Blood Glacier (aka The Station)

“The gates of hell are open. We melted them,” laments Janek (Gerhard Liebmann), a technician working against climate change in the remote German Alps. The rapidly shrinking glaciers give birth to a bloody eco-apocalypse of mutant hybrids. They replicate with ferocious fecundity, viciously attacking animals and humans, in the most violent form of Darwinism.

Blood Glacier has moments of pure bloodletting glee, notably an Angela Merkel-lookalike minister drilling a giant beetle-eagle hybrid in the eye, and scientists, more interested in their 'historical discovery' than preserving nature and human life, get their gory comeuppance. Films about monstrous birth (The Thing, Alien, Frankenstein) always involve perverse motherhood – here absent/aborting mothers are as much to blame as global warming. Subtextual conservatisms aside, though, Blood Glacier poses difficult questions, such as, how can we reconcile love of humanity and the fight against climate change? The answer is disturbing to say the least. [Rachel Bowles]