Notes from London Film Festival (I.)
After The Hunt / The Testament of Ann Lee / The Fence / Alpha
Autumn film festivals present an opportunity for the urbane cinephile to gorge themselves on the next calendar year of releases from the auteur-arthouse-middlebrow bloc.
London Film Festival is an unmatched extravaganza in that regard. While weary critics may note that many of the big-ticket events went directly from gala premiere status to multiplex release, we see mid-festival outings for Roofman, After The Hunt, Frankenstein et al as a pluralising opportunity for the populus to enjoy the festival too.
So when we asked critics on the ground to report back their findings, we half-expected a struggle session to emerge. Instead, we think you’ll find our survey of London Film Festival 2025, presented across this week in three parts, offers an excited and curious overview of films worthy of further consideration long after this festival season.
Words by Arta Barzanji, Kirsty Asher, Ben Flanagan, Phoebe Hadaway.
After the Hunt (Luca Guadagnino, USA)
The petit bourgeois and its discontents - After the Hunt treats Yale’s philosophy set as a market where ideas circulate like chips at a polite casino: tradable, flashy, weightless. Grants, tenure, reputation are the house; “principles” are collateral. The film’s best joke is structural—its breezy, décor-forward filmmaking mirrors the milieu’s unseriousness so precisely that any attempt to take these people seriously collapses on contact. That skimming is the critique.
Luca Guadagnino has long worked inside plush upper-middle-class bubbles, but more and more recently, he’s embraced frivolity outright. Against the prestige reflex to solder “importance” onto everything, he leans into the middlebrow object—glossy, nimble, consumable—and lets its lightness do the deflating. Compared to the costume-jewellery gravitas of Call Me by Your Name (2017) and Suspiria (2018), the shrug here feels almost honest.
It’s an index of the moment, but the results are mixed. As a cultural object, it’s a fascinating barometer; as a filmic experience, it’s baggy and intermittently nonsensical. Scenes pivot on canned contrivances, arguments telescope into policy-brief plotting, and glib satire sometimes flattens what it claims to expose. It also slots into a run of recent movies—the post-Tár (2022) cycle, broadly speaking—that prod the cynicism underlying identity politics as middle-class career strategy. After the Hunt often hits the right nerve (status masquerading as ethics) but not always the right pressure: the ironies come too easily, and moral risk is frequently exchanged for tonal smirk.
Still, the shift matters. In an ecosystem ruled by prestige-TV solemnity, festival austerity, and superhero bloat, an unabashed middlebrow feature can feel like relief. Partly the times have changed (self-seriousness has curdled); partly Guadagnino has made canny tweaks—tighter rhythms, cheekier blocking, an instinct to end on a smirk rather than a thesis. The choices are hit-and-miss, but they carry energy and a willingness to confront rather than conform to the sensibilities of many of the cultured petit bourgeois who will be the film’s main audience, even if the confrontation is often on questionable terms. Not deep, not entirely negligible; a lively, exasperating emblem of where culture is, and what the middlebrow can still do when it stops pretending profundity is priceless. AB
The Testament of Ann Lee (Mona Fastvold, USA/UK)
Rod Cooper identified the existence of a ‘folk horror’ subgenre for Kine Weekly in 1970, but in The Testament of Ann Lee, director Mona Fastvold may have ushered in the folk musical. The story of Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried) is of an eighteenth century Mancunian woman whose ardent belief in God and repellent views on sex led to her becoming the figurehead of the Shaker movement, an offshoot of the Quakers who used their bodies and voices to sensually testify to God’s glory while simultaneously practising strict celibacy. She, her brother William (Lewis Pullman), and a few devout followers travel to New York in pursuit of a divine utopia, where men and women live together equally as a community.
In the style of Cyrano (2021) and Annette (2021) the musical numbers are sung live, and Seyfried’s birdsong soprano perfectly elucidates Ann Lee’s seraphic mysticism. Composer Daniel Blumberg’s (he who put Cafe Oto on the map at this year’s Academy Awards) score sees him reunited with The Brutalist (2024) team to create enchanting rounds based off of actual Shaker hymns, reinterpreting songs originally written in a manner more akin to folk music than the hymns of the institutional Church of England. The result sets it quite apart from mainstream musical films. This, along with Celia Rowlson-Hall’s billowing choreography reimagines an organic and freeform nature of Shaker worship with the cast immersing themselves in the choreography and music, blurring the lines between performance and ritual.
While criticism has been aimed at the film’s runtime and pursuant loss of momentum, a keen issue is its reluctance to critique Ann Lee. Much like her followers, Fastvold seems too entranced by Ann to address the issues of her movement, like her brother William dismissing his secret lover, cauterising his homosexuality out of devotion to his sister, or that any two followers who fall in love must leave the community. Harsh terms from a woman portrayed in such an angelic light. As Seyfried and Pullman described production as ‘theatre camp’, this film feels like an idealisation of theatre kids given free rein to run rampant. Given how insular the musical theatre community can be, The Testament of Ann Lee may well gain a cult following of its own. KA
The Fence (Claire Denis, France)
Based on Black Battles With Dogs by Bernard-Marie Koltès, The Fence is by some measure Claire Denis’ chattiest film. Though its surface suggests a straightforward stage-to-screen adaptation, the depth of information conveys every bit the experimentation of L’Intrus (2004). Here, she asks us to go beyond language, a disorienting request amidst schematic plotting and a barrage of theatrical declarations.
