Plutonic Rainbows

Vogue's note on Gianni Versace's Fall 1992 ready-to-wear collection carried a sentence that has stayed with me longer than any of the photographs from the show. "Getting strapped required eight hands." The clothes were beautiful in the usual Versace way, all glow and gold and a kind of Roman-emperor confidence, but the line betrayed how much engineering it took to land the silhouette. A woman couldn't walk into one of these looks alone. The dress had become a small infrastructure.

Versace called the show Miss S&M, in the sort of unembarrassed register he had been working in for years. The runway pulled in the supermodels of the moment, the same handful of women whose faces Lagerfeld was reading against Rose Macaulay on the Chanel runway earlier that year. What separates the two shows is that Lagerfeld's was a literary footnote in couture; Versace's was a hardware shop. PVC, oxblood leather, silk straps with steel buckles, and the safety pins that would soon define the house: not yet the giant chrome ones that held Liz Hurley together at the Four Weddings premiere two years later, but the smaller silver ones already migrating from punk shorthand to evening-dress structure.

The reception split along a fault line that fashion writing still finds awkward. Helmut Newton, whose own work had been engineering women into hardware for thirty years, told Vogue he loved it. Suzy Menkes, less so. "I don't want women to be sex objects or any of that," she said immediately after the show, then added, "But, after all, women have a right to choose." It is the kind of line a critic delivers when the work has refused to give her a clean exit. She had walked into the show with a position and walked out with half of it.

Versace himself gave the season its post-show punctuation. At an AIDS benefit in New York a few weeks later, the same looks turned up on the guest list, and he crowed to The New York Times, "Last night, there were two hundred socialites in bondage." The quote is archived in the trade press as a kind of victory lap, although what it actually marks is the moment a collection's vocabulary crossed from runway to red carpet without anyone losing their nerve. The clothes were never meant for a dungeon. They were meant for the front of a benefit photograph.

The other thing the show did, almost by accident, was institutionalise the Medusa head. Versace had been using the face on stationery and press packs, but Fall 1992 is the season the trade press dates as the emblem becoming the house's permanent logo, set into safety pins, clasps, buckles and buttons rather than printed on labels. By the following summer the Medusa was as inescapable as the safety pin itself, and the safety pin had stopped meaning punk and started meaning Versace.

What I keep coming back to is the eight hands. The whole moment sits inside that small piece of stagecraft. A collection presented as transgression that required, to actually wear, a quiet conspiracy of dressers backstage. The clothes look like rebellion, but they behaved like couture, and the gap between the two is where Versace made his case.

Dunmail Raise is not where I would choose to discover that a car had stopped cooperating. On the A591, the old AA telephone box appears in the records as a point of practical help: box number 487, placed on the Keswick-Grasmere road, ten miles south of Keswick, in the AA's historical list of roadside boxes. What survives now is less a telephone than a small black-and-yellow instruction in how fear once worked.

Before a mobile could turn a breakdown into an administrative nuisance, the road retained stretches where contact had a location. You had to reach the box. Weather, darkness, an injured passenger, a car that couldn't be left unattended: each fact counted while the telephone stood elsewhere, fixed and indifferent. I don't miss that vulnerability, but I do recognise the peculiar dignity of an emergency system that admitted distance rather than disguising it.

The AA's own timeline records the turning point with unusual neatness. In 1968 its wooden sentry boxes were phased out, apart from those protected by listing or retained in scenic places, as the network peaked at 787 boxes. In 2002 the telephones were decommissioned because mobile phones had made them redundant. Between those dates, the box moved from active equipment to something the landscape could keep after its reason for being had gone.

Number 487 had acquired another kind of protection before that final switch-off. Historic England lists the box as Grade II, first listed on 27 January 1987, its photograph still showing the black structure with AA yellow lettering and the number set out on the eaves. Listing is an odd form of aftercare. It can preserve the shelter, the paint scheme, perhaps the exact scale of a door, but it cannot preserve the moment when opening that door altered the odds of getting home.

I am tempted to call the box comforting, and that isn't quite honest. Its whole design assumes a failed journey. It belongs to the old grammar of the road: know the route, note the last petrol station, be aware that the next human voice may require a walk. The smartphone has improved most of this beyond argument. It has also thinned the visible evidence that we depend on systems at all. A call now seems to rise from the hand, not from a maintained network, charged battery, mast and contract.

