The Big Picture Magazine
In its opening scenes, Julia Ducournau’s Raw establishes Justine (Garance Marillier) as a strict vegetarian; when she finds a piece of meat in her mashed potatoes at a buffet, she spits it out with repulsion. However, through a series of increasingly squirm-inducing moments, Ducournau traces her protagonist’s journey to the polar opposite of the gastronomic spectrum: […]
Éric Rohmer was fascinated by philosopher Blaise Pascal’s ‘wager’ of faith, a literal gamble one takes in either believing or not believing in God. Believing is the best ‘bet’ one can make, since there is no way of losing: “If you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager that he exists […]
The central location in Andrei Tarkovsky’s meditative Stalker sounds like something out of a fairy tale: deep within “The Zone” – a mysterious and ever-shifting landscape left on Earth by some unknown entity – is a room that realises its inhabitants’ deepest desires. In theory, this location should be a gift, and perhaps it was […]
Rainbow imagery plays a central role in Stanley Kubrick’s final film, the enigmatic Eyes Wide Shut.
The Game is a film about awareness and relationships, with Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas), a wealthy businessman protagonist who keeps the world at a considered distance. Van Orton reduces almost all relationships to services – an that fits the capitalist economy in which he operates. His world is constructed of near-hermetically sealed spheres: the private […]
Murmur of the Heart consists of two halves: the first a celebration of youth, and the second an awakening to adulthood’s messy realities.
(Warning: This article contains plot spoilers) M. Night Shyamalan has undergone an identity crisis. The writer, director, and bit-part ‘actor’ of The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs and The Village came something of a mid-career cropper. With his subsequent movies failing to impress, Shyamalan went from being the new master of suspense and king of the […]
Adam Wingard uses close attention to sightlines and shot-reverse-shot editing to atomise and dislocate relations in a grief-stricken New Mexico family in their 2014 horror-thriller The Guest. The Petersons have lost their eldest son, Caleb, who has died in combat whilst fighting for the US army. The unexpected arrival of David (Dan Stevens), a charismatic […]
Some of the best horror films, from Rosemary’s Baby (1968) to The Shining (1980), are fueled by subverting qualities often associated with family, such as safety, loyalty, and trust. While the thought of being murdered is terrifying in and of itself, it is even more disturbing when the perpetrator is a family member. Severin Fiala […]