The Beaver Reviews the BFI London Film Festival

By Vanessa Huang

Illustrated by Jessica Chan

Good One ★★★

Never has a film seemed so quintessentially indie: a coming-of-age story that’s naturalistic, unhurried, and willing to lay bare the growing pains that surface through mundane conversations and lingering silences. In Good One, India Donaldson lets the awkward moments breathe, following Sam (Lily Collias), a teenager on a multi-day hiking and camping trip with her dad and his best friend.

While generational differences play out in small doses of endearing dad humour, there’s a sense of something troubling beneath this easygoing camaraderie–a betrayal that can’t quite be articulated. When this tension finally breaks, it brings a profound shift, marking a point of no return for Sam. And God knows childhood doesn’t protect us from all of life’s sharper edges, but adulthood adds a colder sting. Donaldson’s screenplay lands in thematically rich territory–if only there were a little more meat on the bone. 

Emilia Perez ★★★

Venerated director Jacques Audiard returns with Emilia Perez, a genre-bending musical crime comedy that’s as ambitious as it is turbulent. Set in Mexico, we meet our eponymous trans protagonist, a powerful drug cartel boss who stages her own death to undergo gender reassignment surgery and start anew. 

The film stumbles early with the ungainly introduction of music, a hasty addendum that just doesn’t work at all. Half-hearted whispering to a beat hardly makes for a good musical–not when legions of musicals can shamelessly lean into theatrics. Still, the central conceit is compelling enough, and there’s something strangely beguiling about all the sharp tonal changes. And amidst all the big swings (some connecting, others missing), there’s a sweet sincerity in its exploration of rebirth and finding yourself, even if it is awfully messy. 

A Real Pain ★★★½ 

There’s a reason actors often end up typecast: they just do it so well. With Jesse Eisenberg as the uptight, responsible one and Kieran Culkin as the chaotic provocateur, it hardly feels – with all due respect – a stretch in their acting abilities. Eisenberg, stepping into the director’s seat, seems to lean into these familiar dynamics with a knowing touch.  

The two play cousins embarking on a tour of Poland to fulfil the deathbed wish of their grandmother, a Polish Jew who escaped the Holocaust to start a new life in America. In a tour group with lots of different personalities, foibles and friction naturally result–and it is indeed a very talky film. More intriguing, however, is how the cousins navigate their relationship and their own identities against the weight of their shared family history. The film beautifully touches on what it means to be “the product of a thousand fucking miracles” and the deep reverence for all that came before us. It’s a comforting notion–that we belong to a bigger narrative, something larger and more enduring than our individual lives, woven from the struggles, triumphs, love, and loss of those who paved the way. 

Misericordia ★★★★

Set against the tense, isolated backdrop of rural France, Misericordia is a taut, gripping tale of jealousy and betrayal. When circumstances bring Jérémie (Felix Kysyl) back to his hometown, he stays in the home of a childhood friend’s mother. What should be a nostalgic reunion quickly spirals into a dark, sexual psychodrama–with, interestingly enough, very little sex.

The film toys with the conventions of a murder mystery, flirting with a whodunnit but not quite committing, instead dabbling in themes of desire and perversion, and constantly subverting expectations. There’s nowhere quite as gossipy or stifling as provincial life, and Misericordia undercuts this setting with sharp, dark comedy that amplifies the absurdity and the tension in equal measure.

It’s thoroughly entertaining and best watched with a crowd. A Saltburn but better made, if you will. 

Nightbitch ★★★★

Invoking a similar rage to Björn L Runge’s The Wife (2017), Nightbitch quite literally makes motherhood a bitch. Amy Adams is our nameless Mother, an artist-turned-stay-at-home-mother with a young son and maddeningly oblivious husband in tow. With Husband being weaponised incompetence personified, Mother is condemned to a fate of waking up, making breakfast, taking her son to playgroup, running errands, cooking dinner, cleaning up, then going to bed. Again and again and again, with no relief in sight. It’s so infuriating one could scream. In Mother’s case, she starts turning into a dog. 

Writer and director Marielle Heller’s vision succeeds in its broad strokes, capturing the duality women face to be both selfless and endlessly capable. Daring, too, is the idea that a woman can resent motherhood while deeply loving her child when any ounce of discontent is too easily maligned as bad mothering. 

Films about women are often assigned (by others) the lofty ambition of speaking to all of womanhood. Nightbitch doesn’t do that, and I don’t think it should. And while it is weighed down by a rather muted ending, it offers a primal sense of catharsis that is both provocative and abrasive, confronting the animalistic side of a mother’s rage.

I’m Still Here ★★★★

Sunny days, ice cream on the beach, cheesy dance moves in the living room–hallmarks of a happy family summer, one imagines. Here, it’s true and it isn’t: the Paivas are a regular family, with all their petty squabbles, playful teasing, and small, everyday joys. But they also live in Rio de Janeiro in 1971, under the shadow of Brazil’s brutal military dictatorship. 

