Odessa A’zion (“Hellraiser”) plays Tara, a teenager in contemporary Fall River, and a descendant of the Borden family. Tara faces typical growing pains — her boyfriend Carl (Michael Cooper Jr., “On the Come Up”) is going away for college; she and her younger brother Caleb (Jackson Dean Vincent, “The Secrets We Keep”) bicker over their infant brother Jack; parents Emily (Leslie Bibb, “Running with the Devil”) and Ben (Dermot Mulroney, “The Mountain Between Us”) are having difficulties, leading Caleb and Tara to wonder which parent they will end up with. There is also the matter of Tara’s aunt Diane (Mary Buss, “Lord Finn”), locked away in a psychiatric hospital because she murdered her infant child, a crime linked to the infamous ancestor.

Perhaps more pressing is that there are murders taking place in Tara’s neighborhood. The police initially treat them as missing persons, but the audience are treated to scenes of murder. These sequences are suspenseful as the victims sense someone is nearby, sometimes in isolated surroundings like a pre-dawn jog through the town, or during a walk home through woods. But other murders take place within the home, making it clear that nowhere and no one is safe. The murders are shocking and brutal, featuring ample blood spatter but also injury detail. This makes the film wince-inducing, especially when limbs are split, accompanied by screams of agony. No quick and simple kills à la Michael Myers here — while the killer’s face remains out of shot, the ax and its impact are there for all to see.

Who is responsible for these murders? Each victim is linked to Tara. Could someone be striking on her behalf? Is Tara losing her grip on reality? Or is there something supernatural at play? This obscured face or silhouette of the killer sets up a whodunnit, perhaps akin to “Scream,” and The Inhabitant does borrow from the slasher genre with its stalk and slay set pieces, though the wider context is more reminiscent of psychological/supernatural horrors like “Secret Window,” “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Gothika,” where the source of the horror is ambiguous. Lauder’s direction as well as Kevin Bachar’s script maintain this ambiguity throughout the film. At times we are drawn towards one suspect, but as more details are revealed, we are treated to other plausible answers. Dream sequences as well as a seance are thoroughly eerie, with quick cuts creating a distorted perception, closely tied to Tara and ensuring the viewer is as confused as the protagonist or indeed those around her.

Furthermore, the environment in which this takes place itself feels inhabited. Tara’s home is an extensive interweaving of rooms and corridors, a place of comfort but also tension and even menace. Tara’s relationship with her parents is as fractious as that between them, and her best friend Suzy (Lizze Broadway, “Ghosted”) is her closest confidant. It turns out, however, that there is more to Suzy than meets the eye. While her character is perhaps under-served, the attention paid to her allows the film to refer to various issues around identity and relationships. Sequences focused on Suzy are among the most tragic, not least because she is the one Tara can always go to, but Tara remains ignorant of much of Suzy’s pain.

Pleasingly, the film’s focus is maintained on the females, with the male characters — Carl, Ben, Caleb — kept on the periphery. Horror is well served when focused on women, because of the genre’s inherent concern with victimhood. The frequent victim position of women, such as Tara receiving unwanted male attention and the institutionalization of Diane, adds to the sense of women’s compromised subjectivity. The largely absent father suggests that Emily is neglected, and that Tara must force a space for herself, which is all the more difficult when her own mind is unreliable. Thus, one could read the murders as a violent eruption in the face of female suppression, just as much as a mental illness or a family curse, although the uncertainty that pervades the film allows for multiple readings.

This uncertainty is facilitated with a fluid visual style, including long panning takes as well as a delicate shifting of position within shot/reverse-shot patterns. During an early conversation between Tara and therapist Dr. Sanchez (Sabreena Iman, “The Line”), the camera pans behind one character’s head but instead of completing the motion in that position, we cut to a completion of the motion behind the other character’s head. Meanwhile, a jarring editing pattern continues throughout, as past and present, memory, dream and reality cut between each other. This style keeps the viewer off balance, as confused by what could be happening as Tara. This lack of clarity, combined with the visceral and indeed emotional violence, ensures that The Inhabitant is eerie, gripping and shocking, with an ambiguity between the psychological and supernatural as sharp as an axe blade.

