Matriarch

 Laura (Jemima Rooper) is a hot mess. A successful career woman, sure, but she's struggling with bulimia, spends her days perpetually drunk, and is prone to partying her way through the night before heading into the office in a cocaine haze.

 She's not really having a good time, though. Her interactions with others are a weird mix of tentatively reaching out and then snapping at them whenever she's shown any kindness. Not hard to guess there's a lot of unresolved issues there.

 That lifestyle claims its due not twenty minutes into the movie, and she collapses from a coke overdose after an all-night bender. As she lies dying on her bathroom floor, a black oil spill crawls from outside the frame and into her; It causes one truly horrifying nightmare, and then she wakes up on her sofa, as if nothing had happened.

 The next day she receives a call from Celia (Kate Dickie), her estranged mom, with whom she obviously has a strained relationship. Tired and confused, still reeling from her near-death experience, she quits her job - after some choice, unwarranted nastiness towards her (too-nice and understanding) boss - and heads out back home, somewhere in rural Scotland.

 As soon as she's crossed the threshold of her childhood home, the poisonous spite Laura's bottled up throughout the years overflows - her contempt and hate for her mom are tangible. Celia, meanwhile, takes it in stride and is all conciliatory, manic cheerfulness, desperately trying to paper over years of bad parenting.

 And there's clearly something odd going on at the village. There's weird charms hanging from the local trees, old acquaintances look a lot younger than they should, and there's clearly some ulterior motive behind Celia's newfound interest in her daughter (her attempts to placate Laura are transparently - hilariously - self-serving), and it's easy to see she can't stand her. Best of all, Laura is so self-absorbed (and, to be fair, caught up in some pretty out there weirdness) that she's nearly oblivious to it all.

 There's also the matter of the black ooze that keeps welling up from Laura's flesh... and Celia's.

 Matriarch is an American-produced slice of very British folk horror - a particularly indecent take on the sub-genre, with a wicked streak of humour. Explanations are produced eventually, leading to a satisfying, bizarre finale that features some nice cosmic horror-adjacent imagery that's pretty impressive for a low-budget production like this.

 Writer/director Ben Steiner keeps things simmering nicely until they boil over, the dialog is sharp, and the actors seem to be having a blast portraying two extremely toxic people - one of them because she doesn't know any better, the other one irredeemable. I wasn't initially convinced by Rooper's acting, which felt too mannered, but it grew on me - it fits her character well. Dickie is (as ever) a delight, and she gets the lion's share of the laughs, but both actresses have strong scenes and a very good sense of comedic timing. Which is an odd thing to praise in a horror movie, but there you go.

 In case I've given the wrong impression: it keeps a tight enough leash on the mood, and has enough effectively disturbing imagery that it never really tips over into comedy - or even horror comedy territory. I'd describe it as a hornier, less out-there companion piece to that other weird folk horror movie from 2022, Men; It's not scary, but it can be unsettling - there's some pretty disgusting body horror, a cool story served with a thick helping of atmospheric uncanniness, all sorts of sex-tinged weirdness and the sort of behaviour from both leads that would curdle milk and make monocles shatter violently. Great fun for the whole family, in other words, as long as the family consists of perverts.

 All that plus a sex druid and something I can only describe as Cunthulhu. What else could you possibly need?

Shepherd

 A young man (Russell Owen), recently bereaved and under obvious distress, decides to accept a shepherd job in a barren isle off the cost of Scotland (The Isle of Mull, posing as a much smaller island). A laconic captain (the always welcome Kate Dickie) takes him and his dog Baxter  (Shuggie) there, uttering all sorts of ominous pronouncements on the way ("Something's haunting you, Mr. Black. I can see it. I hope you get the chance to confront it.")

 Egads.

