design of DEFA’s folktales by Märchenfilme expert Corinna Alexandra Rader, new notes on each film in this set by DEFA historians Sebastian Heiduschke and Qinna Shen, plus the original Hans Christian Andersen and Brothers Grimm stories that inspired The Tinderbox, Snow White, Snow White and Rose Red, The Frog King and The Robe. [2000 copies] Corinna Alexandra Rader’s essay, ‘Magic Kingdoms: Thoughts on Set Design in DEFA’s Folktales’, considers the visual world of DEFA’s fairy tale films, focusing on their use of studio sets, historical architecture and scenic painting to create immersive realms. Rader traces the deliberate artifice of the 1950s and its evolution through the following decades: towards greater use of real landscapes in the 1970s, then a more sophisticated blend of location and studio work in the 1980s. She also places the films in their cultural context, discussing their educational purpose and moral imperatives.
  
  Qinna Shen’s film notes highlight how DEFA consistently reshaped traditional fairy tales to reflect the state’s socialist and humanist values. Shen argues that The Tinderbox was adapted to emphasise friendship, solidarity and collective action, with magic supporting desirable human qualities and encouraging social responsibility. Her analysis of The Frog Kinghighlights its focus on personal growth and moral accountability. Its proactive princess, she notes, reflects contemporary East German attitudes towards women, rather than the more passive stereotypes of traditional fairy tales. Shen reads The Robe as a satire about resistance from within the system and a dictator’s self-deception. Aimed more at adults than children, the adaptation turns the original tale into a critique of the abuse of power under totalitarianism.
  
  Sebastian Heiduschke’s notes focus more on production history, context and reception. He presents Snow White as a hugely successful popular adaptation that balances fidelity to the Grimm source with the resources of the DEFA studio system. He points to the production’s distinguished cast, elaborate sets and costumes as evidence of the respect it received. His overview of Snow White and Rose Red highlights director Siegfried Hartmann’s move towards location shooting in medieval towns and natural landscapes. He also discusses the importance of collaboration between East German and Czechoslovak filmmakers.
• 1080p HD presentations of all five films from restorations by the DEFA Foundation.
• Original German soundtracks for all five films plus optional English-dubbed version of The Tinderbox (standard definition).
• Optional English subtitles, newly translated for this release.

Disc 1: The Tinderbox.

• The Tinderbox English dub (in standard definition sourced from a slightly shorter alternative print, 81 minutes)
• NEW audio commentary on The Tinderbox by socialist cinema expert Ally Pitts, host of A Russian and Soviet Movie Podcast. This detailed, informative commentary favours politically relevant readings of the film’s rich symbolism over folkloric interpretations. Pitts begins by deconstructing the musical score, describing it as a Marxist dialectic, and discusses the opening song, sung as the soldier walks from the road into the woodland. Later, he draws attention to a refrain from a politically charged tune that would one day be reused in an episode of The Simpsons. Throughout, he analyses the film’s visual language and practical effects in enough detail to be valuable to media studies students and aspiring filmmakers. Pitts also points out how the film’s narrative differs from Andersen’s original story. Some changes were clearly made for political reasons, to emphasise moral elements already present; others were more pragmatic. For example, the giant hounds speak in the original tale, but this would have been difficult to convey convincingly on screen and might have undermined rather than strengthened the magical suspension of disbelief.
• The Emperor’s New Clothes (Herbert K. Schulz, 1956, 20 mins.) — short stop-motion animation adapted from the Hans Christian Andersen tale by the DEFA Studio for Animation Film. A satisfyingly faithful retelling, with visual comedy and impressively smooth animation.
• The Fisherman and his Wife (Werner Krauße, 1975, 14 mins.) — short stop-motion animation adapted from the Brothers Grimm tale by the DEFA Studio for Animation Film. The character design is excellent, and the little dog steals the show alongside the psychedelically patterned fish. At first, the fish grants the fisherman’s modest wishes, but it grows increasingly fearsome and eventually loses patience with his wife’s greedier demands. It’s a parable about hard work and being content with a simple life.
• Beauty and the Beast (Katja Georgi, 1976, 25 mins.) — short stop-motion animation adapted from the Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve tale by the DEFA Studio for Animation Film. This is an excellent telling of the magical tale, with appealing puppet design for Belle and an inventive, elephantine interpretation of the Beast that manages to be both grotesque and cute. The production values are top-tier, with detailed miniature sets and beautiful lighting that captures painterly Baroque compositions, all accompanied by an enchanting score.
• NEW An Enchanted Land: Folktales in East German Culture (2026, 25 minutes) German cinema expert Rachel Palfreyman on the history of folktales in German culture and their adaptations in West and East Germany. In this insightful, information-rich discussion, Palfreyman introduces the Brothers Grimm through the lens of liberal nationalism. She explains how they viewed folk art and fairy tales as windows into a pure German spirit, untouched by ‘book learning’, and as a way to reclaim national identity after the Napoleonic period had overwhelmed it with imposed French sentiment.
• The Brothers Grimm were among the first to collect and write down many of these stories. In doing so, they established a template for fairy tales, while selecting which morals to foreground in each story. Palfreyman compares different versions and traces how some stories changed between their first publication and the Grimms’ later, substantially revised editions. She then discusses the films in this set against the historical and cultural background of their production, offering insights into their intentions and possible interpretations as the times changed.