Our stern, but honorable protagonist, who in similar films might be played by Daniel Craig, Matt Damon or Liam Neeson, is Father Quart, portrayed by Richard Armitage (“Ocean’s 8”). We are introduced to Quart in suitable tough guy pose — performing press-ups while stripped to the waist, which is not the only time that this male body is presented as a spectacle. Quart is a member of Vatican External Affairs — i.e., Vatican intelligence — sent to investigate a church in Seville. The church is up for demolition so that urban regeneration / gentrification can proceed, but the owner of the land as well as the resident priest are resisting the developers. Mysterious deaths in the church cause the Vatican to take an interest, an interest further fueled by a mysterious hacker who breaks through the Vatican’s firewalls to send a personal plea to the Pope. Eager to avoid a scandal, the head of External Affairs, Monseñor Paolo Spada (Paul Guilfoyle, “Spotlight”) dispatches Quart, who is struggling with guilt over his last assignment. Quart insists to all that he encounters that he is in Seville to “write a report,” but the various figures he meets, including landowner Macarena Bruner (Amaia Salamanca, “Despite Everything”), Padre Príamo Ferro (Paul Freeman, “A Fantastic Fear of Everything”), Pencho Gavira (Rodolfo Sancho, “Don’t Listen”), Gris Masala (Alicia Borrachero, “Terminator: Dark Fate”) and Comisionado Navajo (Victor Mallarino, “Bluff”) are, not unreasonably, convinced that there is more going on. Indeed, Quart quickly learns of heated marital disputes, local legends, blackmail and cover-ups.

The Catholic Church lends itself to this genre. Like intelligence agencies, it is presented as a large-scale institution with bureaucracy, multiple departments, an almost regal presence at the top, senior bigwigs, field agents plus high technology, and tensions with local authorities. Some might find it unrealistic that a priest is equipped with a handgun and remote tech support, running around like James Bond or Jack Bauer. Others might find it all too believable that the Church wields this sort of power. Ultimately, whether any of this is realistic or not is irrelevant, because the real question is does it work as a narrative? For the most part, the answer is yes, as screenwriter-director Sergio Dow delivers an intriguing and absorbing thriller with attractive Euro-locations and many ornate surroundings in which its colorful cavalcade of characters clash. Dow’s direction is unremarkable but functional, eschewing shaky cam stylistics or jarring editing like Paul Greengrass, or attention-grabbing long takes à la Sam Hargraves’ “Extraction.” The action sequences are punchy but contained, allowing us to see the action choreography and keeping gunshots to a minimum.

Unusually though, Dow manages to make hacking dramatic. An early scene in the Vatican’s cyber security center features inter-cutting between the priestly tech team (because that’s a sentence) and a mysterious hooded figure hacking into their systems with all the import of breaching the NSA. Fingers tapping on keyboards and various screens of rapidly appearing code are not inherently exciting, but with judicious cutting, Dow and editors Pablo Blanco and Miguel Angel Prieto evoke genuine tension more akin to Michael Mann’s electrifying “Blackhat” than the tedious “Live Free or Die Hard.”

Pleasingly, despite the slightly camp hacker figure, The Man from Rome features relatively little in the way of moustache-twirling villainy. A loose assembly of enemies demonstrates the globalized nature of finance, embezzlement, development and corruption. That said, Gavira makes for a convincing bastard, both in terms of his financial venality and domestic attitude.

