We meet the artists behind The

“The web is like a forest in a fairytale”

Manipulate’s intriguing 2022 programme is full of themes around folk-myth, identity, taboo and desire. We chat to artists involved, Sadiq Ali and the Snap-Elastic collective, about how these ideas surface in their shows, The Chosen Haram and Eat Me

Interview: Eliza Gearty

Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic

Eat Me, Snap-Elastic

Maybe it’s to do with the fact that it takes place in deepest, darkest winter, when most festivities have passed but the days remain short, dark and bleak. Or maybe it's because it’s Scotland’s leading celebration of puppetry, one of the world’s most ancient and most ritualistic forms of theatre. Whatever the reason, Manipulate has always felt a little Fairy Tale Noir. The Edinburgh-based festival, produced and delivered annually by Puppet Animation Scotland, commonly veers towards art that seems uncanny, inventive and unique, and stories that feel simultaneously age-old and cutting-edge. This year’s programme is no exception. It features a range of shows with echoes of magic and myth, from Daniel Livingstone and Petre Dobre’s keenly visual interpretation of The Sandman to Adrien M and Claire B’s VR ‘odyssey’ fable. But all of these shows are also decisively contemporary – exploring current-day themes around identity, sexuality, climate crisis and global unrest – and push the envelope when it comes to form and style. We chat to some of the artists behind two very different shows at Manipulate this year, The Chosen Haram and Eat Me, about merging ancient motifs with new ideas, freedom, stigmatised desire and why the internet could be the dark forest or the locked door of the modernday fairytale.

The Chosen Haram Opening Manipulate Festival this year is The Chosen Haram, Sadiq Ali’s piece about a Muslim man called Ahmad who falls in love with a man called Steve. Drawn from his experiences growing up in Edinburgh, where “one side of life was going to Mosque and prayers, and the other side of life was discovering I am a queer person,” the show blends Chinese pole with visual and physical theatre to tell a story of sexuality, faith, addiction and connection. In a sense, The Chosen Haram follows the same narrative structure as the mythical ‘Hero’s Journey’. The show’s protagonist Ahmad goes on an ‘adventure’, where he is required to overcome a number of ‘barriers, both social and cultural’ in order to reach happiness and fulfilment. In the case of The Chosen Haram, this ‘adventure’ is symbolised by the dating app. “[Online dating] can be a chance to find liberation and freedom, especially if you’re in quite a restrictive environment or framework,” says Ali. “It can be quite a discreet way to get out of that.” But Ahmad’s leap into the unknown is, classically, not solely liberating, and throws up some of its own challenges. “What I found, particularly from living in London for a number of years, is that on one side you have this opportunity for liberation and for freedom, and on the other you have the reality of the chemsex [scene] and drugs and sex underworld within the gay community that is very accessible through apps,” Ali says. “So you have a chance to find freedom but you also have a chance to find self-destruction.”

Eat Me The female-led collective Snap-Elastic were inspired to make their show Eat Me by an unnerving story that is almost too disturbing to print. A real-life incident of ‘consensual cannibalism’ led them to begin developing the piece in 2015 (google it at your own risk). “It interested us - the act of something being consensual, and the shifting complexities of consent,” explains Isy Sharman, one-fourth of Snap-Elastic. “The framing of what is normal and what’s sick – it kind of enters that conversation a little bit, in terms of what society deems as appropriate, even if it’s a consensual, private experience between two people. This is what drew us to the idea.” An unexpected dynamic at the heart of the show, which won’t be revealed here, subverts the traditional idea of what we consider when we think about violent acts like cannibalism. “This sort of violence is so hard for us to understand as a society,” says Eszter Marsalko, another member of the group who worked on the project. “But what if [they both view it as] an act of love? That was what interested us – the meeting of violence and love.” The show also came out of the collective’s interests and frustrations with true crime and Nordic noir. “That image of women being chased through the forest by men, the glorification of the violence against women – we wanted to pick apart some of these tropes,” adds Snap-Elastic’s Claire Willoughby. Predator and Prey, as they are called in the show, meet one another on the dark web. Willougby notes that the dark web can be “a place of escape for a lot of people, somewhere where if you have nothing to fear, you have nothing to hide.” The dark web “somehow reflects the idea of the woods in fairytales, where people disappear to and come back changed,” says Willoughby. “They can be a place of liberation or transformation, where you escape the restrictions of society. And that felt like a really clear connection to us.”

