For her feature-film debut, British playwright and television writer Joy Wilkinson (Dr. Who, Lockwood & Co.) crafts a riveting erotic thriller.
It begins as Lena (Emma McDonald, The Serpent Queen), a working-class single mother in London, dresses up for a night on the town–complete with oversized hoop earrings and short, fitted dress–to meet a man she met on a dating app. With a history of abandonment, she's eager for connection.
She waits and waits, but he doesn't show, so she commiserates with Daniel (1917's Billy Postlethwaite, rangy son of Pete Postlethwaite), whose date also ghosted him. "It's a big city full of assholes," she reasons (McDonald and Postlethwaite previously worked together in Paul Hart’s 2019 musical version of Macbeth and Wilkinson’s 2021 short "The Everlasting Club").
Daniel keeps the key–or copy of the key–to every place he's lived, and he's lived all over the city, so she suggests they sneak into each one. He's put off by her assertiveness, and at first she seems like the predator, but he eventually relents. It injects excitement into her life, on the one hand; on the other, visiting his past helps Lena to better understand this stranger.
It works until it doesn't. Then it all goes to shit.
Lena didn't tell Daniel she has a seven-year-old son--she and his father share custody--and Daniel didn't tell Lena about his sociopathic tendencies, because why would he? He's a sociopath, and what starts out as an unexpected, adventurous date turns into a perilous battle for survival.
For a $300K debut, 7 Keys is stylish, but not slick, with each section represented by a different color scheme and a score that ranges from suspenseful to ominous as Lena and Daniel reveal more of themselves, through words and actions, and the situation escalates from erotic to horrific (the film was shot by Mary Farbrother and scored by Max Perryment).
If the ending could be more satisfying, the acting is always compelling, particularly from the charismatic Emma McDonald. Until he turns aggressive and demanding, Daniel is more withdrawn by comparison, which Lena initially reads as timidity or cautiousness.
Neither victim nor superwoman, she takes risks to be sure–loneliness can do that to a person–but she's strong and resourceful, yet also openhearted and nurturing. Wilkinson doesn't press the point, but they're valuable qualities for a single mother...though her ability to read social cues could use work.
In her director's statement, the filmmaker explains the thinking behind a scenario both symbolic and plausible: "I've always been fascinated by keys. They're mythic objects in stories, unlocking secret places, other worlds, and even in our world, they have a magic. Children can't be trusted with them, which fueled my childhood fears of being homeless and my obsession with finding a home, primal drives that still fill my dreams and nightmares." She adds, "Keys had power to unlock new experiences. Illicit things."
The end result plays like a post-millennial take on the 1990s erotic thriller with a woman of color given greater agency than the sidekick roles of yore. Lena reminded me of Stephanie Sigman's Laura in Gerardo Naranjo's original Spanish-language Miss Bala or Matilda Lutz's Jen in Coralie Fargeat’s blood-soaked Revenge.
Those films have more gore, but all three women, accustomed to being underestimated, find reserves of strength when tangling with men too dazzled or tradition-minded to understand what they're up against.
There's no slut-shaming here, just a story about loneliness in
the big city and a vulnerable woman's desire for
companionship gone very, very wrong.
7 Keys premieres on VOD Jan 27, 2026. Images from the Jeva Films via IMDb (Emma McDonald) and Mashable (McDonald and Billy Postlethwaite).
Danny Boyle's 28 Years Later, the third film in a series--and first in a new trilogy--that began with 2002's 28 Days Later, ended with a cliffhanger that left some delighted and others pissed. Count me among the delighted.
As last year's film came to an end, young Spike (the terrific Alfie Williams), who gets separated from his newly-widowed father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, missing in action this time around), has endured all manner of cancerous and rage-infected calamities and come out the other side, fully intact.
Left: Spike and Jamie running from rage zombies in 28 Years Later
Then he runs into the bejeweled and velour track-suited Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell, fresh from Ryan Coogler's Sinners and back for more villainy). Jimmy calls his followers Fingers: platinum blond cretins who look like a cross between the Feral Kid in Mad Max 2 and the towheaded terrors of Children of the Corn. (Though he previously recalled odious British entertainer and notorious pedophile Jimmy Savile, they've toned down that look this time around.)
