Mickey 17

 Mickey (Edward Pattinson) is an expendable. He signed his life away to escape an ugly situation on Earth to go off-planet on a colony ship run by a failed politician with delusions of grandeur (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife (Toni Collette).

 His function on the ship is, quite literally, to die for science. His conscience is transferred, somehow, between deaths, stored on a 'brick' (the prop for which is, in a good example of the film's loopy humour, an actual brick), and his new bodies are created by a machine that spits them out with the same juddering, back and forth spasms as an inkjet printer. The crew use him to examine the deadly effects of space radiation, foreign pathogens, experimental drugs; A recyclable human test subject.

 His occupation makes him all but a pariah on the ship, an untouchable for all except for Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a security officer who takes an inexplicable and fierce romantic interest in Mickey and stays with him throughout all his incarnations.

 The main plot of the film kicks in after the colony ship arrives at their destination, an icy planet appropriately named Niflheim. Mickey's current incarnation, 17, is left for dead on an icy crevice, and is rescued by the planet's native life forms (a counterintuitively cute mix that look like wood lice and move like excited French bulldogs). But in the time it takes him to get back to the ship, they've already printed out 18 - leaving them as multiples, a situation that marks them both for disposal. And from there the film shoots out in multiple directions at once.

 At its heart Mickey 17 (the film, not the character) is a farce, a pretty unsubtle satire that runs its titular protagonist through a bunch of ridiculous situations, bouncing off cartoony characters. It's nominally sci-fi, but despite a killer production design and some lip service to depicting how future technologies might impact society at large, its got no real interest in that genre; It's a comedy through and through, and it will happily contradict its internal rules for the sake of an easy joke or an exciting scene. Hollywood sci-fi, in other words.

 The satire becomes a bit more pointed in its second half, with the introduction of a racist agenda, odes to failing upwards and self-serving jingoism. It's impossible to avoid assigning targets to the film's barbs, but they are pretty toothless and vague, seemingly by design. Ruffalo and Collette's power couple, for example, take pains to at least appear to be respectful to others, which is at severe odds with their real-world analogue's performative anti-wokeness. Isn't that depressing? Satirical, fictional dystopian politicians are better than what we've got.

 Likewise, the whole second half of the movie devolves into a bloated morass of plotlines and contrivances. Writer/Director Bong Joon-ho throws together a bunch of his usual preoccupations (class warfare, lack of empathy, exploitation) but he's hobbled by an uncharacteristic optimism which robs the movie of a lot of its intended bite. His script has a lot of solid ideas and jokes, but the plotting is unsatisfying, and his seeming contempt for his characters makes some late-game triumphs feel hollow.

 There's enough good stuff to make it entirely worthwhile, though. Joon ho's directing is, as usual, incredible (there's a dinner scene here that should handily make him a contender come awards season), the cinematography by Darius Khondji is characteristically beautiful, and the special effects are excellent.
 Every single character in the movie except Mickey 17 (but including 18) becomes a cartoonish asshole at least some of the time. That doesn't do wonders for their likeability or coherence, but it does get a few laughs. Ruffalo's comedic take on a showboat politician is as broad as a barn - a less restrained cousin to his rake in Poor Things - but it is very funny, as is Steve Yeun as a self-serving "friend" or the callous gaggle of scientists that very excitedly observe and take notes on Mickey's agony.
 Pattinson's turn is also buffoonish: he is an idiot as the protagonist, and a volatile psycho in his next incarnation. But his meekness is endearing, and the fact that (partly due to circumstance) he never turns into a raging asshole like everyone else does makes him a successful anchor to the film.

 If I had to be honest, I'd recommend every other Bong Joon-ho film over this one; It just feels too undisciplined, too self-indulgent, and ultimately, forgettable . But it still made me laugh quite a bit, and it frequently looks incredible.

Blind War (Mang zhan)

 For all its many, many faults, you can't blame Blind War for not being entertaining. And it's never more entertaining than during its first ten minutes: a courtroom-set symphony of gunfire that includes a priest opening fire on a judge, a clown getting dramatically mowed down by the police, and the pretty defense lawyer stabbing a policeman. There's a gatling gun, a flying... helium? canister, multiple explosions and a small army of policemen and criminals going at it within the building and in the street outside.

