Wendy Ide’s pick of other films: Wild Foxes, Hokum, Swapped, I’ve Seen All I Need to See

Wild Foxes

(94 mins, 15) Directed by Valéry Carnoy; starring Samuel Kircher, Faycal Anaflous, Jef Jacobs

At a residential academy for young athletes in France, promising teenage boxer Camille (Samuel Kircher) and his close friend Matteo (Faycal Anaflous) have the future mapped out: Camille will be the champion, Matteo his coach. In this highly charged environment, in which even the closest friendships are undercut by tacit rivalry, they are a powerful team. When Camille has a serious accident – a 30ft fall from an abandoned concrete structure in the nearby woods – Matteo saves him, carrying the unconscious Camille back to the academy. 

Camille heals quickly, but something has changed. His nerve is broken; he feels pain where none should exist. The Belgian director Valéry Carnoy’s snarl of a debut explores the pack-animal dynamics of this ultra-competitive milieu, where former friends attack at any sign of weakness. Once the star fighter, and the magnetic centre of a room full of aggressively bantering boys, Camille is ostracised, becoming the butt of derisive jokes.

It’s not an unfamiliar story. This kind of hothouse training environment has inspired several other film-makers – Wild Foxes has a particular kinship with Ronnie Sandahl’s 2020 football drama Tigers. But Carnoy’s lean storytelling and the impressive performances from the young cast mean that the film lands its emotional punches with force.

Hokum

(107 mins, 15) Directed by Damian McCarthy; starring Adam Scott, Peter Coonan, David Wilmot

Damian McCarthy’s third feature, the spooky hotel chiller Hokum, is further proof, after Oddity and Kate Dolan’s You Are Not My Mother, that Irish horror is having a moment. The film follows Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott), an exceptionally disagreeable American celebrity novelist, on a trip to the now down-at-heel Irish country inn where his late parents spent their honeymoon. He plans to scatter their ashes and to be as unpleasant as possible to everyone he meets. But the hotel harbours secrets, including – it’s rumoured – the presence of a witch who shackles her victims to be consumed, piecemeal, by the monsters of hell.

McCarthy, who cut his teeth with his well-regarded short film He Dies at the End, combines haunted buildings, childhood trauma, folklore and hallucinogenic mushrooms for his latest picture. It’s a heady mix. Most of the individual elements are hardly original, but McCarthy layers oppressive atmosphere (the location is brilliantly chosen – a building with windows that look like open-mouthed howls of despair, covered in corpse-grey pebbledash) with eerie sound design that gradually sucks the oxygen out of the cinema, leaving you jittery and breathless. 

The film is efficiently tense, despite some clunky exposition, and delivers a handful of highly effective jump scares. I jolted so vigorously at one point that I inadvertently kicked the back of The Observer’s former critic Mark Kermode’s seat like an annoying child on a long-haul flight. 

Swapped

(102 mins, PG) Directed by Nathan Greno; voiced by Juno Temple, Michael B Jordan, Ambika Mod

The setting for this animated feature is a fantasy realm populated by winsome creatures that seem to be part animal, part plant (wolves with shrubs growing out of their heads, for example, or deer with sapling-supple limbs). But the themes of Swapped – competition for resources, territorial disputes – are something of an animation staple. Both Zootropolis and Hoppers ventured into similar thematic territory, with the latter sharing the same body-swap narrative device as this production from Netflix, where it is now streaming. The latest film from Tangled director Nathan Greno – and his first project outside Disney studios – Swapped also weaves in a food scarcity element; something that makes it more timely than the film-makers might have imagined.

Michael B Jordan, fresh from his Academy Award for Sinners, voices Ollie, a tiny furry animal that looks like a miniature otter wearing a toupee. Juno Temple plays Ivy, a large, parakeet-hued bird with a crest of foliage rather than feathers and an overbearingly bossy personality. 

In the wild, they are foes, competing for the same meagre supply of fruits. But a freak encounter with a magic fungus offers the opportunity for each to see through the other’s eyes. It’s all rather predictable, but the world-building is distinctive and the animation is pleasingly lush.

I’ve Seen All I Need to See

(84 mins, 15) Directed by Zeshaan Younus; starring Renee Gagner, Rosie McDonald, Sydney McCarthy

An aspiring actor trying to carve out a career in LA, Parker (Renee Gagner) is jolted from her dispiriting routine of auditions by the news that her estranged older sister, Indiana (Rosie McDonald), has died suddenly. Grief drags her back to her Arizona home town in the hope that she can piece together Indiana’s final days. 

And that’s pretty much it in terms of the plot of this brooding mood piece. Fractured in structure and strung together with a wispily disengaged Terrence Malick-style narration, this is an opaque, shapeless thriller: an experiment in vibes. 

Zeshaan Younus’s second feature is a visually striking work – there are arresting shots of silhouetted cacti accompanied by droning, amorphous, reverb-heavy guitar music – but it proves frustratingly elusive. The muddy sound and murky plotting do little to shine a light on the picture’s underpowered story.

Photographs by Vertigo Releasing, Skydance Animation/Netflix, Bulldog Film, Black Bear Pictures