Manipulate Festival runs in Edinburgh from 28 Jan-5 Feb

The Chosen Haram is at Summerhall, 28 Jan

Eat Me is at the Studio, Festival Theatre, 30 & 31 Jan

manipulatefestival.org

Photo: Glen McCarty

Review January 2022 –

Music Now

January can often be a barren wasteland in terms of releases, but there’s new music this month from Niteworks, Goodnight Louisa, Kathryn Joseph and more

Words: Tallah Brash

Following a handful of performances with the Tinderbox Orchestra at the likes of Hidden Door and the Pianodrome, the inimitable Kathryn Joseph has been working with 30 musicians from the collective to deliver orchestral versions of three of her songs – The Weary and The Blood from SAY Award winning album Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled, and Weight taken from her second album From When I Wake the Want Is. The resulting three-track EP, aptly titled The Blood, The Weight, The Weary, takes Joseph’s compositions and songwriting to new heights; careful not to lose the feel of the originals, it’s almost as if they’ve been coloured in here – keeping inside the lines – and given a new lease of life. In short, it’s quite something. The EP is set for a digital-only release via Bandcamp

Photo: Craig McIntosh Photo: Kat Gollock

Goodnight Louisa

Photo: Marilena Vlachopoulou on 29 January and will be launched with a special collaborative performance as part of this year’s Celtic Connections festival at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on the same day, the sort of show that doesn’t come along too often. Also celebrating the launch of a brand new record at Celtic Connections this month is Randolph’s Leap frontman Adam Ross, who releases his debut solo album, Staring At Mountains, on 14 January via Olive Grove Records. Stepping away from the indie-folk collective he’s worked with for over a decade, Staring At Mountains sees Ross working with external musicians for the first time, with stunning violin accompaniment from Pedro Cameron (Man of the Minch) and gorgeous backing vocals from Jenny Sturgeon. Although it’s a much more sombre affair than what we’re used to from Randolph’s Leap, Ross’s storytelling and songwriting is still second to none here, and his unique sense of humour and delightful rhyming couplets can still be found on tracks like Alice & Christine: ‘Alice lived in Berwick / Upon Tweed with her dad Derek / While Christine lived in Lerwick / Way Up in the Shetland Isles / They kept in touch by letter / Christine said the day she met her / She would send a Fair Isle sweater’. Across the record there’s an effortless warmth in the stripped-back nature of the compositions made up of just acoustic guitar, violin and vocals, and it just sounds undeniably Scottish and like a big warm hug. Catch Ross at The Hug & Pint on 21 January as part of Celtic Connections. There’s more exceptional songwriting from East Kilbride singer-songwriter Michael Timmons this month too as he releases his second album, The Lightness of the Dread, on 28 January via Gargleblast Records. Produced by Andy Miller (Mogwai, Songs: Ohia, Life Without Buildings) and with input from The Twilight Sad’s Andy MacFarlane (Timmons is due to support the Sad on a run of January dates), The Lightness of Dread beautifully explores the grief Timmons experienced following the death of his father, and trying to find the light in dark times – something many can relate to. Instrumentally, the album is clean and uncluttered with additional flourishes here and there, only when absolutely necessary. Timmons’ voice is the true star here; full of so much delicate and heartfelt emotion, it’s hard not to get lost in. Not long after the breakup of Edinburgh band SKJØR, 2019 saw lead singer Louise McCraw launch her solo project Goodnight Louisa, with the super catchy Hollow God marking a decidedly darker, more synth-led electronic direction for McCraw. On 21 January more of those lovely warm electronics, synth-pop and exceptional vocals can be heard across her debut album, Human Danger. “Each of the songs is about a different aspect of human danger,” McCraw explains, “of how dangerous