teach me the art of war

Fire and Bones by Kathy Reichs: This is a Temperance Brennan novel, also of Bones TV show fame, chosen with no regard for series order but simply because it's the one my library happened to have available for immediate ebook download when I wanted it. This didn't seem to matter, as it usually doesn't in this kind of long-running crime series. There was some stuff about a relationship in the background that was clearly part of a longer-running arc, but it was pretty self-explanatory and neither took up much page space nor made any difference to the main mystery plot. That said, it was a very odd reading experience, in ways I don't think are accounted for just by not knowing Temperance's full backstory.

( No spoilers, just thoughts )

Naked in Death by JD Robb (AKA Nora Roberts): JD Robb is the penname Nora Roberts uses for her near-future, lightly sci-fi tinged crime/romance genre mashup novels. I did start this series in the correct order, at the strict urging of my mother, who has been dying to have someone to enthuse with about these books for ages and who pounced the moment I mentioned being in the mood for something quick, formulaic and exciting. This certainly fit the bill, although it also went to some dark places that I had definitely not osmosed to expect from Nora Roberts.

The protagonist Eve Dallas is a police lieutenant working in New York in the late 2050s. Guns have been outlawed; sex work has been legalised and heavily regulated for safety; despite these facts, sex workers are getting killed with guns in a string of clearly related homicides. Eve is assigned to the case as primary investigator, but her professionalism soon comes under threat from two directions: the nature of the case dredges up old wounds related to her own childhood trauma, while the romantic overtures of a mysterious, handsome, absurdly wealthy entrepreneur named Roarke start to win her over despite her best efforts to stay distant.

( More thoughts )

Deliver Me by Ashley Hawthorne: My adventures in pull-to-pub Reylo fic continue, and...oh, man. How do I even begin to review this one? I haven't had such warring feelings about a book since The Hurricane Wars. I think there's a common theme here where I have so much fannish goodwill towards these books that I give them leeway on flaws that would otherwise be an instant DNF, and then I end up enjoying them so much that I'm glad I gave them that leeway, but the flaws are still very much there and ARGH...

Let me start by saying that I unreservedly adore what this book is trying to be. It's about Mia, a Texan college student and devout (but very socially progressive) Christian who joins her Bible study's prison pen pal initiative and gets paired with Gabriel, who at 28 years old has been incarcerated since his mid-teens for the murder of his father. Mia soon comes to understand that Gabriel did not get a fair trial: abandoned by his remaining family, too young and traumatised to self-advocate, he was left to the mercy of an overworked, disinterested public defender and a media circus that the courts took no measures whatsoever to manage. His history of harrowing abuse and the desperate circumstances surrounding the altercation with his father were all excluded from evidence, and he was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life without parole when his mitigating circumstances should have reduced the conviction to second degree. He and Mia fall in love and begin a relationship through their correspondence; Mia becomes passionate about the brokenness of the Texas justice system and changes her major with the goal of becoming a lawyer; she also convinces a nihilistically resigned Gabriel to appeal his conviction in the hopes of a fairer retrial.

( Thoughts, technically with spoilers, though nothing you wouldn't guess from the first few chapters )

[REC] (2007): This is Spanish found footage horror about a zombie virus outbreak in an apartment complex, filmed by a TV reporting duo who get trapped in there while accompanying first responders for a workplace documentary feature. On the whole I thought it was well executed. The lead reporter went off the deep end and into "We have to film every second of this!!! We have to show them what's really happening!!!!!" territory faster than I thought was entirely convincing, but I was happy to write it off in-universe as her way of coping so that I could kick back and enjoy the grisly terror that ensued.

There are elements of the film that I have to imagine would have been more shocking pre-COVID. Locked inside your apartment building, you say? Prevented by police from seeking basic medical care and supplies, you say? Hazmat-suited biosafety officials roaming outside the window, you say? Well, we've all been there! But the zombies themselves were very scary, and the end scene with ( spoilers ) had me breathless.