The end. That was it. Until 28 days later...in film time.
Nia DaCosta, who was behind last year's revitalized adaptation of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, picks up where Boyle left off with Spike's induction into a hyper-violent subculture where every kid is a "Jimmy," a miniature version of their megalomaniacal leader, who reports to a never-seen "Old Nick."
Spike is a brave and resourceful boy, but unlike his new companions, he's neither sadistic nor stupid. He will, however, do what it takes to survive–and possibly even to escape–even if it means murdering a fellow human being.
Miles away lies the Bone Temple, an ossuary created by Dr. Kelson (a fired-up, iodine-coated Ralph Fiennes).
I assumed he wasn't alive at the end of the previous film, but Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland--who wrote every film in the series except 2007's 28 Weeks Later--never definitively confirmed his fate, and DaCosta has, essentially, handed the sequel to the madman and the doctor.
No offense to 15-year-old Williams--13 when the two back-to-back shoots began in 2024--but when you've got two uninhibited, road-tested talents like O'Connell and Fiennes at your disposal: it's the right thing to do.
The result is a film that dispenses with the world-building to amp up the weird and the funny with even more what-the-fuck moments than before.
Once again left to his own devices, the good doctor becomes obsessed with Samson (6' 9" ex-MMA fighter Chi Lewis-Parry), the big, hulking, frequently nude "alpha" introduced in the previous film. True to form, Garland doesn't spell things out any more than necessary, but the brilliant, if lonely eccentric detects--or dearly wants to detect--the slightest trace of residual humanity in this vicious, bug-eyed creature, so he comes up with a plan to calm him down, and from there, to try to quell the psychosis that animates his kind.
Though DaCosta didn't call on Scottish band Young Fathers, like Boyle--who first hired them for T2 Trainspotting--she introduces a side of Dr. Kelson previously unexplored, and it involves pop music, because he keeps a set of 1980s and '90s records in his bunker along with a functional player, so while he's toiling away on a project that could have monumental ramifications for the dwindling dregs of humanity, he has Duran Duran in all their synthy glory to buoy his spirits.
Just as Fiennes gave his all to the record producer he played in Luca Guadagnino's shockingly good La Piscine remake A Bigger Splash–in which he does a snaky sashay to the Stones' "Emotional Rescue" that has to be seen to be believed–he ups the ante here in ways sure to put a smile on the gloomiest of faces (he also joins Lewis-Parry in a bit of full frontal).
I've never seen a Shakespearean actor let his freak flag fly so high. Dr. Kelson's pop fandom is the light to the film's considerable dark, because it's otherwise as gory as the previous one--if not more so--with spine-snapping, chest-flaying, and plenty of Jimmy's upside-down cross version of "charity."
Everything comes together at the end with an electrifying showdown involving Jimmy Crystal, Dr. Kelson, Spike, and a surprising new friend (The Green Knight's Erin Kellyman, a kick in the pants) the kid made along the way.
If you're all about themes, Garland, most recently of the unsparing docudrama Warfare with co-director and Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, has your back with cynical thoughts about religion, groupthink, and whatnot, but I enjoy this series for the enthralling fusion of action, ingenuity, and vivid characterizations.
I appreciate the larger themes, but they aren't what keep me coming back, and this entry offers an additional attraction: the return of Jim, the bicycle courier from the first film. I can't imagine Cillian Murphy, who won an Oscar for Christopher Nolan's 2023 Oppenheimer, would return after 24 years unless he had sufficient confidence in Garland's screenplay and DaCosta's direction, but he appears in a touching story line that seems likely to expand in the third (technically fifth) and final film to be directed by Danny Boyle.
Granted, the state of today's world, even without real-life rage zombies wreaking havoc, has had me tearing up at most anything, but the sight of Jim safe and sound–for the moment–made me a little misty.