the world has become when we disregard others so easily, and put our own desires ahead of them.” The album tackles subjects from women’s safety (‘Fuck the dark / I’m sick of being scared / Of all that lurks behind my shoulders / When I walk alone / My keys between my fingers’ she sings on Only a Matter of Time, while she later pleads ‘Get your hands off my girlfriend’ on a track of the same name) to myths around female perfection which she tackles on Diana, an unsettling tale of a dream she had about Princess Diana when she was ill, resulting in Diana telling McCraw: ‘Gotta save the world, even if it kills you’. Human Danger is an exceptional debut, its 11 gleaming tracks as heavily indebted to 80s synthpop as they are to the likes of Daughter. Following a longlisted nomination for their second album Air Fàir An Là in 2019, Isle of Skye electro-trad fusion outfit Niteworks return this month with their third record, A ‘Ghrian. Due on 14 January, A ‘Ghrian is a grand affair, featuring more of what we’ve come to love about the band; pulsing dance grooves effortlessly and uniquely melded together with traditional Celtic sounds. As well as the Gaelic language being celebrated once more, for the first time the four-piece have incorporated English folk and Scots songs into their music to stunning effect. “With this album we’ve sought to create a more expansive sound that’s cinematic in its nature,” drummer Ruairidh Graham says of the record. “We were partly inspired by our work writing the music for Edinburgh’s Hogmanay Fare Well film that reflected on what 2020 had been like for many during the pandemic. The nature of the project required broad expansive sounds, and that led to us going further in that direction through the writing and recording of the album.” While this fusion of sound might sound jarring and perhaps not be for everyone, dance music fans and trad aficionados will definitely find something here to like. Elsewhere, Glasgow band Twin Atlantic, now a duo, release new album Transparency (7 Jan), John Wills and Pinkie Maclure, aka Pumajaw, release their latest album Scapa Foolscap (21 Jan); Beerjacket releases his latest album Handstands (28 Jan), and on the following page you’ll find a full review of Euphoria, the debut EP from Glasgow post-punks VLURE. There’s a smattering of singles due this month too, with Edinburgh duo Slim Wrist, fka Super Inuit, releasing the atmospheric Shone (28 Jan), the second single under their new name; Lou McLean and Berta Kennedy release their debut collaborative effort, Shelf Life (24 Jan) and Jill Lorean releases Mothers (26 Jan).

Kathryn Joseph

Music

Bonobo Fragments Ninja Tune, 14 Jan rrrrr

Listen to: Tides, Otomo, Closer

MØ Motordrome RCA, 28 Jan rrrrr

Listen To: Youth Is Lost, Cool to Cry, Goosebumps After wrestling with writer’s block through lockdown, Simon Green, aka Bonobo, has resurfaced with a masterpiece in wistful, cathartic electronica, his seventh studio album Fragments. Its title refers to the ideas that he struggled to perfect alone, which only came unstuck through collaborations with artists like Jamila Woods, Joji and Jordan Rakei, offering new flavours to his contemplative stamp. Influences from Detroit house emerge on Rosewood and Sapien, while a pootling synth on Shadows resembles Mr Scruff. The biggest surprise is Otomo, where O’Flynn has transformed Bonobo’s sample of Bulgarian choir 100 Kaba-Gaidi into a pulsing arrangement with an 808 drop and compulsive beat. The choir raises its voice to a wail as O’Flynn’s bass roars through, together evoking the euphoria of the dancefloor that Bonobo was missing last year. True to form, Bonobo builds a heart-rending motif throughout the record from looped waves of Lara Somogyi’s harp. ‘We won’t be dry soon, here come the tides’, sings Jamila Woods on Tides, encapsulating the ebb and flow of nature, of lockdowns, and of unprecedented times. Bonobo has constructed a bittersweet yet hopeful companion to this late stage of the pandemic, holding space both for grief and a blissful renewal. [Becca Inglis] Yard Act The Overload Zen F.C. / Island Records, 21 Jan rrrrr

