Richard Whittaker

Combined with the glacially slow and uneventful narrative, the end result feels like a feature by a small, cheap animation studio in 2010 trying to make a Miyazaki-esque cartoon.

If there are two signatures to Indonesian horror, they would be an overwhelming sense of relentless dread, and poisonous centipedes. The Queen of Black Magic has plenty of both, and an enthralling supernatural siege story binding everything together so tight you'll barely be able to breathe.

It's a slow build to collapse, escaping the traditional trap of such supernatural suspense films in that both of them have secrets, and it's not the acts themselves but the deceits that have led them to this place.

It's a hodgepodge of wildly divergent narrative styles, from the mystical to the grisly and into the ridiculous.

Knapp's script is ultimately about how we are trapped in our own pasts, and even when they can seem like a pillow they can become an anchor. It's a soft, sad, yet insistent message that, even as the grass overtakes the baseball pitch where Adam practices, and even as the last windmills slow their spin, becomes a quiet voice of hope.

Will good triumph over evil? Who cares, when there's this much chaotic creature fun to be had.

Rosi seeks to give glimpses of insight, to find emotional truths in the mother keening in the prison cell where her son died, and the courting couple who comment on the imminent rain but ignore the distant sound of machine gun fire. To fill in the contextual gaps would damage those truths, but to leave them inevitably will leave the audience questioning what's outside of his frame.

It's hard to say that any other edit would be better, because Brothers by Blood is one single, grey mass to the bone, an unfortunate use of a sterling cast and a book that deserves a more textured retelling.

It's delightfully frightful fun, a fine addition to the venerable and febrile tradition of Australian comedy-horror.

McAulay has crafted a terse, bleak drama. It's reminiscent of the portrait of a corrupt male friendship in Super Dark Times, but with the added pressures of kinship and family. To describe Don't Tell a Soul as a story of toxic masculinity is both accurate but, in a time when every film with a flawed or unpleasant male an/protagonist gets that tag, almost glib. There's something rancid between the boys.