Glorious Life or Grave: What We Saw at London Film Festival 2025
- The Big Ship
- 12 minutes ago
- 9 min read
Words on Train Dreams, After the Hunt & God is Shy by Bryson Edward Howe
Words on Sirāt & Sentimental Value by Caleb Carter
Train Dreams - dir. Clint Bentley
I recently got glasses for the first time. It is odd having a new lens to see the world through, something sharper but also protective; a membrane between me and everything that isn't me now enhanced, a neat concession to augmentation. Back when I was passing through jobs as a tradesman, we'd sit on rooftops while the building was still half-built, and men would posture to me what it meant to be a man. The talk was always about weight: lifting it, carrying it, proving you could. We postured a creed. We drank a creed. We went home sore with a creed, disappearing into the skyline of a city already changed since I got here. Me-smog-city, watching commuter lines zipper the city together and without glasses to see properly the lights smeared into a wet necklace on the river, twinkling in soft-edge bokeh.
In Train Dreams, loosely inspired by Denis Johnson's book of the same name, Robert Grainier (who never quite becomes a myth, no matter how many times the film invites him to) is a man who keeps getting reset by accident: by grief, by fire, by the noise of progress measuring itself with heavier and heavier steel. The West that Johnson wrote - the one that kept inventing new distances - shrinks here into something carryable and exact. Trusting only its junctures and verses, here is The Great American Novel become a pocket psalter in palm; Grainier doesn't narrate America so much as get narrated by it: a complex man who hides behind his simplicity, who by happenstance (by accident) is caught in the tide of change and swept up in all that it destroys and builds (and oh what a cycle). By its end, I'm sat back in my seat, pinching the bridge of my nose in that new habit glasses teach you, and I'm a little embarrassed by how moved I am by the film's refusal to hurry, and by Robert Grainier, whose view of the world, whose lens, is constantly corrected, and how that happens to us, too. Grief. Love. Work. A book. A birth. A heartbreak. A song. A new jacket. A haircut. A pair of glasses.
May our vision always be adjustable without becoming distrustful.
May we learn to tighten the frame without losing the sky.
May we keep the fragments close enough to lose the whole.
And, God, may the long machine that binds our days keep its rhythm so soft,
that we may still hear each other when we speak.
After the Hunt - dir. Luca Guadagnino
After the Hunt is one of those films where the most interesting thing about it is the part it's too nervous to touch. Guadagnino builds a perfectly glossy surface here - elegant, operatic, controlled - but makes me wonder what would ooze out if he just scratched at it with slightly sharper nails. The setup has all the right tensions: a working-class professor (Garfield) is accused of assaulting a student (Ayo) whose moral authority is quietly backed by her father's endowment money, and a middle-class professor (Roberts), quite literally stuck in the "middle" between the two. The film only gestures toward this paradox, that power can look like Garfield (white, cis, male, straight) while residing entirely elsewhere, before retreating into its neutral moral ambience.
We're in America, but it's the same estuary water as here: built around the etiquette of not saying what's obvious. Not the knife-fork kind, but the deeper kind, the "don't embarrass yourself by saying the quiet mechanics out loud" kind, the kind that is class's favourite disguise, the one that turns fear into poise and mutes any real threat of mobility into the myth of meritocracy. The result is a very watchable and strangely polite film. Though it frustratingly keeps tidying away the question of whether identity can be commuted into authority. Sometimes it can, but often it's a more baroque exchange, one which has transformed it into a form of currency, beyond mere identity politics: that you can be righteous and resourced, compromised and broke (or both righteous and compromised and still prosper if your surname matches your college's library building).
In the end, any actual accountability happens offscreen, translated only into the bureaucratic language of public liability. The professor isn't redeemed by his origins, nor damned by them, just reminded that moving up often means moving into someone else's pocket (as we find out in the film's obnoxious coda). But maybe that's too British of me, wanting accidents to reveal structure. The right characters are in the right rooms to find it, but for a film that falls on the shoulders of one forced to learn that moderation is not a moral position, trying to prove otherwise flattens it into something much less incendiary than it desires to be.
God is Shy - dir. Jocelyn Charles
My girlfriend talks in her sleep and I answer. I wait for the signal to open, for the thin gold frequency between parted lips. The first word arrives sideways, then a small laugh. Crenelations not of dreams but the bright remainder. I take it all as instruction.
When Blake saw angels in the trees of Peckham Rye, he called it invocation. I call it just trying to listen (a flicker of wing, a spark of gold, a ghost in the trees). My problem is that I always try to reply. To get the last word in against God. But you are a great listener. What cracking conversation you must hear: brick answering bracken, smoke answering mist; the wind lifting from the border hills, its voice low and iron-grey; somewhere north of Berwick the pylons sing, their lattice throats catching the storm, each one crowned with a cold corona, and between them: the moor, black water pooled, reflecting no stars at all.
She sighs, turns over, and says: everything's fine, and I believe her. But by morning, she doesn't remember. She looks at me with her waking eyes, so human, and asks what she said.
