Plutonic Rainbows

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

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

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

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.

Sources:

• Island of Lost Souls: Mark Jenkin on Enys Men — Sight & Sound

• Enys Men review — Sight & Sound

• Mark Jenkin's Enys Men: Cornish Folk Horror — Horror Homeroom

Anthropic published a piece on harness design for long-running applications that crystallises something I've been circling for months. The thesis: the scaffolding around the model matters more than the model itself. Not a little more. Structurally more.

Their architecture borrows from GANs. A planner expands a brief prompt into a full spec. A generator builds features iteratively. An evaluator, running Playwright against the live application, grades the output against a rubric. The generator never sees its own score directly. The evaluator never generates code. Separation of concerns, applied to cognition.

The evaluator is the interesting part. Out of the box, Claude's QA capability is described as "poor." When asked to assess its own work, it praises the result confidently, even when the quality is obviously mediocre. A NeurIPS 2024 paper puts numbers on this: GPT-4 recognises its own output at 73.5% accuracy, and self-recognition correlates linearly with self-preference. Stronger models show more pronounced bias when they err. The better the model gets, the harder it is to make it honest about its own mistakes.

So you separate the roles. Tuning a standalone evaluator to be skeptical is, as Anthropic puts it, "far more tractable than making a generator critical of its own output." I've been applying this to my own workflows. A Topaz image enhancement pipeline now runs an image analysis agent as a quality gate before distributing files. Blog deployments get a post-deploy evaluator that fetches the live page and verifies OG tags, image rendering, internal links. The coordination overhead is real, but the alternative is trusting the thing that made the mistake to notice the mistake.

Context management is the other half. Long sessions degrade. Not because you run out of tokens, but because reasoning quality rots as history accumulates. Factory.ai calls this context rot, distinguishing it from context exhaustion. Anthropic's solution is context resets: clear the window entirely, hand off state through structured files, let the next agent start fresh. Compaction, summarising in place, preserves more history but introduces compression artifacts in the reasoning itself. Resets are blunter but cleaner.

The most honest admission in the article is about cost. A solo agent built a retro game in twenty minutes for nine dollars. Broken mechanics, poor UI. The full harness took six hours and two hundred dollars, but produced something that actually worked. That's the real tradeoff, not whether harnesses are better, but whether the quality delta justifies 20x the spend. For a throwaway prototype, probably not. For anything facing users, obviously yes.

Every component in a harness encodes an assumption about what the model can't do alone. When Anthropic moved from Sonnet to Opus, they removed their sprint decomposition system entirely because Opus sustained coherence over longer sessions. The subagent patterns that seemed essential six months ago might be overhead tomorrow. The discipline isn't building the perfect harness. It's knowing which pieces to remove.

Sources:

• Harness Design for Long-Running Apps — Anthropic Engineering

• LLM Evaluators Recognize and Favor Their Own Generations — NeurIPS 2024

• The Context Window Problem — Factory.ai

Cursor launched Composer 2 on March 19 with the kind of language companies use when they want you to feel something big just happened. "Frontier-level coding intelligence." "Our first continued pretraining run." The blog post read like a declaration of independence from foundation model providers. Within 24 hours, a developer named Fynn caught an internal model identifier leaking through Cursor's OpenAI-compatible base URL: kimi-k2p5-rl-0317-s515-fast.

That is not subtle. Kimi K2.5 is an open-source model from Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based company backed by Alibaba. One trillion parameters total, 32 billion active per request. Cursor took it, applied reinforcement learning on coding tasks, and shipped it as their own breakthrough. Yulun Du, Head of Pretraining at Moonshot, confirmed the tokenizer was "completely identical." The base model was never mentioned in the announcement.

Cursor co-founder Aman Sanger eventually acknowledged the omission on X: "It was a miss to not mention the Kimi base in our blog from the start." He claimed roughly a quarter of the compute came from the base model, with the rest from Cursor's own training. That ratio is debatable, but the transparency failure is not.

The licensing angle makes it worse. Kimi K2.5 ships under a Modified MIT License requiring prominent UI attribution for any product exceeding 100 million monthly active users or $20 million in monthly revenue. Cursor's annualized revenue exceeds $2 billion. Their interface displayed "Composer 2" and nothing else. Moonshot initially had employees publicly questioning whether the use was authorized. Those posts disappeared, replaced by an official statement calling it an "authorized commercial partnership" through inference provider Fireworks AI.