In opposition to these shady characters, Armitage is an engaging lead, channeling an energy reminiscent of Clive Owen in “The International.” As Monseñor Spada, Guilfoyle is a tricky presence, appearing by turns both trustworthy and also less so. Carlos Cuevas as Padre Cooey provides a Q-like figure to Quart’s 00-Dog Collar, while Salamanca makes Macarena a suitable damsel who manages her distress quite well, thank you very much. Fionniula Flanagan (“Havenhurst”) makes a surprising appearance as a Spanish Duchess, who is perhaps used rather heavy-handedly. As this list may indicate, the film has a lot of characters, and it may be hard to keep up with them, but it does keep the viewer guessing, which is part of the fun with a film like this. And by large, this is a fun film, that effectively infuses the genre tropes with its religious conceit. Some elements are less effective: There is a romance angle that goes nowhere, so begs the question of what was the point? More grating is the constant presence of English dialogue. One character is Irish and two are American, the rest are Spanish, Italian or from Eastern Europe. Yet in Vatican City and Seville, everyone speaks English, with a variety of accents. With a largely Spanish cast and a clear presence of internationalism, the English is quite jarring, to the extent that when Quart orders a coffee in Spanish, it comes as something of a relief. For an international co-production between Spain, Italy and Colombia, it is strange and annoying that subtitles still seem to be a big problem.

Aside from these two aspects, and a rather clunky title, The Man from Rome is an effectively intriguing conspiracy mystery that blends espionage, cyber thrills and religion into a rich concoction. It may not be worth devout worship, but no one involved in the film need say a Hail Mary.

The Breach, directed by Rodrigo Gudiño (“The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh”) and written by Ian Weir and Craig Davidson (based on the Audible Original by Nick Cutter) is a Canadian curio that relies on understatement amongst its performers as well as some gorgeous scenery. We open on this scenery as a solitary canoe drifts down a river, surrounded by trees and a stunning sky. As the canoe floats past a family picnicking by the river, we gather from their reactions that there is something unpleasant in that canoe, before the title of the film fills the frame and we launch into a title sequence that takes us through mysterious clouds and lights. These credits are reminiscent of the opening of “Event Horizon” as well as the end of “Wounds,” and that will not be the last recall that Gudiño’s film provides.

Once the object in the canoe is inspected by police chief John Hawkins (Allan Hawco, “Midnight at the Paradise”), the mystery deepens and John sets off to investigate further with his ex-girlfriend Meg Fullbright (Emily Alatalo, “Spare Parts”), who knows the river and forest and hires out boats, and her ex-boyfriend Jacob Redgrave (Wesley French, “Trouble in the Garden”), who is also the local coroner. Thus, the tensions between our central three characters are established, and the film mechanically reminds us of these tensions periodically. This is but the first of a number of unnecessary details in the film that demonstrate overwriting, detracting from the central premise that is itself overly complicated.

Our heroes find a grand old mansion in the woods, which initially seems to be isolated yet also remarkably well-equipped. They understandably ask, “Who builds a place like this in the woods?” and no answer is provided by the film other than “We want to make a scary house movie and cabin in the woods was too clichéd.” Clichés are fine when used well, as both “The Cabin in the Woods” and 2013’s “Evil Dead” demonstrate. However, when the attempts to avoid clichés mean recourse to others, it leads to a deeply unsatisfying experience. The mansion is described as older than it should be, but we do not learn why. The power systems of the house have been repurposed, but we do not understand how. A further family dynamic featuring Linda Parsons (Natalie Brown, “Blood Honey”) is introduced that includes undefined drama and such pet names as Tinkerbell. This family seem to have wandered in from another film, suggesting a lack of faith in the central three. Granted, they are quite dull, the performances perfunctory at best.

Also perfunctory is the over-plotting to explain a rogue scientific experiment — aren’t they all? — which recalls “From Beyond” as well as “The Mist” and even “REC,” but brings none of the atmosphere, menace or drama of any of these. There are some very gory moments with some admittedly creative designs, but the inclusion of gore seems more like compensation for a lack of commitment to the other aspects of the film. Gudiño’s direction is often flat and clumsy, such as fast cuts when John, Meg and Jake discover things that we know are weird because they repeatedly say, “No fucking way.” Worse are the rather feeble action sequences that feature little visual flair and indeed contradict earlier instances. Further contradictions emerge when the isolated aspect of the mansion is removed for reasons best described as plot; suggestions are made of a global conspiracy that is supported by discussion of peanut butter (seriously); the juxtaposition of both scientific and occult tropes adds to the irritating hodgepodge that the film increasingly collapses into.