 For a while, as Eric settles into the derelict cottage the job comes with, and it looks like the movie might slow down and breathe a little. It doesn't last long.
 Soon the poor guy is suffering nested nightmares, being followed around by a woman in black, or dealing with low-level haunted house shit. When it's not that, hints of his dark, troubled past bubble up or Captain Fisher phones up with some more vague accusations. There's also a mystery, of sorts (it never goes anywhere) with a bunch of journals an artistic soul left behind; you know, the type of person who'd draw some pretty ravens by a warning about a witch; "She's here!"
 Even if it's at a glacial pace, there's always something going on in this movie. It's a constant, slow-motion barrage of very tame weirdness and psychological distress.

 Shepherd's a (mostly) gorgeously mounted gothic tale that struggles with the tale part. It's a tone exercise that, grasping for a story, settles on cobbling together hoary clichés, shopworn imagery, and nothing much beside. Maybe if we smother it in dour solemnity no one will notice.

 Technically, at least, it excels. Writer/director Russell Owen has a real eye for composition and keeps things lively, always with an eye towards constantly driving the screws in. And while it's always a bit too obvious in its intent, a little crass, the film gets by on looks: Cinematographer Richard Stoddard makes the unusual choice to film with a lot of curved lenses, even in interior shots, and lavishes a lot of attention on the gorgeous windswept hillsides and moors. Along with a sometimes overbearing score by Callum Donaldson, the visuals and style-over-everything mindset ensure that the atmosphere goes a long way to salvage a lousy script.

 The acting is great as well; Owen sells his character's funk convincingly. Dickie, meanwhile, make a huge impression with a tiny part as a sort of one-woman Greek chorus/pack of furies; This character, complete with her awesome wardrobe (Costume design by Gigi Siegel) belongs in a much more fun movie than this one.

 

 Even the ace visuals stumble towards the end, as escalation requires more than the meagre budget allows; Few movies manage to do convincing CGI fire, and Shepherd is not one of them. The climactic scene where we finally see the root of Eric's trauma fares much worse - a very funny instance of supposedly horrifying cartoon physics. Good thing I wasn't invested in the plot, huh?

 Maybe that's too mean. There's a lot to like here, it's just that it's in service of a completely uninspired, vacuous core. I do hope everyone involved gets more chances, I'd love to see what these people would do with a story worth telling.

Prevenge

 The title is misleading. If you're expecting a time traveller taking control of himself as a fetus to manipulate his mom into killing the mothers of people who would eventually wrong him, that is [SPOILER] not what's happening here at all.
 No, the plot for Prevenge completely avoids that, to its detriment, by being about something else entirely. They could have milked that pun title so much more! What a disgrace.

 Ruth (Alice Lowe) is a very very pregnant murderer, first shown as she slits the throat of a sleazy-ish pet shop owner (Dan Renton Skinner). Others (including Tom Davis and Kate Dickie) will soon follow as she works her way through a list of targets. The law barely even puts in an appearance; I have no idea what the Cardiff police department ever did to Alice Lowe, but here they're portrayed as the most inept bunch imaginable. Unless more of the movie is going on inside Ruth's head than it seems. Anyhow; the why of the murders becomes clear as the film goes on, but other than that the film keeps its cards relatively close to its chest.

 It's a weird, thorny bit of gallows comedy; Clever and more than a little bit unhinged.

 The cast is uniformly good; The cinematography (by Ryan Eddleston) and an excellent soundtrack (by Pablo Clements and James Griffith) conspire to give the movie a dream-like sheen; While in general it shoots for a more realistic, washed-out, fuzzy atmosphere with a muted palette, the movie knows to throw in some really good-looking compositions and bright primary colors.

 The script is an ornery bastard. It paints Ruth as a sort of chameleon, adopting all sorts of disguises to approach her victims, and has her then spoil the effect by trying to get into their heads - almost as if she was working herself up to killing them... or to find a reason not to go through. Her ambivalence towards  the carnage becomes clearer as the film goes, and includes her having verbal spats with her unborn daughter (the little one shows no compunction whatsoever). Meanwhile, her midwife insists that the baby now controls her life. It's all very funny, a little uncomfortable, and oddly relatable... somehow.

