Monthly Archives: February 2026

My Father’s Shadow      Akinola Davies Jr (UK/Nig; 2025)   Sope Dirisu

viewed Tyneside Cinema 15 Feb 2026; ticket £13.49

a moment of truth

I saw Akinola Davies’ ‘My Fathers Shadow’ with my adult daughter.  In the course of the film Aki and Remi young brothers are led round Lagos by Folani their father.  He’s not only showing them the town but he also needs to conduct the urgent business of trying to get the backpay owed to him by the factory where he works. Towards the end of the day as they take refreshment in a bar, there’s a moment of emotional truth.  A moment in which details evident but dispersed within the action of scenario, suddenly come together with unhappy clarity to expose what has been going on with Folani.  But the day is not over. As day turns into night Davies connects all the different strands of his film allowing a complete and brutal picture of the social personal and political forces scattered throughout to be seen understood assimilated.   

Sitting next to my daughter Davies’ film made me think of my own role as a father (and would have done even if I had not been sitting next to my daughter).  ‘Shadow’ is in part a moral statement about the temporal nature of being a father.  The film is not moral in the sense of it being judgemental of Fulani.  It’s moral lies in the sense of pointing to fatherdom as being subject to the imperative of time and to life as a process.  We are all answerable in and to time.  Fathers at some stage of the unravelling of life and death may have to reckon with the consequences of their behaviour.  Even when it is too late for reconciliation. 

Sitting next to her in the Cinema listening to Folani talk to his sons, I was aware acutely aware of the failings the shortcomings in my fathering.  Perhaps that was why I’d chosen to go to this film with her, because although I didn’t know anything about it (except the setting) its very title ‘My Father’s Shadow’ held out the prospect of some examination of ‘this role’ which is a rare enough cinematic theme, especially as much of it is shot from the point of view of the child.   

This is a movie that I could see with my daughter after which we could look each other in the eye and talk through some of the bad daddy times and issues that still resonate through our relationship. Of course Davies’ movie is not made as a therapeutic vehicle; most people will not be seeing the film in this light or in my circumstances.  But in terms of relations ‘Shadow’ hits a vein of emotional intensity and temporal veracity that is grounded in the knowledge of messy familial worlds characterised by betrayal manipulation and love – the psychic blood that courses through the veins of life.

“Life is hard in Nigeria.”  Folani explains to his sons as he takes them through Lagos.

Davies’ film works all the more effectively because it is set in the socio-political contexts that shape Folani and give depth to his experience and his being in the world.  And Folani’s world is that of living in a neo-colonialist system.  The hand-over of power from the British to ‘Nigerians’ happened in 1960. There was no significant liberation movement and the hand over of power was relatively seamless.  Meaning that the capitalist economic system and the political social structures were fundamentally unchanged.  Besides the use of hereditary chiefs to rule local areas, the main structure erected by the British for controlling and defining Nigeria was its Army.  When the British ‘left’ the Nigerian army was the only national institution that effectively had reach throughout Nigeria.  Lip service was paid to democracy and fashioning responsive structures, but in effect the army simply continued to administer and exploit the systems the British had instigated for their own purposes, with added layers of corruption relating to individual officers tribal and family affiliations.    Folani and the millions of others like him became neo-colonialist subjects: without power without voice without significance:  as inconsequential as insects  

As night falls on Lagos it becomes certain that Folani will not get the back pay he desperately needs. He’s a nobody, beaten down in body and soul by a system that exploits his labour to create wealth for the factory owner but who is powerless to claim what is his due.  “Life is hard in Nigeria”.  The day Folani and his sons walk through Lagos is the day of days when the results of the national elections for a civilian government are to be announced.  The town is electric with excitement at the prospect of a civilian government that the people themselves will have elected.  But as Folani and his sons walked the town during the day the omnipresence of the military was all too evident: large numbers of soldiers circulating and in the air sinister rumours of military atrocities.  As night falls the TV in the bar where Folani and his sons are sitting explodes with the reality of betrayal. Even as the people are celebrating the picture on the screen cuts to the large bedecked figure of a general in military fatigues.  He announces the end of hope: due to suspected irregularities at the polling stations the elections have been declared void and the military will now take over the government.  The people, Folani, they all know they have been cheated.  They also know that it was inevitable that the dirty deed would be done, without shame without appeal; any attempt at mass or even individual protest to be met with murderous force.  You will be shot.  They have the guns; the people only have their bodies;  neo-colonial drift wood, expendable.  

