There’s a moment at the end of Vitalina Varela, where after a film dominated by the omnipresent force of darkness aesthetically and politically, Varela and Ventura get to experience the sunlight, get to achieve what Vitalina came to this country to do. It is a moment of grace and otherworldly beauty, people finding solace and poetry in the act of grief. The final shot of the film has stuck in my mind in the months following my viewing, coming back to me in flashes as I work or struggle with my own mental health. Someone looking after another person for…

There was a time in my life where I shared a class with an ex of mine. It was my first serious breakup and months after it was over, weeks since we had last talked, we were put in the same high school class. I shouldn’t have been there since I was a year below her but the school made the decision that I belonged in that particular class for the semester. For weeks at a time, I would walk into the class with music blaring and my mind in a place of angst and frustration, trying to drown out…

My best friend and noted stupid boy Greg Hill-Turner misread a Twitter DM in his slightly intoxicated, depressed emotional state and confused my disdain for a lunch deadline (mixed with my lack of creative drive to write the article for it) for me writing an essay on my lunch itself and being unhappy about it. After several exchanges of bemusement, I yelled at him to pay me £5 to write an essay on a bacon sandwich and the mad bastard actually did it. He told me to go fuck myself while paying me for a commission which is certainly an…

Hero: The Elegance of Violence

Two women in red dresses in a field of cherry trees duel to the death. There is no brutality or cruelty being expressed, no raw movements of aggression or hate. Their duel is peaceful. It is almost sensual, these two giving every ounce of their being to a form of war that’s alien to most viewers. They seem like they wish this battle could go on forever, without violence being enacted, just the tangible sensation of the fight flowing through them until the end of time. When the violence does come, it never lingers or…

The key moment in John Carter comes about halfway through. John, almost by instinct, throws away his ego and his desire for wealth for the sake of two people. The danger they face is considerable, the likelihood of his death is almost certain but he doesn’t care, swinging his sword as hordes of his enemies descend upon his shirtless body. The camera shows us the faces of the women he’s willing to do anything to protect, the overwhelming emotion coming from their eyes as they realise the love in this stranger’s heart. John’s body slowly disappears as the fight continues…

The camera is never stable. In this heated and disgusting environment, the way we see the world is through shakes, incoherent zooms and blurry footage. There is nothing close to comfort in the presentation, it is constantly disorienting and unnerving. Punishment Park has a premise of unrelenting terror, the kind of idea that would have ran well in the defeated nihilistic genre scene of the late 70s and mid 80s. Protesters who are given the option to go to jail for not supposedly serving their country in armed combat or to try and survive three days in Punishment Park, where…

Mass Effect 2 Overlord: The Struggles of Autistic Representation

A few things are important to note before we begin, at points, this will become hard to read as it deals with a varying degree of sensitive subjects including psychological manipulation, torture and intense ableism. This is difficult to write about but I think it’s important, and if you believe you’re incapable of reading something that deals with these subjects in explicit detail, you’d be better off leaving this page. …

The Ending of Mass Effect 3, 7 Years Later

Throughout Mass Effect 3, your character Commander Shepard ends up in a dream of a forest. The skies are completely grey and everything seems to lack colour except for your avatar, the brightness of the hair and the armour that you’ve made for them seems to shine beyond this realm. Trees are endlessly tall and the world around where you’re supposed to be is shrouded by overwhelming white light, keeping you trapped in this place until you’re allowed to leave. There is no avoiding these segments, they happen after every major…