 The action is.... well, it's more about quantity than quality; There are some cool moves, but the choreography is not that complex, it's not cut well, and the CGI explosions and blood effects are pretty bad. It is pretty fun, though.

 During that fracas the heroic captain Dong Gu (Andy On) manages to put down the main villain, but it comes with two consequences (or CONSEQUENCES, as the Baba Yaga would say, nodding sagely): First, he's permanently blinded by a close-range flashbang detonation. And second, he earns the mortal enmity of a psychotic woman (Yang Xing) when he kills her lover.

 This movie plays like a deadpan spoof of eighties action movies, starting with the fact that after all his heroics Dong Gu gets blamed of incompetence by his by-the-book boss and run out of the police force. He's understandably miffed, and has trouble adapting to his new sightless civilian life; But with the help of his teen-aged daughter, he learns that his preternatural hearing (signalled by his twitching ears, a visual device I never stopped finding hilarious) is actually a pretty decent substitute for eyesight. This is way more Daredevil than Zatoichi or Blind Fury.

 Since his daughter is all he has to live for, she of course gets abducted during a trip abroad. But, get this: she gets abducted by same crime family that was on trial in that initial shootout. And it's all happenstance! They just run a human trafficking ring and she was available (in the backstage of a prestigious classical music concert - you know, the type of place lowlife thugs would normally haunt). The script (by Laogou Lin) is... well, let's just be charitable and say its sole concern is to facilitate action scenes.

 When Dong Gu goes on a rampage to recover his daughter, the psycho who has it out for him sees him on TV, breaks out of prison, murders a police woman and takes her place to get close to him. "I'll get close to my enemy and use him to get revenge on the old bosses who raped me" is a novel angle for a villain, but based on the evidence here I doubt it'll catch on.

 From there the duo start working their way up the crime ladder to get to the head of the trafficking ring.

 Oh, and there are extremely ill-advised attempts at broad comedy, mostly thanks to a hapless local cop. They are painful to watch, and I say this as someone who's somewhat inured to this sort of sort of thing thanks to a lifetime of watching martial arts films. At one point they have the guy use the body of an innocent murdered woman as a (terrible) punchline, a rotten cherry on top of the shit pile.

 Blind War is an incredibly fucking stupid movie. It's haphazardly put together (I don't normally notice continuity errors, but I saw quite a few here) and poorly conceptualized. Andy On is fine as the protagonist, but his fellow cast members have a huge appetite for scenery; It's hard to fault them for bad acting when excess seems to be their goal, but it still comes off as a little cringe-worthy.

 And speaking of excess, Director Suiqiang Huo works overtime to make every single scene as epic as he can, with the result that the film becomes a extremely unwieldy. He employs speed ramping, slow motion, arc shots... it really does feel like the spoof of a heightened action movie, especially when the cameras are orbiting two people while they have a relatively non-important conversation as if it was an epic revelation. The music follows suit, and is painfully intrusive. Especially during the 'comedy' bits.

 So it's a good thing that the film's got a lot of action; It's not, as mentioned above, great action, but it's frequent, loud and pleasingly excessive. It does not compare well at all to movies from the 87eleven team or (the more direct comparison) the Hong Kong action epics from the 80s and 90s, but taken as its own thing - especially when considering it seems to be a relatively low-budget title - it's... all right. Consider this a very reticent recommendation, but please don't hold me responsible for any brain damage.

The Tunnel

 In 2007 the Australian government decided to tap into huge reservoirs of water that had filtered through to the abandoned tunnels beneath Sydney. The move gained some notoriety thanks to worries about a transient population of homeless people living underground, but it all came to nothing - the project was suddenly swept under the rug, quietly cancelled.

 That's the fictional basis for The Tunnel, an Australian found footage film that follows a film crew that tries to find out what the story was behind the sudden, mysterious death of the controversial water-recycling project. After being stonewalled by the government, journalist Natasha Warner illegally leads a small news crew into the tunnels into the darkness beneath. Where, of course, they are stalked and picked off one by one by... something.

 The film is framed as a documentary looking into what happened in this expedition, alternating between talking head interviews, the footage they shot both before and during their doomed underground jaunt, and incidental footage from security cameras. There's a surprising amount of buildup, which goes into the office politics at the newsroom and informs the inevitable character conflict when things go wrong later; The film's premise also gives a credible justification for everything being on film (although that gets a little contrived late in the game) and it allows the movie to look a little better than it would were if it were just people waving cameras around. You get footage of the film discussing how to get interstitials and pickup shots, and you also get to see it as well, which is rather clever.

