Parky At the Pictures (30/10/2026)

(Reviews of Gentle Monster; City of Masks; and Bad Day At the Office)

GENTLE MONSTER.

Here is a film with a backstory. In 2022, director Marie Kreutzer released Corsage, an exceptional study of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria that paired the typically compelling Vicky Krieps with the respected Florian Teichtmeister, as Franz Josef II. When reports emerged in January 2023 that Teichtmeister had been caught in possession of child pornography, Kreutzer contacted the actor to seek clarification. He reassured her that the claims were false and she took his word. However, he pleaded guilty on trial to possessing 76,000 files and received a suspended two-year sentence, leaving Kreutzer to face criticism in some quarters for her handling of the episode and for her fury that her feminist masterpiece had been irretrievably compromised.

Although she had already been developing a scenario based on a newspaper report about a paedophile ring in North Rhine-Westphalia, Kreutzer has clearly drawn on the Teichtmeister scandal in Gentle Monster, which centres on a trusting wife, as she both responds to her husband's exposure and re-evaluates the quirkily idyllic life she thought they had shared, without secrets.

Avant-garde musician Lucy Weiss (Léa Seydoux) is working on a piano arrangement of Charles & Eddie's `Would I Lie to You?', when documentarist husband, Philip (Laurence Rupp), has a panic attack in their Munich apartment. Seeking a fresh start away from the stresses of the city, the couple move to a house in the countryside with their seven year-old son, Johnny (Malo Blanchet), who is thrilled to have a trampoline in the garden.

Johnny will only brush his teeth if his father sings him Coldplay's `Yellow' and Lucy teases him on his first day at a new school about needing to grow up before he turns 20. Lucy and Philip have sex on the mattress they are using before buying a bed, as they have focussed on Johnny's room before their own. She is pleased to have sold out a concert in Berlin, but Philip's enthusiasm is mooted, as his career is not going so well, as he has been forced to take television assignments to keep money coming in.

The morning after Lucy suggests they dump their mobiles and get a landline, Philip is arrested by Elsa Kühn (Jella Haase), who seizes his computers and watches on as he calls lawyer Lukas (Nils Strunk) and hugs a confused, but calm Lucy. It's only when she gets to the police station that she realises that her husband has been arrested for suspected child pornography offences. Elsa informs her that Philip is being investigated for possessing and trading images, as well as possibly making them.

Seething, Lucy ignores Philip in the car park and drives home to pack bags and move in with her mother, Eloise (Catherine Deneuve). At her concert, she plays an angry rendition of The Cure's `Boys Don't Cry'. In a post-gig interview, she explains that she didn't want to be a classical pianist like her mother and turned to deconstructing pop songs written by men because they are better at expressing their feelings in lyrics than they are in real life. But she questions the validity of their emotions and places them in a new musical context.

Eloise asks why Philip isn't with Lucy, but she refuses to talk and tells her mother to shush after she opines that moving to the countryside is worse for a female artist's career than childbirth. Changing phones to stop Philip calling her, Lucy asks Elsa for help, as she has no idea what is going on and how much she can tell friends and family without harming Philip's reputation. Elsa regrets not being able to share and recommends consulting the police psychologist. But she is in denial herself because her dementia-stricken academic father, Hermann (Sylvester Groth), keeps touching his carer, Natalia (Patrycja Ziółkowska), and Elsa pleads with her to stay wihtout lodging a complaint.

Forced to sit next to Philip at Lukas's wedding, Lucy leaves after the first dance. But Lukas follows her to the car and reveals that Philip had amassed the images while researching a documentary and Lucy (who still loves him) doesn't know what to believe. She is none the wiser after watching Elsa chat to Johnny about his relationship with his father. However, she learns that holding images is illegal even for a documentary and Elsa warns her that things might still emerge during the computer searches. She doesn't say, however, that a dark web user named GentleMonster87 had used Johnny's trampoline footage on a paedophile forum, as she doesn't know whether Philip was trying to buy their trust as either an investigator or a potential client. Lucy asks Elsa how she can do such work and she claims it's the only job she's ever done that makes sense.

