EIFF: Out There/These Violent Delights/Bodyhackers

Out There ⭐️⭐️⭐️

The year is 1994 and something strange is afoot in the rural Welsh village of Caradoc. Strange lights dance in the sky, especially above the dense forest on the outskirts of town, and there are rumours of an old testing facility still working away under the radar. This could well be a case for Mulder and Scully, but in the absence of an FBI presence (I think they’re too busy being turned into LEGO at the moment), a scrappy band of youths will have to step in to investigate. 

Their leader is Maz, played by Nerys Amber Stocks. Five years on from her stargazing father’s death in a workplace accident at the aforementioned ‘secret’ base, Maz, now an older teen, carries the starry-eyed torch of the family forward, pondering the existence of extraterrestrials through the lens of her inherited telescope. The true circumstances of her father’s passing are a mystery to her, and local UFO chatter intensifies, she is resolute that all answers lie with tracking down the little green men.

Along for the ride is her best friend, Elis, as well as local tin-hat toter Bryn, an ardent advocate for full disclosure, his campervan packed with years of research. Adding some star power to the cast – as well as a notable Welsh seal of approval – is Michael Sheen as Shifty Gruff, the local guru/spiritualist/hallucinogenics dealer. Even in ye olde 90s, multiple revenue streams really were the way to go. He gets a lot of the funniest lines (he doesn’t communicate telepathically; just telephonically). 

While the humour is hit and miss across the wider film, it has an undeniably big heart and stands as an enjoyable throwback to 80s youth flicks like The Goonies and The Lost Boys. Its Welshie spirit and its apt needle drops carry it through, though it could stand to be a lot more eccentric.

These Violent Delights ⭐️⭐️

From Scottish Ballet comes These Violent Delights, an unorthodox retelling of Romeo and Juliet that, like & Juliet before it, places the Capulet heiress at its core. Its title echoes the speech given by Friar Laurence – possibly the most infamous example of a shoddy texter – at the star-crossed pair’s wedding: ‘These violent delights have violent ends’. 

I feel duty-bound to confess that I know very little about ballet outside of annually revisiting The Nutcracker, but dance, as an art form, may well be the rawest medium of them all. With so little to go off of, your immediate emotional response and your investment in the movement playing out on-stage is one of the key metrics with which to gauge the production. 

While I’ve loved ballet performances in the past – the ones that matched the undeniable artistry of the dancing itself with a fantastic sense of place, plot or character – this film simply didn’t speak to me in the same way. All performers are perfectly capable and there’s interesting imagery at play, with Juliet often beset on all sides by a shifting mass of masked dancers, all scrambling to get their hands on her, seemingly representing the inevitability of her eventual fate. 

The unconventional approach to the story, however, left me unsure of where we were in the narrative. It’s one of the most famous stories of our time, so you can see why a creative team would want to find another way of approaching it – instead focusing much more on the later acts of the play, involving Juliet’s sleeping draught and Romeo’s poison – but I often found the shifting perspectives and non-linear storytelling obstructive. I’d have much preferred a more simplistic yet confident and sure portrayal as a means of better showcasing an obviously talented group.  

Bodyhackers ⭐️

Portuguese director Carlos Conceição grapples with a confusing yarn of plastic surgery gone wrong in this eighty-minute feature. It’s light on substance, yet feels rather like a Lite version of 2024’s The Substance, which covered similarly cautionary ground to critical acclaim. 

The film’s marketing tees up Joana Ribeiro’s Renée as the star – an ex-ballerina with self esteem (or perhaps just eyesight) problems. As with so many of these stories, she’s a gorgeous woman by all accounts, yet still feels an acute sense of dissatisfaction when she catches her own reflection. An early shot sells this quite well as the image warps to and fro, curving her features like a funhouse mirror. Rather than check her prescription, she falls right into the hands of the immediately seedy Virtruvo Beauty Corp, where she undergoes a metamorphic transformation.

Once we’ve garnered a connection with Renée, Conceição swiftly abandons her in favour of a lengthy storyline with McCaul Lombardi’s Denver, a brooding and boring bloke who we first meet literally getting picked up off the street. He’s technically the love interest, but he spends most of the movie off galavanting with just about every other woman he can find while she heals post-surgery. His travels take him to a garden party populated by all manner of walking, talking surgical oddities. They’re vaguely interesting additions, with ears and appendages in all the wrong places, but Denver gets to boinking them with a speed reminiscent of Bond’s exploits at the mountaintop clinic in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

The interactions between patients are superficially interesting, but they uniformly descend into similarly raunchy territory that doesn’t feel nearly as subversive and exciting as the director clearly wants it to be. The same goes for the ‘central’ relationship between Denver and Renée, which goes on the backburner for the entire second act before Conceição attempts to revive it in the final twenty minutes. The pair have no chemistry to speak of, and so you, like EE in the Old Town mid-Fringe, just don’t believe in their connection at all. 

Several scenes happen with no context whatsoever, which makes them feel as though they were randomly plucked out of a hat and stitched together in a purely arbitrary order. Perhaps that’s an intentional choice meant to have us doubting what’s real and what’s fake, but the result is baffling. A jet-black horse makes a handful of appearances, too. A noble steed, I’m sure, but a complete ass-pull in terms of any plot significance whatsoever.