Listen to: Tall Poppies, Dead Horse, The Overload

Despite lending her vocals to what was once one of the world’s biggest songs (Major Lazer’s megahit Lean On had the summer of 2015 in a headlock), Danish pop sensation MØ remains an alternative figure in the world of pop. Her unique blend of cool and collected electro-pop examines new depths on her third album Motordrome. There’s lots to enjoy here. The violin-heavy opener Kindness sets the tone for an album which doubles down on the theatrics of the lyrics. Her voice has rarely sounded better than it does on the menacing and seductive Youth Is Lost, a song which playfully namechecks The Little Mermaid one minute, lamenting the brevity of human life the next. Other highlights include anthemic sad gal singalong Cool to Cry, end-of-thenight yearning power ballad Goosebumps and the sexy guitardriven Hip Bones. Brad Pitt is an ode to MØ’s childhood crush, and the actor’s relationship with Juliette Lewis. The song contains the refrain: ‘If we never make it, I’m OK with it’. You get the sense that – really – she’s far from OK with it. These are songs for dark evenings in big cities, dancing through heartbreak. For when you feel small, but anything feels possible. [Tara Hepburn] Continuing their brand of dance-worthy, 80s-influenced indie-pop, Fickle Friends return with a pure party of a record. ‘Isn’t it nice to just live in the moment?’ vocalist Natassja Shiner fittingly asks on fizzing single IRL. Like all good parties, there’s an overwhelming buzz of feeling alive that’s reflected sonically, jumping from one hook-laced chorus to another, with lyrics like honest drunken confessions and wholehearted discussions about life, love and every other struggle in between. Yeah Yeah Yeah vents frustration at existing with a lack of purpose; Pretty Great is a pretty great jam that bops along to the story of kissing someone at a party and being too wasted to remember their name, while Glow is a buoyant thank you note to the person giving Shiner back her shine. Hell, they even know how to clear the room with the simmering down closer that hits like the brick wall of ‘time to go home’ sobriety at 4am. Ironically, for an album called Are We Gonna Be Alright?, the record feels far more like a soundtrack for forgetting such big questions, and instead, favours just letting it all go to some seriously sugary pop for a little while. [Dylan Tuck]

Fickle Friends Are We Gonna Be Alright? Cooking Vinyl, 14 Jan rrrrr

Listen To: Pretty Great, Glow, IRL Of all the post-punk newcomers cluttering BBC Radio 6 Music right now, Yard Act might be the Fallest of them all. Frontman James Smith’s Northern grit is present and correct, not to mention the alternating cynicism, disgust and earnest desire for something more than the status quo. A character-driven lyrical thread ties the album’s concerns together (i.e. the trappings of capitalism) but musically, Yard Act are all over the shop. They borrow from brooding post-punk (Tall Poppies), minimalism + woodblock (Rich), pseudo-electro (Payday) and even Britpop’s earwormy guitar-pop (The Overload, Witness). But it all makes for a rich palette to wax lyrical about ‘concrete meadows of the soul’ or the brilliant summation of everything terrifying about little England: ‘Morris-dancing to Sham 69’. It’s a little front-loaded as the first three songs are by far the most immediate and memorable. But luckily, Tall Poppies anchors the closing songs with its six-plus minutes, painting a grim portrait of dreary, provincial life without being condescending or reductive. It’s a beautifully nuanced tale that offsets the snarky nature of the rest of the album, something that makes the final note of sincere hopefulness on 100% Endurance earned rather than forced. [Lewis Wade]

Pan Daijing Tissues PAN, 21 Jan rrrrr

Listen to: Tissues (all four movements in full)