Lucy asks Eloise if she can borrow some money, but she still can't talk to her about her marriage. Philip invites her to the house and they chat in the garden beside the trampoline. He confesses that there is no documentary and that he had been dealing porn files to make money to renovate the house so that he was pulling his weight financially. Lucy knew he had been a drug dealer before and he claims he had simply been a middleman and had not produced any images or harmed a child himself. Apologising, he rushes to his car and drives away, with Luch chasing after him because she still needs answers.

We flashback two years, as Lucy performs `Groovy Kind of Love' on stage. When Johnny interrupts sex with a nightmare, Philip goes to reassure him naked and stops off at his computer before returning to bed. While having counselling, Lucy denies her work is more important than Philip's, but his mother, Inge (Regina Fritsch), warns her, during a weekend at their lakeside Austrian home, that he is a sensitive type who will find taking orders in television very difficult after being his own boss. He thinks Lucy looks down on his work and admits that he's a mere technician while she's a genuine artist.

Back in the present day, Elsa is having problems making her brother help out more with their father. She goes to IKEA to buy him a reading lamp and bumps into the Weiss family shopping for a birthday present for Philip's father. Lucy tells her that Philip has a defence because he went on to the dark web to make money. But Elsa doesn't have the heart to tell her that there is no money involved in this case - although Lucy finds out for herself when Inge divulges that she is planning to give them part of their inheritance now so they can build a life. Suddenly, seeing things clearly, Lucy bundles Johnny into the car. However, he jumps out and runs back to his father, leaving Lucy no option but to tell Inge what is going on. She is surprised that Lucy hadn't noticed anything untoward, but she sympathises with her, even though she admits that she will still support her son if he needs help.

Eloise has Lucy meet a therapist friend and recommends throwing up to cleanse herself. However, Lucy says there is no off button she can press to stop herself loving Philip, regardless of what he has done. Meanwhile, Elsa fails to prevent Natalia from leaving after her father climbs into her bed and hates herself when she offers her more money to stay. She further despairs when she moves in to look after him and he tells her to make more of an effort and put some lipstick on. Slamming the door, she locks herself in her room.

Lucy files for divorce and tells Lukas she wants full custody of Johnny, especially after learning there were over 1800 files on Philip's devices going back several years. Returning to the country house, she supervises the loading of her piano into a van. She finds Philip's hoodie and smells it before putting it on and finding a memory stick in the pocket. Among the images of domestic bliss, she sees one of Johnny with his shirt off. Stepping away from the laptop, she goes into the garden to take a call from her son. He is staying with Eloise and asks Lucy to bounce on the trampoline. As they sing `Yellow' over the credits, an insert shows some monochrome footage that Philip took over Lucy, as she reclined on the bed. Closing captions reveal that the majority of cases involving child pornography involve someone close.

Exuding shock, confusion, and pain, Léa Seydoux holds this rather disappointing drama together with a display of excruciatingly raw emotion that can't quite disguise the fact that Marie Kreutzer has rather ducked the issue she was seemingly so keen to explore. Given how deeply hurt she was by the Teichtmeister case and its ramifications, it's perhaps not surprising that Kreutzer approaches the theme of child pornography in the way she does. But she offers little in-depth insight into Philip's mindset and clumsily contrasts Lucy's refusal to believe the worst of the man she loves with Elsa's unwillingness to accept that her ailing father is a sex pest. There's precious procedural detail about how the police investigate such cases or how they came to suspect Philip in the first place. Similarly, Kreutzer skates over the loyalty he commands from both his mother and his lawyer, while Lucy gets begrudged morale support from her judgemental mother.