Warm Bodies (2013): A zombie on the hunt for brains meets a girl out scavenging for medical supplies to take back to her walled city, and instead of falling to it, falls in love. The zombie (known only as R, since he can't remember his name or anything about his past life) saves her life (though only after eating her boyfriend) and decides he's going to help her: first by taking her home with him to shelter in the abandoned airport where he and the rest of the horde eke out their shuffling, groaning, flesh-hungry existence; then by escorting her back to the human settlement in safety. But connecting with her has set off some mysterious process inside him, and suddenly he and the other zombies all start to show signs of humanity again.

This was SO CUTE. I loved everything about R's point of view: his shrugging awkwardness, the warm-hearty-meal pleasure of eating brains, his craving for anything that made him feel alive, the things he was self-conscious about (don't stare, she'll think you're a weirdo!) vs the things he wasn't (being a horrific animated corpse - that's just his normal). There's nothing deep or complex going on in this movie at all, but it delivered exactly what I hoped for: the aesthetic trappings of a horror flick, the fluffy joy of a romcom, and the winking sense of humour of a genre-savvy story with no ambition to be anything other than fun.

Two Can Play by Ali Hazelwood: Now this is the Ali Hazelwood story (singular) I’m here for! Our love interest is a very tall, hung, professionally successful STEM genius (a video game designer, this time) and a staunch feminist ally; so staunch, in fact, that he has spent years marinating miserably in his secret love for the heroine rather than run even the faintest trace of a risk that she might, if she were to squint at his actions in the worst possible faith, feel sexually harassed by his approach. Thanks to the fastidious avoidance by which he has overcompensated for his attraction, the heroine has been convinced he hates her - right up until a forced proximity scenario (a mandatory work retreat, this time) exposes our love interest’s true feelings for the heroine and causes her to fall in love with him, too. Delicious.

I wish I could take this as a sign that Ali is returning to my preferred form after the great big bundle of Not My Thing that was her last full length novel, Problematic Summer Romance. Alas, this novella actually predates that; it has only just hit shelves in print, but it was released as an Audible exclusive back in 2024, and I ignored its existence until now because fuck Audible exclusives. So while I’m always holding out hope for more rehashes of this exact story, I dare not hope too highly. Ali’s next release could still end up being another "hot for big brother's friend" age gap kinkathon. Or another omegaverse. Maybe it’ll be age gap big brother's friend omegaverse! To whatever god/s or higher powers you acknowledge, please pray for me that it not be so.

Me when I catch my kids' cold: 🙁🤧
Me when my husband doesn't catch our kids' cold, meaning I get to spend like half the weekend watching horror movies in bed while he takes over the heavy-duty parenting: 😈😈😈😈😈

Get Out (2017): HOLY SHIT WOW OKAY. WOW. I confess to being surprised back in 2017 when the whole world suddenly started saying that Jordan Peele, who I knew only as one of the two guys who made silly skits about hats, was actually a huge horror genius. I get it now. This was absolutely terrifying, but in a way that feels very different from any of the other horror I've been binging over this last couple of months. It has all the cleverness and humour you'd expect from a career comedian turned wunderkind of elevated horror, coupled with villains who are straight-up bloodcurdling in their fetishistic admiration of Blackness and cold disregard for real Black lives.

Chris is a young Black photographer on a trip out of town to meet his white girlfriend's family for the first time. They present as stereotypical white Liberals: wealthy but self-effacing, welcoming but awkward, proud of their self-avowed colourblindness but incapable of meeting an actual Black person without being deeply weird about race. And of course, all those smiles and good intentions turn out to be a deliberate front: the Armitage family has a secret, incredibly sinister plot to acquire and exploit Black bodies, and Chris finds himself ensnared in it before he has time to realise his unease is a gut response to something much darker than a few fumbling microaggressions. This film blew my mind. It was scary, it was funny, it was FUN, and underneath all that it was an extremely clear-sighted callout of a kind of covert racism that almost a full decade later still often seems to get a pass.

The Conjuring (2013): I loved this! It's a straightforward haunted house/demonic possession type story - family moves into creaky old country house, bad supernatural things happen, demonologists come to the rescue with a terrifying climactic exorcism scene - but every part of it is executed to spooky perfection. It's aesthetically beautiful (of the several posters/covers, this one best captures the ~vibe imo), has a cast of likeable characters I was cheering for the whole time, and manages to sustain an immaculate atmosphere of paranormal suspense livened up with just a small handful of well-timed jumpscares. No complaints. Prime material for a semi-regular Halloween rewatch.