Blood Red Shoes Ghosts On Tape Jazz Life, 14 Jan rrrrr

Listen to: Murder Me, Give Up, I Lose Whatever I Own Taken from her 2019 exhibition-performance of the same name, Tissues continues Pan Daijing’s experiments in creating music that blends industrial electronics and operatic vocals into something that pushes through creeping disquiet into places that are ecstatically moving. Of course there is a sense of something being lost without the benefit of the performance the piece was meant to accompany, but the music more than holds its own. Though comprising a sonic palette familiar from Daijing’s previous work, the piece is a more expansive effort, both spatially and structurally, unfurling across 50 minutes as one extended track. As such there are long passages that feel like some kind of inhaling, a piece gathering itself before bursting forth, which when it does is always impactful. These gathering moments never feel like aimless meanderings though, every moment has a tension to it, constantly teetering between the potential for something gorgeous or something terrifying. This patience and gradual development is key, as the rewards, such as the hammered chords accompanying the whole soundscape growling back to life in the piece’s closing movement, are spectacular. It adds up to a remarkable work of often queasy beauty that never releases its grip. [Joe Creely] VLURE Euphoria So Young Records, 14 Jan rrrrr

Listen to: Heartbeat, I Won’t Run (From Love)

Blood Red Shoes have come a long way since the boring days by the Brighton sea of their debut in 2008. 2019’s Get Tragic marked the band’s first material for five years, ushering in a decidedly more digital sound, with members of 2:54 and Tigercub helping reproduce the electro odyssey live.

Ghosts On Tapes picks up on this synthesised sheen. Give Up finds Ansell channelling the new era of furious racketeers in his spit-fuelled vocals before we wig out into a cosmic synth wormhole. And, as the name suggests, the album deals with the spectres of BRS past and present, something Grammy-nominated producer Tom Dalgety plays up to with paranormal white noise and ominous mid-song segues looming. For a pair that have been intrinsically linked for 17 years though, there’s a surprising amount of solo songs. Thankfully, the latter half of the record finally sees the pair fuse together into the die-hard dichotomy we’ve come to adore. I Lose Whatever I Own boasts an Elephant-sized glam riff while Dig a Hole gleans from Tropical Fuck Storm’s whirlwind of psych wooziness and welcome flange. Ever the musical misfits, Blood Red Shoes’ righteous spirit remains even if their sound is a shape-shifting entity. [Cheri Amour] Years & Years Night Call Polydor, 21 Jan rrrrr

Listen to: Starstruck, Crave Glasgow’s music scene has long been known for leaning into the theatrics, and unashamedly so. With the likes of Walt Disco, The Ninth Wave and Lucia & the Best Boys all offering their own unique takes on goth, glam-rock and post-punk, fellow Glasgow-based five-piece VLURE present a darker edge. Having reinvented their sound over lockdown, VLURE really embrace their electronic influences on their debut EP Euphoria. The influence of coldwave and techno is evident on Show Me How to Live Again and Heartbeat, with their pulsing synths and thrashing drums, while frontman Hamish Hutcheson’s snarly vocals channel the spirit of The Prodigy’s Keith Flint. The Storm and Euphoria showcase the band’s softer side, though, incorporating more classical instrumentation like strings and piano. Meanwhile, lead single I Won’t Run (From Love) is about as 80s-indebted as a track can come, with its glistening synths and wistful harmonies. VLURE’s Euphoria EP is intense, menacing and, ironically, not particularly euphoric – or at least not in the traditional sense. But the EP presents an interesting new direction for VLURE, and it’s one that shows some very promising potential. [Nadia Younes]