The Breach is a victim of an affliction found in many horror films, as well as action and, perhaps to a lesser extent, science fiction. When you look at some of the most effective horror films, from “Shivers” to “The Shining” to “Hellraiser” to “Ringu,” as well as modern efforts like “It Follows” and “The Babadook,” they are simple stories creatively told. The Breach, however, is a convoluted assemblage of stories, tropes and clichés, jumbled together with little focus or clarity. We do not get drawn into the character dynamics nor indeed the (admittedly dangerous) situation, because the film expends too much effort on introducing new weird or gruesome things to maintain attention. The end result is an unengaging mess that recalls enough better films that you may well wish you are watching those instead. The unwieldy collection of different elements overwhelm each other, but the viewer is left thoroughly underwhelmed.

Flash forward a decade later. Pilot Spalding is traveling through Argentina in the guise of a Swiss banana farmer with a large plantation in Brazil. How a Swiss banana farmer living in Brazil would speak English is not familiar to me (but whatever), however, the accent was chosen and it doesn’t sound well-practiced.

Why is the American’s first stop Argentina? Who knows? In fact, there’s no explanation how he got there or how he manages to live. From his appearance, he doesn’t seem to have bothered making himself presentable during the decade since the War ended. You could argue that Argentina is where many Nazi fugitives were in hiding. They’re also hiding in Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru, and other countries, but you have to start somewhere, I suppose, and perhaps he was going in alphabetical order. The former pilot’s quest for revenge begins with the capture of two random Germans, then torturing them in a makeshift basement, apparently hoping to get a clue where the Colonel might be hiding. Why these two Germans? Who knows? Who cares? It does suggest the hunt for the SS Officer will be slow-going, since the airman himself estimates there are 40,000 Nazi fugitives on the loose and this is before the Internet. So, a day devoted to interrogating two Germans would place the time to locate all 40,000 at approximately 54 years, and that’s without taking coffee breaks or siestas.

The American is not alone for long, though. He runs into an assault-rifle toting Israeli special agent (Corinne Britti, “Take Care of Emily”) that is also hunting a fugitive Nazi, even though it’s a different Nazi: Albert Vogel (Al Pagano, “How to Live Your Best Death”), a physicist that is rumored to be hooking up with Russian agents to help the Soviet Union develop nuclear weapons. Why the physicist has taken a roundabout way to Russia is not explained. Germany to Argentina to Russia isn’t very practical or logical. The Israeli agent is in luck, however. This Vogel character has been unknowingly captured by the American. Israel and the U.S. maintain close ties, but this coincidence is not only ridiculous, it’s supernatural. Nevertheless, the American and the Israeli have more things to worry about than an itinerary. Stopping for a drink in a nearby bar, they are met by three Nazis — who seem to be Prussian equivalents of the “Three Amigos.” Showing their perspicacity, the Germans don’t buy the story that the pilot is a Swiss banana grower importing bananas from his Brazilian farm for Argentinian palettes. They call in a hit squad to terminate him and his (God forbid!) Israeli comrade. But the crew they’ve ordered to hunt them down has obviously failed “Car Chase Shootout 101.” The Nazi hunters escape. This allows two essential things to happen. The Israeli and the American can go about their business, and the film can have a third act.

It’s at this point we learn the secret of the “Condor’s Nest.” It is a hidden Nazi hideout from where the Third Reich is planning a comeback. Inhabiting the nest aren’t simply German buffoons — although they seem to act like it. The man is charge is Heinrich Himmler (James Urbaniak, “Wonderstruck”)! You thought he was killed in the war? How naive! He is alive, but not exactly well. His make-up is a bit blotchy as is that of his cohorts, which includes veteran actor Bruce Davison (“Breach”), who raises a few concerns in passable German. But just as the latter feels reassured that Himmler has things under control, the American flyboy and the Mossad Mamma discover the Condor’s Nest and a big shootout ensues — and you can guess who wins.