I've always found stories involving professional exorcists, paranormal investigators etc. oddly comforting, no matter how scary they try to be. I know I should be alarmed by the idea that the supernatural not only exists but is sufficiently widespread to have spawned a viable career path, but it's just so nice to think that if you're ever in a situation where traditional law enforcement fails you, there's some stake-wielding hero or beautiful clairvoyant or quietly powerful magic shop owner out there who will put their own life on the line to help you. It's even nicer in stories where the rules of Christian folklore apply, and you can cling to a crucifix or a bottle of holy water for protection during your hero's brief but unavoidable offscreen time. The Christians do very much have to be Catholic, though. This is theologically disappointing but aesthetically essential. Imagine if you were in one of these movies, cowering in some dark, haunted corner as you wait for your exorcist to arrive, and then in walks some Protestant fresh from his drab conference-hall worship centre wearing his clerical collar with jeans. Dude doesn't even know Latin, probably. He and the demon are going to have to communicate through Google Translate.

Paranormal Activity (2007): Katie has been experiencing terrors in the dead of night since she was eight years old. Her shitty boyfriend Micah, finding out about them after they move in together, decides to "help" her by treating the whole thing as a sleuthing game and antagonising the demon attached to her while filming the whole thing. This is some seriously stripped back horror: something like half the runtime is just footage of the couple sleeping, while the other half is an increasingly weary Katie begging Micah not to film her, all happening inside the same few rooms of a neat, modern, unremarkable suburban American house. And it is SCARY. It had me on tenterhooks the whole time, heart leaping into my throat with every footstep noise or flicker of shadow. The final shot almost had me out of my seat.

Unlike The Conjuring, there are no comforting demonologists to save the day here; they exist, but they're, like, super busy and can't help you. I think that part might actually have been even scarier than the demon.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984): A group of teens start having vivid nightmares about the same disfigured man with knives on his fingers; if he kills them in their dreams, they die in real life. Now, this one I definitely did watch back in high school! Almost none of it actually jogged my memory, though, besides the Freddy costume itself and the scene where he slits his abdomen to reveal all those maggots. Man, though, what a fun slasher. I'd forgotten how funny Freddy is, the way he does his murders like they're playful capers - and then how scary it is at the end, when he loses his temper at being bested by Nancy and that playfulness turns to unbridled rage.

In the early part of the nineteenth century, Emma, a farmer's daughter from a tiny rural French village, consents to marry Charles Bovary, a cheerfully mediocre country doctor who fell in love with her while treating her father's broken leg. Emma has grown up an avid reader of romances and sentimental poetry; her head is full of passionate, idyllic expectations to which the humble realities of her life as Madame Bovary fail utterly to measure up. She sinks into a deep depression, spends profligately to assuage her existential boredom, and embarks on a series of adulterous affairs as she nurses an ever-deepening contempt for her adoring but unexciting husband.

I enormously enjoyed almost all of this book. I say "almost" because the ending was not enjoyable at all, but I admire and respect and agree with the way everything concluded even if it didn't exactly spark joy. Honestly, if there is such a thing as a perfect novel, this one might just be that; every part of it is executed smoothly, effectively and with magnificent literary flare.

I cannot overstate the loveliness of Flaubert's prose. I read it in English (the 1886 Eleanor Marx-Aveling version, specifically) but even in translation it was impossible not to appreciate how clean and finely tuned the use of language is. There's a cinematic quality to everything, a vivid precision, that fills each scene to bursting with evocative imagery but never once tips over into excess. The writing is also unflaggingly witty and wry, but in an understated way, not harsh or cynical; Madame Bovary receives no quarter for her terrible decisions but I also never felt like Flaubert lacked compassion for her.

