Those under the impression that the meta hip-horror genre had crawled back into the grave with Scream 4 might find themselves experiencing déjà vu on watching Christopher B. Landon’s Happy Death Day. Mind, they won’t be alone in the feeling. If you’ve ever watched: Groundhog Day, Mean Girls, Halloween, Scooby-Doo, Clue, American Pie, A Nightmare on Elm Street, or, indeed, Screams 1 to 4, this one’ll resurrect familiarity. As a chirpy take on the slasher genre – more playful than the Wes Craven send-ups – there’s a lot of fun to be had here but a feature of slightly less eclectic genre pickings would have been welcome.
If watching A Bigger Splash was like climbing into a jacuzzi and discovering that it may contain a crab, Luca Guadagnino’s third chapter in his so-called trilogy of desire, Call Me By Your Name (which follows the former and I am Love before it), might be considered akin to climbing into said jacuzzi, finding it crab free, being handed a cornucopia of cool, Sicilian lemonade, and then having to remain as the water drains away. It may be la dolce vita, but love stings.
Bittersweet has rarely felt more apt a description than in the case of Ingrid Goes West, a film both painfully sour in its bitterness and poignantly sweet in its aesthetic. Pitch black humour might make for a biting satire but, in Matt Spicer’s hands, this comes not at the expense of heartbreaking emotional resonance. You’ll never ‘follow’ social media in the same way again.
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