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The thing that stood out to me the most was the films impressive technical competency and sound production. The use of soundscapes and utilising music as a motif was done brilliantly- sound isn’t often the first thing I pick up on in a film so it was especially imposing. I noticed the use of sound also acted as a storytelling device and was expressive in conveying important and integral messages to the film.

Actors performance was also outstanding and I was impressed with the visuals and cinematography throughout- particularly the use of colour grading- I went into the film with no expectations and I think that made it all the more suprising and striking. 

There’s definitley a lot more to unpack as I feel everything to do with sacraligion and the supernatural likely has deeper connotations about the films central race and identity themes, but overall a beautifully crafted and engaging story!

“In this healthy and beautiful life my share has been nothing but suffering.”   ༺♰༻

A film where you have to let go of traditional narration and surrender to dream logic- with each frame meticulously crafted in true surrealism and abstract cinema.

Poetic, introspective, and visually mesmerizing- a film that feels more like a living painting than a traditional narrative. Through stunning cinematography and meticulously composed mise-en-scène, muted tones contrast with the vivid reds of pomegranates: a recurring visual metaphor for life, death, and spiritual transformation. In Christian iconography, pomegranates symbolize resurrection and eternal life, while their blood-red seeds evoke both sensuality and sacrifice. Parajanov uses them to reflect the heart of Sayat-Nova; the poet’s bleeding soul, torn between earthly desires and divine transcendence.

Books and literature emerge as a recurring motif, underscoring the poet’s devotion to art and knowledge. Dialogue is sparse & replaced by haunting diegetic music, prayers, and the unsettling sounds of pomegranates being consumed. Every frame feels timeless and sacrilegious, rich with symbolic layers that touch on purification, sacrifice, and the interplay between the sacred and the sensual.

It’s baffling, hypnotic, and uncompromising in its creative vision; a series of poetic tableaux where meaning lingers beneath the surface. I’m not sure I’ll ever fully understand it, but its imagery will stay with me.

House (1977)  ✩₊˚.⋆🕸️⋆⁺₊✧

The film’s mise-en-scène evokes a dreamlike quality, with an iridescent glow that creates a hazy, illusory effect. Obayashi’s use of multimedia and experimental editing: such as vignettes, dissolve fades, dreamlike montages, and rapid jump cuts, makes the film visually dynamic, with saturated color and film leaks enhancing its surreal tone.

Flowers serve both a symbolic and aesthetic purpose, contrasting beauty with the violence the girls endure. In Japanese culture, flowers represent mourning and remembrance, reflecting the aunt’s eternal yearning and transformation into a vengeful spirit. Obayashi’s use of artificial floral motifs heightens the film’s whimsical yet eerie atmosphere, reinforcing the clash between light-hearted fantasy and macabre horror.

The recurring vanilla sky is a striking visual motif, symbolizing longing and idealized memory. Its ethereal beauty emphasizes the film’s artificiality and mirrors the fleeting nature of life- contrasting the sky’s softness with the girls’ brutal fates. This dreamlike palette enhances the film’s surreal, otherworldly quality.

“What's the matter with me, Mark? I don't seem able to feel anything.”  ｡･:*˚:✧｡

A quintessential Hitchcock thriller, ‘Dial M for Murder’ delves into the unraveling of a seemingly perfect marriage, with Margot’s red dress symbolizing danger, ion, and guilt. This is juxtaposed with yellow flowers, which Hitchcock subverts from their traditional meaning of warmth to represent deception and decay, reflecting the tension beneath the surface and facade of the marriage. The ever-present flowers in the apartment highlight the fragile illusion of domestic bliss, with the apartment itself becoming a claustrophobic stage for manipulation and murder.

Hitchcock’s technical brilliance is on full display, using whip pans and circular tracking shots to amplify suspense and disorientation, while creating a sense of control and surveillance. Tracking shots are used to evoke both voyeurism (a recurring theme true to Hitchcock’s signature style) and entrapment, mirroring the characters’ psychological and emotional imprisonment. The use of color psychology is particularly striking: cold blues reflect Tony’s detached, calculating nature, while red lighting during Margot’s wrongful conviction heightens her psychological turmoil and mirrors danger.

The apartment acts as a theatrical stage, with dark green curtains symbolizing the characters’ physical and moral entrapment. Green tones evoke decay, jealousy, and greed- key to Tony’s sinister plan, while contrasting with Margot’s innocence. Hitchcock subverts Hollywood norms by casting a typically heroic star as the chilling antagonist, shocking audiences and adding to the film’s tense, unpredictable atmosphere.

‘You remain dead for all of eternity but you’re alive only for a brief moment.’  ꒰১ ໒꒱⋆ ˚｡⋆

Lilya 4-ever is a deeply emotional exploration of tragedy through exploitation and despair. While the film’s social commentary is powerful, it’s the emotional connection to Lilya’s fleeting moments of hope that hit hardest for me. Her brief escapes contrast starkly with the grim reality she faces, making her suffering all the more poignant.