There is a yellow severity to an AA box that the red public telephone kiosk doesn't have. A red box could be social, even faintly theatrical; the black and yellow box speaks only of trouble and the organisation summoned to deal with it. On an exposed road that narrow purpose must once have been a relief. Now it makes the surviving structure unusually stark: an emergency verb left behind after the sentence has changed.

Passing box 487 today would not make me want the old arrangement back. I would still check the charge on my phone and keep driving. Yet the little listed box marks something that constant connection has made difficult to feel clearly: help used to occupy a place in the landscape, and until you reached it the road was allowed to keep you waiting.

In 2012, three researchers from the University of Toronto submitted an image classifier to a contest and opened a much larger argument. Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton's model scored a 15.3 per cent top-five test error in the ILSVRC-2012 competition, while the second-best entry managed 26.2 per cent. The gap, set out in their original NeurIPS paper, wasn't a marginal win that needed a persuasive press release. It was a result other computer-vision researchers had to explain.

What holds my attention isn't just the winning number. The paper says the network trained for five to six days on two NVIDIA GTX 580 GPUs, each with 3GB of memory. Graphics cards were no longer merely drawing a synthetic world for a screen; here they were helping a network sort the visible world into categories. That shift now seems inevitable because it succeeded, but few changes in computing are inevitable before someone makes them run.

AlexNet didn't arrive through a single brilliant trick. It joined a deep convolutional network to a sufficiently large labelled image set and a GPU implementation quick enough to train it at useful scale. The authors also used non-saturating units and dropout, choices that mattered, but the awkward physical detail remains decisive: the experiment had to fit across two graphics cards. Software theory met memory limits, heat and a week of waiting.

IEEE Spectrum's history of AlexNet gets this balance right. ImageNet, CUDA and neural networks had each been developing before the contest, without producing this particular shock on their own. Krizhevsky had already written GPU convolutional-network code and extended it for ImageNet and multiple GPUs. A dataset, an unfashionable method and hardware built for another market met at exactly the useful moment.

There is a version of AI history that makes progress sound like an orderly succession of better ideas. I don't trust it. Plenty of ideas sit in papers for years because they are too expensive, too slow or too fiddly to win an ordinary comparison. Then a machine built for videogames makes a previously impractical calculation bearable, and the field suddenly discovers that its taste has changed. After a result like 15.3 against 26.2, skepticism starts to look less like rigour and more like a backlog.

It is tempting to treat this as the direct origin story of every generative model now taking up server halls and headlines. That would flatten too much: an image classifier is not a language model, and today's systems contain many later inventions. Still, AlexNet exposed a habit that remains with us. We talk about intelligence as though it lives solely in algorithms, while the winning idea often depends on which computation can be bought, powered and repeated enough times.

Two GTX 580 cards are modest hardware by current standards. Their place in this story is useful precisely because they look modest now. A research field can pivot on a benchmark result, but it can also pivot on an engineer finding that hardware from one culture of computing is suddenly good enough to remake another.

In 1953, Rose Macaulay published a book about ruins that ended in surrender. Pleasure of Ruins is a four-hundred-page march through the Western imagination's romance with broken stones: Roman ruins, Mayan temples, the gothic abbeys English aristocrats had built in their gardens just to watch them moulder. Macaulay wrote it a decade after the Blitz had taken her Marylebone flat and her library, and the book closes with a verdict she meant for the whole tradition. Ruinenlust, she said, had come full circle. We had had our fill.

Thirty-nine years later, Karl Lagerfeld read the book and built a couture collection out of it.

The Chanel Spring 1992 haute couture show was presented in Paris in January of that year, and even now it gets cited more than almost anything else from Lagerfeld's tenure. Most of the citations are for one dress: a slim black silhouette layered with chunky gold-and-glass chain, worn down the runway by Christy Turlington and later, in the long afterlife of fashion images, by Penélope Cruz in Broken Embraces and Lily-Rose Depp at the 2019 Met Gala. The dress was also a brilliant marketing vehicle for Chanel costume jewellery, which was the brand's most profitable category at the time. A Trojan horse with chains.

The motif kept walking the rest of the show. A navy suit cuffed in chunky chrome made the same point in plainer metal — bracelet doing the work the glass-and-gold dress had done in armature.