On the contrary, her downfall arises from the most painfully human emotional state: she takes for granted what she has, and exaggerates the value of what she doesn't. The life Emma Bovary was born to was one of comfortable ordinariness: she is secure but not wealthy, clever but not brilliant, loved warmly and unconditionally but without passion. But her peaceful life is worthless to her, and the idea of happiness being derived from within never even seems to occur to her. She craves drama, romance, specialness, and feels hard done by when life fails to deliver it to her. She attributes her feelings of emptiness and dissatisfaction to some inadequacy of her life circumstances: if she only possessed XYZ trappings of wealth, or if only a suitably passionate lover arrived to sweep her off her feet, all her misery would evaporate and she'd finally experience true happiness. And when the expensive goods and the torrid affairs fail to make her happy, instead of realising the fundamental flaw in her philosophy, she doubles down harder and keeps chasing that next, bigger, stronger hit that will surely satisfy her hunger at last.

Flaubert is extremely funny about the disconnect between Madame Bovary's pretensions and her material life circumstances. I want to quote the whole several pages in which a lover's impassioned declarations to her are interwoven with the proceedings of a local agricultural fair going on outside the window of their love-nest, but I'll satisfy myself with this short excerpt:

'Thus we,' he said, 'why did we come to know one another? What chance willed it? It was because across the infinite, like two streams that flow but to unite, our special bents of mind had driven us towards each other.'
And he seized her hand; she did not withdraw it.
'For good farming generally!' cried the president.
'Just now, for example, when I went to your house-'
'To Monsieur Bizat of Quincampoix-'
'Did I know I should accompany you?'
'Seventy francs.'
'A hundred times I wished to go; and I followed you - I remained.'
'Manures!'
'And I shall remain tonight, tomorrow, all other days, all my life!'
'To Monsieur Caron of Argueil, a gold medal!'

The whole book is in this tone, more or less. It's utterly delightful.

The Silence of the Lambs (1991): Okay, so, this an actual masterpiece and I can 100% see why it's on all those "best films of all time" lists. I loved it, but it's so good that saying I loved it feels kind of superfluous; as a work of art it is just so far above the liking or disliking of one barely film-literate nerd with a Dreamwidth blog. But I'm going to review it anyway because there's a good chance it's going to end up being my favourite piece of media I've consumed this year and maybe even one of my favourite pieces of all time. GUYS. THIS FILM.

The heroine is Clarice Starling, a bright and ambitious FBI trainee who becomes involved in the hunt for Buffalo Bill, a serial killer who skins his victims. Clarice is sent to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a genius psychiatrist and convicted serial killer whom the FBI believe may be able to help them identify Buffalo Bill. I love that in a film where the whole plot revolves around catching and stopping a guy who is on the loose literally skinning people, the most terrifying character is one who spends most of his screentime locked safely in a prison cell. Lecter had the most chilling presence of any villain I've ever seen. He also had this intense, darkly playful, weirdly chivalrous interest in Clarice that appealed to me in ways I'm not sure I'm willing to examine too closely. (Known villainfucker horny for new villain, news at 11.) The acting was absolutely brilliant all around; the cinematography was beautiful in this grim, grounded way; the score was haunting; the climactic scene almost stopped my heart.

It was also - this is going to sound like very weak praise in comparison to all my gushing, but I'll say it anyway - a lot less transphobic than I thought it might be, given the whole concept of "crazed man denied gender reassignment surgery goes on a murder rampage so that he can wear the skin of his female victims". I know there's been criticism and controversy around this film (and I'm speaking as a cis viewer, so grain of salt and all that) but the filmmakers were very explicit, in the language of their time, that Buffalo Bill was a profoundly disturbed individual whose pathology had nothing to do with an LGBT identity. I also on a more personal level really appreciated the handling of (cis) gender issues, which I know has also been controversial: there was no "teachable" feminist moment, it's true, but the misogyny and pervasive sexual menace Clarice experienced as a female law enforcement officer was vividly present on screen in a way that was impossible to mistake for endorsement, and Clarice herself is an amazingly well-rounded character, competent and fallible and brave and scared and utterly human. I loved how the film demanded we identify with her and forced us to sit with her in those uncomfortable moments, for which, as in real life, there was no clear-cut or simple redress.