Ed Wood-like production values aside, the film’s fatal flaw is being genre-less. Either that or it promises the start of a new, yet unnamed genre. Condor’s Nest might have been improved if the directorial vision had been whole hog slapstick rather than some sort of chimera (part “Saving Private Ryan,” part “Blazing Saddles”). Film instructors often recommend watching low-budget films for educational purposes since it’s easier to learn film making from analyzing basic cinematic mistakes, an exercise that could make watching this film more fun. So, the film has a beginning, middle, and end, and is mildly entertaining. How it achieves the latter would require some study. Which reminds me of a statement by Jean Cocteau, the French writer and filmmaker: “Art is necessary. If I only knew for what.”

Winner of the Golden Lion Award at the 2021 Venice Film Festival, Audrey Diwan’s (“Losing It”) harrowing abortion drama Happening takes place in rural France during the 1960s, a decade before abortion was legalized in France. Based on the memoir by Annie Erma (“Les Années Super-8”), the film is a gripping and, at times, uncomfortable reminder of the inherent physical and emotional dangers of illegal, “back-alley” abortions, procedures that pose a danger to the unborn child as well as to the health of the mother. Co-written by Marcia Romano (“Peaceful”) and brought to life by the naturalistic cinematography of Laurent Tangy (“Mascarade”), the film dramatizes a young woman’s painful quest to terminate her unwanted pregnancy.

In a perfectly realized performance by Anamaria Vartolomei (“How to Be a Good Wife”), Anne Duchesne is an ambitious literature student in her early twenties with aspirations to become a writer. She lives at a school dorm with her best friends Hélène (Luàna Bajrami, “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) and Brigitte (Louise Orry-Diquéro, “Occidental”), independent from her parents, Jacques and Gabrielle (Eric Verdin, “Faithful” and Sandrine Bonnaire, “Into the World”). While immersed in her studies to gain admittance to a top university, Anne discovers that she is pregnant, a situation that will threaten her continued education.

Diwan is unsparing in her depiction of the physical and emotional trauma a young girl had to go through to have an abortion, allowing us to see the graphic details that make Happening essential viewing for those confronting the Supreme Court decision to terminate Roe v Wade, the ruling that has protected abortion seekers and providers for the last fifty years in the United States. Until the moment of discovery, Anne is hard to distinguish from her immature roommates who spend their days studying and their nights looking for adventures at the local clubs.

Here, women who interface too much with boys are called “loose” or “sluts,” and their sexual encounters consist of acting out of fantasies within their own dorm. When her roommates discover that Anne is pregnant, the temperature in their room plummets to zero, and Anne finds only grudging support from her “best friend” Brigitte, who tells her coldly that “it’s not our business.” While Diwan shows us the humiliation that Anne must endure, we learn very little of her history or her background and neither do we learn much about the young man who impregnated her.

Aware of the possibility of jail for the patient and the medical practitioner, a doctor she has trusted (Fabrizio Rongione, “The Unknown Girl”) in the past tells her that she has to keep the child, reminding her that she cannot even discuss the matter with him. In addition, Jean (Kacey Mottet Klein, “Being 17”), a male friend, turns Anne’s plea for help into a sexual proposition asking “why not?” since she no longer has any risk of becoming pregnant. Ultimately, Anne finds a surreptitious practitioner, Madame Rivière (Anna Mouglalis, “The Salamander”) but that is only the beginning of her sorrows.

Yet, for all of its disturbing images, in telling this “horror” story, Diwan avoids melodrama, offering a tense, engaging, and realistic picture of what the world was like for a young woman who is carrying an unwanted child and what it could be again unless our collective voices are heard. Like events shown in Ursula Meier’s brilliant 2012 film “Sister,” life for an unwanted child may not be better than no life at all. Meier makes it evident that growing up in a world without love, even the most skillful and resilient child cannot fill the gaping hole it leaves.

