EIFF Reviews: The Incomer | Bad Day at the Office | Her Private Hell | Pretty Babies | Bodyhackers | Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon

The Incomer | Pic: contributed

The Incomer ★★★★

Bad Day at the Office ★★

Her Private Hell ★★★★

Pretty Babies ★★

Bodyhackers ★★

Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon ★★★★

This year’s EIFF got off to an wry, sly start with The Incomer, Louis Paxton’s entertainingly absurd culture-clash comedy about a pair of grown-up siblings who find their isolated existence on an abandoned Scottish island suddenly under threat from a council worker sent to relocate them. This is the ‘incomer’ of the title, a hapless dork called Daniel (Dohmnall Gleeson), reluctantly despatched to do his boss’s dirty work and promptly rewarded for his efforts with a stone to the forehead from the paranoid, semi-feral Isla and Sandy, played with demented glee by Gayle Rankin and Grant O’Rourke. Their childish hostility is emblematic of thirty years spent with only each other for company, a book of Scottish folklore for entertainment and some faulty ideas from their late father that have left them fearing change, if secretly curious about a world they’ve thus far encountered only in the tat that’s washed up on the beach.

It’s Isla who’s the most suspicious of the guileless, similarly lonely Daniel, and the film’s at its funniest during their their bonding sessions, with Daniel charmed and alarmed by the peculiarities of their life, and Isla and Sandy equally fascinated and baffled by Daniel’s veganism and geek culture-inspired tales of the mainland. The situation gets progressively sillier as they’re forced to unite against another incomer in the form of Daniel’s gone-rogue colleague Callum (Emun Elliott), a urine-drinking survivalist who’s possibly watched Apocalypse Now three-dozen times too many.

But there’s heart to the hijinks too — and an underlying melancholy that the excellent Rankin teases out in her interactions with the Finman (John Hannah), a mythical sea creature whose sinister presence lets the film nod to the mental-health realities of Isla's situation without disrupting the off-kilter world Paxton has created.

Enjoying The Scotsman's coverage of the Edinburgh festivals? For just £2 a month you can get unlimited access to scotsman.com plus 2-for-1 Fringe tickets. For details visit www.scotsman.com/subscriptions

John Hannah also popped up as the lead in the festival’s Midnight Madness strand opener Bad Day at the Office, a frenetic first-person shoot-em-up about an amnesiac (Hannah) who wakes up in a trashed hotel room with a dead body in his bathtub and no idea how it got there or, for that matter, why everyone is now trying to kill him.

Essentially a live-action video game, the whole film looks like Jonas Åkerlund’s debauched promo for the Prodigy’s Smack My Bitch Up, albeit with the perspective switching between different characters, among them a hotel maid (Radha Mitchel) and a fur-coat-wearing London gangster (played by Tamer Hassan). As fun as it is to see Hannah fronting the action, though, this puerile exercise in hyperactivity and eye-gouging hyper-violence gets pretty tiresome pretty quickly.

There’s more eye-gouging in Her Private Hell, Nicolas Winding Refn’s first movie in ten years and yet another dreamily abstract departure from the hipster-cool stylings of Drive. Having surely separated the sheep from the goats with the subsequent Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon, he can’t have too many casual fans left. But for those of us who get a kick out of his primary coloured nightmares, this is primo Refn, its fugue-like pacing and dark-side-of-Hollywood plot providing plenty of scope for swirling visions of madness and twisted scenes of mayhem.

The film drifts between two different worlds linked by a gimp-masked serial killer called the Leather Man. In one of these worlds Sophie Thatcher takes the lead as Elle, a movie star living in a mist-shrouded luxury hotel where she’s about to start work on a kitschy sci-fi film with her similarly aged step-mother Dominique (Havana Rose Liu) and a vacuous starlet named Hunter (Kristine Froseth). In the other, Charles Melton plays Private K, an American serviceman out for revenge against his daughter’s killer in post-World War Two Japan. What one has to do with the other is hard to say, though it could be the latter is some kind of manifestation of Elle’s psychosexual trauma regarding her relationship with Dominique and her own sleazy father, played with wolfish menace by Dougray Scott. He’s the mogul behind the film they’re shooting, the action of which inevitably adds one more layer of obfuscation.

Playful references to Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl abound — and there are echoes too of Brian De Palma's operatic output and Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (particularly in the space Refn gives the fearless Thatcher to fall apart as Elle’s grip on this tenuous dreamscape slips further from her grasp). Refn, however, transforms all of it into a heady cocktail of his own freakishly beautiful design.

Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon | Pic: contributed

Pretty Babies also tries to tap into the dark side of the dream factory with a heightened tale of two Old Hollywood-obsessed high school friends who run off to LA to become actresses but fall into prostitution instead. Though a rape is the inciting incident that has Joan Crawford fans Marie (Emily Alyn Lind) and Luna (Sadie Stanley) high-tailing it out of Texas in a stolen car, once they pick up a couple of hitchhiking prostitutes who’ve embraced the trade after dropping out of ballet school (a backstory that’s about as convincing as it sounds), writer/director Tyler-Marie Evans strangely opts to shoot her up-for-anything cast with the same leering gaze as the men lusting after their gyrating bodies. Lind and Stanley are both excellent, but the story barely hangs together and the exploitative approach leaves a bad taste.

Bodyhackers has even less going for it. A tedious tribute to David Cronenberg, it tries to ape the Canadian body-horror maestro’s gruesome imagery, transgressive storytelling and lofty dialogue with a conspiracy laden tale involving a shadowy corporation running a plastic surgery racket that preys on people’s body dysmorphia and addiction to pursuing impossible beauty standards. Though setting itself up as a twisted industrial espionage thriller, it soon morphs into an incomprehensible Crash-like tale of bizarre sexual kinks involving damaged, surgically altered patients getting off on each other’s scars. Ironically writer/director Carlos Conceição seems strangely content to eradicate whatever might make him unique by submitting to such a slavish act of cinematic cosplay.

Scottish Turner Prize-winning video artist Douglas Gordon also knows a thing or two about appropriating other people’s films. His towering, time-gobbling 24 Hour Psycho transformed the Hitchcock classic into a brutal meditation on life and made Gordon one of the most famous artists of the 1990s — and one of the most inscrutable. The new documentary Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon takes this on board. Despite the title, it’s not directed by Gordon, but it’s not not directed by him either. The credited filmmaker is Finlay Pretsell, and throughout this slippery portrait Pretsell’s subject frequently breaks the fourth wall by suggested editing changes via voice-over and arguing with him on screen about the need to film everything rather than imposing some pre-conceived idea of him onto what they’re doing.

Naturally there’s a fair amount of myth-burnishing going on here too — Gordon is nothing if not a performer. But in guiding Pretsell away from what could easily have been a conventional TV-ready primer, the film becomes a more honest and poignant piece about the strange day-to-day reality of being an artist whose job involves “noticing the insignificant and making it significant.” Gordon’s final suggestion for how Pretsell should end the film — it involves a riff on 24 Hour Psycho — is also an inspired act of creative lunacy.

The Edinburgh International Film Festival runs until 19 August. For more information and tickets visit www.edfilmfest.org

The Scotsman’s arts newsletter is now sent twice a week - subscribe today

Enjoying the Arts & Culture journalism on scotsman.com? Make it easier to find by selecting us as a preferred Google source

Want the latest Scottish headlines sent directly to your phone? Sign up to our new WhatsApp channel here