"In bringing to life India’s rich and intoxicating inner mindscape, Stoker sidesteps views of coming of age inherent to the very term: in coming of age, you shed your old skin, and step out anew. Instead, the film refuses to consider a future free of the past. Adulthood is a sheet placed over childhood; childhood a stain that bleeds through. When I think of Stoker, I think of the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, and her strange female protagonists, the way…

In Paul Dano’s Wildlife, the domestic is a house always on the verge of bursting into flames. It doesn’t take long for the seemingly happy family made up of Jerry, Jeannette, and Joe to begin to disintegrate as worry over money seeps into the foundation of their home. The gender roles that the characters are forced to perform are so rigid that they offer no reprieve; so alienating that they allow for no real alternative. Jerry is all barely-contained masculine…

There’s something wrong with Carol White - it’s a sneeze in the opening scene of the film, it’s the couch she meticulously picked out to match her house that comes in the wrong colour, it’s the way she doesn’t laugh at a sexist joke told over dinner - all these small ways she unwittingly disturbs the peace of her homemaker life. This wrongness is pervasive, and takes effect on her body, as if without her consent it begins to reject…