 The acting is also fairly good, and the characters are simple but well-developed. The technical crew (Steve Miller and Luke Arnold) are a pair of knuckleheads who have a very credible dynamic, and their producer (Andy Rodoreda) is pretty good as the one trying to hold things together.
 It's interesting that while the film makes it perfectly clear that Warner's carelessness is 100% responsible for the crew's dire straits (and a couple of deaths), she still comes off as sympathetic thanks to a near-constant stream of casual chauvinist comments from the people that are supposed to be supporting her.

 There's a lot of running around in dark tunnels, of course, and lots of murky scenes shot with night vision cameras. Director Carlo Ledesma doesn't find a way to make all the scrambled footage cinematic, but a good ambiance, some grisly findings, a very clever "oh shit, we're being watched" moment and a couple of well-placed jump scares keep the tensions running high.
 All the darkness also keeps whatever lurks in The Tunnel nice and mysterious. It's a gamble made necessary by the film's very low budget, but it works beautifully here; The few glimpses we get of it are extremely effective. The director and Writers/producers/editors Julian Harvey and Enzo Tedeschi do a good job of leaning into their limitations.

 The Tunnel seems almost forgotten these days - seemingly eclipsed by As Above So Below, which came a couple of years later and is inferior to this one in most ways that count. It's a very solid entry into the found footage horror pile.

Smoking Causes Coughing (Fumer fait tousser)

 I'm pretty fond of French nutjob Quentin Dupieux. His movies may be somewhat half-baked, indifferently shot, and often frustrating - the guy has next to zero interest in conventional narrative - but they're always funny, batshit crazy, and at the very least interesting.

 Smoking Causes Coughing is, as far as I know, his first superhero movie. And by that, I mean it's a Super Sentai (Power Rangers, basically) spoof that soon loses interest in its setup and digresses into a series of short stories first told by the cast, then characters who stumble into the frame, and then... well, best not to spoil one of the film's biggest laughs.

 Benzène (Gilles Lellouche), Methanol (Vincent Lacoste), Nicotine (Anaïs Demoustier), Mercure (Jean-Pascal Zadi) and Ammoniaque (Oulaya Amamra) are the Tobacco Force, a group of superpowered avengers that assemble into a deadly, toxic force. They are introduced fighting a beautifully crafted Power Ranger-esque walking turtle in a scene that has got it all: Flying kicks, ineffective shuriken, the line "Let's give him a cacer!", and a joyful shower of viscera that somehow reaches a distant family watching the fight through binoculars.

The actors actually stumble back before the barrage of oncoming entrails. It's glorious.

 During the fight, Mercure has some problems focusing his powers, as apparently he's not sincere enough. And sure enough, after the fight their splinter-like boss (Alain Chabat voicing and operating a hilariously dingy puppet) tells the team that they must go into a retreat to learn to work together again.

 There's an intergalactic threat they need to prepare for, and all sorts of interpersonal conflict and insecurities they obviously need to work through, but that'd be boring. So when Benzène tells a scary campfire story (a ridiculous, but mostly deadpan Deerskin-like slasher tale), different characters come out of the woodwork to tell their own bizarre horror-adjacent stories.

 Dupieux films everything with his usual flat style and a washed-out '70s palette. It's not a bad-looking movie, but part of the fun is how ramshackle and workmanlike it looks. The soundtrack is all dusty, cheesy French pop, and the gore effects are basically people hurling buckets of offall at the characters from off-screen. There is a pretty nifty disembodied mouth effect I imagine was done with CGI, but other than that it's not really the sort of movie that distinguishes itself visually. The cast, which consists mostly of French and Belgian TV and comedy vets (plus Adèle Exarchopoulos) is game, but this is the sort of material with which even the best acting would feel stilted... and you wouldn't be able to tell if that was the intention or not.

 On the plus side, it's a great showcase for the writer/director's inventiveness, it boasts a genuinely surprising, unpredictable structure, and the gags range from genuinely solid jokes to absolute headscratchers that are somehow still funny. If you have any tolerance for truly surrealist humour and some patience, this is a great point of entry to Dupieux's bizarre filmography.