The film’s cinematography amplifies this sense of isolation. The cold, desaturated color palette mirrors Lilya’s emotional state, while subtle shifts in lighting and tone during key moments hint at fragile hope. Handheld shots and wide angles emphasize her emotional imprisonment, while the dilapidated mise en scene reinforces the social realism, portraying the decaying environments that trap her.

The use of angel wings in the final sequence acts as a metaphor for fleeting escape, a brief transcendence from the suffering of their lives. It’s a symbol of the brief moments of freedom they yearn for but can never fully grasp. The sparse use of mirrors symbolizes Lilya’s fractured identity, and the haunting silence between the sparse musical cues forces the audience to fully experience her pain.

There is sparse but strategic use of music. There’s the recurring melancholic theme, but sometimes silence creates an uncomfortable but deeply affecting ambience. In the end, Lilya 4-ever is a meditation on the fleeting nature of hope and the inevitability of suffering.

Alice in Wonderland but for adults🗝️🧚🏻‍♂️🕯️

Colour functions as a visual language, emphasising the clash between brutality and innocence. Cool, muted tones dominate the film’s reality, evoking the emotional coldness of post-civil war Spain. Low lighting and deep shadows heighten a sense of fear and foreshadow the violence lurking beneath. In contrast, the fantastical sequences glow with rich, warm hues, reflecting transformation and the allure of escapism.

This carefully controlled palette makes an exception for red-saturated blood: blurring the line between reality and myth while symbolising the inescapable nature of violence in both worlds. The sound design enhances this duality, combining diegetic elements like explosions and gunfire with the delicate fluttering of fairy wings, creating an immersive sense of magical realism.

The film’s visual symbolism is layered and deliberate. Catholic imagery collides with pagan mythology, perhaps questioning which belief system offers true salvation. The Pale Man, more than a monster, mirrors authoritarian cruelty- his feast echoing the lifeless opulence of Vidal’s fascist banquet. The mandrake root, with its infant-like cries, represents motherhood and the tension between life and death. Circular motifs throughout: labyrinths, watches- reinforce themes of eternal return and cyclical violence.

By the end, the film’s visuals shift into a dreamlike fusion of warm and cold tones, leaving Ofelia’s fantasy ambiguous. While open to interpretation, her mythical world feels like a coping mechanism for trauma. Yet, the final image of a blooming flower on a dead tree suggests that something magical endures—even in death—implying that Ofelia’s spirit transcends the cruelty of her reality.

A very disturbing film highlighting the dangers of indoctrination and authoritarianism.

‘I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me, but it's hard to stay mad, when there's so much beauty in the world.’ ₊˚❀༉‧₊˚.

I love the recurring metaphor of roses in American Beauty. Beneath every perfect bloom is a thorn, conveying an underlying message: beauty always comes with pain.

Carolyn’s meticulously pruned rose garden perhaps mirrors her obsession with control and appearances, a polished facade masking a crumbling marriage. The rich, saturated reds pop against the sterile world around them: an artificial beauty that feels almost too perfect, like her carefully curated life.

In Lester’s fantasies, Angela is bathed in rose petals, this famous iconography acts as a visual metaphor for seduction and illusion. The petals could  represent desire stripped of reality, turning her into an object rather than a person. When the fantasy breaks- the petals disappear. Close-ups heighten this contrast: intimate in imagination, but distant and cold in reality.

Roses appear recurringly in the frame, lingering in the background like a silent witness to the repression and longing beneath suburban idealism. Petals fall in the final moments, but they serve as a dark reminder behind beauty and its fragility.

‘I wish there was some way for us to go back and undo the past. But there wasn't.’  *ੈ✩‧₊˚

Mysterious Skin is a devastating exploration of trauma and the fractured identities it leaves behind. Gregg Araki crafts a haunting portrait of two boys who endure the same abuse but develop opposite coping mechanisms: Neil spirals into reckless hypersexuality, while Brian clings to an alien abduction fantasy to repress the truth.

The film’s visual language is striking; Brian’s world is bathed in cold blues, reflecting his emotional numbness, while Neil’s life glows with unsettling golden hues, a reminder of how his ab warped his understanding of love. Fragmented editing mirrors the disted nature of traumatic memory, offering only glimpses of the horror without ever fully revealing it. Thier ab mostly remains a faceless specter, keeping the focus on the boys psychological torment.

The final scene is quietly shattering: two broken souls sitting together, finally facing the truth. Snow falls around them, a fragile suggestion that honesty might be the first step toward healing.

I was expecting this to be another tasteless hype show, but i’ve genuinley not cried at a film or show in the longest time but wow this message was so powerful

yuck

“My life is full because I know I am loved.”  ᡣ𐭩₊˚.⋆⁺₊
   
A deeper introspective film, true to David Lynch’s signature surrealism and unsettling directorial style. There is a frequent use of pov shots, aiming to allign the viewer with the protagonist, with the whole film being cinematographicaly shot strictly in black and white, to create time-period accurate realism and aid continuity. ‘The Elephant Man’ is a cinematic homage to early silent film; echoes German Expressionist cinema, enhancing the films timeliness.