Co-writers Prano Bailey-Bond and Anthony Fletcher set their story in 1980s Britain during the Video Nasties scare. This notorious period of British censorship history was one in which many films were cut or banned by the British Board of Film Censorship (BBFC, later renamed the British Board of Film Classification), due to government policy being influenced by public and political concerns that impressionable (read: Lower class) audiences might be inspired by the images they saw. Enid Baines (Niamh Algar, “Wrath of Man”) is the titular censor, one of a team working at the BBFC who identify whether films should be passed, cut or simply rejected. Enid and her co-workers’ days consist of viewing films and identifying possibly harmful material, especially graphic or sexual violence. Enid takes her work very seriously, as she tells her parents, “It’s not entertainment, I do it to protect people.” Enid is also troubled by the childhood disappearance of her sister Nina, who was never found and it is clear that Enid has never gotten past that event. When a new film arrives for inspection, “Don’t Go In The Church,” Enid finds that it resonates with her trauma and subsequently begins a spiraling descent into suspicion, paranoia and the loss of distinction between fiction and reality.

Niamh Algar exquisitely portrays Enid’s development, steadily becoming more disheveled and distressed as the narrative progresses. Algar is utterly mesmerizing, from her self-imposed resetting by rolling her shoulders to her nervous picking at her fingernails. The supporting cast also deliver sterling work, from her button-down parents George (Andrew Havill, “My Cousin Rachel”) and June (Clare Holman, “Waiting For You”) to Michael Smiley’s (“The Nun”) wonderfully sleazy film producer Doug Smart. It is worth noting that button-down and sleazy is how we see these other characters because our perspective is tied so closely to Enid, as though we were looking through her ornate gold-rimmed spectacles. Director Bailey-Bond uses the very fabric of film to take us into Enid’s distorted mind. At some points the editing glitches and the image quality changes, shifting from high quality film to grainy video footage, while Enid’s dreams (or are they?) feature dolly shots that move through the white noise of the TV screen into the horror film scenario. Bailey-Bond also shifts the aspect ratio, narrowing the frame as the film content spills into reality, or reality collapses into the film.

The video images add to the wonderfully evoked period setting, complete with clunky telephones, padded costumes and a grimy presentation of London. Censor performs a de-sentimentalized and critically nostalgic look at the 1980s. From “Stranger Things” to “Atomic Blonde,” the last decade has seen a great deal of nostalgia reminiscing that it was great in the 80s. Censor demonstrates — but crucially never overstates — that the 80s were not great, certainly no more or less than any other decade. A subtle blend of news footage underlies the narrative events, including newspaper reports of violent murders attributed to horror films as well as activist Mary Whitehouse calling for the banning of this “sick filth.” For those who lived through the period, it carries particular recollections of fear over this new material, especially that of video shop owners who dread police raids for possessing banned material. Fear of the state is further emphasized as we also see footage of prime minister Margaret Thatcher calling for unity (i.e., obedience) and the violent police crackdowns on workers striking in protest of government policy. Much hand-wringing over media content while actual social problems are sidelined? Some things never change.

Enid is very much a product of this reactionary time, believing she is doing the right thing while willfully avoiding the actual causes of her problems. A discussion among Enid and her colleagues highlights problems around income and employment, that might be more pressing for the government than horror films, but Bailey-Bond wisely does not overdo this commentary. Another news report in the film’s final moments re-emphasizes the satirical edge of Censor, but much is left ambiguous. What actually happened to Nina? Are the connections between the film Enid viewed and her past genuine or imagined? Can viewing films change you, or do they affect what we already are? These considerations give the film intellectual weight, which is wonderfully balanced with emotion. Much of the best horror is about melancholia and regret, and that is certainly the case here as Enid’s commitment turns to desperation in this tragic tale of grief and trauma. Where Enid finally goes is deeply sad, and gory violence leaves the viewer with possible catharsis but no resolution.