3 to see at LFF 2016 if you like... thrillers

Irish crime boss Chris (Cillian Murphy) assembles a motley band of misfits and lowlifes to protect him during an arms deal in Boston with the flamboyant Vernon (Sharlto Copley). Things go smoothly, even though Chris doesn’t have the goods he ordered, until a fight unexpectedly breaks out among the minions and the bullets start to fly…

The prolific Ben Wheatley crammed this little beauty in right after his surreal, impressionistic take on J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise, reverting to the hybrid genre roots of his debut Down Terrace (2009). Working, as ever, from a script co-written with partner Amy Jump, Wheatley takes ‘cool’ movie conceits – gangsters, serial killers, period dramas – and subverts them with real-world humour and pathos. 

Although all Ben Wheatley’s films tend to be on the lean side, Free Fire is the most fat-free of all, setting up its bare-bones premise in a characterful 30 minutes and then letting things explode. The Boston setting – a disused umbrella factory – is just a MacGuffin; although it takes the appearance of a crime story (specifically the subgenre of the heist gone wrong), Free Fire is more a live-action animation, suffused with the cheerful fatalism of Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote.

Add to that the gleeful amorality of the spaghetti western – there’s no one even approaching a hero here – and you have the purest thrill ride of the Festival, an escalation of absurdity and violence that owes less to Reservoir Dogs than Monty Python’s imagining of Sam Peckinpah’s version of the Blighty musical Salad Days. A terrific ensemble cast – including Armie Hammer, Michael Smiley, Sam Riley, Jack Reynor and Noah Taylor – keeps the internecine sparks flying, and where else will you see Academy Award winner Brie Larson rolling around in the dirt? 

Zoli and Barba, two severely disabled Hungarian twentysomethings, are collaborating on a comic book about a paraplegic firefighter named Rupaszov, who moonlights as a hitman for a Serbian gangster. Soon, however, they find their fictional creation is taking on a life of his own, with exciting – but also very dangerous – consequences…

Kills on Wheels is the second feature from Attila Till, who made his debut in 2008 with the black comedy Panic, about a woman suffering from panic attacks. It also has the distinction of being this year’s Hungarian entry in the foreign-language Oscar race, following hard on the heels of previous LFF favourites White God (2014) and last year’s Son of Saul.

It’s rare enough to see a film about people with disabilities in which the lead characters are actually played by actors with disabilities. But it’s even rarer to see a film that features actors with disabilities and then sets the subject to one side, giving its cast the chance to play out an exciting action-fantasy that supplies high-octane crime movie thrills while leavening them with the wise-cracking light relief afforded by traditional buddy-movie spills.

Of its three main players, only hitman Rupaszov is played by an able-bodied actor (White God’s Szabolcs Thuróczy), but the film’s main special effect is how quickly we stop noticing, with newcomers Zoltan Fenyvesi and Barba Adam Fekete sparking effortlessly as his creators, graphic artists Zoli and Barba. Director Till uses his characters’ physical vulnerability to nail-biting effect, and Rupaszov’s attempts to get away from a blood-soaked crime scene are breathtakingly tense. But, at the same time, he gives them a much-needed voice, offering thoughtful speculation on their place in society as they talk candidly about life and love, their hopes and dreams.

A reclusive crime-scene photographer finds himself being drawn out of early retirement when of a series of strange occult murders start happening in modern-day Kuala Lumpur. Bodies are found drained of blood, their empty veins cascading out of their cadavers, with the only clues being a pile of bird feathers and an ancient photographic negative…

Interchange is the third feature by Dain Iskandar Said from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Although his first film, Dukun (2007), was never shown in his homeland because of its alleged similarities to a real-life murder case involving ‘bomohs’ (local shamen), his following feature Bunohan: Return to Murder (2012) was selected as his homeland’s foreign-language Oscar entry.

The phrase ‘must be seen to be believed’ is often used, but in the case of Dain Iskandar Said’s Interchange, here is a film that must be seen to be understood – a simple outline of its plot and cogs wouldn’t do justice to its layers of mystery and intrigue. Comparisons have been drawn to Alan Parker’s Angel Heart (1987), but Said’s film deals with the occult via a whole other cosmology.

Drawing upon ancient eastern ideas of folklore and anthropology, Interchange deals viscerally with concepts that stretch the limits of our imagination: restless souls, immortality and human sacrifice. Said deftly juxtaposes the workday reality of daily life with startling images, each progressively elaborate murder scene a chillingly beautiful tableau. The language too – a mix of Malay and English that switches back and forth even within sentences, never mind scenes – gives the film the quality of a dream, all the better to set the stage for its extraordinary supernatural reveal.