In true melancholy, the films sound element- most notably the mechanical diegetic sound effects, subtly allure to the films critique on the Industrial Revolution. Mechanical steam hissing, eerie hums, etc; all work as an unsettling amalgamation- creating an underlying sense of discomfort. Sound design subtly mirror Johns own struggle to be heard in a world that constantly drowns him out. 

A thoroughly emotionally grounded film, offering an insightful critique on the nature of our own society whilst maintaining a somber tonality throughout. Paired with the use of subtle multi- media montage sequences and shots in selective moments, including the ending, which is ultimately ambiguous and dreamlike- true to Lynch’s directorial intention.

‘Treasures gained by wickedness do not profit, but righteousness delivers from death.’ .𖥔 ݁ ˖  

A chilling meditation on the banality of evil, using striking cool tones and a deliberately sterile aesthetic to evoke emotional distance and moral detachment. The film’s muted cyan and steel blue color palette creates an unsettling contrast between the idyllic domestic life of Rudolf and the atrocities taking place just beyond the walls.

The floral motifs and meticulous mise en scene act as a recurring metaphor, juxtaposing the cultivated beauty of the garden with the horrors of the concentration camp, emphasizing the grotesque contradiction of flourishing amidst suffering. Floriography is utilised in a striking montage sequence: close-ups through macro cinematography emphasises their delicate textures and vibrant visuals through hyper real framing, showcasing them as uncanny signifiers, against a juxtaposition of diegetic pastoral ambience amidst nature with the faint ominous presence of sounds from the death camp creating an acousmatic horror effect; the soundscape contributes to a dissonant counterpart effect with recurring poetic realism through stunning & stylised visual imagery. 

The film’s cinematography, heightens the unsettling beauty of the visuals, amplifying the thematic undercurrents of moral ignorance. Monochromatic sequences alongside this juxtaposition of pastoral tranquility with the faint, ominous presence of violence heightens the sense of psychological isolation that permeates the film, never visually entering the camp, but leaving its haunting presence felt through the characters’ indifference.

A Hansel and Gretel allusion acts as a darkly ironic commentary on innocence and complicity, with the black-and-white montage sequences evoking a timeless, mythic quality that recalls the horrors of the Holocaust without overt dramatization. This refusal to show the camps directly becomes a powerful narrative choice, embodying violence through absence rather than representation, creating an eerie cognitive dissonance.

The film’s silence and lack of moral confrontation underscore its critique of a systemic, psychological evil that infiltrates even the most ordinary, domestic spaces, ultimately offering a timeless, unsettling commentary on the perpetuation of violence and moral stagnation. The ending, with Rudolf’s psychosomatic illness, serves as a subtle but striking metaphor for the moral sickness that permeates the film’s universe, where the most egregious acts are met with unfeeling, superficial tranquility.

‘“Hey, Sweden!”   ⋆⁺₊❅。 
They're not Swedish, Mac. They're Norwegian.’

John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ is a masterclass in paranoia and isolation, set against the icy wasteland of Antarctica, where the cold itself acts as pathetic fallacy, mirroring the crew’s slow descent into mistrust and despair. The omnipresent ice becomes both a prison and an executioner, ensuring there’s no escape from the horror among them.

The film’s mise en scène is meticulously crafted to suffocate; cramped corridors, flickering lights, and shifting shadows amplify the sense of confinement. Bioluminescent and neon lighting bathe the station in eerie hues of blue, evoking fear, suspicion, and an unnatural presence, while flashes of red- from emergency lights to sparking wires- signal imminent danger. Fire, in stark contrast to the ice, becomes both destruction and sanctity: a fleeting weapon, yet a force that ensures their inevitable ruin.

Carpenter’s framing shifts from wide group shots to claustrophobic close-ups, visually isolating the characters long before the creature does. The Thing’s grotesque transformations unfold through disorienting cuts, match edits, and overlapping sound, making its mutations feel disturbingly seamless. Flesh rips, bones splinter, and severed limbs sprout new horrors in a nightmarish display of biological anarchy.

The ending, bathed in firelight, refuses resolution; ambiguity is the final horror.

Though I was left very underwhelmed, Onibaba is a film rich in dark aestheticism: shot exclusively in black and white. It uses repeated close ups in moments of tension to help gage characters reactions, paired with its isolated landscape portrayed through low angle shots to create a suffocating atmosphere; aiming to make a viewer feel trapped. There were consistent elements of Japanese folklore/ cottagecore. 

The tall swaying suzuki grass, acting as mise-en-scene, curated a uniquely claustrophobic yet juxtaposingly open setting. The shifting nature of the grass could mirror the instability of the character’s morality. The films high- contrast lighting is reminiscent of German expressionism and Japanese Noh theatre, faces are lit to emphasise grotesqueness, and shadow play is used to implement another layer of disorientation.

The film utilises a heavily naturalistic and diegetic soundscape. The organic noise reflects the films unsettling atmosphere, particularly the use of drums created that ritualistic feel. Onibaba showcases a voyeuristic intensity and an intensely male gaze structure throughout. Finally, the mask prop could act as a symbol of post-war disfigurement and moral decay.