Director Walter Salles tells a true story that he personally knew here, smartly avoiding theatrics and finding meaning in the quotidian rhythms of family life. Early in the film, the Paivas’ moments of warmth and joy are punctuated by harsh reminders of the era’s political realities. Soon enough, Rubens, our patriarch and a political dissident, is taken into custody, never to return. There are no thrills or twists here–only the unflinching resilience of a woman pulling her family through, shouldering the weight of the grief, and courageously pressing on to seek justice.

Nickel Boys ★★★★★

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to see the world through someone else’s eyes? Nickel Boys might be as close as we can get, with director RaMell Ross shooting in first-person POV and bringing a profound empathy to the act of bearing witness. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is a young Black boy with a bright future: living in the Jim Crow-era South, his stellar academics have earned him a spot at community college, seemingly poised to break barriers. But while he’s hitchhiking there, the police stop him in a stolen car, upending his life as he gets sent to a reform school. 

Based on Colson Whitehead’s novel, this is a story rooted in the harrowing history of the Dozier School for Boys, which closed only in 2011. While Elwood arrives optimistic, he’s quickly disabused of that hope in the face of unrelenting violence. But Ross steers us away from the spectacle of suffering and instead towards a devastating erosion of hope, a slow, haunting hardening of the soul. Sometimes, that’s also just the way we remember things: the most painful moments packaged away, fragmented crumbs emerging from the mundanity. 

In every frame, Nickel Boys is a masterclass in intimacy. The gentle hands of a grandmother slicing a cake. The fleeting glances we catch of ourselves in the mirror. In a seamless marriage of form and function, the film swings for the fences and hits a home run. 

Print version:

Nightbitch ★★★★

Invoking a similar rage to Björn L Runge’s The Wife (2017), Nightbitch quite literally makes motherhood a bitch. Amy Adams is our nameless Mother, an artist-turned-stay-at-home-mother with a young son and maddeningly oblivious husband in tow. With Husband being weaponised incompetence personified, Mother is condemned to a fate of waking up, making breakfast, taking her son to playgroup, running errands, cooking dinner, cleaning up, then going to bed. Again and again and again, with no relief in sight. It’s so infuriating one could scream. In Mother’s case, she starts turning into a dog. 

Writer and director Marielle Heller’s vision succeeds in its broad strokes, capturing the duality women face to be both selfless and endlessly capable. Daring, too, is the idea that a woman can resent motherhood while deeply loving her child when any ounce of discontent is too easily maligned as bad mothering. 

Films about women are often assigned (by others) the lofty ambition of speaking to all of womanhood. Nightbitch doesn’t do that, and I don’t think it should. And while it is weighed down by a rather muted ending, it offers a primal sense of catharsis that is both provocative and abrasive, confronting the animalistic side of a mother’s rage.

I’m Still Here ★★★★

Sunny days, ice cream on the beach, cheesy dance moves in the living room–hallmarks of a happy family summer, one imagines. Here, it’s true and it isn’t: the Paivas are a regular family, with all their petty squabbles, playful teasing, and small, everyday joys. But they also live in Rio de Janeiro in 1971, under the shadow of Brazil’s brutal military dictatorship. 

Director Walter Salles tells a true story that he personally knew here, smartly avoiding theatrics and finding meaning in the quotidian rhythms of family life. Early in the film, the Paivas’ moments of warmth and joy are punctuated by harsh reminders of the era’s political realities. Soon enough, Rubens, our patriarch and a political dissident, is taken into custody, never to return. There are no thrills or twists here–only the unflinching resilience of a woman pulling her family through, shouldering the weight of the grief, and courageously pressing on to seek justice.

Nickel Boys ★★★★★

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to see the world through someone else’s eyes? Nickel Boys might be as close as we can get, with director RaMell Ross shooting in first-person POV and bringing a profound empathy to the act of bearing witness. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is a young Black boy with a bright future: living in the Jim Crow-era South, his stellar academics have earned him a spot at community college, seemingly poised to break barriers. But while he’s hitchhiking there, the police stop him in a stolen car, upending his life as he gets sent to a reform school. 

Based on Colson Whitehead’s novel, this is a story rooted in the harrowing history of the Dozier School for Boys, which closed only in 2011. While Elwood arrives optimistic, he’s quickly disabused of that hope in the face of unrelenting violence. But Ross steers us away from the spectacle of suffering and instead towards a devastating erosion of hope, a slow, haunting hardening of the soul. Sometimes, that’s also just the way we remember things: the most painful moments packaged away, fragmented crumbs emerging from the mundanity. 

In every frame, Nickel Boys is a masterclass in intimacy. The gentle hands of a grandmother slicing a cake. The fleeting glances we catch of ourselves in the mirror. In a seamless marriage of form and function, the film swings for the fences and hits a home run. 

Vanessa gives her top picks from the 2024 BFI London Film Festival

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