This matters beyond one company and one model. Cursor built a $29 billion valuation partly on the perception that they were doing novel AI research. The Hacker News thread captured the tension: one user wrote that "the entire company is built on packaging open source and reselling it," while others countered that serious engineering goes into fine-tuning and RLHF pipelines. Both things can be true. But the omission transforms a legitimate technical contribution into something that feels like sleight of hand.

The broader pattern is familiar. When I wrote about why Anthropic had to close the back door, the underlying question was the same: who controls access to what, and does the user actually know? AI tools increasingly operate as routing layers, assembling capabilities from various foundation models. The label on the box tells you almost nothing about what is inside.

Cursor still makes a good product. The editor is fast, Tab predictions feel nearly telepathic some days. None of that required hiding the provenance of the model doing the heavy lifting. The fix was always simple: one line in the blog post, one badge in the UI. They chose not to, and a developer reading API metadata had to do it for them.

Sources:

• Cursor admits its new coding model was built on top of Moonshot AI's Kimi — TechCrunch

• Cursor quietly built Composer 2 on top of Chinese open-source Kimi K2.5 — The Decoder

• Cursor's Composer 2 Is Kimi K2.5 With RL and No Attribution — Awesome Agents

Somewhere around 1987, the consensus was clear. By the time you were forty, you would own a house with rooms that knew your name, drive a car that handled most of the driving, and work roughly twenty-five hours a week. The surplus hours would be spent on hobbies, education, travel. Walter Cronkite predicted a thirty-hour work week by 2000. Omni Magazine ran features on household robots that would clean the rug, iron the clothes, and shovel the snow. The specifics varied, but the emotional shape was consistent: the future would be materially generous and personally liberating.

That feeling had a texture. You could find it in the curved corridors of EPCOT Center, which opened in October 1982 as a diluted version of Walt Disney's original plan for a functioning city of twenty thousand residents. You could find it in the pages of Omni, where Gerard O'Neill predicted that "long before 2081 it will be possible to store in a machine the size of a business card all the information of a good sized library." He was right about that. He was also right about data terminals you could carry anywhere. Where he went wrong, along with nearly everyone else, was in assuming that this kind of power would make daily life feel expansive rather than anxious.

The films told a more complicated story, though we didn't always notice at the time. Blade Runner gave us November 2019 Los Angeles: flying cars, replicants, off-world colonies, and perpetual acid rain. When the real November 2019 arrived, the only thing that fully landed was the digital billboards. Back to the Future Part II, released in 1989, imagined October 2015 with hoverboards, self-lacing sneakers, and food hydrators. It got video calls, drones, flat screens on walls, and biometric door locks. It missed the smartphone entirely. Nobody in the film stares at a rectangle in their palm. Writer Bob Gale later said the film "was not meant to be a serious attempt at predicting the future," but that didn't stop an entire generation from absorbing its assumptions anyway.

The corporate futurists were often more accurate than the filmmakers, which makes their failure stranger. In 1993, AT&T ran a series of ads directed by David Fincher and narrated by Tom Selleck. "Have you ever crossed the country without stopping to ask directions?" "Have you ever gotten a phone call on your wrist?" "Have you ever had an assistant who lived in your computer?" The tagline: the company that will bring it to you... AT&T. Every prediction came true. Google Maps, the Apple Watch, Siri. AT&T delivered none of them. The companies that did, Google and Apple and Amazon, mostly didn't exist in 1993. Foreseeing the future and building it turned out to be completely different skills.

Bill Gates published The Road Ahead in 1995 and predicted what he called "the wallet PC," which was essentially the smartphone. He predicted video-on-demand replacing rental stores. He predicted social networking. In 286 pages, he barely mentioned the internet. He also predicted that phones would "look more or less like today's phones," which is the kind of mistake that reveals how even the most sophisticated forecasters anchor to the present more than they realise.

The deeper question isn't which gadgets arrived and which didn't. The question is what happened to the emotional promise. The analog revival in vinyl, film photography, and cassettes isn't just consumer preference. It's a vote against the texture of the world that actually materialised. Peter Thiel put it bluntly around 2011: "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." David Graeber, in his 2012 essay Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit, went further. He distinguished between what he called "poetic technologies," which marshal rational means toward fantastic ends (pyramids, moon shots, transcontinental railways), and "bureaucratic technologies," which serve administrative purposes. The future, Graeber argued, didn't fail to arrive because the science stalled. It failed because corporations chose cost reduction over transformation. The internet became, in his words, "simulation technology rather than transformation."