Catherine Deneuve is icily perfect as Eloise, while Jella Haase does a good job in showing how Elsa bottles up her emotions as the only female in her unit and as the sibling left to deal with the consequences of her father's illness. Laurence Rupp

is sold slightly short by the depiction of Philip, but he does enough to suggest why Lucy would take such convincing that he was capable of anything so depraved.

His home movies are deftly pastiched by Judith Kaufmann, who also captures the beauty of the country house and its surroundings and the Alpine lake house. She also uses close-ups to convey the the pressure that Lucy is under and to allow Seydoux to suggest the thousand and one things running through her mind, as she tries to think of any clues she might have missed. The flashback feels rather cumbersome in this regard, but Ulrike Kofler's editing is otherwise effective, as are production designer Myrna Wolf's interiors, with the largely empty rooms reinforcing the sense of a family in flux. Some of the song choices feel a bit obvious, but Camille reworks them to captivating effect in order to underline the fact that men and what they say can't always be taken at face value. Kreutzer states this case with care and consideration and shrewdly ends without anything being resolved. But it always feels as though there should be more going on beneath the surface.

CITY OF MASKS.

If IMDB can be trusted, London-based Italian director Andrea M. Catinella has been a busy boy over the last couple of years. Among the 30 credits he has racked up since 2021 are the features, Island of Dolls 2, The Dancing Queen, Christmas With the Pups 2: Pups Alone (both 2024), Piglet, Mouseboat Massacre, Hook, and Bait (all 2025). Few of this septet has been widely seen, but this is still a hugely impressive output. Sadly, there's nothing to get particularly excited about in Catinella's Halloween offering, City of Masks.

A decade after a production of the musical, City of Masks, ended in tragedy, producer Victor Langdon (Deano Bugatti Mitchison) aims to revive the show at the Wimbledon Theatre with a new song score. Christian Winters (Charlie Goddard) is thrilled to land his first major role, as The Maskmaker. But he's spooked in his dressing room when the lights go out on his first day and he hears a ghostly voice speaking to him.

He continues to hear it during the first rehearsal session, just 18 days before a VIP preview, and Victor reminds him that the theatre is not haunted and that City of Masks is not cursed. During a break, however, Christian wanders into a candlelit room in the bowels of the theatre and finds the masked Eve Devereux (Amanda Jiang) playing the piano. She says she wondered if he would ever find her and he seems to fall under her spell, as she plays. But he says nothing of what had just happened to lead, Sebastian (Lewis Santer), and their co-star, Lena (Shayli Reagan).

Disturbed while reading a notebook left on his make-up table, Christian realises he's looking at the original score. Wandering backstage again, he meets Eve, who shows him a flashback in which Victor locks her in a blazing changing-room because he felt that she had upstaged him in his own show. She tells Christian that she has reopened the theatre for her and that she will use him to exact her revenge.

When Christian sings `Paper Faces' from the old score during a rehearsal, Victor is freaked - all the more so when a lamp falls from the rigging and he remonstrates with stage manager Helen (Charlotte Jackson Coleman) to get things fixed. Christian and Lena go for coffee and she teases him about the theatre being haunted. He asks if things get easier, as he's feeling the pressure of playing such an important role. But it only increases when Victor suggests that he takes over The Wanderer from Sebastian. He is furious and confronts Victor about what he's playing at and demands to know whether Eve is alive or dead.

While working late, Christian finds another piece of sheet music at his dressing-room door and, when he goes to investigate, he stumbles across Victor and Lena having sex in his office. The producer brandishes a loaded gun and tells Christian to be in his office at 9am. As he turns, Lena shoots him a bashful look, as she slips back inside Victor's office.

She tries to speak to Christian the next morning after Victor has given him some new stage notes and issued a warning about staying focussed. But Eve tells him that Lena isn't as innocent as she appears and urges him to watch her face when he proposes the duet that Eve hands him (before disappearing into thin air). Lena is moved by the song and Sebastian teases Victor that she has gone over to Christian's side.