The Gorge

 There's a rift somewhere in the northern hemisphere, a huge gorge where monsters dwell. Two opposing towers overlook it, manned by two people who overlook an automated defense system (mines and turrets) to prevent the imprisoned things from leaking out.

 Two snipers from both sides of the old iron curtain - Levi (Miles Teller) from the west and Drasa (Anya Taylor Joy) from the East - are hired to guard The Gorge for a year. It's all hush-hush; They have no idea where they are, they are only briefed by their predecessors (who don't know much more than they do), and the gorge itself is guarded by magical cloakers that somehow prevent spy satellites and google maps from seeing it. And if that sort of hand-waving bothers you, I'd recommend avoiding this movie like the plague because it is the sort of film that categorically does not sweat the details.

 As the loneliness and boredom of their respective posts sets in, Drasa and Levi start making eyes at each other across the rift. Levi is a stick in the mud, especially compared to Drasa, who on her birthday starts blasting The Ramones' Blitzkrieg Pop; As they start communicating through the medium of binoculars and writing pads, the residents downstairs come to complain about the music - so the couple flirts both by writing messages to each other and by covering each other's backs with their sniping skills as human/plant zombie hybrids come swarming out of The Gorge.

 This first part of the movie is all about Levi and Drasa's growing attraction and, despite some clunky dialog, it's probably the best part of the movie. As the months go by the long-distance starts to wear on the two; When Drasa is at a low point, Levi jury-rigs a rocket to function as a long-distance grappling hook and the couple have their first proper date and night together.

 But this is nominally an action/horror film, so the script (by Zach Dean) soon finds a way to strand the lovers within the gorge. There it becomes an action/survival yarn as Levi and Drasa search for a way out and bring all its deeply stupid mysteries to light - all while being pursued by a bunch of CGI monsters.
 It's a little bit Annihilation and a whole lot of the Resident Evil videogames, right down to the requisite ancient 8mm tape with a scientist explaining exactly what's going on and equipment that remains strangely functional after more than half a century of complete neglect. Hey, at least it functions as a pretty funny callback to the director's use of low-fi analog footage in his other films.

 The action is decent but not very exciting; Director Scott Derrickson is more of a horror guy, and he and cinematographer Dan Laustsen (Guillermo Del Toro and Chad Stahelski's go-to DP) make the different environments of The Gorge look creepily alien, mostly thanks to some interesting, Fury-Road-like exaggerated colour grading and mutated plants and animal remains.
 As for the shootouts, brawls and chases, there are a couple of interesting set pieces but the choreographies aren't all that great. Most of the monsters are essentially fast zombies (I was really annoyed by that, because they find the skeletons of much more interesting beasts) and the extensive use of CGI never achieves a good sense of physicality.

 For better of for worse, The Gorge has a very modern Blockbuster mindset - think the latter Fast and Furiouses, or the Jurassic Worlds: The action is middling and it's proudly, very loudly dumb; I mean, this one's nowhere near as meat-headed as either of those, but the script does devolve into a similar morass of poorly though-out world-building and unlikely developments. It goes beyond the plot and setting - there are a ton of obvious mistakes that should have really been caught during production, like the fact that both Drasa and Levi are using assault rifles with regular sights to snipe across huge distances; Anyone who's logged at least a little time on any military shooter would call shenanigans. Maybe I'm overestimating the amount of people who'd notice that, but given the movie's videogame feel I suspect it's not insubstantial. And the film is full of this sort of thing.

Fortunately, the romance is solid, and it ultimately proves more central to the movie than the action beats. I remain sceptic about Miles Teller, who I find deeply uncharismatic and plays a bit of a sadsack here (his first message to Drasa is 'we're not allowed to fraternise' or something like that). Anya Taylor-Joy, however, more than makes up for him; She's no Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but it's the same sort of dynamic where she puts in all the personality and sense of fun.

 Their relationship makes the movie - it's nowhere close to, say, Before The Sunset, but it's easy to root for these two. It gives the film some stakes, and us a reason to overlook the rote action and all the idiocy.

Stree

 "Based on a ridiculous true phenomenon" Warns a disclaimer right after the title card of Indian horror/comedy Stree.

 There are a few ridiculous phenomena in this movie, but the disclaimer specifically refers to the practice in some parts of the country to write "come back tomorrow" outside a house to deter ghosts from coming in.