Re-Animator (1985): A brilliant but antisocial medical student has developed a serum that can reanimate the dead, and ropes his normie roommate into his batshit experiments, with fatal consequences for their reputations and also, potentially, their actual lives. This one was just straight-up fun! It features a zombie doctor carrying his own severed head around in a surgical tray full of donor blood to keep it alive, and from that one detail I think anyone should be able to make up their minds whether or not the film will be to their taste. I thought it was hilarious, and some really great homoerotic tension between the weird serum inventor and the normie roommate. I had hoped to be able to join snickfic in her fannish enthusiasm for them, but sadly didn't quite get there (neither of them has the overlong hair or angstbucket backstory that my fannish motor primarily runs on). But I really enjoyed the film and can see myself watching it again on a night when I just want to have a good time.

Here's a life hack for time-poor music fans. If you ignore all new releases within your chosen genre for an entire calendar year, then you get to read a whole bunch of Album of the Year lists at your convenience and listen to ONLY the best stuff.

Which is to say: I have a couple more music recs that aren't, like, hrr grr arrgh blargh Satan! Recs that have maybe a passing chance of appealing to the majority of you who aren't into extreme metal! I also have some recs that probably only Zook and Liriaen and Kimara should even bother glancing at, let alone listening to if they haven't already, but I'll stick those at the bottom of the post. Because it seems like a lot of the best "metal" of 2025 was actually quite mild and accessible, or even just straight up crossover stuff that wasn't really metal at all but appealed to a lot of metalheads for its dark ambiance and experimentality.

Album recs, normal person edition

The Spin by Messa: Smoky, jazzy female vocals over a goth-tinged canvas of reverb-heavy guitar and driving beats. I don't think I've found a single AotY list in my whole search that did not include this album in the top couple of spots. Technically it's doom metal but I really don't think you need to be a doom metal fan, or a metal fan in general, to appreciate this; it's just gorgeous.

Here, have a music video! It's more aesthetic than riveting, but it does feature the extremely attractive singer on a motorbike and is a good representative sample of the album. If you bounce off this song, there's nothing here for you; if you like it, oh boy do you have a treat coming with the rest of the album. <3



Camgirl by Crippling Alcoholism: I honestly have no idea what to call this. It's not metal, though metalheads have been loving it; it's too heavy to be post-punk or goth rock or synthwave, but it has elements of all of them. It's dark and dreamy and wonderful and I have listened to it so many times in the last few days. (Disclaimer: this is a concept album about a sex worker, and I can only make out about half of the lyrics. Quite possibly it's sympathetic and thoughtful? I'm choosing to hear it as sympathetic and thoughtful. But I can't rule out the presence of bigoted shit in the less intelligible parts, and I haven't bothered to listen to any band interviews about the inspiration behind the album, so I cannot in good faith vouch for them as anything other than auditorily enjoyable.)

There might be more coming; in particular, there are new albums by Ainsoph and Calva Louise that come highly recommended and based on their first couple of tracks have a lot of promise, but I haven't found time to give them a full listen yet. But I honestly just want to spend a while listening to The Spin and Camgirl on repeat before I delve into anything else. They're SO GOOD.

Album recs, hrr grr argh Satan edition

Scapulimancy by Hedonist: This is fantastically fun, catchy, filthy death metal with brutal vocals and chugging Bolt Thrower-esque riffs. It's not an album that prompts any sophisticated or nuanced response in me whatsoever; it's an album that scoops the thoughts out of my brain and replaces them with nothing but primitive satisfaction. I don't headbang but this band makes me want to. Just. FUCK yes.

Heritage by Structure: Bear with me. You're all alone in the middle of a black night ocean that is maybe a real body of water or maybe a metaphor for your filthy conscience, being dragged down into the unfathomable depths by an anchor tied to your feet. Looking up as you sink, you see the cosmic sparkle of millions of stars refracting through the water's surface from far above. This is death/doom at its best and I am thoroughly smitten.