The most interesting things in the collection were not the chains. They were the jackets. Lagerfeld had built a series of trompe-l'œil tweeds that were not tweed at all: they were raffia, painted in watercolour to look like the house's signature weave. The tailoring was so tight the jackets had to be zipped up the back rather than buttoned at the front; gold jewelled buttons running down the lapels were decoration, not closure. He called the silhouettes "diabolically body-conscious," and looking at a single look the cameras kept, you can see what he meant. A red-orange jacket structured into one architectural line. Black opera gloves. The whole pose engineered around the absence of a front opening.

The same logic carries through the rest of the collection. A white jacket worn over gold leather trousers repeats the architecture in a colder palette: dark trim and gilded buttons running the lapels for show, a single real button doing the actual work, the front pose engineered around the absence of a closure to draw the eye to.

This is where the Macaulay reference starts to matter, and where it also starts to look strange.

Lagerfeld's tattered chiffon skirts (separate from the jackets, but shown alongside them) were the show's literal acknowledgement of Pleasure of Ruins. Lagerfeld is the one who told the press the book was on his mind, his favourite, the thing that pushed him toward the deliberate decay of the silk. The trade press accepted the citation at face value, then and now: Lagerfeld read a book about loving ruins, and made some clothes about loving ruins. Done.

The trouble is that Pleasure of Ruins is not really a book about loving ruins. Macaulay's argument, and you have to push past the gorgeous central chapters about Pompeii and the Cambodian temples to get there, is that the Romantic appetite for ruin was something Europeans had earned through centuries of safe spectatorship, and that the twentieth century had revoked the licence. The bombed churches and cathedrals of postwar Europe gave her, she wrote, "nothing but resentful sadness, like the bombed cities." Her closing line is the one I quoted at the top. Ruinenlust was over. We were finished with it.

So either Lagerfeld read the book against itself, mining the picturesque chapters and ignoring the postwar conscience, or he understood Macaulay perfectly and was making something more complicated than the trade press credited him for. A couture show built on an aesthetic the source text had already declared exhausted is, at the very least, a knowing gesture. In the same show he wrapped tree trunks in graffiti and floated bubbles down from the ceiling; he was not above an inside joke. I think he was reading Macaulay the way he read everything in his enormous, untouchable library — not as a thesis to defend but as a quarry. He took what he wanted and left the rest.

The Met has a Lagerfeld Chanel piece from his Spring 1983 debut in its collection. It is a black dress trimmed in trompe-l'œil baubles made by the House of Lesage: fake jewels embroidered to look real. Nine years before he zipped the backs of those raffia jackets, he was already running this exact substitution. The jewels would not be jewels. The tweed would not be tweed. The chain dress would be a vehicle for the actual chains in the boutique. There is a coherence to Lagerfeld's half-century at Chanel that has very little to do with reverence for Coco and almost everything to do with what Suzy Menkes once said — that Karl had to destroy Chanel or become a caricature of her.

In January 1992, he picked up a book about the end of European ruin-aesthetics and built a runway collection from it. Macaulay had written a decade past the bombs that took her library, telling the tradition to go home. He heard a different sentence and answered it.

Rose Glass made Saint Maud for roughly $2.5 million, which is less than the catering budget on most studio horror. You'd never know it. The film looks like it cost ten times that, partly because Ben Fordesman's cinematography treats a bleak Scarborough beachfront like it's the edge of the world, and partly because the production design understands that a lonely bedsit can be more frightening than any haunted house if you shoot it correctly.

Morfydd Clark plays Maud, a palliative care nurse who has recently converted to Catholicism after something went wrong with a previous patient. She's assigned to care for Amanda, a terminally ill choreographer played by Jennifer Ehle with the precise detachment of someone who has already made peace with dying and finds Maud's earnestness first curious, then entertaining, then repulsive. The power dynamic between them is the engine of the film. Amanda has money, sophistication, a history of artistic achievement. Maud has God. For a while, God seems like enough.

The possession question is handled with more ambiguity than most horror films would tolerate. Maud experiences physical sensations she interprets as divine. Her body arches. Her eyes roll back. Whether this is ecstasy or seizure depends entirely on which character you believe, and Glass refuses to resolve the tension. She cited Taxi Driver as an influence, which tracks: Maud shares Travis Bickle's conviction that she has been chosen for a sacred mission, and the same inability to recognise that the mission is the disease.

I keep returning to Adam Janota Bzowski's score. Also a debut. He built what he called a Colourbox, a folder of processed sounds made by hitting objects with a drumstick and running the recordings through effects chains until they became something between music and industrial noise. The result sits underneath the film like a migraine, present even when you can't quite identify it. There's a click-clack sound that recurs, something straining and ready to snap. It won an Ivor Novello nomination, which felt overdue by the time it happened.