From her 2018 debut Little Woods through Hedda, with stops along the way for The Marvels and a Candyman sequel, Nia DaCosta has a solid track record, but there was no guarantee she was going to pull off this high-stakes sequel in such fine style, but I'll be damned: she does. And then some.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple opens in Seattle on Jan 15 at SIFF Cinema Downtown and the usual AMC and Regal suspects. Images: Dexerto (Jack O'Connell and the Jimmys), People / Credit: Miya Mizuno (Alfie Williams and Aaron Taylor-Johnson), Sortiraparis (Ralph Fiennes), Reactor (Chi Lewis-Parry), and The Seattle Times / Sony Pictures (Fiennes and O'Connell).
FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER (Jim Jarmusch, USA, 2025, 110 mins)
You see, it's in the blood, both kids are good to mom,
blood's thicker than the mud.--Sly & the Family Stone (1971)
After dancing to the beat of his own minimalist, post-punk drum for 45 years now, I wouldn't expect filmmaker and musician Jim Jarmusch to turn into a sentimentalist just because he's entered his eighth decade and, thank goodness, he hasn't. That would be a pretty disappointing turn of events.
Much like 2005's Broken Flowers, though, in which Bill Murray's aging Lothario attempts to locate the son he never knew, Father Mother Sister Brother finds the 72-year-old filmmaker in a reflective, stock-taking mood.
Though he's always kept his personal life to himself, Jarmusch has been in a partnership with producer/director Sara Driver for nearly 50 years, and the same daughter who inspired him to cast Selena Gomez in 2019's The Dead Don't Die, is now in her 20s. (For those unfamiliar with Driver's work, I suggest starting with her very good Jean-Michel Basquiat documentary.)
In the first story, Father, two adult children, Emily (Mayim Bialik, most recently of Jeopardy!) and Jeff (Adam Driver, so terrific in 2016's Patterson) take a road trip to rural New Jersey to visit their estranged father (Tom Waits, who first worked with Jarmusch on 1986's jailbird picaresque Down by Law).
Neither is looking forward to it. To them, he's just an old coot who's been cadging them for money for years. If anything, Jeff is the softest touch, while Emily is more skeptical (the actors are very good together). Only four years older than Jarmusch, Waits looks even older, though it's always a treat to see him on screen, especially in the films of Jarmusch and the Coen brothers, who have the best handle on his well-honed comedic skills.
The three proceed to have an awkward, but not completely unpleasant visit filled with water and tea–Father isn't exactly living large. Or is he? It's clear they don't trust the guy, but they don't really know him either, since he keeps surprising them in various ways. It feels like there's something he's trying to say, possibly about his estate, since Jarmusch makes the most of pregnant pauses–something he's been doing since at least 1984's Stranger Than Paradise–but the conclusion relies more on actions than words.
Mother presents a parent-child relationship from another perspective as a proper British mother (Charlotte Rampling) waits in her Dublin home for her daughters, Timothea (Cate Blanchett, reuniting with Jarmusch after 2002's Coffee and Cigarettes) and Lilith (the ever-versatile Vicky Krieps), to drop by for a visit. The former looks like a square in her oversized glasses and sensible shoes, while the latter looks like a Fassbinder player with her pink hair and fake fur coat (though Catherine George designed the costumes, producer Saint Laurent, the French design house, made them).
Another awkward tea party ensues, though not for the same reasons. Most everything Lilith tells her mother, a successful author, is a lie. She wants her to think she's a heterosexual with a wealthy fiancé, but she doesn't appear to be or to have either of those things (Irish actressSarah Greene assists with the charade). Though Father has a conclusive ending, this story doesn't, other than to establish that the sisters, differences aside, get along well enough.Their mother, however, is like a stranger, though Timothea puts up a better front than Lilith, who may never meet with her approval.
The film ends with Sister Brother in which twins Skye (Pose's nonbinary Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat, who made his feature debut in The Dead Don't Die) reconnect in Paris after the death of their parents (they're at least the second set of non-white twins to appears in a Jarmusch film after Spike Lee's siblings, Cinqué and Joie, in Coffee and Cigarettes).