Sirāt - dir. Oliver Laxe
✵ ALL ✵ MAY ✵ HAVE ✵ IF ✵ THEY ✵ DARE ✵ TRY ✵ A ✵ GLORIOUS ✵ LIFE ✵ OR ✵ GRAVE ✵
Everybody at the dance is offered a ticket out. The come-up is a collective surcharge, but the waning rave is a jagged rayon vert. Chemistry eddies, then diverts, then bursts the banks of will, and the dancers' tacit deferral of The Real World - tirelessly circling the treeline like a myth - sours, then submits. Blinds are closed to defend the weakest, who are otherwise exiled. With the remainder, a deal is struck. Go or stay, here where blacklight is a parasite on the underbelly of the sun. Sometimes, through the club-smudge, nothing else can be seen but their glowing white t-shirts moving up and down: still breathing, in this hollowed out hot place, still here. A harder bargain sirens below the surface. What if we never, ever stopped? What do we stand to lose? And how would it stack up against this?
In Sirāt, the rave is traditional, ancestral to the point of irony: a roving, leather thing, via the haptic lineage of the soundsystem (the first shots are of hands building obsidian pyramids, big dig petroglyphs that magically wobble the air), and with the psychic barometer of a shaman with dementia. The theorized death-drive of electronica - and its BPD Bacchanal of our age - in film, is a curious phenomenon, where nihilism haemorrhages from weak livers pinging against the glass of infinity. Raves are anti-most-things but mirages and love - these also next in line to be shunned for stringent eternities dreamed by drum after drum after drum, and even in fiction disbelief has to be suspended to entertain its dopaminergic calamity. Climax's nightmare often seems just that, a fantasy, a lyric of hell, and whilst I adore Victoria with every ounce of my being, no amount of pingers could lure me into weapon-dealing round the back of Berghain.
Oliver Laxe's stroke of genius is never to apologise for his Burning Man trust-funders, whose ketamine colonialism leaves them rambling, really, as lost as us all. It is his apocalyptic ambitions that equalise the ends and the means: not only do the ravers' death-drives appear excruciatingly logical but also suddenly seem, at the end of the world, far more sensible than the protagonist searching for his daughter in the South Sahara. Their dust laws flatten me. Rust, distance, no crescendo. Repeat with what is lost... Repeat with what is lost.... How can speakers be this loud if they're so damn empty? Sirāt is named after the Islamic bridge over hell into paradise, "as thin as a hair, as sharp as a sword." On any given morning my mood swings between the depression and elation of admitting that there was not and will never be a pot of gold, instead speculating what electra I can harvest on the rainbow's edge; today that is our state of grace. "One more dance", indeed. Just one. This time with the warlords who brought us here. Forgiven for their bale, beneath the setting sun.
Sentimental Value - dir. Joaquim Trier
Van Gogh's Self-Portrait With Bandaged Ear is on my bedroom wall and I hope that when people see it they don't think that I think self-harm is beautiful when it's painted. I just like his green coat.
I'm reading Olga Ravn's My Work, her autofiction on post-natal depression. She says writing is like having a child, but it is also her rescue from the child. They both make baby sounds. She says it is like breastfeeding, a "darkness // that makes rocks move // across the forest floor // over thousands of years". I think it's because we want to make things that are us and aren't us at the same time. But when we make things that aren't us it pushes us further from the whole.
I want to write about art and depression but it disgusts me. I want to defend art without abstracting depression. There, see. Even there I was about to write "art is the catastrophe of signs". Sometimes I'm so sick of myself.
Joaquim Trier says that Sentimental Value is about reconciling the language of art with the language of the social sphere.
A kind of linguistic kintsugi.
In a key scene in Sentimental Value, aging director Gustav Borg asks an American actress to re-enact his own mother's suicide in the room where she committed suicide. Like her grandmother was, his daughter is also depressed. It's unclear if he is. There is a crack in the foundations of their house that has been there since the Holocaust.
When you meet people who truly believe in ghosts they describe them to be a comfort.
I have written about my mother's depression once, plainly, but my own suicidal ideation, twice, in abstraction: "what let's me stay // lent 45° off the scarp's edge // the light outside on decision day // is crushed silk on a singing saw" and "really, I have wept at branches // akin to // kisses from my father, madness // akin to // permission".
What???
Do I think that self-harm is beautiful when it's painted?
I started writing that artists are depressed because they are "always an émigré. Art is not only the amber instrument through which he evaluates the country, but also always the defunct language with which he tries to traverse it. His slow-time pidgin, this mealworm ferment, resists assimilation. He is always the cheat, the alien, the secret agent." What??? "Dossier for one: The Artist must never 'go native'. The Artist must observe the social sphere (c.f. turn out its pockets, make love to it, harass it, assassinate it), but The Artist must never 'go native'. The Artist must embody 'the foreigner', they must love art over everyone, they must have an ego that accommodates their inflated inner world, they must be pathologically idle. The Artist must never 'go native'." Sometimes I'm so sick of myself.
I stopped therapy because it was expensive and also because somebody told me I was over-therapized. In therapy I found out that the reason I am depressed is actually just because I spend all of my dopamine all at once. Because I stay up watching reels and porn and eating sweets and vaping. It's just a hangover. How gross. I mean that literally, gross as in not beautiful. I spend all of my dopamine all at once because there is a bottomless, whirring internal ghost and reels and porn and sweets and vaping quieten it. I write because there is a bottomless, whirring internal ghost and it can go out the crack into something that isn't me. Lynch said you can't make art when you're depressed, not good art anyway, so Van Gogh must have been happy whilst he was painting his green coat.
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