Feeling apprehensive about going on, Christian tells Eve about a tragedy that had occurred when he entered a school talent show and she tells him to forget his past and their foreheads meet, as they sit on the piano stool in her candlelit hideaway. Meanwhile, Maya Jensen (Madalina Bellariu Ion), a reporter from The Sun, informs Lena that she is doing a story on Victor and needs a word.

Eve comes to Christian's digs and asks if he is trying to unmask her. They kiss, only for her to flee because Christian's mother, Julie (Kay Boggett), turns up on his doorstep because she's come to London to see his preview. Leaving her dozing after a feed, Christian meets Eve at the theatre and she takes him to the roof. She removes her mask and they kiss and she says he makes her feel alive. But they are interrupted by Sebastian, who wants to know where Christian keeps getting all the new songs from and warns him that Victor is out of control and needs taking down.

Meanwhile, Maya gets incriminating evidence that Victor has stolen a donation to the theatre and has faked documents so that he gets all the royalties from City of Masks. She also finds CCTV footage of Eve trapped in her burning dressing-room. Victor still thinks he's untouchable, however, and brings Ghislaine (Vanessa Bailey) back to his office and is taken aback when he sees the blonde's face turn into Eve in the mirror.

Lena sees Christian with Eve in the theatre and is spooked. He tells her that he will sing for her because she has helped him conquer his fears and she provides him with documents that will condemn Victor. He, however, is plotting Christian's downfall and asks Lena to give him a mask to wear for the dress rehearsal.

Back at the bedsit, Julie tells Christian that Eve was his father's favourite and they had gone to see City of Masks after he died to cheer themselves up. She reveals that they had gone backstage and that Eve had given him a mask because he looked so sad. Passing him a photo of his father, Julie urges Christian to get past what is blocking him and make her proud.

Before the curtain goes up, Maya approaches Christian and he gives her the documents that Eve had shown him. As she leafs through them, she sees Eve and strokes her face because it's been so long since she had seen her. She presents the files to Victor in his office and delights in telling him he's finished. Eve also turns up to taunt him and Victor fires at her ranting about seeing her die in the flames.

Having had his face burnt by the chemical Victor had squeezed on the mask, Christian goes on in the mask Eve had given him as a boy and she encourages him to show his talent. He's the hit of the first half, but he notices Sebastian leading Julie out of her box, at the same time that Victor is leading Maya to the room in which Eve had died. Julie is bundled in, too, and Victor tosses a match on to the papers Sebastian had pre-doused in petrol. As they scream in terror, Christian sings his big number, while Julie steals Lena's mask to join him for the finale.

Luckily, she still has time to nip upstairs and pull the chains off the burning room and free Julie and Maya, who turns out to be Eve's niece and she sneers as he's cuffed by the cops and led away. Cackling dementedly, he swears defiantly at Eve on the steps of the theatre, as firefighters jog past to put out the blaze. Maya gives Christian a music box and he sits at the piano in the candle room, where Eve finds him and they kiss before leaving together.

It's hard to know what's worse: the standard of the acting or Enrico Tessarin's slipshod screenplay. The stiffness of the delivery can, to a degree, be put down to the tin-eared dialogue. But only the spiritedly over-the-top Deano Bugatti Mitchison comes close to creating a vibrant character, although Charlie Goddard, Shayli Reagan, and Amanda Jiang sing well enough. Not that the songs are up to much, mind you. Or that the musical makes any sort of sense.

But the plot hardly slots neatly into place, either, with Tessarin often seeming to be making it up as he goes along. There's certainly no consistency in what characters like Sebastian and Lena know or why Victor has power over them. But the whole backstory is a jumble of convenient strands to be grabbed at when the storyline seems to be drifting down a blind alley. Who investigated the fire all those years ago? How could they not have seen the big arrow over Victor's head? They would have saved everyone a lot of trouble.