One has short hair, while the other has long dreadlocks, but they both favor black leather jackets. They're also younger than the other siblings, in addition to more thoughtful and less anxious. If the brother swears by his daily micro-dose regimen, the drug-free sister is fine with the occasional shot of espresso.
While paying their respects to the now-empty flat in which they grew up, they have an exchange with the landlady (Françoise Lebrun from Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore, a Jarmusch favorite). It's a brief, but touching moment that wouldn't work as well with another actress.
If their parents also come across as mysterious, there's less tension here with the not knowing; with the fact that there was a lot about their American-born parents they didn't know–and now they never will.
Father Mother Sister Brother is Jarmusch's fourth anthology film, though I wouldn't say it completes a quartet, since it's as different from the tales of cultural dislocation in 1989's Mystery Train as the dark nights of the driver-and-passenger souls in 1991's geographically-diverse Night on Earth as the comic vignettes about addiction and obsession in Coffee and Cigarettes.
Granted, there's a lot of driving in this film, shot by Frederick Elmes and Yorick Le Saux from the front seat, so it feels like we're in cars with the characters as roads in New Jersey, Dublin, and Paris stretch ahead of them into futures unwritten.
Like Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colours Trilogy, in which a pensioner struggles to place a bottle in a recycling receptacle in each film, Jarmusch includes certain details in each section: color coordination (Mother is fairly horrified), a Rolex that may or may not be real, toasts with water, tea and espresso ("Can you toast with tea?," asks the literal-minded Jeff), tables laden with beverages shot from above, and skateboarders snaking in front of and around moving vehicles before slowing down and speeding up again.
The film begins and ends with an electric guitar-and-synth score from Jarmusch and German-British artist Anika (they both record for Sacred Bones). The music returns between each section alongside imagery that recalls Jeremy Blake's interstitials for P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love.
Anika also sings a couple of covers in her heavily-accented style, Classics IV's "Spooky," which appears in its original form, as well, and Nico's "These Days." If a little wobbly on the former, she's quite effective on the latter. I'm not sure if there's any significance, but both songs debuted in 1967.
Since it premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year, where it won the Golden Lion, some critics have described Father Mother Sister Brother as a return to form, which seems like another way of saying that they didn't like The Dead Don't Die, his sole foray into zom-com territory, except Jarmusch's filmography has always had its ups and downs, so I wouldn't go that far.
All told, it's one of his most understated films, even as it asks some of the biggest questions, like, "Can we ever really know our parents?" And, "Can we ever really know our kids?" In each case, the answer is a resounding no.
Since I know little about Jarmusch's off-screen life, I couldn't say whether he took inspiration from his relationships with his parents or with his daughter, but only the third chapter asks: "Does it really matter?" He doesn't hesitate to provide a definitive answer...though yours may be entirely different.
Father Mother Sister Brother opens in Seattle at SIFF Film Center on Jan 9. Image from The New Yorker via Bethuel / Vague Notion / MUBI (Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat), Consequence (Tom Waits and Mayim Bialik), AP News (Françoise Lebrun), and First Showing (Moore and Sabbat).
Why would a couple kill three people who never did them any harm?
In his 1973 feature debut, Polish filmmaker Grzegorz Królikiewicz, who began as a documentarian, provides a spectacularly expressive answer to that question. The result, as cultural critic Ela Bittencourt aptly puts it in the essay included with the new Radiance release, is "complex and invigorating."
I tend to think of experimental films as those without a clear-cut narrative or in which the narrative is scrambled. That isn't the case with Królikiewicz's film, which plays out in chronological order, and has a beginning, a middle, and an end, in addition to two distinct characters, but in most other respects, it's an experimental feature or, more accurately, a narrative feature that incorporates experimental or avant garde techniques.
I say this not just to set the scene, but because I was dazzled by the high-contrast black and white images and discordant sound design, but also confused and frustrated, since I couldn't, at first, figure out who these people were and what was going on. To be sure, things happen, but Królikiewicz prioritizes impressions over conventional narrative beats.