Disc 2: Snow White & Snow White and Rose Red

• NEW Mirror, Mirror: The Evolution of Snow White & Snow White and Rose Red (2026, 22 minutes) — video essay on DEFA’s adaptations of Snow White and Snow White and Rose Red by film and animation scholar Sam Summers. He finds similarities between the stories: both feature young girls coming of age amid dangers in the form of spells, curses and obsessive villains driven by pride, envy and greed. Both also use woodland as a setting for transformation. However, one Snow White begins as royalty and becomes humble, while the other begins humbly and ends as royalty. Summers places each film in its historical context, noting the two-decade gap between them. He also offers insightful analysis of other versions of the Snow White story, including an entertaining discussion of an exploitative 1933 animated version starring Betty Boop. He contrasts DEFA’s Snow White with Disney’s 1937 film, pointing out that Disney films were once banned in East Germany because of their over-capitalist ethos.
• NEW Mirror, Mirror: The Evolution of Snow White & Snow White and Rose Red (2026, 22 mins.) Video essay on DEFA’s adaptations of Snow White and Snow White and Rose Red by film and animation scholar Sam Summers. Comparing the two treatments, Summers finds similarities in that both stories involve young girls coming or age while dealing with dangers in the forms of spells, curses, and obsessive villains motivated by pride, envy and greed. Both narratives feature woodland as sites of transformation however, one Snow White begins as royalty and becomes humble while the other begins humble and ends-up as royalty. Summers places each film into its historical context, separated by two decades, and goes on to offer insightful analysis of the various treatments of the Snow White story including an entertaining discussion of an exploitative 1933 animated version starring Betty Boop, and contrasts the DEFA Snow White with the 1937 Disney iteration pointing out that Disney films were once banned in East Germany due to their overtly capitalist ethos.

Disc 3: The Frog King & The Robe

• NEW audio commentary on The Robe by film historian Michael Brooke. Brooke gives a concise historical and contextual overview of the film, which began production in 1961 but wasn’t completed and released until 1991, making it the East German film with the longest production period. He compares it with two other fairy tale films: France’s The King and Mr Bird (1948–1980), which was screened in several incomplete versions during its 33 years in production, and Richard Williams’s The Thief and the Cobbler, which spent around 30 years in production and has been released in several cuts under different titles. Brooke then traces the film’s production up to its shelving in 1962, after state censors declared it ‘hostile to the party’ and containing ‘counter-revolutionary traits open to antagonistic interpretations’. He places this decision in context, noting that The Robe was the only fairy tale film among 27 others effectively banned by the regime. Brooke discusses the narrative, highlights changes in emphasis from the source material and considers what may have angered the state film board—chiefly the huge town-wall set, which accidentally foreshadowed the Berlin Wall. He also provides plenty of production details and brief biographies of the cast and crew, along with several astute observations. I particularly enjoyed his comparison of the invisible, intangible clothes to a kind of medieval cryptocurrency. I didn’t enjoy the film, but I loved the commentary.

Cast & Crew

directors: Siegfried Hartmann (Tinderbox & Rose Red) • Gottfried Kolditz (Snow White) • Walter Beck (Frog) • Konrad Petzold (Robe).
writers: Margot Beichler (Tinderbox, Snow White, Rose Red) • Siegfried Hartmann, Anneliese Kocialek, Fred Rodrian (Tinderbox) • Günter Kaltofen &
Gudrun ‘Rammler’ Deubener (Snow White) • Siegfried Hartmann & Willi Brückner (Rose Red) • Walter Beck & Gerd Gericke (Frog) • Egon Günther (Robe).
starring: Rolf Ludwig & Barbara Mehlan (Tinderbox) • Fritz Schlegel (Tinderbox & Snow White) • Doris Weikow, Marianne Christina Schilling, Heinz Scholz & Willi Scholz (Snow White) • Julie Jurištová, Katrin Martin, Pavel Trávníček, Bodo Wolf, Hans-Peter Minetti, Johannes Wieke & Hajo Mende (Rose Red) • Jana Mattukat, Jens-Uwe Bogadtke & Peter Sodann (Frog) • Wolf Kaiser, Horst Drinda, Werner Lierck & Eva-Maria Hagen. (Robe).

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