Video essay

First of all, on my last post about Australian horror movies, rhoda_rants linked me to this great video essay about Australian horror, which I did not know had a reputation overseas as being notably brutal even for the genre. Well worth a watch! I'm still chewing on the contents and deciding how much I agree with them (for instance, my emotional reaction to Wolf Creek was quite different from the essayist's, see below) but in particular I thought the analysis of colonialism as a major (albeit unexamined) presence in the Australian concept of an inherently dangerous and inhospitable Outback was spot on. I think deep down we all know damn well that this continent was not made to support a population of pale-skinned agrarians, and I'm very interested now to track down the cited anthology of Aboriginal horror shorts that portray the land not as a threat but as a source of comfort in the face of imported danger.

Feature films

Wolf Creek (2005): Two young British tourists and an Aussie bloke they've taken up with experience car troubles while roadtripping through the far remote Australian Outback, and accept help from a charming older man who turns out to be a sadistic serial killer. This is a film that excels at its objective, and its objective is something I do not really vibe with and don't care to experience again. It was just...brutal. Brutal and cruel and bleak in a way that felt far too grounded and believable to be fun. There's no mercy for the victims at all, no real moments of relief or triumph, no room for hope to grow. Mick, the killer, is not your cartoonish slasher villain in a silly mask. He's normal and lovable in a way that from an Australian perspective feels almost sacred - an embodiment of the tough, friendly, irreverent outback Aussie spirit in an era where most of us now live in cities. (He's not an over-the-top Crocodile Dundee type, either. I have a grandfather and some uncles out in WA who are just like Mick, minus the penchant for rape and murder.) It was also unnerving to see Cassandra Magrath in the role of one of the victims; I know her as the beloved daughter character in the extremely tonally different show SeaChange. This film was not really much more gory than The Texas Chain Saw Massacre but the violence felt far more shocking and unpleasant. Thanks, I hate it! The directors did great, though.

Friday the 13th (1980): Well, this was a happy accident! I was absolutely sure this was one of the few horror movies I'd already watched back in my teens, and so I didn't bother to look up a plot synopsis before watching. If I had, then I would probably have been put off by the reveal of ( spoilers ) But:
1) I apparently had the film mixed up with Nightmare on Elm Street, which is the one I actually did watch in high school (I think I also watched Halloween, but I won't be 100% sure until I rewatch it).
2) The execution was campy enough that the upsetting-to-me themes didn't bother me at all in this case, and in fact made for a really great twist that deepened what until then seemed like a rather bland "everybody dies for no good reason" type slasher.

I don't have much more to say about this one, which is at least partly because I watched it with Husband and Close Friend who when put together are unstoppable chatterboxes during movies, and the vibe was more fun group hangout than serious media analysis. But it was fun! And I think I'll watch more of them, maybe next month when the salient date comes around again thanks to February being a round 28 days this year.

DNF: Black Water (2007): I got bored about halfway through this and gave up. I thought I would like it because it's all about a croc attack, and I am all about croc attacks in other contexts - I gobble up documentaries about terrifying wildlife and have had some great times during feeding hour at various national reptile parks. But by the time a solid half hour had elapsed of these three comically underprepared dickheads being stuck up a mangrove tree with no crocodile in sight, I just didn't care anymore. They probably got eaten eventually. Oh, well.

In lieu of a serious review, I'm just going to treat you guys (if you haven't already seen it) to a wildly popular crocodile-related Australian meme. Here's how one of our most famously nutty politicians responded when approached on the subject of same-sex marriage:



Horror shorts

Finally, a couple of horror shorts I watched recently. I don't have much to say about these, but they were fun, and I thought I'd link them in case others of you guys have also seen them/might be interested:

Connect 4 by RDCworld1: I knew these guys for their entertaining merging of Black "hood" culture with weeb/gamer geekery, but apparently now they do horror shorts as well! Connect 4 is a little paranormal snippet with a streak of gallows humour; I enjoyed it a lot.

2am: The Smiling Man by Michael Evans: The physical acting in this! Super, super scary body language. Also great editing. Loved it.