When it was announced in March last year that Years & Years would be continuing as a solo project, something about the band’s statement felt a bit off. Describing the upcoming album as “an Olly endeavour”, it seemed that the former trio – made up of Olly Alexander, Mikey Goldsworthy and Emre Türkmen – had different visions for the release. The resulting release, Night Call, sounds disappointingly dated. Where the band’s previous records were packed with euphoric, club-ready anthems, the tracks on Night Call too often lean into pop music clichés. Lead single Starstruck is probably the album’s strongest moment, but even it sounds like it might have originally been written for another popstar, ironically, also called Olly. Sweet Talker ticks all the usual chart hit boxes yet still falls flat; Immaculate sounds like a Pitbull B-side that almost didn’t even make the cut at all, while Strange and Unusual slightly breaks the mould but fails to reach the climax we’re longing for. Unfortunately, Olly Alexander’s first solo outing as Years & Years doesn’t quite hit the mark, but even though they may be few and far between, there are still some glimmers of potential on Night Call. [Nadia Younes]

Scotland on Screen:

Will Hewitt and Austen McCowan

We sit down with Will Hewitt and Austen McCowan, the duo behind production company Melt the Fly, at their studio in Leith to discuss the formation of their partnership, their recent Scottish BAFTA success and what we can look forward to next

Interview: Rohan Crickmar

Filmography: Long Live My Happy Head (2021), Harmonic Spectrum (2021), Sink or Skim (2019), Instruments in the Architecture: Building the Pianodrome (2019)

I: @meltthefly meltthefly.com

Wiltshire-born Will Hewitt and Edinburgh native Austen McCowan are the creative minds behind the Leithbased production company Melt the Fly. We’re speaking to them at their studio on Pitt Street in Leith a few weeks after they won a Scottish BAFTA for Harmonic Spectrum, their splendid short documentary following a musician navigating life on the autistic spectrum through his piano work. The pair first began working together as teens while finishing their A-levels in Doha, Qatar around 2010. This change of environment exposed them both to an inspirational arts teacher, and for McCowan, it was his first real access to the potentials of photography. It also gave them plenty of time to ruminate. As Hewitt puts it, “Doha made it much easier to focus on creative work, as there wasn’t a lot else to do.” On completing their schooling, Hewitt returned to England to study at Falmouth University, while McCowan went first to Stevenson College in Edinburgh, before studying at Duncan of Jordanstone in Dundee. It was during McCowan’s period of study on Tayside that he and Hewitt began filming a local bluegrass band called Wire & Wool. Hewitt was still working in England at this point, but was travelling up to visit his good friend and pursue their mutual love of documentary. “These were pretty chaotic shoots and we managed to make our mistakes there, even if we didn’t have a film to show for it in the end,” says Hewitt. By the mid-2010s, McCowan had begun establishing himself as a freelance cameraperson and drone operator. He was working out of Paul Bock’s Studio 128, where the Melt the Fly offices are now housed. Hewitt joined him in Edinburgh in March 2018, after which point the pair have never really looked back. The early support and continued mentoring from documentarian Amy Hardie (The Edge of Dreaming, Seven Songs for a Long Life) was crucial in helping Hewitt and McCowan realise the true ambition and scope of their early short film project Sink or Skim. This delightful half-hour documentary about the World Stone Skimming Championship in Easdale was commissioned by Louise Thornton at BBC Scotland, alongside works by Hannah Currie (Lumo: Too Young to Die) and Léa Luiz de Oliveira (Spit it Out). Both filmmakers are also keen to acknowledge the opportunities and support given by Noé Mendelle at the Scottish Documentary Institute (SDI). Not only Photo: Duncan McGlynn did Harmonic Spectrum emerge out of the SDI’s flagship short doc scheme Bridging the Gap, but their forthcoming feature debut, Long Live My Happy Head (2022), was offered invaluable support and networking opportunities through SDI’s pitching forum The Edinburgh Pitch. “It was really through conversations at the Edinburgh Pitch that we were able to get commissioned by Tony Nellany at BBC Scotland,” says McCowan.Austen McCowan (L) and Will Hewitt (R) at the BAFTA Scotland Awards Behind the scenes of Harmonic Spectrum

