paul2001sw-1

One of the problems of living in a free society is that if an individual or group is able to sustain themselves economically, they often have carte blanche to do as they will, regardless of how destructive their behavour is to others. Hence we get cryptocurrency scammers and the like; and also religious cults. This series focuses on Gloriavale, New Zealand, where a cult that sustains itself by treeting its female members as brood mares, and putting the children they spawn to unpaid work at a young age. Cult members are, it seems, not necessarily happy, but scared of an outside world in which they have been denied the opportunity to acquire any capital. The story is both utterly shocking, but also banal. Finally legal action is being taken against the cult on specific charges (unpaid labour, sexual abuse); but while I don't want to live in a dictatorship, it somehow feels wrong that such an organisation has been allowed to exist at all for half a century, exploiting and indoctrinating its members in plain sight of the rest of us.

The stars (Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleason) and director (Martin Mcdonagh) of 'In Bruges' team up again in 'The Banshees of Inisherin', and to my mind, somewhat more successfully. It's a strange film, nonetheless: on a remote Irish island, a man decides to no longer consider another as his friend, leading to some very strange consequences, mostly observed by an old woman resembling the grim reaper. Off on the mainland, the Irish civil war goes on. The film could scarcely be called realistic, yet its world is believable. There's not a lot of plot, and the jokes are more sly than laugh-out-loud, but it has its own uneasy charm.

The enormity of the holocaust is such that makes it almost impossible to comprehend, unless abstracted in a way that almost inevitably misses the point. Holocaust movies are inevitably set in work camps, not in the extermination camps, where, quite simply, thousands of people per day were transported for immediate execution. Claude Lanzmann's film attempts to deal with this through first person accounts from survivors (and a few perpetrators to boot). While I am sure what we see is heavily edited, it is not edited like a normal documentary: pauses are left in, we hear the words and then the translation, and there's little in the way of associated imagery except for the recurring motif of the view from the train. The result is painful but serves effectively to bring death to life. I don't think anyone could enjoy watching this film, and one could consider it over-long, but it makes its point, and there are few more important points to be made.