Davies’ final sequence in ’Shadow’ is magnificent and humbling.  We see that for the neo-colonialist insect what is denied in life is granted by death.   The Rituals of Death bestow the honour dignity and worth never attainable in life.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

No Other Choice     Park Chan Wook (Kor; 2025) Lee Byung-hun, Son Ye-jin

viewed 27 Jan 2026 Tyneside Cinema; ticket £13.49

it all ends happily ever after

The most interesting sequences in Park’s ‘No Other Choice’ bookend his movie.  The establishment of Man Su and his family in their suburban paradise ending with Man Su’s exclamation: “I got it all!”; and the final shots of the the complete automation of the paper industry from the felling of trees through to the manufacturing process. The film in effect takes two hours and ten minutes to link them with the tale of ‘an overcoming.’   

This is a story of suburban folk, their trial and tribulations in an age of angst.

Thinking about another Korean director Bong Joon Ho, the strength of his early work lay in its interpenetration of contemporary Korea by the folk memories of an earlier archaic period dominated by ghosts and spirits.  ‘No Other Choice’ finds Korea in clear water, the past has completely vanished from the rear view mirror. The country is in full embrace of the American way of life: BBQ land.  No spooks.  But in fact the eventual form taken by Park’s film does invoke ideas from another realm.    

Man Su has wife kids with music lessons, dogs, lifestyle, works for a paper company that enables him to keep up the life style and the mortgage payments to the bank.  It all depends on the job.  But in a sequence that is parody of the process of corporate downsizing, we see Man Su given the order of the boot and then becoming the object of compensatory therapeutic counselling provided by the company to help him ‘move on’ with his life and get another job.  At which point we come to the core of the movie: his embrace of ‘overcoming’, a favourite Hollywood motif in which individuals take on the world which has put them down and win out; daring to dream daring to realise the dream: they ‘overcome.’  Life as an obstacle course.  A fairy tale.

Man Su’s situation is that like the protagonist is a fairy tale he needs to find a way out of his dilemma.  There is: no other choice. 

As automation (and we await the tranche of films dealing with those poor souls ditched for Al) takes over the paper making business, work is thin on the ground.  But the redundant Man Su realises he needs work in this, the one business he knows.  His wife’s part time work as a dental hygienist and his job stacking shelves will not make the money needed to keep dogs in chow or stop the re-po guys from taking his house back.  Man Su has some serious stuff to ‘overcome’. He lights on the idea of a little serial killing.  The idea is to kill off the competitors vying with him for the one and only good job that’s has been advertised in the paper making trade.

Park’s movie is intended as a satirical response to the ruthless nature of corporate capitalism, in particular in economies undergoing rapid change.  Exemplifying how the cut throat redundancy practices of firms have a contaminatory effect on individuals, causing them in turn to become ruthless in pursuit of their own interests, whatever the cost to others. 

But it’s a satire that’s wrapped up in the tissue paper of the trials and tribulations of the petit bourgeois life style.  As Man Su sets about his killing spree the film digresses, developing subplots involving both his family life and the life of one of his victims.  These are effectively little stories centering about the usual stuff consuming the emotional energy of the suburbs: marital infidelity and anti social children.  These little digressions all end as anti-climaxes but, and here’s the but, everything always turns out well.

As Park’s film develops it becomes apparent that it changes key.  The script that begins as a satire transforms into a fairy tale.  As Man Su embarks upon the first of the three traditional tests set the hero in a typical story by the brothers Grimm, the satire dissolves out of the scenario, replaced by Man Su embarking on three mythic tasks. As in fairyland what’s critical is that the accomplishment of each of these tasks advances the prospects of the hero. There are no adverse consequences.  Ma Su murders and everything continues as normal; the killings are simply tests of his worthiness to reclaim his estate.  In fairy tale terms   they take place in a parallel psychic space; in dramatic terms they have an anticlimactic quality.

