These new thrillers straddle the horror genre and are now available on VOD and other digital platforms.
Forgive Us All
Directed by Jordana Stott
2025. Runtime 93 minutes.
Forgive Us All is being marketed as a post-apocalyptic zombie picture, but it’s a western at heart, substituting the Undead for Injuns.
In the remote New Zealand mountains, self-reliant Rory (Lily Sullivan) and her cantankerous dad Otto (Richard Roxburgh) live in seclusion and work their farm, fully aware that the world outside has gone to shit. Two years earlier, Rory lost her young daughter to a virus that has ravaged the world, turning normies into flesh-eating cannibals. “We’re surviving,” Otto tells Rory. “What are we surviving for?” comes the reply.
The arrival of mysterious stranger Noah (Lance Giles), pursued by bad guys led by Logan (Callan Mulvey), sets the drama in motion. Who’s been infected, who’s righteous, who lays claim to the last bastion of civilization becomes the issue, all aware that on the fringes stalk the insensate scourge of man’s destruction.
Forgive Us All is an actor’s production: the principals wear two hats, in front of the camera and as producers. This is a DIY trend; every movie is an actors’ reel. In some cases, it affords a route for filmmakers, now that the studios are collapsing.
Forgive Us All’s budget is low, evidenced by how clean everything is, a condition DP Peter McCaffrey tries to muddle with somber digital tints. The mournful mountain music score is provided by Brandon Roberts. The movie adds nothing to the zombie mythos; it plays by the rules established by other movies. The walkers are always on the fringes, but the action is so sloooow you often forget they’re even there.
The pleasure comes from the performances. Lily Sullivan is rugged and sexy as Rory, and Callan Mulvey imbues Logan with a suitable creepiness. It’s especially good to see Richard Roxburgh, memorable from the TV series Rake, apply his calm, emotive presence. He’s perfect as the coot. He even knows the proper way to take off a cowboy hat, by the brim and not the crown.
The Drowned
Directed by Samuel Clemens
2025. Runtime 90 minutes.
Three men arrive at a remote seaside house to retrieve a priceless painting they’ve heisted. We, the viewers, arrive in medias res, after the robbery, and after a cohort of theirs has delivered the painting, rolled in a canister, and possibly suffered a terrible fate. The house is empty, there’s a bucket of blood in the closet, and the beach is strewn with body parts, which may or may not belong to their accomplice.
The three can’t agree on how to proceed, and tensions boil when three beautiful women inexplicably wash up on the shore. One must be CPR’d after drowning, and they are all brought into the house. Mind games ensue, the women circling and seducing the criminals. The thieves speak in code and non sequiturs—a language only they know, because they’re the only ones who know what they’re doing there.
The Drowned sports good acting all around, the thieves played by Alan Calton, Michelangelo Fortuzzi, and Dominic Vulliamy, and the sirens played by Lily Catalifo, Lara Lemon, and Sandrine Salyéres.
Fun fact: the director, Samuel Clemens, is the son of Brian Clemens—who wrote and produced the 1960s TV series The Avengers—and is the great-great-great-nephew of Mark Twain.
The Drowned has literary ambitions, woven with references to Greek mythology, most notably The Odyssey. The allusions are subtle but, cumulatively, make for an interesting, trance-like drama. Put logic aside and just let it wash over you, and The Drowned is an offbeat, hallucinatory entertainment.
Last Stop Rocafort St.
Directed by Luis Prieto
2024. Runtime 89 minutes.
Rocafort Station is a stop on the Barcelona subway, notorious as a suicide site. Young Laura (Natalia Azahara) has been assigned to manage it and immediately encounters a ghost who launches her on a quest to solve its riddle. She enlists an alcoholic ex-cop (Javier Gutiérrez) who has written about his experience with the Yellow Line Killer, a case that he worked twenty years earlier, had tragic consequences, and which sent him around the bend. Now he reluctantly looks back at it with Laura’s urging, uncovering shades of occultism, and a warning that if or when you encounter the specter of The Ghost Dog, you join the ranks of the damned.
Last Stop Rocafort St. is a suspenseful procedural, making the most of that creepy underworld that exists between stations in any subway system. Ms. Azahara and Mr. Gutiérrez make an unlikely yet compelling team, piling up clues that lead to a dramatic climax. They are joined in the cast by Valéria Sorolla as Laura’s incidental lesbian lover, Cris.
Luis Prieto is becoming an impresario of horror-based thrillers. Trained in the USA, Mr. Prieto returned to Spain and has since racked up an impressive resumé of feature films there and in the States, including a remake of Refn’s Pusher (2012), Kidnap (2017) with Halle Berry, White Lines (2020), plus TV series and Netflix originals. Last Stop Rocafort St. is his latest.
Confident storytelling by Mr. Prieto, clever staging, engrossing characters, and thoughtful scares distinguish Last Stop Rocafort St. as an entertainment. In Spanish with English subtitles.