PART whimsical romcom, part folklore horror, the pitch-black Swedish comedy Border will keep you guessing to the end.
Stately telly epic Chernobyl comes to DVD — and very nearly justifies to the towering hype. And there’s something very familiar about the poorly-teen romance Five Feet Apart…
DVD Of The Week: Border
(15) 110mins, out now
GENRE-DEFYING Swedish oddity from the writer of Let The Right One In, by equal turns charming and disturbing. Well, perhaps more disturbing than charming.
Morphing from whimsical romcom to folklore horror, it is anchored by Eva Melander’s nuanced performance as the ultimate outsider on a voyage of self-discovery (or elf-discovery, if you like).
Unrecognisable beneath layers of Oscar-nominated makeup, she brings a certain soulfulness to the role of a customs officer with a grossly exaggerated nose for mischief.
Often uncomfortable and occasionally very funny, this twisted delight will keep you guessing until the end.
★★★★☆
Five Feet Apart
(12A) 116mins, out now
TAKE two (fairly) well-known actors, a solid premise and a poor script — and you get Five Feet Apart, a bubblegum look at love for those with a chronic illness that tries to hit hard but fails to deliver.
While in hospital, cystic fibrosis sufferer Stella (Haley Lu Richardson) falls in love with fellow patient Will (Cole Sprouse). The catch? Will has a bacterial infection in his lungs that, if transmitted to Stella, would put her life at risk, meaning the pair must remain six feet apart at all times.
Life confined to a hospital bed is hardly exciting — as is very apparent in the movie’s first half. There is so much filler here, including numerous musical montages. With a running time approaching two hours, this feels padded, drawn-out.
The second half is better, with real chemistry between Richardson and Sprouse. Their strong performances are undercut by the sugary — and very familiar — story but I will admit the ending did pull at my heartstrings… a bit.
★★★☆☆
Chernobyl
(15) 330mins, out Monday
THE telly epic comes to DVD and very nearly lives up to the towering hype. It’s grisly but gripping, with a mournful, dirge-like tone and stately pace befitting the immensity of the tragedy.
There are some mesmerising sequences and countless astonishing images, with Hildur Guonadottir’s otherworldly score as powerful a presence as any of the characters. Also, moments of Catch-22 absurdity amid the unfolding horror, as Communist Party stooges stubbornly deny what’s blindingly obvious to everyone else. (The scene with the naked miners will linger long in the memory, and is as close as the series comes to providing light relief.)
It’s not flawless. Some of the dialogue is clunky and not all the cast are as effective as the superb Jared Harris, whose upstanding boffin Valery Legasov finds himself increasingly compromised as the clean-up becomes a cover-up. (Poor Emily Watson, playing a composite character representing a number of real-life scientists, seems unsure if she’s meant to be doing an accent or not.)
Those quibbles are minor, however, in the context of a haunting, harrowing watch.
★★★★★
Ashes In The Snow
(15) 97mins, out now
WORTHY wartime literary adaptation about a Lithuanian girl deported to Stalin’s Siberia to dig up beetroot and unearth redemptive, triumph-of-the-human-spirit self-discoveries. Both, however, prove thin on the ground.
Londoner Bel Powley makes little impression as Lina, whose skills as an artist save her from ending up in a ditch with a bullet in the temple.
Mostly she stands around looking vaguely mortified, which is fair enough given her captors’ propensity to shoot people for squirreling away the occasional illicit beet. But there is no emotional heft to the brutality.
Though nicely shot, and exploring a part of history most viewers here will know little about, this is ultimately as entertaining as you would expect from a movie set in a Soviet labour camp.
The fact this is the highest-grossing movie in Lithuanian history is depressing enough in itself. Get a history book from the library instead.
★★☆☆☆
The Prodigy
(15) 88mins, out Monday
DAFT addition to the creepy-kid sub-genre, with IT’s Jackson Robert Scott the troubled moppet in thrall to malevolent forces.
The adult cast — led by Taylor Schilling (Orange Is The New Black) — show willing but the horror rarely gets out of second gear, plodding mechanically through its predictable beats, right down to the inevitable sticky end for the family pet.
For a more sophisticated and more rewarding chiller, watch The Hole In The Ground, which came out last week and isn’t nearly so reliant on garden shears for its scares.
★★☆☆☆
MOST READ IN FILM
Eye For An Eye
(15) 93 mins, out now
IT’S such a fine line between clever and stupid. The makers of this laughably poor crime caper perhaps thought they were wryly subverting noir tropes, rather than lazily stumbling over them. Almost so bad it’s entertaining, this ultimately fails to clear even that low bar.
John Travolta is the schlubby private investigator with a cat called Raymond (as in Chandler, presumably) and Barry Gibb’s beard. His real-life daughter Ella Bleu plays the young widow at the heart of what passes for the intrigue.
Familiar faces include Robert Patrick, Famke Janssen and an alarmingly hefty Brendan Fraser, to whom the years have been crueller than any ancient mummy’s curse.
If it’s just about plausible those three needed the money, what Morgan Freeman is doing in dross like this is anyone’s guess. That poser is the closest this has to a compelling mystery.
★☆☆☆☆
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News Photo Check out this week’s top DVD picks from the pitch-black Swedish comedy Border to telly epic Chernobyl
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