 In the town of Chandery, the sign - which  adorns most houses - is meant for the eyes of the Stree... which simply means "woman". The place is haunted by a female spectre that roams the streets during the nights of a four-day-long festival, abducting men and leaving only their clothes behind.

 As the festival begins, gifted tailor Vicky (Rajkummar Rao) receives a visit from a mysterious beautiful woman (Shraddha Kapoor), who commissions him to put together a whole dress for her before the end of the festival. Vicky, who is completely smitten, agrees, and begins a very clumsy courtship of the mysterious stranger.

 As Vicky and the mystery woman develop a (very chaste) relationship, the ghost strikes night after night, leading Vicky and his goofball friends (Aparshakti Khurana, Abhishek Banerjee and Pankaj Tripathi) are semi-willingly drawn into an attempt to stop the supernatural menace.

 The movie focuses mostly on its goofy character humour, which is a good thing because the horror side of things is a complete bust. The film is built around a good monster - The Stree gets one kick-ass scene where her shrivelled face and luminous eyes are just about visible behind her veil, but her method of locomotion looks so bad it ruins any attempt at being menacing. It doesn't help that making men vanish and leaving their clothes behind just isn't a very horrifying concept.

 Director Amar Kaushik and Cinematographer Amalendu Chaudhary do build up some nice ambiance and compose a few lovely shots, but the horror scenes themselves rely too much on bog standard, over-used horror tricks: A silhouette disappearing in the background, a figure crossing quickly in front of the camera, Evil-Dead-style tracking camera shots crashing into the victims... all performed without any real sense of style.

 I won't hold 'not being scary' against a horror comedy, but I would like for the horror elements not to be this half-assed. Oh well, at least we get some nice sets.

 The humour fares a bit better; Vicky and company are all amiable dumbasses, and they have some genuinely charming moments together. There's a lot of broad humour and mugging, but most of the jokes are character-based and good-natured. There's a lot of picaresque moments that are oddly innocent, and the script by Raj & DK has some pretty clever ideas, including a deconstruction of some of the mythology it builds around its ghost. I laughed a few times, and honestly that's all I need to give a comedy a pass.

 There's an odd subtext against public urination. The first victim bites it after pissing on a wall, someone else is taken after our hero erases one of the warding messages with his pee, and another character is taken was shown earlier micturating along with two of his friends. Really makes you think, doesn't it? I wonder if this is the Indian cultural equivalent of premarital sex in 80's horror.

 In any case, none of this is enough to sustain it for two full hours. The soundtrack is also incredibly annoying - the incidental music is very on-the-nose and intrusive, and I deeply loathed every single one of the three or four hindi pop songs that the film chooses to accompany the action. Not my style, to put it mildly.

 The acting is... well, it mostly worked for me; Everyone overacts like crazy to try and sell the exaggerated characters, which is not my favorite mode, but I didn't hate it, and as mentioned they did manage to make me laugh. The one exception is Kapoor, who plays her character completely straight and thus makes the biggest impression.
 The biggest casualty of the film's over-eager tone is the protagonist, who Rao often plays as a live-action cartoon. The guy's charismatic, but not charismatic enough to pull off some of that shit, and as a result I found his performance a bit grating - especially on the romantic side of things. Seriously, during the big seduction scene I couldn't help but to think of Charlie Sheen in Hot Shots!
 It's exactly the same wildly over-acted pervy smug smile, presented in a very similar way:

This is a problem, because they're two completely different styles of comedy.

 Aside from a few niggles and a general unevenness, the whole thing is cute enough to be mildly enjoyable. Plus, it finds a graceful note with how it ends up dealing with the whole supernatural menace.

 It was successful enough to get a sequel, which is good because it teases one with a very strange final scene. Unfortunately, this is the first installment in something called the "Maddock Horror Comedy Universe", so the sequel incorporates characters from two other unrelated movies that were released in between; The whole thing comes with an MCU-style slate that stretches out to 2028 and I can't even begin to state how much of a turn-off this sort of shit is. The wife liked it, though, so we may still watch it at some point in the future. And one of the in-between movies is about a werewolf. I do like me some werewolves. Dammit, there go my principles.

 Oh well. In the meanwhile, does anyone else have a sudden craving for bacon?

Mmm, bacon.