Mark Fisher called it the cancellation of the future. In Ghosts of My Life, published in 2014, he wrote that contemporary culture is haunted by "the lost futures of modernity, which failed to occur or were cancelled by postmodernity and neoliberalism." There was a trajectory, he argued, and it was interrupted. "Now we find ourselves haunted by this future that we vaguely expected at the time, and that was terminated somewhere during the 80s." Fisher saw hauntological art, from Burial's crackled electronics to the Caretaker's decaying ballroom loops, as a refusal to give up on the desire for that future. Not nostalgia. Something closer to grief.

I keep thinking about Tomorrow's World, the BBC programme that ran from 1965 to 2003. Thirty-eight years of presenting inventions and prototypes. It predicted home computers and the information superhighway early and accurately. It also featured segments on submarine divers trawling for seagulls and concepts for whale buses. The hit rate was uneven, but the tone was unwavering: the future was coming and it would be interesting. Not frightening. Not something to brace for. Interesting. That tone feels alien now.

The cruelest thing about the 1980s vision of the future is that the technology mostly arrived. The context it was supposed to arrive in did not. We have video calls, smart homes, voice assistants, and more computing power in our pockets than existed in the whole of NASA during the Apollo programme. We also have surveillance capitalism, the gig economy, climate anxiety, and a work week that got longer instead of shorter. The things that were supposed to free up human time instead colonised it. The tools arrived. The leisure didn't.

When the aesthetic of the 1970s and 1980s returns in film and music now, it carries a specific kind of unease. Not just period charm. Something closer to looking at blueprints for a house that was never built. The measurements are all there. The foundation was poured. Someone just decided to build a car park instead.

Sources:

• Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit — The Baffler

• AT&T Predicted the Future But Couldn't Win It — Ben Guttmann

• Remembering the Giddy Futurism of Omni Magazine — Slate

• The Road Ahead at 30 — GeekWire

U.S. vinyl revenue crossed a billion dollars in 2025. That figure, from the RIAA, represents 46.8 million units sold and the nineteenth consecutive year of growth. Vinyl now generates more than triple the revenue of CDs. At some point in the last two decades, the word "revival" stopped applying. This is just the market now.

Film photography tells a similar story. Over twenty million rolls sold globally in 2023, up 15% year on year, with the trajectory still climbing. Pentax released a new half-frame camera. Leica reissued the M6 at $5,900 body only. Harman Photo has invested millions in new manufacturing equipment. You do not pour capital into dying formats.

Cassettes are the most startling chapter. Sales jumped 204.7% in the first quarter of 2025. Sixty-three thousand units is not going to threaten streaming, but the demographic driving it matters: people under 25 who never experienced these formats the first time around. You cannot be nostalgic for something you never had.

The standard framing, that people are rejecting technology, misses what is actually happening. Nobody buying a turntable is giving up their phone. The CRT monitors now commanding $500 to $2,000 in retro gaming communities sit next to modern displays on the same desk. This is not retreat. It is correction. People are reasserting preferences that digital convenience trained them to suppress: the preference for owning a thing rather than licensing access to it, for friction that forces attention, for constraint that shapes creative work instead of infinite choice that paralyses it.

Film photographers talk about this constantly. Thirty-six exposures on a roll changes how you see. You compose differently when each frame is irreversible. The pre-internet world ran on similar constraints across everything, and those constraints produced forms of attention that frictionless abundance has not replicated.

There is an obvious paradox. TikTok and Reddit are the primary channels through which analog culture now circulates. The movement against digital saturation depends on digital saturation for distribution. But the paradox is thinner than it looks. People use Instagram to find the camera; they use the camera to get away from Instagram. The tool and the escape coexist because what people are fleeing is not screens as such but the specific texture of algorithmic attention, passive, infinite, optimised for retention rather than satisfaction.

CRT monitors make the functional case plainly. Zero input lag is measurable, not sentimental. Scanlines render pre-HD games the way their artists intended. Objects that outlast their original context sometimes acquire practical value precisely because nothing new can replace them.

Nineteen years of growth. A billion dollars. Film expanding at 15% annually. Under-25s who never wound a cassette driving tape sales up 205%. Something about the physical, the constrained, and the owned satisfies a need that digital, for all its convenience, has not figured out how to meet.

Sources:

• Vinyl Surpassed $1B in U.S. Revenue in 2025 — Hollywood Reporter

• Why Cassette Tapes Refuse to Die: 2025 Edition — Tape Lab

• 2026 Analog Revival: Gen Z and Millennials Embracing Nostalgic Tech — BizTech Weekly

ELLE gave her the cover in October 1992 and the leopard print did the rest. Basia Milewicz had that particular quality where the camera couldn't decide whether to focus on the bone structure or the attitude, so it just surrendered to both.