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To serve out his parole a prodigal addict returns to his island community, which is waiting on the arrival of its priest. But which priest?

More stylish horror from Mike Flanagan, but it's a lumpy story that left me with mixed feelings. I was well engaged by its serious take on religious ritual and fanaticism, but not so much by its speculation on the afterlife, especially when delivered through over-balanced monologues that lean over into exposition.

Flanagan puts his case for the latter aspect in a youtube interview, saying that the monologues just turn up when he's writing and that he trusts the collaboration with his actors. Not buying it, I'm afraid, and I suspect his admission that this production was a long time in the works betrays it as an immature concept that couldn't cohere no matter how much labour he spent.

Early on there's a promising angle, when the deaconess refers to 'ordinary time' in the religious year, implying that there's a special time to come. That does refer to the afterlife, but more immediately to the eucharist with its tingling of bells, when mundane time intersects with God time, and the transcendant becomes immanent: that which is not natural begins to move among us. At least it's the kind of material the camera can elaborate on, and in my view much preferable to characters telling us what's on their minds when we should be able to intuit that for ourselves.

To put it another way, horror works through action, not words, and that's true especially in religious horror. No matter how many incantations, or sermons, or expressions of rapture, you still gotta get the thing done. Think of the climax of The Exorcist and the embodiment of the Lamb of God in the sacrifice of Father Karras.

So I wasn't grabbed by the story-telling, but was happy with the performances and the atmosphere created by the music, location and cinematography. One nice effect was the swivel pan on the hero's face whenever drifting off to sleep. And there was one trademark scene in a rowing boat on the water at night - end of ep.4, I think - when Flanagan brought the threads together in a moment of awesome horror. But that came at the end of lots and lots of talking, and was only given a faint echo in the busy climax to the series.

Finally, the hero's addiction is 'talked through', but without true insight - disappointing, since Flanagan admits he's gone through similar in his own life.

Overall: Some serious stuff to chew over, but mostly for the Flanagan completionists.

On the eve of her comeback tour, an addict popstar seeks out something for the pain - but finds pain is all that's on offer.

Wow! Complete blast of a journey into madness, and for me much more entertaining than the first movie. The pace is spot on, and I only came up for breath about halfway through. There's also some experimental stuff in here that really works for me: first the apartment scene with the advancing 'smile' figures, and then the audience reaction in the final scene. Excellent story-telling. And the score is weird and eerie - hang on for the final credits to get the sound in isolation.

The stand out element is the lead performance. First time I've seen this actor, and her talent blew me away. You can really spot it in the dance rehearsal, where her moves are precise and flowing. Then in the singing - of her own songs - and in her reactions and close-ups, with those big brown eyes. She carries the story with increasing intensity as her world convulses into nightmare.

The drawbacks come from the fact most of the frights are done through abrupt jump-scares, and the final scene relies heavily on CGI - not to my taste at all at all.

But the cardinal sin is that the character's psychosis never reaches through to touch cold reality, a connection that is essential to the horror genre. So we end up with an internal interpretation of a mental collapse, with the external world remaining passive. In other words, the nightmare is her reality, with no way out, and we're just along for the ride. Most horrors achieve the connection through elaborate demonic/ghostly mumbo-jumbo from the past, but the best ones boil it down to the terror that arises on realizing our view of the world is fatally wrong. Here, the character never has that realization, but invents a reality for herself.

There is one possible connection in the speech scene, where the name on the teleprompter remains the same from an objective angle after the point of view switches from the first-person - but I'm not even sure that was intentional, and it wouldn't be enough anyway.

So I class this alongside Black Swan and The Black String as a macabre tale of madness, but not a horror of the first order.

Overall: Great entertainment, but kinda misses the point.

A one night stand turns in to a bloody last stand. But whose?

Cat-and-mouse thriller that cuts up the time-line and holds back information to get us thinking. Reviewers keep referring to a twist, but for me the film-maker frames what is a simple story from opposite angles to get depth into the characters, and it's no surprise when suspicions over the reliability of the story-telling are confirmed.

The opening sequence is simply a 'final girl' fleeing through woods, and so stylized that I got the feeling of a violent allegory of how men and women negotiate romantic love, driven home by the choice of song. Further in, it feels like a study in the deathwish, with kinky sex and drugs and guns. In any case, this is not a straightforward serial-killer movie.

What raises this up for me, fot all its cleverness, is the performance in the lead role. At first I had my doubts about the actress, but when the extended dialogue comes on and the character loses her passivity she becomes intriguing, so that the long final sequence in the car (with a subtle mirror insert) brings out a sympathy twisted around from what I felt at the beginning.

The other performances are good, particularly the Demon, whose uncertainty captures the paradox where the dominator in S&M is really the submissive, without control.

Cinematography is gorgeous, full on red, like a reflection of blood. The editing is pacey most of the way, but then allows extended dialogue that always puts the characters into conflict, sometimes subtly, sometimes with humour. The score is ominous and laid on thick, but then the mood lightens up with a dozen softly-sung folk tunes.

If there is a flaw, it's in a scene in the woods with a bottle of vodka. It's an anomaly without explanation, although I may have missed some logic. I've read that the shooting of a big action scene had to be abandoned because of interference by the money-men, so maybe the scene in the woods would have tied in with that but couldn't be edited out.

Overall: Sophisticated blood fest.

P.s. Stick with the final credits.