Left: Jan and Maria Malisz
To Polish viewers at the time, it might have made more sense, since Królikiewicz drew from an actual case. Granted, by 1972, when he made the film, the story of Kraków couple Jan and Maria Malisz was old news, since the crime they committed took place in 1933. Nonetheless, the film premiered on the international stage at Cannes where it met with a warm reception.
In their physicality, 25-year-old Jan (Man of Iron's Franciszek Trzeciak) and Maria (Anna Nieborowska) are a study in contrasts. He has thinning hair, a wide forehead, and rounded features, whereas she has straight hair with severely-cut bangs and sharp, angular features. His face is open, hers closed, but the camera loves them both, and they're always compelling even when it isn't clear what's going on, not least since, like New York crime-scene photographer Weegee, DP Bogdan Dziworski often surrounds them with negative space to emphasize their isolation from everyone else, including Jan's judgmental younger brother (Camera Buff's Jerzy Stuhr).
Królikiewicz depicts a few critical weeks in their lives, opening with a raucous house party in cramped quarters that plays like something out of an Aleksei German or Robert Eggers film; it's possible they both live on the same street, or even in the same building. The revelers eat, drink, puke, exchange unpleasantries, and, in one case, pass out before Jan breaks it up.
Right: A party to which you would not want to be invited.
An aspiring illustrator and architect, Jan arrives the next day, late and unshaven, at the photography studio where he works as an assistant as Janusz Hajdun and Henryk Kuzniak's string-laden score merges with a disturbing squeaking sound–from some kind of machinery, perhaps–that gives way to something more ominous when his boss lets him go.
The director then catches up with Maria, who appears to be waiting for someone, or maybe she just met up with them. She has leaves in her hair as if she slept on the ground, an indirect way of revealing that she's a sex worker. She straightens out her clothes and combs her hair loudly–the loudest, more aggressive hair-combing I've ever heard–but then, as the expression on her face grows angrier, the sound drops away to nothingness.
Królikiewicz continues with these intriguing, if inscrutable vignettes. Jan and Maria visit a church, presumably to get married, followed by an administrative building, where they have an unsatisfying encounter, culminating in a sequence in which Jan sits on a park bench at the bottom of a hill to meet up with Maria. When she arrives, he hits her with a white bird of some kind, a pigeon or a dove, though I have no idea why. (This sequence was deleted from British prints due to 1937's Animal Rights Act.)
Each encounter, together or separately, is more miserable and humiliating than the last. More often than not, there's no dialogue, just classical horns or violins that give way to something more atonal or even just sound effects like children whispering, dogs barking, or clamorous bell-ringing.
It's all meant to be unsettling, and it is, not least the way Królikiewicz places nearly as much emphasis on the texture of objects, like a particularly rough-hewn table, as the posture of a body or the planes of a face.
It's disorienting, to be sure, but it doesn't feel like art for art's sake, so much as an attempt to show a claustrophobic world through jaundiced eyes. A despondent individual isn't likely to spend much time looking up at the sky when they could be staring at a splinter-laden table or the muddy ground.
Jan becomes so despondent he attempts to take his life, but Maria rescues him in the nick of time. For all its challenges, the film is never dull, though this sequence had me on the edge of my seat. It's no spoiler to reveal that Jan doesn't die, because he hasn't yet committed the crime that will make him infamous, but he's lost all hope. In rescuing him, Maria doesn't simply do a good deed--she confirms that she still has faith in their future.
When things don't get better, though, they scheme to rob the postman who delivers pension payments. While their neighbors see the 30-year-old as a bearer of good news, they see him as a living, breathing bank. Even if you sympathize with their plight, it's not like they're targeting a well-endowed institution or wealthy landowner who can absorb the loss. On the contrary.
Until this point, Jan and Maria have exhibited a propensity for violence, but not murder, and nor do they plan to kill anybody, but everything goes so horribly wrong that they end up killing the postman and their elderly property owners (their names were Walenty Przebinda and Helena and Michał Süskind).
