5 things to watch this weekend – 21 to 23 October

Banshees, poltergeists, rippers – it’s dangerous out there. What are you watching this weekend?

21 October 2022

By Sam Wigley

Decision to Leave (2022)

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide, including BFI Southbank

Only Almodóvar, or perhaps David Fincher, rivals Park Chan-wook in his recent burst of lushly directed, labyrinth-plotted melodramas. His latest is as head-spinningly tricky to keep up with as The Handmaiden (2016), but its pristine storytelling is just as seductive. This is filmmaking that purrs. The plot is a riff on Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), seeing a Busan detective (Park Hae-il) investigate the death of a man found at the bottom of a local climbing rock. Police procedural becomes perverse love story as he falls for the man’s beautiful widow (Tang Wei), even as she emerges as suspect number one.

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

Reuniting Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, the stars of his debut film In Bruges (2008), this riotously funny and sad latest feature from Martin McDonagh is his best yet. Set on a fictional island just off the coast of Ireland in the 1920s, with sounds of the civil war to be heard on the mainland, it’s a brutal black comedy in which two former best friends are suddenly at loggerheads. Facing up to his mortality, Gleeson’s aspiring musician decides he simply no longer has time to waste on the banal banter of his long-time drinking buddy, a simple soul poignantly played by Farrell. 

Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 80s Kadokawa Years

Where’s it on? Blu-ray and video on demand

Little by little, the wonderful work of Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi is becoming more available to see. First we got his wacky haunted-house debut Hausu (1977), then his sublime late-period war trilogy (2012 to 2017). Now Third Window Films has collected up four of his 1980s pictures, typically fantasy-tinged tales of puberty and adventurous school kids. The most familiar title will be The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (1983), which was later remade as an anime in 2006 by Mamoru Hosoda, though the masterpiece of the group must be the terrifically named His Motorbike, Her Island – a dreamy 1986 romance about speed, fate and desire.

Poltergeist (1982)

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide, including BFI Southbank

The idea of malevolent ghosts entering the homes of suburban America via their TV sets is as chilling as it is inspired, and this unlikely meeting of minds between director Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) and producer Steven Spielberg is still incredibly freaky 40 years on. Released the week before E.T., the contract for which prevented Spielberg from directing this too, it shares a similarly comfortable Californian domestic setting – and in fact E.T. too has some supernatural business with a television. In Poltergeist, however, the situation is played for sheer terror: this all-American family is visited not by a friendly alien but by violent spirits who abduct their daughter and cause unholy mayhem about the house.

Hands of the Ripper (1971)

Where’s it on? Talking Pictures TV, Saturday 10.55pm, also on BFI Player

Hands of the Ripper (1971)

Angharad Rees – Demelza in the 1970s original series of Poldark – plays Jack the Ripper’s daughter in this superb latter-day Hammer horror. Fifteen years after witnessing him murdering her mother, she’s still living with the trauma but also perhaps with an even more malignant influence – a spate of murders occuring around the Whitechapel area bears all the hallmarks of Jack himself. While not one of Hammer’s best remembered films, Hands of the Ripper runs along a treat, building to a marvellously atmospheric finale in the whispering gallery of St Paul’s Cathedral. The director is Peter Sasdy, who would follow it up with a TV horror classic – Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape (1972).

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