THE CUT OF KIM NEWMAN
The critic and novelist selects the month’s weirdest home-ent releases
Illustration: Neil Edwards. Alamy
A NORWEGIAN KAIJU picture, Roar Uthaug’s Troll treads in the giant footsteps of found-footage hit Trollhunter but plays as a Scandi-noir homage to King Kong or Godzilla. A railway tunnel blasted through frozen mountains awakens a moss-bearded, earth-and-rock-bodied giant. Paleontologist Nora (Ine Marie Wilmann) is drafted into the team put together to stop the rampage and needs to consult her estranged father (Gard B. Eidsvold) — dismissed as mad because of his now-suddenly-proven theories on trolls — to learn how to stop the fearsome, if not unsympathetic monster before it levels Oslo. A terrific mix of spectacle, humour, politics and devastation. Iranian-born, Scandinavia-based Ali Abbasi — who made his own bizarre troll story (Border) and an underrated Frankenstein variant (Shelley) — returns home, at least in setting, with Holy Spider (which was shot in Jordan). The based-on-fact drama pits a female journalist (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) against a serial killer (Mehdi Bajestani) in the holy city of Mashhad. Our hero, belittled and harassed at every turn, is terrified that the murderer of prostitutes is unapprehended because religious authorities basically think he’s doing a good job keeping women in their place… a belief the killer also takes comfort in, leading to a suspenseful third act in court as the establishment seem to be looking for a way to let the odious killer off lightly.