Still, Carla Fuschillo's cinematography has a richness that helps capture the atmosphere within the theatre, which has been cannily used by production designer Grace Lee - although one suspects she would be hard-pressed to produce a floor plan to show where everything fits into what appears to be a cavernous backstage area for a theatre with such a modest façade. Cantinella directs steadily enough when it comes to camera placement and making evocative use of light and shade. But the pacing is sluggish and there are absolutely no scares. There have been plenty of Phantom rip-offs and this is serviceable enough, providing you aren't a stickler for narrative logic of plausible performance.

BAD DAY AT THE OFFICE.

Having started out directing action flicks like Underground (2007) and Bodyguard: A New Beginning (2008), Chee Keong Cheung devoted his energies to various initiatives across the British film industry. For a few years, therefore, Redcon-1 (2018) has sat in isolation on Cheung's directorial CV. But the CEO of Action Xtreme (the UK's only action studio) has been busy recently, with the Go-Pro point-of-view actioner, A Bad Day At the Office, coming between the Nigerian-set Son of the Soil (2025) and the sci-fi thriller, The Experiment (2026).

Waking in a London hotel room with a hangover and no idea who he is or how he got there, Karl Davis (John Hannah) identifies himself from a bottle of pills he appears to have memo'd himself to take every hour for his heart. On discovering a corpse in the bath, he fights off a couple of suspiciously thuggish cops before convincing Molly (Radha Mitchell) - the maid he had bedded the night before - that all is not as it seems. Bumping off more menacing figures in black helmets on a stairwell, the pair reach a lift and take stock in the back of a taxi after smashing up another handful of cops in the underground car park. Molly calls her brother, Vince (Craig Miller) , to ask if they can come over, but the cabby tries to gas them and Karl parkours over numerous rooftops in a bid to catch him and discover who he's working for. Meanwhile, Molly finds a bicycle and lingers droolingly over a patisserie window display somewhere near Piccadilly Circus, where Karl's face is on every big screen under a `Wanted' banner.

Meanwhile, a Serbian gangster named Ivan (Tim Fellingham), has arrived at the hotel room and found his father dead in the bath. He orders his goons to increase the bounty before putting his golden pistol in a copper's mouth. By now, Karl is on the Underground with Molly and they get attacked by an axe-wielding bride and groom. Molly snatches a curry to throw in the bride's face before they make their getaway, with Karl reluctantly following as Molly takes him to the nightclub where Vince works. Karl reveals that he keeps having flashbacks to having his chest cut open, but they don't have long to chat - even about Molly's contention that they're stuck inside a twisted variation on The Hangover (2009) - as they're pestered by Molly's ex, Brad (Charlie MacGechan), before Karl gets a phone call urging him to finish what he started. Fighting off a prostitute and her pimp in the washroom (where Karl has to fish in a vomit-filled sink for a dropped heart pill) and the gun-toting DJ, Poco the Killer Clown (Beau Fowler), the fugitives flee in the dead Vince's car.

They argue after Karl finds his picture on Molly's phone and she explains they'd been sleeping together during his stay at the hotel. She has him rushed to hospital when he collapses and her doctor friend, Rachel (Rhoda Montemayor) informs Karl that he's dying from multiple organ failure because of a toxic substance seemingly linked to K-Labs. Seeing flashbacks to his youth and to surgeons standing over him, Karl learns he only has a day to live. He's nearly killed by a syringe-stabbing nurse, but he vanquishes her before machine-gunning his way along a corridor to a rear entrance after being told by a henchman in scrubs that he's being chased for killing someone's father.

With the pieces still not falling into place, Karl follows Molly to an Internet café, where they learn about the Serbian connection. A clue takes them to tke Klimax Lounge strip club, where Kandi (Roxanne McKee) takes Karl to the CCTV room so he can see what happened the previous evening. However, Ivan arrives brandishing a hammer and he caves in some skulls, while Molly tries to lay low. Somehow, Karl rescues her after a standoff that sees Kandi sacrifice herself and they head off in pursuit of the sinister Dr Stafford (Phil Zimmermann) in a Japanese sauna in West Brompton.