Glass joins a line of directors who understand that faith and horror share a border. The same territory The Blackcoat's Daughter occupies, where the supernatural isn't the threat but the comfort, and the real horror is what happens when it withdraws. Saint Maud takes that idea further. Maud's self-mortification scenes, nails pressed into the soles of her shoes, kneeling on broken glass, are shot with a tenderness that makes them harder to watch than if they were played for shock. She isn't being punished. She's trying to feel something she felt once and can't find again.

The final image is the cruelest thing A24 has put on screen. We see Maud's apotheosis through her own eyes first: wings, a crowd of worshippers, transfiguration. Then a smash cut to reality. An 84-minute film and Glass saves her most devastating technique for the last three seconds. The entire audience at Toronto reportedly gasped. I believe it. Some images you can't unsee, not because they're graphic but because they contain two contradictory truths at once and force you to hold both.

Sources

• Saint Maud Review - Variety

• Saint Maud - BFI Sight and Sound

• Composer Interview - SPIN

Oz Perkins finished the script in 2012. It took three years to find financing because nobody believed it could work as a film. They were half right. The Blackcoat's Daughter doesn't work as a conventional horror movie. It works as something considerably stranger and more durable than that.

The setup is boarding school gothic at its most reduced. Bramford Academy empties out for winter break. Two girls remain. Kat, a freshman played by Kiernan Shipka, has parents who simply don't show up. Rose, a senior played by Lucy Boynton, has manipulated the dates so she can deal with a suspected pregnancy. Meanwhile a third storyline follows Joan, an asylum escapee played by Emma Roberts, hitchhiking through upstate New York. These three threads intercut without explanation, and the film trusts you to hold all of them without a timeline card or a helpful chyron.

That structural confidence is the first thing that separates this from the possession films it superficially resembles. Perkins isn't interested in the mechanics of demonic inhabitation. He treats the possession the way Tarkovsky treated the Zone in Stalker, as a condition that reveals character rather than overwhelming it. Kat doesn't thrash around or speak in tongues. She gets quieter. She bows to the furnace. She develops a stillness that Shipka calibrates with precision that shouldn't be available to someone who was fifteen when she filmed this.

I'm not sure the film entirely earns its non-linear structure. There's a reveal in the final act that recontextualises Joan's storyline, and while it's been foreshadowed with care, the emotional payoff depends on you having felt something for a character the film has kept deliberately opaque. Emma Roberts does what she can with this. Her performance is the quietest thing she's ever done, almost withdrawn, but the screenplay gives her so little to work with before the turn that the revelation lands more as an intellectual satisfaction than a gut punch.

The atmosphere, though. Perkins builds dread the way frost forms on glass, so gradually that you only notice when you can't see through it anymore. Elvis Perkins, Oz's brother, composed the score having never worked on a film before, and you can hear that unfamiliarity working in its favour. It doesn't sound like a horror score. It sounds like someone trying to describe loneliness with a piano and not quite finding the right notes, which turns out to be exactly right for what this film is doing.

Perkins has said explicitly that the horror elements are a Trojan Horse. His actual intent was to tell a sad story about loss. That framing might sound like directorial pretension, the kind of thing filmmakers say to distance themselves from genre, but the final image proves he means it. Kat, now adult, alone on a frozen road, weeping because the demon has left her. Not because it possessed her. Because it abandoned her. The thing that every horror film positions as the threat is, for Kat, the only presence that ever stayed. When it goes, she has nothing.

This is where the Perkins biography becomes unavoidable. Oz lost his father Anthony Perkins, Norman Bates himself, to AIDS-related pneumonia in 1992. His mother Berry Berenson was killed on American Airlines Flight 11 on September 11, 2001. I don't think you need to know this to understand the film, but you can feel it in the architecture. The Blackcoat's Daughter understands, at a cellular level, what it means to be left behind.

The film premiered at Toronto in 2015 under its original and better title, February. It didn't reach US cinemas until 2017, by which point A24 had renamed it to something more marketable. It made $38,000 at the box office. Essentially nothing. Since then it's accumulated a reputation that outstrips most films that opened wide that year. The New York Times put it on their list of 13 scariest horror movies in 2020, five years after its premiere, the kind of slow critical reappraisal that happens when a film was always good but arrived before its audience was ready.