It feels strangely awkward watching movies about people who talk and behave like me! I know I’m not alone in that; Australian cultural cringe is a well studied phenomenon, and we don't exactly have a local equivalent of Hollywood churning out all-Aussie blockbusters on a regular schedule. When I think of Australian cinema, I think of boring arts grant dramas that no one wants to watch and culturally hyperspecific comedy that we don't want anyone else to watch lest the world know us for the bunch of dags we really are. Fun, tropey genre films are supposed to be about Special Fake Movie People with accents I've never heard in person and manners that are upside down from mine.

And yet, as I'm learning through my local library's streaming service, there's some really good Australian horror out there. I couldn't tell you exactly where to find these overseas, but at least some of them appear to have had international releases, so for all I know, they're on Netflix for you guys. I'd be so thrilled to hear what people without my cultural biases think. :D

The Tunnel (2011): This is a mockumentary about a news crew who fall foul of a mysterious subterranean killer while investigating a lead related to Sydney's network of abandoned train tunnels. The tunnels are real, and I vaguely remember hearing spooky rumours about them during the early 2010s, which I'm now thinking may have been part of a guerrilla marketing campaign for this film, lol. Anyway, this one scared the everloving shit out of me. The vibes are fantastic, the mockumentary gimmick is executed flawlessly, and most of all everything was just so familiar. I used to get everywhere I ever needed to go on those exact Sydney trains. The characters are completely normal, relatable Aussies of the kind you could meet everyday on the street. The actual plot is a bit thin but I was happy to overlook the silly bits because it was just such a damn enjoyable viewing experience. And the monster was SO FUCKING CREEPY. Pick this one if you like mockumentaries and/or wish to know more about ya girl from dreamwidth's old commute.

Relic (2020): A mother and daughter drive out to a small town in rural Victoria to check on grandma, whose neighbours haven't seen her in days. She is missing when they arrive, but reappears in the house days later, unwilling or unable to explain where she's been. Her stately country house is covered in what looks like black mould and there's a terrible black bruise on her chest. This is a heartwrenching film about the grief of losing an elderly parent to dementia, and also a fantastic haunted house story full of dark family secrets, unanswered questions and unexplained paranormal phenomena. The creaky old house and the damp, miserable evergreen forest surrounding it threw me back to the days of visiting my own grandparents. It really does capture the highly specific atmosphere of a certain kind of well-off but precipitously ageing rural town in southeastern Australia; I swear I could almost taste the air. For whatever it's worth, the Russo brothers are credited as executive producers; I don't know much about movie production and have honestly never been sure what kind of role an executive producer plays, but hey, those were two names I recognised. Take or leave the name recognition, though - I loved this movie either way.

Talk To Me (2022): A group of South Australian teens acquire an embalmed hand that lets them summon dead souls to temporarily possess them. But one of their séance parties goes too far, and a malevolent spirit decides it doesn't want to leave. This is a mix of paranormal and psychological horror that's as much about grief (the protagonist lost her mother to a very obvious suicide that her dad won’t admit to her was suicide) as about bloodthirsty ghosts. I am not sure why reviewers chose to bill a movie this thoroughly depressing as "fun" - it was fun at the start, sure, but by the end it had descended to a truly tragic place. I liked it a lot! But it definitely belongs on the downer end of the mood spectrum.

You'll Never Find Me (2023): In an isolated trailer park in the middle of the night, a young woman knocks on an older man's door to beg shelter from a violent thunderstorm. The woman is desperate, drenched, and seems unable to get her story straight about how she got there or where she came from; the man is withdrawn and antisocial and was drinking alone before the woman arrived. They both seem frightened of each other. Something about the situation is unmistakably off, but what it is exactly, the film plays close to its chest for the first exquisitely slow hour. This is a quiet, cagey movie that ratchets up the tension through unnerving not-quite-normal dialogue and uncomfortable just-barely-off-centre close-ups so that when things finally start going overtly wrong at around the hour mark, it feels almost like a relief - pain is easier to bear than the anticipation of it. I don't often enjoy trippy, "what the fuck is happening here" type stories and I REALLY don't often enjoy stories that end in the particular kind of twist this one used, but in this case I was absolutely sold on everything. Brilliant movie. Raised my blood pressure so high I had to flop on the couch and just breathe for like half an hour afterwards. No notes.