Friday, 3 October 2014

"Luna" (The Guardian 03/10/14)


Luna **
Dir: Dave McKean. With: Ben Daniels, Dervla Kirwan, Stephanie Leonidas. 101 mins. Cert: 15

Artist Dave McKean’s ambitious follow-up to 2005’s underappreciated Neil Gaiman collaboration Mirrormask again combines live-action with animated elements, only this time fuses them to a far more agonised narrative: it’s hard work getting to the ideas and images that stick. A reunion of old university pals at a clifftop retreat unleashes smartly visualised demons – dead babies, creative blocks – and allows McKean to argue for the consoling properties of fantasy. Yet there’s a heavy purgative aspect to it: the drama assumes the look of lumpy, anglicised Bergman, as though this personal, potentially meaningful material simply hasn’t been processed in the passage from soul to screen. 

Luna opens in selected cinemas from today.

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