I'd put it alongside The Witch and Nosferatu in a narrow tradition of horror films that trust their own silence more than their scares. It's not perfect. The pacing will lose some viewers before the halfway mark, and if you need your horror to explain its mythology, this will frustrate you. But I keep thinking about Kat bowing to the furnace. That image has a weight to it that most horror directors spend entire franchises trying to manufacture and never find.

Sources

• The Blackcoat's Daughter - Wikipedia

• The Blackcoat's Daughter - Rotten Tomatoes

Geinoh Yamashirogumi was not a band. It was a collective of over two hundred people, scientists and engineers and students, led by Tsutomu Ohashi, a professor of agricultural chemistry who composed under the name Shoji Yamashiro. Their 1986 album Ecophony Rinne is structured as a four-movement symphony tracing the Buddhist cycle of samsara: primordial germination, death, dormancy, reincarnation. That description makes it sound academic. It isn't.

The first movement opens with something that resembles the universe waking up. Synthesised gamelan, programmed on Roland D-50 and Yamaha DX7-II keyboards because standard MIDI couldn't handle the slendro and pelog tuning scales of Indonesian tradition, collides with field recordings from Central African forests and Buddhist mantras captured with binaural microphones. Javanese jegog bamboo percussion sits alongside pipe organ patches built from sampled Tibetan horns. None of this should cohere. It does, somehow, in a way that feels less composed than geological.

The album's impossible cover art gives you the right frame of reference: mythological, dense, deliberately overwhelming. Kristoffer Cornils at HHV called it "one of the positively strangest, most alluring albums of all time," and for once the hyperbole fits. The record aligns with Jon Hassell's Fourth World concept, blending indigenous forms with electronic processing, but the scale here dwarfs anything Hassell attempted. Two hundred people is not a studio experiment. It is an institution committing fully to an idea.

Ohashi later published research in the Journal of Neurophysiology demonstrating that ultrasonic frequencies above 20kHz, inaudible to human hearing, measurably affect brain activity when paired with audible sound. He called it the hypersonic effect. That research grew directly from the recording methodology on Ecophony Rinne and its successor Ecophony Gaia. The man was scoring the lifecycle of the universe and simultaneously running psychoacoustic experiments. I've written about the peculiarities of early Japanese CD mastering before. Ohashi's obsession with preserving ultrasonic content explains why his group's pressings demanded unusual care.

Two years after Ecophony Rinne, Katsuhiro Otomo commissioned the group to score Akira. He gave them only two conceptual themes, "festival" and "requiem," and let them compose before the animation was finished. The visuals were cut to the music, not the other way around. Everything that made the Akira soundtrack feel alien and inevitable, the jegog, the Noh chanting, the layered electronic processing, was rehearsed here first. Ecophony Rinne is the proof of concept that haunts the margins of one of the most celebrated soundtracks in film history.

Sources

• Geinoh Yamashirogumi 'Ecophony Rinne' - Electronic Sound

• The Music You Can't Hear - Time Capsule Sound

• Ecophony Rinne Review - HHV Magazine

Sora is dead. OpenAI confirmed the shutdown on March 24, pulling both the consumer app and the API. The official statement frames this as a strategic pivot toward "world simulation research to advance robotics," which is the corporate equivalent of saying you didn't want to go to the party anyway.

The numbers tell a simpler story. Sora launched as a standalone iOS app in late 2025 and hit number one on the App Store within 24 hours. Downloads peaked at 3.3 million in November. By February 2026 they had fallen 67 percent, to 1.1 million. Total in-app purchases across the product's entire lifespan: $2.1 million. That is not a revenue stream. That is a rounding error on the inference bill for a single month of GPT-5.

The Disney deal collapsing made this worse. Disney had signed a three-year agreement that included a planned $1 billion investment in OpenAI and licensing of Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters for Sora-generated content. It fell apart. Disney confirmed "no money changed hands." Losing a billion-dollar partnership on a product that was already bleeding users doesn't leave much ambiguity about where the axe falls next.

But Sora was the easy cut. The harder question is what follows.

