GFF 2013: The Fifth Season (La cinquième saison)

The Fifth Season is one of those films that borrows from everyone – there are shades of Bergman, Tarkovsky, von Trier, and a generous sprinkling of The Wicker Man – but retains a clear style of its own. A curse befalls a Flemish township as spring never arrives and the community is plunged into an endless winter, a plight that any Glaswegian can sympathise with. There’s a brilliant shorthand to the images from co-directors Jessica Woodworth and Peter Brosens: the opening five minutes is a thing of beauty as the townsfolk are introduced with the clear-eyed precision of a Wes Anderson prologue. We like these people – a puce-faced farmer with a disobedient rooster, two young lovers who share an erotic kiss in the frozen woodland, a lanky beekeeper and his wheelchair-bound son – and watching them face the coming apocalypse is a moving experience. File with The Turin Horse and Melancholia as one of the great end of the world movies of the 2010s. [Jamie Dunn]