"Memories of this night are extremely hazy": Beneficial Shock! Goes to The London Film Festival

As the sun rose, kissing Eros’ bow at Piccadilly Circus, caffeinated film-fans shuffled into venues across the capital ready to love, hate, at the very least stay awake through, the offerings at the 69th London Film Festival. With names such as Rian Johnson, Guillermo Del Toro and Jim Jarmusch lined up, this year’s festival was always bound to make waves. Some big fish fell by the wayside, but Beneficial Shock! Managed to nab a place at many glitzy premieres alongside some sleeper hits during this year's event.

Last year, LFF opened with Steve McQueen’s World War II drama Blitz, welcoming punters with a formal handshake. This year, formalities were replaced with a high five in the guise of Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. Rian Johnson’s third instalment in his delightful Knives Out franchise cashes in on the formula cemented in Glass Onion by toying with darker elements. It’s as indulgent as the previous entries, just as a whodunnit should be, with some choice wordplay eliciting rippling chuckles across the screen. While some ensemble members get more to chew on than others–rule of thumb, always give Andrew Scott more screen time–Josh O’Connor is an excellent foil to Craig’s Benoit Blanc, who is made even more delightful in his rugged makeover.

Other headliners were quieter, like Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother, a triptych of familial vignettes which are softly funny and toe-curlingly awkward. It’s a tender and excellently observed string of chamber pieces celebrating the awkward pauses broken only by crunched biscuits and benign homeware compliments–rituals which Jarmusch shares transnationally in the film. It’s about diluting blood bonds, underlining how reliant our most treasured relationships are on regular presence. The biting jabs and painful silences between rounds of tea stay forefront in the mind once the houselights rise, but this film is really about the unconditional love underpinning every family in Jarmusch’s film.

No one unconditionally loves like man’s best friend. Hence, the queue was long for Ben Leonberg's canine-starring horror Good Boy. Yet attendees proved to be barking up the wrong tree when Jan Kosama’s unwieldy thriller Good Boy started instead. Starring Stephen Graham, Andrea Riseborough and up-and-comer Anson Boon, the film sees a yobbish lad get kidnapped after a night on the lash. He wakes chained and at the whims of Graham’s Chris, an ex-copper with friends in high places, intent on teaching terrible Tommy (Boon) the errors of his way. It’s a bumpy ride, with Graham’s unusually meek performance slow to defrost next to the tonal mish-mash Kosama offers. No matter the ludicrous plot, somehow it ticks along, and by the time Tommy is double laced and buttoned up, it’s impossible to unclench your fists. There is the matter of the ending, which seems to note the efficacy of Chris’ parental strategies, never mind the taser, but with aberrant performances from Bafta-types and the unpredictability of the plot, it simply demands to be shared among disbelievers.

"Strange memories on this nervous night..."

This penchant for risks points to a common thread with this year's festival, that fortune favours the bold. Nothing demonstrated that better than Bi Gan’s five-films-for-the-price-of-one ode to cinema, Resurrection. Bi manages to swerve the masturbatory fantasies typical of kino love letters while offering a genuinely entrancing quintet of dreamy short stories. From a magical protogee to a mountaintop encounter with the Spirit of Bitterness, Bi lays out his conceptual epic with a smirk, conceived as screenwriting acrobatics which are showy, proud and ring slightly hollow for it. However, next to The Ballad of a Small Player, Edward Berger’s Schrader-lite follow-up to Conclave, Bi’s film earns its badge as this year’s biggest and boldest flourish.

'A penchant for risks points to a common thread with this year's festival, that fortune favours the bold.'

From macro to micro, LFF 2025 was rich in smaller fare. Documentary Kim Novak’s Vertigo made some noise by giving the screen legend space to wax lyrical about her relationship with her work, most notably Alfred Hitchcock’s psychosexual all-timer, Vertigo. While staid and victim to a bafflingly aggressive bokeh, Novak unavoidably entranced every cinema-goer, this time with no bell, book, nor candle. Smaller still was Super Nature, a humble debut by Ed Sayers, which sees the wildlife enthusiast employ amateur cinematographers from across the globe to film animals in the tricky Super 8 format. It’s a thin feature, but the footage is stunning and the collaborative mode of production a tonic amidst a festival rife with dark topics.

"Go straight for the jugular. Get right into felonies."

Breaking the boundaries between documentary and drama was The Voice of Hind Rajab, a dramatised production recreating the final phone calls between Red Crescent workers and Hind Rami Iyad Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl murdered by Israeli forces in 2024. Blending reality with fiction, this drama provokes the limits of art as activism by challenging viewers to face the impossible odds which Hind faced without cushioning the overwhelming sense of futility in regards to finding justice for Hind and ending the atrocities in Gaza. It’s an intelligently constructed retelling, but unpicking its many facets risks losing sight of the film’s core, that being Hind’s death.

©2025 Mime Films / Tanet Films

Nothing cuts as deep after The Voice of Hind Rajab, but there were still plenty of memorable moments provided by the festival’s gala features. Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind was classic-Kelly: low-key, elegant, wistful. This time, however, Reichardt throws in a touch of screwball, anchored in a brilliantly vulnerable and funny turn from the festival’s hard-working A-lister, Josh O’Connor. Speaking of hard work, the effort put into the production of Guillermo Del Toro’s dream project, Frankenstein, shines through in every scene.  It’s as extravagant as Del Toro fans would expect and will surely make for excellent wintery viewing as the hoarfrost begins to brush the branches.

“We’re sitting on the main nerve right now"

However, the standout big film this year had to be Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia. While Poor Things was deceptively heartfelt and Kinds of Kindness played as a B-side talking to devoted Yorgos-stans, Bugonia really has that brutal nastiness which made his early work so captivating. It’s a reimagining of the South Korean farce Save The Green Planet!, which follows a conspiracy theorist who kidnaps a CEO whom he believes to be an alien. Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone masterfully adopt these roles, with the latter modernising the CEO character into a Stanley Cup girl boss with a self-defence trainer. It’s punchy, shocking, and exposes that nihilistic itch which is so tempting to scratch as the world helplessly spirals into climate chaos. The stand-by queues for this one were brutally long, with those who didn’t make it rightly to be disappointed. 

©2025 Element Pictures, CJ ENM, Fruit Tree, Square Peg

Like Bugonia, LFF 2025 had a crazed buzz. Despite the dark subject matter of most of the films, there was a joyful vibe, akin to the feeling of being in a shopping centre pre-Christmas: over-stimulating, yet still merry. With a stacked line-up, bustling BFI lobby and even a surprise appearance from The Boss Steven Spielberg (The other Boss Bruce Springsteen was also in attendance), a contagious excitement gripped the cultural epicentres of London during the past two weeks. It is sure to catch on as these features get a general release.

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Report by Barney Nuttall
(text inserts from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson / ©1971)