Wendy Ide’s pick of other films: My Father’s Shadow, Send Help, 100 Nights of Hero

My Father’s Shadow

(93 mins, 12A) Directed by Akinola Davies Jr; starring Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù, Godwin Egbo, Chibuike Marvellous Egbo

Much has been written in film theory about ways of looking –specifically the difference between the male gaze and the female gaze. But there’s another, equally distinctive and less gender-centric cinematic perspective: the child’s gaze. Through the guileless, unfiltered eyes of children, we can experience momentous events broken down into tiny, intensely focused details.

Even if the youngsters, such as the two boys who are at the heart of the British-Nigerian director Akinola Davies Jr’s superb debut feature, don’t fully understand what they are witnessing, they can still serve as innocent, unwitting guides for an adult audience. The child’s eye might be as drawn to a bug on a window ledge, or a paper cutout of a wrestler, as it is to history unfolding, but it sees everything.

The children in the this story are 11-year-old Remi (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo) and eight-year-old Akin (Godwin Egbo), bickering, fractious brothers left alone at their village house while their mother runs errands. The long, empty day gets an exciting new focus with the arrival of their largely absent father Folarin (a commanding and charismatic Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù) who lets them tag along on a day trip to Lagos. The boys find themselves in a jumpy, highly charged city that is reeling from a rumoured massacre of protesters but charged with full of optimism after the 1993 election, and the h hope that the win for Social Democratic party presidential candidate MKO Abiola would put an end to a decade under military rule (the results were later annulled). Davies threads snippets of sound and archive footage into the film, evoking the sensory assault experienced by these village kids.

Over an eventful day, the boys see their father in a new light; he’s a man who is respected and has a magnetic effect on the women they meet. But although he tries to hide it from his boys, there’s a sense that time, for Folarin, is running out.

Send Help

(113 mins, 15) Directed by Sam Raimi; starring Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien, Edyll Ismail 

Overlooked for a promotion, and undervalued and openly mocked by her swaggering alpha male boss, Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is well meaning but has all the social appeal of three-day-old roadkill. But t The balance shifts when she and her obnoxious boss Bradley (Dylan O’Brien) are stranded on a desert island after a plane crash. It turns out that frumpy Linda is a survival skills geek. Not only does she have the knowledge to keep them both alive, she is thriving on the challenges.

In the gleefully malicious hands of director Sam Raimi (this is a tonal throwback to his late 1990s era of lean, efficiently sadistic comedies such as A Simple Plan), this Triangle of Sadness-style parable of privilege, power and role reversals spirals into a squelchy, gross-out body horror and a darkly comic revenge trajectory. It’s enjoyably lurid stuff, and McAdams is a blast. It’s just a pity that a third-act twist seems a little too familiar.

100 Nights of Hero

(91 mins, 12A) Directed by Julia Jackman; starring Emma Corrin, Maika Monroe, Nicholas Galitzine

Neglected wife Cherry (Maika Monroe) is abandoned by her husband in the company of his charming best friend Manfred (Nicholas Galitzine). What Cherry doesn’t realise is that the two men have made a wager – her fidelity and her future are at stake. What the men don’t realise is that Cherry’s maid, Hero (Emma Corrin), is smarter than all of them put together and, night after night, weaves stories of rebel women to distract Manfred from his nefarious intentions.

Julia Jackman’s droll queer feminist parable unfolds in a flamboyantly kitsch alternative reality, ruled over by a patriarchal band of masked priests who call themselves the Beak Brothers: imagine Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale viewed through Yorgos Lanthimos at his most stylised’s lens. It’s funny and fresh – a genuinely original work. Pop star spotters take note: Charli XCX appears in a small but significant supporting role.

Photograph courtesy of the BFI/Disney