Screentime: His House is a genuinely spine-chilling horror flick; and Borat is back
Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat
Fourteen years on from his big screen debut, the inimitable Kazakh journalist Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) returns in the aptly titled (16s). Previously sentenced to hard labour for single-handedly causing his country’s economic collapse, Borat is offered a reprieve: travel to America and offer US Vice-President Mike Pence a gift — Johnny the Monkey, the Kazakh Minister for Culture — designed to restore harmonious relations between the US and Kazakhstan. Alas for Borat, his teenage daughter Turat (Maria Bakalova) eats Johnny the Monkey, leaving Borat with no choice but to offer Turat instead.
Citing the more outrageous aspects of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm would take up most of the review: suffice to say that the sting in which Donald Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, is caught in a hotel room in a compromising position with Turat is merely one of a long line of scenarios in which the ingenuous Borat lays bare casual sexism, racism and anti-Semitism as he motors his horsebox from Texas to New York. There’s a strange kind of pathos at play here, in that Borat’s targets often seem to play along with his dim-witted schtick simply to spare his feelings; that said, when Borat is espousing what amounts to a fascist philosophy, it’s hard to feel sympathy for those who get caught out. Some of the scenarios feel too good to be true, and give rise to the nagging suspicion that they may have been staged, but it’s in the more audacious, off-the-cuff scenes — Rudy Giuliani’s honey-trap, Borat’s invading a Mike Pence speech dressed as Donald Trump — that the movie really earns its stripes. Blackly comic, and at times breathtakingly brutal in its assault on good taste, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is funny, flawed and unmissable. (Amazon Prime)
Having trekked all the way from war-torn South Sudan to the suburbs of London, asylum seekers Bol (Sope Dirisu) and Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) find themselves living in His House (15A), a poky, rundown affair on a bleak estate.
Soon, however, the couple discovers that they are sharing their new accommodation with a ghostly presence. Are Bol and Rial simply hallucinating as a result of PTSD? Is grief causing them to conjure up what they most desperately want to see? Or is there something more sinister hiding in the walls? Written and directed by Remi Weekes, from a story by Felicity Evans and Toby Venables, His House is that rarest of beasts, an original horror movie. It’s a layered story, in which Remi Weekes alludes to the pressure experienced by Rial and Bol to be ‘one of the good ones’, ie, a couple willing to assimilate themselves into their new environment, and which suggests that the haunting they experience is in part that of their tortured consciences made manifest as they divest themselves of their history and culture. There’s a gripping backstory too, one which explores the couple’s harrowing journey to Britain, and which involves the kind of unsupportable grief that might unhinge even the strongest mind.
(15A) stars Drew Fonteiro as Sam, an ambulance paramedic who has struggled since he was a child with the guilt of not saving his younger sister from drowning. When Sam is murdered in cold blood by Tyler (Tyler Fleming), who has discovered that Sam is having an affair with Tyler’s wife Mia (Melissa Macedo), Sam doesn’t die. Instead, he finds himself inhabiting the body of Jay (Marc Menchaca), his best friend, who is married to Mia’s sister Poppy (Michelle Macedo).
Written by Robi Michael and Gal Katzir, with Michael directing, Every Time I Die is an absorbing drama despite failing to explain how Sam might be able to transmigrate from one body to another every time he dies. Indeed, the metaphysical aspect of how Sam responds to his regular resurrections is more interesting than the wildly improbable plot, as a number of actors incorporate Sam’s defining characteristics into their own performance to persuade us that Sam is alive and desperate to keep Mia safe from the sociopathic Tyler. Intriguing and thought-provoking, Every Time I Die is a solid psychological thriller that doesn’t quite deliver on the promise of its quirky title. (various platforms)
