Feverhouse

Scripted by Ken Hollings, this short feature might better be considered as a poem: something out of Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal via the French Surrealist cinema and Throbbing Gristle's brutalist chic. Shot in expressionist monochrome, it roams the rooms and corridors of what might be the titular hospital, a grim Victorian edifice where bodies lie untended on trolleys, nurses murder inmates, a nurse-patient love affair flutters inthe shadows, the sick and blind stumble in Beckettian repetition, and the oblique, disturbing narrative only hints at larger horrors. Given all that, it hovers dangerously close to pretension, sometimes teetering over the edge, but still remains a darkly individual visual essay, despite its precedents. It's also blessed with an exciting score, a brew of metal gamelan and junkyard bebop from Biting Tongues.