 What's more surprising are some startling flashes of empathy, and some really affecting, low-key scenes. Lowe wrote Prevenge while she was pregnant, and then hurried through both starring and directing it before the baby came to term. I guess this unusual (pardon me) gestation shows through in a raw sense of honesty lurking beneath the film's arch, extremely wry facade. Definitely not what you'd expect out of a rampaging pregnant woman movie where a man vomits inside his wig.
 In case it's not clear- all this is a pretty roundabout way of saying I kind of loved it. 

Raven's Hollow

 There's a few movies out there giving historical authors a fictional adventure that would prefigure whatever they're later known for, or thrusting them into stories that vaguely resemble something they might have written. Think Ken Russell's Gothic, or Cast a Deadly Spell for a particularly batshit take on the formula.
 Raven's Hollow idoes this for Edgar Allan Poe (not his first fictional appearance in movies), and in a somewhat unusual choice, mostly restricts its references and quotes to the man's poetic work* especially, of course, the Raven. You could argue it also foreshadows the creation of his detective Dupin, but honestly that oversells Poe's investigative prowess in this movie.

 After a cold open where a girl is chased and killed by that most terrifying of monsters -a cloud of CGI fallen leaves- we cut to the titles, and then to a scene where Poe (William Moseley) runs across a crucified, disembowelled man while riding out on some sort of military drill with four other cadets. We know he's Edgar Allan Poe, because his mates refer to him as both Edgar and Poe when they address him.

 While cutting the corpse down, the dying man whispers 'Raven' and promptly dies. The group, egged on by Poe, decide to take the corpse to a nearby settlement - the titular Raven's Hollow.

 Once there they get the obligatory folk horror passive aggressive reception from the townsfolk, and start suspecting not all is what it seems. Poe, being the inquisitive type, opts to stay in town to see if he can solve the mystery... and the movie starts falling apart soon afterwards.

 As more characters are introduced and we start learning the facts, it becomes clear that the raven is some sort of evil spirt monster, and that the town is somehow complicit in its murders. As events escalate they... well, they basically stop making sense, and the plot starts just stumbling forward in ways that don't quite mesh together. Dialog turns from cogent conversations to people spouting unrelated lines and exposition at one another. Poe -who, remember, wrote detective stories well before Conan Doyle came up with Sherlock Holmes- is presented as an analytical thinker, but the sort of conclusions he jumps to here are highly suspect (he turns out to be correct every time, of course.)

 At least this leads to him deducing that taking opium will protect him from the monster's mind tricks (!), which results in a scene of him tripping balls and seeing locomotive-like jets of steam come out of his horse. Finally: an origin story for Poe's opium habit.

 All this is a shame, because the movie looks very good - All autumnal landscapes and creepy, semi-abandoned townships; who'd have thought Latvia'd make a good stand-in for upstate New York? The wardrobe looks great, too, and the color coordination seems to be on-point. The direction is assured and there are some great touches here and there - I particularly like a scene where Poe's face becomes increasingly bathed in red light as he approaches a bloody tableaux in a church. None of this disguises that it's a low-budget production, but it at least puts in the effort and mostly succeeds. Unfortunately the monster itself is a major letdown, a crappily designed thing rendered in sub-par CGI.
 The acting is good, too! Besides Moseley, who manages to say a lot of nonsense and seemingly mean it, all the actors (including the awesomely named Oberon K.A. Adjepong, the always welcome Kate Dickey, and Melanie Zanetti) do a lot to help keep the tone consistent.

 Beyond it just not being a satisfying story in and of itself, it's also not particularly faithful to Poe's style; it doesn't come off like something he would ever write. There are a few references, of course: character names, minor incidents, and Poe quotes his own poetry during the movie, but it all feels pretty hollow (pun not intended), and honestly... how someone could get to The Raven from the events of this movie is anyone's guess.