Stafford reveals that he simply did what Karl asked him to do because he wanted to start a new life. Before he can explain, however, Molly butts in to be followed by a demented yakuza and lots of bushido blades in skimpy towels. It's next to impossible to know what's going on in the ensuing fight sequence, but it culminates in Karl being abducted while trying to rescue Molly. He finds himself in the presence of Solomon (Tamer Hassan), who reveals that Goran Petrovic used to run London with Karl as his right-hand man. When Goran kills someone close to him, Karl decides to destroy him and bring an end to the turf war with his former partner, Solomon.

Realising he has brought all this misery upon himself, Karl is ready to call it quits. But Solomon reminds him about Molly and (wearing pig masks) they take over the ship aboard which former life Karl had hidden the blueprints to Goran's lair, Century Towers.

They blast their way up the levels with Solomon complaining that he's getting too old for this kind of caper. Once in the inner sanctum, however, they find a video in which former life Karl reveals that he hadn't defected after all and the whole plan had been a ruse to lure Solomon into the open. He is gunned down and Karl returns to Goran's widow,

Eva (Lana Parrilla), who kisses him in gratitude for doing her bidding. Molly looks on regretfully, as she cares for Karl. However, she turns out to have been babysitting Karl for Eva so that Stafford could give him the antidote to his toxins. But Karl doesn't want to go back to his old life and he strangles Molly (who has a Serbian accent not an Australian one) and is relieved she is finally silent.

She needs another bullet to finish her off, but Karl still refuses to let Eva give him the antidote. Solomon (who had been wearing a bulletproof vest) arrives to witness Karl push Eva's head into the plane engine casing and then accepts his invitation to shoot him because he's had enough. Haven't we all?

Writers Chee Keong Cheung and Oliver Morran clearly haven't, as they insist on foisting a code upon us, in which young versions of Karl (Sami Amber) and Molly (Lucy Geach) exit the K-Labs facility and staring into the sky, as Goran and Eva look on via CCTV screens. Had the film not long outstayed its welcome, this might have piqued a little curiosity. But, frankly, who cares what we're supposed to take from the scene or from a movie that is little more than a series of game levels played out to a thuddingly dull heavy rock score that has the gall to chuck a little Vivaldi into the mix.

So little information is leaked that the audience has to make it to the end to glean an inkling about what they've been watching. Yet, this thick ear of a picture somehow manages to impose a cinematic version of the Stockholm Syndrome. It's soon apparent that, for all its tricksy visual gambits and smears of pink graffiti, this is time-wasting nonsense. But, being trapped inside it for almost two hours, viewers start to appreciate the stubborn audacity of all those excessive camera gyrations, as well as the thought that went into the shots that obscure more than they reveal and often make next to no sense when they're welded together. By the hour mark, one even feels beholden to give `fair dos' nods to cinematographers Martyna Knitter and Lorenzo Levrini, editors Alistair Cave and Nathan Coetzee, and production designer Eve Finnie, who could well be the star of the show. One also feels the need to tip the hat to John Hannah and Radha Mitchell for committing so doggedly to the cornball POV conceit while putting up with all the crass fart jokes and delivering the most risible dialogue imaginable.

None of this makes the feature less trashy, but it gives one a perception of the hard work and dedication that went into making it. This may sound like a backhanded compliment, but it's sincerely meant, as the technical ambition shown here is entirely laudable, even if the resulting story is not. The POV technique has proved notoriously hard to pull off since Robert Montgomery first attempted it in Lady in the Lake (1946). Subsequent efforts like The Blair Witch Project (1999), [•REC] (2007), Enter the Void (2009), Hardcore Henry (2016), and Host (2020) have dabbled to mixed effect. Bad Day At the Office isn't in their league. But at least it's a bold bid to do something different.