OpenAI's product surface area has become genuinely difficult to enumerate. ChatGPT in six tiers (free, Plus, Pro, Team, Enterprise, Edu). The API platform. Codex. Deep Research. The agent mode that absorbed Operator before Operator was even a year old. Atlas, their web browser. DALL-E 3, now deprecated as of May. A hardware device with Jony Ive. E-commerce features bolted onto ChatGPT. A $200 million Department of Defense contract. The GPT Store, which appears to be in a state of quiet abandonment, with no monetisation pathway and community threads full of people asking if anyone at OpenAI still works on it.

Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of Applications, addressed this directly in a March all-hands meeting. "We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests," she told employees, calling Anthropic's success a "wake-up call." The Wall Street Journal reported that current and former employees described the company as having "lost much of its focus last year" with an organisational structure that was "a mess." Internally, OpenAI's own diagnosis was blunt: too many apps, not enough focus.

I wrote in January about the revenue panic driving OpenAI's decisions, and in February about the circular capital flows propping up the whole structure. The Sora shutdown fits both patterns. HSBC Global Research now projects OpenAI still won't be profitable by 2030 and faces a $207 billion funding shortfall, with cumulative rental costs of $792 billion against projected free cash flow of just $282 billion. The company is burning 57 percent of revenue in 2026 and 2027. For comparison, Anthropic burns 33 percent in 2026 and drops to 9 percent by 2027.

Those numbers explain why Sora had to go. They also explain why Sora probably isn't the last thing to go. The shipping cadence that once felt like momentum now looks like a company throwing products at the wall while the inference costs pile up underneath. Something has to give, and OpenAI has chosen to give up the things that don't make money. Which, at the moment, is almost everything except ChatGPT subscriptions and API access.

The pre-IPO calculus matters here. You don't go public carrying a video generation product that made two million dollars and cost orders of magnitude more to run. You cut it, you talk about focus, and you hope investors read that as discipline rather than retreat. Whether the GPT Store, Atlas, or the Ive hardware survive the same arithmetic is something I'd bet against.

Sources:

• OpenAI Shelving Side Projects to Focus on Key Business — PYMNTS

• Panicked OpenAI Execs Cutting Projects as Walls Close In — Futurism

• OpenAI won't make money by 2030, faces $207B funding shortfall — Fortune

• OpenAI Shuts Down Sora AI: What Happened? — Deeper Insights

Mark Jenkin's Enys Men opens with a woman walking the same path, checking the same flowers, writing "no change" in the same notebook, day after day. The structure is so rigid it takes fifteen minutes before you realise the film is training you. Teaching you the rhythm so it can break it.

The setup is simple. A wildlife volunteer (Mary Woodvine, extraordinary in near-silence) lives alone on an island off the Cornish coast. It's 1973. She monitors a rare cliff-edge flower. She records her observations. She drinks tea, listens to static on the radio, sleeps. Then does it again. Jenkin shot it on his own clockwork Bolex, which can only record 27 seconds before needing to be wound again, and you feel that constraint in every cut. The edits are blunt. Image slams against image, a technique Jenkin traces back to Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout, and it works the same way here: not smooth, not comfortable, but alive with friction.

The folk horror references are obvious and deliberate. Children in white dresses carrying hawthorn branches, straight from The Wicker Man's May Day. Standing stones. Miners emerging from the earth like the dead rising. But Jenkin doesn't build toward a revelation the way genre convention demands. The temporal layers just accumulate. Past and present coexist on screen without hierarchy, without explanation, without the courtesy of a twist. The film's philosophical anchor is block universe theory, the idea that all moments exist simultaneously, and Jenkin commits to it structurally. There are no flashbacks because nothing is past.

The island swallows her in red and white and stone, and Jenkin's hand-processed 16mm bleeds colour until the landscape looks fevered. The Sight & Sound review described "sensorial immersion into the textures, shapes and colours of the place," and that's exactly right. This is not a film you follow so much as one you absorb.

The critical split tells you everything. Eighty percent on Rotten Tomatoes, 5.6 on IMDb. Critics who value formal ambition loved it. Audiences expecting narrative resolution did not. I understand both reactions, but I think the dismissals miss what Jenkin is actually doing. The horror isn't what changes. It's that nothing does, until you can't trust your own ability to tell the difference.

Jenkin made this in 21 days during COVID lockdown, on an island, mostly alone. The enforced isolation mapped directly onto the film's premise. He wrote it, directed it, shot it, recorded the sound in post, composed the score, and edited it himself. That level of singular authorship shows. For better or worse, there is nobody else's sensibility in the frame. It reminded me of how hauntological music works: the texture carries the meaning that narrative refuses to.