Only the couple's 47-year-old daughter survives (the braces on her legs suggest polio). The sequence is so frenzied and fractured, it's hard to tell what's going on, not least since the POV alternates between victims and perpetrators. In a way, Michael Powell's 1960 Peeping Tom predicts what the director is doing here, just as it would also predict how Richard Brooks handles the brutal murder that concludes 1977's Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
Though they make their escape, the police catch up to Jan and Maria soon enough. The film ends as they present their respective cases. This remarkable sequence concentrates so intently on their words and faces, that most everything else, including judge and jury, literally fades away into the darkness. The two finally have the chance to explain themselves, and they do.
I won't say what happens other than that their undying love for each other comes through loud and clear. Though the murder reveals them at their very worst, they're at their best here, but by then it's too late.
It isn't mentioned in the film, but after Jan's passing, interest in his work took off.
It's the Van Gogh Syndrome in full effect--Jan might not have turned to such a deperate, futile act if people could have seen the value of his work while he was still able to benefit, though I would imagine his infamy juiced its value. Further, Through and Through isn't the only film to depict a Polish artist whose reputation grew in the wake of a horrific murder. Surrealist painter and photographer Zdzisław Beksiński, however, was the victim and not the perpetrator. Jan P. Matuszyński recreates the whole sordid affair in his 2016 docudrama, The Last Family. If less successful as a film, Beksiński's paintings are quite extraordinary.
In the illuminating interview included with this release, Walerian Borowczyk biographer Michał Oleszczyk claims that comparisons to Arthur Penn's 1967 Bonnie and Clyde and Leonard Castle's 1970 The Honeymoon Killers, both inspired by real cases, make sense, but don't quite fit, and I'm inclined to agree, though I'm not convinced that Terrence Malick's elegiac Badlands, also released in 1973, proves more fitting. Near as I can tell, Charlie Starkweather, both in person and as portrayed by an electric young Martin Sheen, was a bad seed, whereas Jan was an artistic soul who lost his way.
Over the years, critics have also cited Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Jean-Luc Godard.
Królikiewicz taught seminars on the French filmmaker, and I can see similarities with 1960's Breathless, which was also inspired by a real case, and 1965's Pierrot le Fou, which also features lovers on the run. The Crime and Punishment comparison proves misleading, however, because unlike Raskolnikov, neither Jan nor Maria has any interest in getting right with God. Though the director's feature hews closer to Italian Neorealism than French (or even Czech) New Wave, he shared Godard's interest in abstraction, ellipses, and misdirection.
In his interview, Oleszczyk goes on to proclaim Through and Through the best Polish film--pretty high praise considering the competition, some of whom are still going strong, like Jerzy Skolimowski, Agnieszka Holland, and Paweł Pawlikowski, all of whom have received Academy Award recognition--in 2014, Pawlikowski won the Best Foreign Language Film award for Ida.
One way or the other, though, it's a singularly shattering achievement.
Through and Through makes its Blu-ray debut courtesy of Radiance Films. Though Królikiewicz passed away in 2017, cinematographer Dziworski oversaw the film's 2K restoration. Supplemental features include three short films–"Everyone Gets What He Doesn't Need" (1966), "Brothers" (1971), and "Don't Cry" (1972). In her excellent essay, "Altered States: The Cinema of Grzegorz Królikiewicz," Ela Bittencourt proclaims 1993's The Case of Bronek Pekosinski as the director's masterpiece, so I hope Radiance gets around to that one, too. I found this paper useful for my research.
Images from Cinema Crazed (Anna Nieborowska), Krowoderska.pl (Jan and Maria Malisz), the IMDb (Franciszek Trzeciak and Nieborowska, alone and with revelers), and Mabumbe (Trzeciak with Jerzy Block as "Old Man").
Coverage of the Seattle International Film Festival and year-round art house programming in the Pacific Northwest.
Kathy Fennessy is President of the Seattle Film Critics Society, a Northwest Film Forum board member, and a Tomatometer-approved critic. She writes or has written for Amazon, Minneapolis's City Pages, Resonance, Rock and Roll Globe, Seattle Sound, and The Stranger.