When asked about their recent Scottish BAFTA success with Harmonic Spectrum, both filmmakers say they “never expected it to happen.” For Hewitt, it was just “really pleasing to hear that people outside of our little corner of the industry liked our film,” while for McCowan, “the audience that will now be brought to the film will be that much bigger.” The film is both a portrait piece, in keeping with the bulk of their documentary work thus far, and an exploration of the misunderstandings surrounding autism spectrum disorder (ASD). McCowan sincerely hopes that the film will “change people’s attitudes and ideas about neurodivergence” and continues by saying that a cornerstone of his work with Hewitt is that they look to “use film in a way that is also beneficial to society.” Among the many influences they have had on their rapidly developing filmmaking careers, Hewitt wanted to give particular attention to Jerry Rothwell and his film The Reason I Jump and the work of Charlie Russell, especially Chris Packham: Asperger’s and Me and Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die. On Russell’s filmmaking, McCowan mentioned his “very personable and poignant style and his knack for teasing out information in interviews” as being particularly influential. So what'snext for Melt the Fly? Long Live My Happy Head is set to air on BBC Scotland in the new year and is being represented for international sales by Berlin-based agency Rise and Shine, headed up by Stefan Kloos (Last Men in Aleppo). The duo are also in the early stages of development on a new mid-length documentary about “Scotland’s very own homemovie action hero.” We look forward to hearing more beyond that mysterious logline, but Hewitt and McCowan tell us the project will explore the potential of a returnable format and will draw heavily upon some of those mistakes made in their early days, and some of the friends they met along the way. They are also looking to build a production slate at Melt the Fly and as a result, are keen to hear from new directors who have great access to interesting characters and stories.

A Hero Director: Asghar Farhadi Starring: Amir Jadidi, Mohsen Tanabandeh, Fereshteh Sadr Orafaee rrrrr

Even in a cinematic tradition renowned for its unparalleled subtlety and moral thorniness, there is still no one doing it quite like Asghar Farhadi. With A Hero, the Iranian new wave director returns with another Catch-22 tale of ethical quagmire, a pressure cooker of a social realist piece that battens down Iran’s rigid structures of honour, propriety and obligation, and waits for the inevitable explosion. The titular hero is Rahim (Amir Jadidi), a puppy-eyed divorcé imprisoned for an outstanding debt. When his girlfriend discovers a bag of lost gold, it sets off a domino effect of misunderstandings and ethical quandaries. As with most of Farhadi’s films, the catalysts that sink his protagonist deeper into dilemma seem incidental, but Farhadi knows well how the ground beneath can collapse with the thinnest fracture, how the court of public opinion can turn on the smallest dime. Set in Iran and definitively occupied with the country’s strict social mores, A Hero is nevertheless Farhadi’s most universal film yet, concerned less with categorising Rahim as hero or charlatan than with what it means to behave ethically and unselfishly in an increasingly visible world, where every act – even the quietest – is laid out for public consumption. “One can always prioritise good deeds over personal interest,” Rahim is told. Yet as the boundaries between public and private, moral and performative, collapse, who can say where the difference lies. [Anahit Behrooz]

Released 7 Jan by Curzon; certificate TBC

Parallel Mothers Director: Pedro Almodóvar Starring: Penélope Cruz, Milena Smit rrrrr

A chaotic whirl of vivid colour and misunderstanding fit for the horniest and queerest of Shakespeare plays, Pedro Almodóvar’s latest proves his audacious sensibility is going nowhere, even when treading his most politically mature ground.