In recent films, Denis broke new ground by adding iPhone camerawork to her repertoire. It returns in a high-octane flashback, while other scenes oscillate between digital and 35mm with apparent freedom. Here, she has gone one further by using generative AI to depict a canine transformation. Ethical questions are secondary to aesthetic ugliness, leaving a gauche symbol that literalises the worst tendencies of the film to minimise the black characters’ perspectives. Filmed in a Cameroon which is flattened through ellison of specific signifiers - an opening card refers to the location as ‘Central Africa’.
This makes some sense within the narrative. Horn (Matt Dillon) feebly runs a construction site-cum-fiefdom. As he awaits the arrival of his new bride (Mia McKenna-Bruce), a local man (Isaach de Bankolé) approaches the surroundings to request the return of his brother’s body. This setup emboldens four acting styles which are in complete tension. McKenna-Bruce is surely the first actor to embody the Home Counties within the Claire Denis corpus. Her naturalism contrasts Tom Blyth’s Shakespearian opining as a brutish engineer. That, in turn, prickles against Matt Dillon’s post-method grumbling, which hits a wall before de Bankolé’s mannered stoicism. These disparate rhythms create lines that course between the characters like a mesh of barbed wire.
Everyone is immaculately dressed by Saint Laurent, hoisting their lounging around this palace of shipping containers into a grand opera. Denis, who films bodies in spaces as though the prelude to porno (complimentary), sees through these costumes to emphasise the emotion in small gestures: a clenched fist, the sharpness of a cheekbone, a champagne flute knocked back. By the shotgun wielding ending, the film takes on a 90s thriller air glimpsed through all-enveloping dust. BF
Alpha (Julia Ducournau. France)
Faghagging too close to the sun - Julia Ducournau, France’s premier exporter of post-New Extremity, has returned. Alpha is a messy and occasionally beautiful film that ultimately fails to land any of its many planes. Opening with a Portishead needledrop as Alpha (Mélissa Boros) gets a stick and poke tattoo with a contaminated needle, the film immediately sets its atmosphere; dingy, sleek and strangely beautiful. Ducournau is at her most authentic examining the relation between the body and society, but the film’s central metaphor, an AIDS-esque virus that is ravaging the margins of society, collapses under the weight of the film’s warring interests of poverty, religion and motherhood.
Set primarily in 1990, Ducournau has said that she wanted to “[...]put something sacred in these deaths that were never mourned”. And in the image of this disease that embalms its victims in marble, she creates striking and saintly images that work to canonise, in the catholic sense, those that died during the AIDS epidemic. This exposes Ducournau’s almost parasitic relationship to queerness. Though not openly queer, Ducournau’s work constantly flirts with it, though the androgynous monster in Titane (2021) and lesbian awakening of Raw (2016) tend to be the most shallow parts of her films. Such aesthetics are so removed from contemporary or historical context as to stand as imagery if nothing more. But playing loosely with a clear AIDS stand-in leads Alpha to some troubling logical end points, especially as it ties into the film’s view of religion.
Due to Alpha and her mother’s (Golshifteh Farahani) middle class position, they are distanced from their North African family. This is contrasted with Alpha’s estranged uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim), who is more integrated into the film’s banlieue setting. Amin, however, is going through heroin withdrawals, and is diagnosed early on, by Alpha’s Grandmother as being infected with “The Red Wind”, which Ducournau’s script ties directly to their Islamic beliefs. He resides in the same room that Alpha is quarantined to by her mother, creating thinly sketched tension between the pair. This leads to a startling sequence when the two of them sneak out to a queer (coded) nightclub full of patients of the mysterious disease. They find a moment of Nick Cave soundtracked transcendence. Surrounded by half marbled people, dancing, loving, being truly alive despite everything, it’s a genuinely striking and beautiful scene, but just as this sequence ends and the film reaches its emotional climax, it’s undercut by the bizarre inclusion of Tame Impala’s Urban Outfitters-core “Let It Happen”.
By this point, the mysterious disease is directly referred to as “The Red Wind” by secular characters, directly correlating it to religious plague. This ties the film to a more dangerous real world idea, of AIDS as vengeance on heathens. This was such a prominent idea in the 1980s that PSAs, such as AIDS Monolith (1987) by acclaimed art house director Nicolas Roeg, would lean into this idea. Despite her good intentions, Ducournau’s fragile attempts to complicate the central metaphor only serve to make the whole film naive at best and actively reactionary at worst. PH