Film reviews: The North | Rose of Nevada | Exit 8 | The Blue Trail

The North (15) ★★★★

Rose of Nevada (15) ★★★★

Exit 8 (15) ★★★★

The Blue Trail (15) ★★★★

Following two former flatmates as they attempt to revive their friendship by hiking to Cape Wrath from the start of the West Highland Way, there’s a pleasingly Werner Herzog-esque edge to The North. Made with a minimal crew that collectively hiked and wild-camped along the route in order to capture the hard-to-reach locations, Dutch writer/director Bart Schrijver eschews cheesy drone shots of his Highland vistas in order to capture the scale of the landscape in gnarlier, more honest fashion, often framing his actors in miniature against the imposing valleys and mountains. The creative dividends are plain to see; this is one of the best-looking films made in Scotland in recent years — and one of the most compelling.

The latter is thanks to a deceptively simple, yet finely wrought story about friendship and getting older and how life gets in the way of what’s important. For Chris (Bart Harder), who’s Dutch and can’t quite disconnect from his career, the hike is something of a last hurrah before settling down with his girlfriend to start a family; for Lluis (Carles Pulido), who’s Latino, it’s a chance to perhaps recharge his creative batteries having recently given up his job shooting wedding videos. In truth, though, perhaps neither of them really know why they’re doing it or what they want to get out of it beyond embracing the initial joy that comes from hanging out together for the first time in ten years.

What’s great here, though, is not just the way the film is alive to how people and friendships change over time, but how solitude and nature and facing the physical challenge of a 350-mile hike with the rain frequently lashing down and midges devouring your face can reveal things about yourself that you weren’t expecting. To his credit, Schrijver doesn’t go in for big transformative moments; fellow hikers may dispense platitudes that relate to his protagonists’ lives, but the film keeps things more ambiguous about what it all means for their friendship or for them as individuals going forth. It’s enough that it means something in the moment. Reflection comes later.

Having developed an intriguingly anachronistic filmmaking style with his scratchy, hand-cranked celluloid debut Bait and its enigmatic follow up Enys Men, cult filmmaker Mark Jenkin’s new film Rose of Nevada feels similarly and appropriately out of time. Coming on like a found-footage film in which the aesthetic is at odds with the era in which it’s set, it’s a seafaring mystery revolving around the ominous return of a Cornish fishing trawler 30 years after it disappeared. Having cost two fishermen their lives and apparently plunged the village into an economic downturn, the titular vessel’s seemingly cursed status doesn’t stop it being put back into service.

That’s bad news for local family man Nick (George MacKay) and drifter Liam (Calum Turner). Coerced into working as deckhands, they soon find themselves cast into a weird time warp when they return to shore and discover it’s now 1993. If this makes Rose of Nevada sounds like something out of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror, rest assured Jenkin puts his own distinctive spin on proceedings, using the non-synched sound and grainy film stock to sinister purpose as a way of interrogating nostalgia for a past that never was.

READ MORE: Film reviews: Glenrothan | The Wizard of the Kremlin | Outcome | Colours of Time

There are more temporal anomalies in Exit 8, a slick and inventively minimalist Japanese horror film about an emotionally disconnected office temp (Kazunari Ninomiya) who finds himself stuck in a subway station when the girlfriend he recently broke up with calls to tell him she’s pregnant with his child. Though based on a popular video game, co-writer/director Genki Kawamura (director of the anime smash Your Name) transforms the hypnotic gameplay into an over-arching metaphor for its protagonist’s suddenly inescapable fear of becoming a parent, a fear slyly teased out as we watch him wander the infinity loop-style corridors of the near-deserted station trying to make it to the eponymous exit repeatedly signposted before him like a Sisyphean taunt.

Incorporating nods to The Shining and MC Escher, and making creative narrative use of various gaming concepts, Exit 8 proves that video games can inspire creepy, thoughtful, engaging cinema, not just IP cash cows like The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.

A dystopian nightmare with a difference, Brazilian genre oddity The Blue Trail revolves around a 77-year-old woman determined to escape a government-mandated scheme to forcibly relocate the elderly to a retirement colony to free up housing and employment for the young. Painting a subtly damning portrait of a society that pays lip-service to the value of old people while casually stripping them of their freedoms, director Gabriel Mascaro crafts an intriguing tale of resistance by zeroing in on his septuagenarian protagonist’s quietly rebellious refusal to embrace her fate. Denise Weinberg is a hoot in the lead.

All films are in cinemas from 24 April

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