Botched

 There's a certain temerity in calling your movie "Botched", as if you were looking out at the audience and calling them out, daring them to make the obvious joke. Especially if it's an extremely low-budget horror/comedy with pantomime leanings, which is what I'd call a high-risk proposition.

 The title is explained away in the first few minutes: Richie (Stephen Dorff) successfully pulls off a heist at an auction house, only to be foiled by two accidents which leave him limping away and his loot scattered on the street. His irate boss (Sean Pertwee) sends him on another job to make amends: To steal a bejewelled crucifix from a huge building in Moscow.

 First impressions aren't bad; The plain cinematography and lackluster credit titles make it look like a TV Movie, but the gliding camerawork does a good job of first presenting the location of the heist, then the crime itself and the crew's exit from the premises. Sure, there's some very crappy slow motion and inexplicable speed ramps (always a warning sign), but director Kit Ryan is at least putting in an effort.

 Things quickly go to shit when Richie gets to  Russia. And I mean that both within and without the film itself. First off, Richie is partnered with a pair of obviously incompetent local thugs - Peter (Jamie Foreman) and Yuri (Russell Smith). Peter, in particular, is a psycho who murders someone during the robbery, but worse than that, Foreman plays him with manic relish and a deeply suspect stereotypical Russian accent that would make the Russian agents in Rocky and Bullwinkle die of embarrassment.

 His every line delivery is so forced it drains any situation he's in of any possible humour, even when the jokes seem like they would work on paper - it's a deeply embarrassing performance that I can't see working unless you're very young, extremely forgiving, or, ahem, chemically predisposed to liking it.

 The first example of this is when he tries to keep the lift the criminals are using to escape clear of other people, and they just ignore him. There's a kernel of a funny idea there, but Foreman's mugging and exaggerated frustration make it more cringeworthy than anything else.
 The lift breaks down, leaving Richie, his accomplices and a bunch of bystanders in an empty, derelict floor. At first they think security discovered the murder/robbery, but then they start getting killed in colourful ways by a deranged serial killer who uses the floor as his own personal hunting ground. A killing floor, if you will.

 And that's where it becomes clear that Peter is not the only vaudeville reject in the cast: most of the survivors are one-joke idiots whose main method of joke delivery is mugging shamelessly for the cameras.
 This also applies to the slasher (Zak Maguire), who's introduced twirling like a blood-spattered Dee Dee from Dexter's Lab, and overacts like a motherfucker. At least he's having fun, I guess?

 The film follows suit with its stylistic choices and the places it goes. There's what I can only describe as wacky hijinks galore. I think it's going for a live-action cartoon feel, but the thing it most consistently reminded me of is the tacky TV comedy of the 70s and early 80s; Mostly Benny Hill, thanks to all the sped-up sequences. Or, to be much less charitable, the Star Wars Holiday Special due to the pantomime acting and jokes.

 OK, that's (slightly) unfair - mainly because there really are a couple of decent jokes in the script (by Raymond and Eamon Friel and Derek Boyle). Not many, and most are ruined by the delivery, but it does buy the film some goodwill.

 And some of the so-bad-it's-good stuff actually works; I'm partial to an extremely poorly made, Caddyshack-like rat muppet that gets a surprising amount of plot relevance and stars in one of the best gags.

 There's a lot of gore, too, and the special effects are outstanding compared to everything else. There's severed limbs and heads, impalements, lots of corpses, a good fire stunt - good stuff, even when they pair one of the impalements with disco music because... well, maybe it'll be funny? (It isn't.)
 No matter; Soon the cheesy Casiotone soundtrack (by Tom Green) will kick in again, and we're back to amateur hour.

 The acting is atrocious. even for the people who play it straight; The requisite love interest (Bronagh Gallagher) runs all her lines through a truly atrocious accent. It's all so bad it actually makes Dorff's committed performance look pretty good - and let's face it, he's never been the best actor out there (and I say this with a lot of affection).

 It pains me to say it, because it could have worked, maybe - but it's just a deeply shitty movie with many inexplicable, terrible-looking choices. It happens, I guess. They went full ham hoping for cult immortality... and fucked it up. If only there were a word I could use to encapsulate that.

(The film is a joint production between Germany, UK, Ireland and the US, with most countries represented in the cast - I went with UK for its nationality as that's where the director is from.)