Parallel Mothers first meets its two titular mothers, Janis (a powerhouse performance by Cruz) and teenaged Ana (enchanting up-andcomer Smit), on the brink of expectancy and traces their paths in the following years as they – in contradiction to the film’s wry title – collide and intersect. The turns of Almodóvar’s script are too delightful to spoil, but suffice to say there is enough melodrama here for the trashiest telenovela, and neither mothers nor babies are quite who they seem. Yet what strikes most amid the relentless soap-operatic beats is Almodóvar’s subversively restrained approach, grounding each new plot twist in the emotional realities of these women: their quiet domesticities, their searing intimacies. This unexpected sobriety is bolstered by a half-subplot, half-framing device in which Janis employs the services of her eventual baby daddy to excavate the mass graves of those killed in her village during the Spanish Civil War. Coupled with a visual language that stresses a nonsexual kind of voyeurism – babies seen through monitors, photographer Janis framing her subjects through her lens – Parallel Mothers transforms into an unforgettable interrogation of the instability of historical memory, and the imperative of gazing unflinchingly at our collective, bloodied pasts. Intoxicatingly alive even amid death, this might be Almodóvar’s most radically human work yet. [Anahit Behrooz]

Released 28 Jan by Pathé; certificate 15

A Hero Memoria Parallel Mothers Nightmare Alley

Memoria Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul Starring: Tilda Swinton rrrrr

The films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul are impossibly tender and beguilingly strange – reorienting the way we relate to the mundane, they heighten the unassuming magic of the everyday with a gentle surrealism. Memoria is possibly Weerasethakul’s most sensorily transportative work yet, employing a cinematic language where what we hear takes full narrative precedence. Tilda Swinton plays Jessica, an English orchid farmer in Colombia who’s haunted by a mysterious loud bang that only she can hear. As she attempts to unearth the nature or origin of the sound, it seems that Memoria (Weerasethakul’s first film outside Thailand) is deeply concerned with the problem of translation. As Jessica painstakingly moulds both Spanish and English to describe the bang, the film unravels the deep fallibilities of language: how do we ever shape the verbal to perfectly approximate the aural, or communicate the isolating specificity of personal experience to someone else? An answer is suggested, and Memoria rewards its most open-minded listeners with a quietly dizzying revelation. Unreservedly patient with its stillness, the film creates space for the seamless erosion of boundaries between the past and the present, the earthly and the spectral. Reminding us that even a small stone carries centuries of rich history, Memoria invites us to become attuned to deep time, leaving us with the feeling that the landscapes around us are lush with secrets and memories – if only we would pay attention. A cerebral and elusive puzzle, Memoria creates echoes that reverberate long after we leave the cinema. [Xuanlin Tham]

Released 14 Jan by Sovereign Film Distribution; certificate TBC

Nightmare Alley Director: Guillermo del Toro Starring: Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara rrrrr

There’s clearly been plenty of cash thrown at this bravura remake of Edmund Goulding’s 1947 film noir. The cast is spilling over with talent; the 40s sets are resplendent; the cinematography is sumptuous. Happily, the lustre hasn’t diminished the story’s seedy streak. In Guillermo del Toro’s hands, this tale following the rapid rise and fall of a morally ambiguous hustler remains thrillingly tawdry. It’s a film of two halves. The first follows Bradley Cooper’s Stan Carlisle, a loner on the lam who finds a home at a travelling carnival trading in grotesque freak shows and saucy spectacle. He’s a born showman with an affinity for cheapjack mind-reading, which he masters under the tutelage of two seasoned mentalists (Toni Collette and David Strathairn). The second half sees Stan wowing city folk with a slicker, more sensationalist version of this act, but it’s here he encounters Cate Blanchett’s Lilith, a psychiatrist whose ability to read a mark exceeds his own. The performances make Nightmare Alley click. Blanchett is the standout as a wildly sultry femme fatale who’s part Barbara Stanwyck, part Hannibal Lecter. But the actors – and the jaw-dropping production design – are doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Despite stretching the runtime (this version is 40 minutes longer than Goulding’s), del Toro doesn’t find much psychological depth. The characters’ murky motivations dampen some of the ghoulish fun, but you won’t have much chance to grumble while you’re reeling from the acid in the face ending. [Jamie Dunn]

Released 21 Jan by Searchlight Pictures; certificate TBC