 Once Man Su has completed his three tasks he can reclaim his kingdom. 

As in a fairy tale it all ends happily ever after.  Man Su gets the job he wants with the paper company.  He manages a production process that is totally automated.  He is the only human employed on new era shop floor.  No ghosts or spirits haunt either the Company or Man Su.  The dogs return; the mortgage payments are made, Man Su’s little girl, a musical genius, plays cello for them for the first time.  Disney! Cry your eyes out.

Park’s ‘No Other Choice’  starting out as a satire transforms into a Disney cartoon.  And the more it conforms to the norms of Disney the more the satiric elements of the film diminish.  But the cost of becoming a Hollywood fairy tale is that that as the satirical intent in the movie is lost, the film becomes increasingly predicable in its play out. ‘No Other Choice’ as a satire had potential to sparkle; as a fairy tale it’s overlong dull and lacking sparkle.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk  

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The Duke of Burgundy  Peter Strickland (UK;  2014)   Sidse Babett Knudson; Monica Swinn        

Viewed: Star and Shadow Cinema 29 Jan 2026; Ticket: £7.00

Insecti=cide…the bugs have the excuse of being dead

My feeling after viewing Strickland’s ‘Duke of Burgundy’ was that I had viewed a sub-standard piece of formulaic erotica directed by a director seduced by his own amour propre. The film dominated by Strickland’s input as writer director, feels like a love note to himself, an exercise in a particular sort of contemporary narcissism.

The title is taken from the name of a type of highly patterned butterfly of which we see many in the course of the film, mostly dead, like the film itself.

The Duke of Burgundy is an indulgent movie lacking tensions and ideas that reveals Strickland as a film monger, who in this movie manipulates form and structure to engender the illusion that his films have some sort of  substance. 

In ‘Katalin Varga’ Strickland made extensive use of landscape to extend out the emotional mood of his revenge narrative; in ‘Berberian Sound Studio’ he made similar use of his sound track to feed and extend the layered narrative threads.  In both these movies the form and structure of the material fed directly into the film’s themes and subject matter: revenge in the case of ‘Katalin’ and in ‘Berberian’ the idea of evil as a pervasive overflowing overwhelming psychic force.   

Intercut visual imagery and sound fx as filmic devices can work as signifiers pointing to something in the nature of the film. The use of landscape or skyscape shots cut into the flow of a drama implies that the audience should make some sort of cognitive or emotional link (or perhaps make an absurdist non-link) implicit in the juxtaposition of the two different sources of  imagery.  Likewise the use of suggestive emotive or violent sound superimposed on images out of the visual context is a signifier or a manipulator that radically changes the viewers’ state of mind and understanding of what they are seeing on screen. 

 ‘Katalin Varga’ justifies its cut-aways to scenic imagery by suggesting the linking of the idea of revenge with the forces of nature; ‘Berberian Sound Studio’s’ demonic sound fx work effectively for the first half of the scenario before collapsing in on themselves, overused and unable to sustain the weight of its soundscaped and infested netherworlds.  In ‘The Duke of Burgundy’ there’s a lack of underlying idea.  Strickland’s filmic devices register as tricks, spurious effects used to fill out his soft porn scenario,  to leaven footage  that is otherwise drearily monotonous.  For all the SM baggage the seamed stockings, high heeled boots, bodices, encasement, bondage and SM persiflage eventally come across as rather silly but not particularly interesting.  

‘The Duke of Burgindy’ locks into the mistress/servant game that  Cynthia and Evelyn are playing (a game that sometimes breaks down).  The relationship is characterised  by long mannered invariant looks that pass between the two players and Strickland’s dialogue.  I know that most of the dialogue takes place ‘within the game’ but delivered in dead-pan deliberation the actual lines are at the level of a subpar Monty Pythan spoof.

The Duke of Burgundy script, without a driving idea or perception, lacking in tensions has no where to go and ends up going nowhere.  To the relationship between Evelyn and Cynthia Strickland adds the trees the bugs and bug talk asking the viewer to buy into spliced manipulation rather than significance.   Strickland’s film traps the audience on the surface of life but it’s a flat dull surface.   

If you really identify with flat surface, then this is the movie for you.  So perhaps it’s an identity thing.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk