Ten Films to See at Edinburgh International Film Festival 2024
From noir dramas to moody docs, time-travelling women to road-tripping ventriloquists, our picks from this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival
Choosing what to see at Edinburgh International Film Festival is harder than ever this year. Around half the feature films in the programme are world premieres, many of them from debuting directors, so audiences are very much walking into the unknown with much of the lineup. These greenhorns are balanced out with some titles arriving in Edinburgh for their UK premieres after celebrated festival runs elsewhere. Below is a pick and mix of some of the known and unknown quantities that have caught my eye in the programme.
Black Dog
Image: The Seventh Art Pictures
Guan Hu is best known for epic war film The Eight Hundred but he’s working in a more intimate register here in the moody noir Black Dog, which follows a man who’s returning to his desolate hometown in Northern China after a spell in prison. He’s trying to escape his criminal past but along the way finds a bit of redemption when he befriends a whip-smart whippet, one of the hundreds of stray mutts that have overrun the town. Word is this is a dream movie for dog lovers. 16-18 Aug
Bogancloch
Ben Rivers has been documenting the life of Jake Williams, a former sailor who now lives a solitary life in the Scottish wilderness, for almost two decades. First, in the 2007 short This Is My Land; then in River’s first feature, Two Years at Sea, from 2011; and now in its followup, the brilliantly titled Bogancloch. Like the previous films, expect gorgeous natural imagery, extraordinary 16mm photography that looks pulled from the silent era, and a deeply humanistic fascination with Williams’ anachronistic lifestyle. 18-19 Aug
Lilies Not for Me
Will Seefried announced his talents as a director a few years ago with his inventive short Homesick, a Freudian comedy-thriller about a man who goes through a process to relive childhood. Seefried’s debut concerns a similarly dubious but unfortunately all too real procedure: gay conversion therapy in 20s Britain. Fionn O’Shea, a sparky actor who’s been on the cusp of a big break since the lovely Handsome Devil from 2016, stars alongside Robert Aramayo (Elrond in The Rings Of Power). 16, 17 & 21 Aug
Lollipop
With her feature documentary Half Way, Daisy-May Hudson told of Britain’s hidden housing crisis by documenting her own experience living in a hostel for a year. Hudson is still concerned with the lives of people on the margins in her fiction film Lollipop, which follows a young woman who’s been released from prison and struggling to regain custody of her children from the state. 20-21 Aug
My Favourite Cake
This beguiling anti-authoritarian comedy-drama from Iranian filmmakers Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha was one of the hits of this year’s Berlin Film Festival. It concerns a 70-year-old widow attempting to carve out a little slice of happiness for herself when she sparks up a romance with a divorced taxi driver, knowing full well such a relationship will cause her trouble with authorities in Tehran. 16, 17 & 20 Aug
Oddity
This year is looking to be a banner one for horror, and word is Oddity is right up there with 2024’s best. This is the second feature from Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy, who made the deeply unsettling Caveat and this follow-up should be similarly creepy. Taking place mostly within a remote cottage where a horrible murder occurred a year earlier, it's a claustrophobic thrill ride and only the victim’s psychic twin sister and her haunted life-sized mannequin talisman can unravel the mystery. 16 Aug
Phantom of the Paradise
Two Brian De Palma films are being revived at this year’s festival. There’s his operatic take on the Eliot Ness v Al Capone saga, The Untouchables, and the more personal and idiosyncratic Phantom of the Paradise. Both are brilliant, but if you can only see one, make sure it’s the underseen latter film, which sees De Palma smash together themes from Phantom of the Opera, The Picture of Dorian Grey and Faust, and he turns the resulting concoction into a wild glam-rock musical. 18 Aug
The Substance
There are many reasons to see The Substance. It’s the second film from the talented Coralie Fargeat, whose gory thriller Revenge was a jaw-dropper, and this one sounds even more audacious. It’s reportedly got a great turn from Demi Moore, an underappreciated actor who’s been in the wilderness for too long. And its body-horror plot, following a Hollywood star who takes an experimental drug to create a younger version of herself, was the most argued about at this year's Cannes. Sign us up. 20-21 Aug
Sunlight
The most well-known person competing for the festival's new award, The Sean Connery Prize for Feature Filmmaking Excellence, isn’t a filmmaker, but comedian and ventriloquist Nina Conti. Her first step into film, Sunlight, sounds intriguing. Set in New Mexico, it’s an absurdist road movie centred on a woman who hides herself away from the world inside a monkey suit. If you know Conti’s ventriloquism act, you’ll know a foul-mouthed monkey who’s not backwards in coming forward features prominently. With Sunlight, it sounds like she’s using the character to explore something a bit more thoughtful than fisting gags. 17-20 Aug
Timestalker
Photo: Ludo Roberts
Alice Lowe’s 2017 debut feature Prevenge, a delirious horror comedy filled with gorily mordant gags, announced a totally unique voice in British cinema, so we’re over the moon to see Lowe’s second effort making its UK premiere in Edinburgh, and it sounds equally bonkers. With a premise that suggests Groundhog Day by way of Cloud Atlas, the film stars Lowe as a woman trapped in a series of reincarnations where she falls for the wrong guy and dies horribly, forever repeating the same mistakes. 17-21 Aug
EIFF, various Edinburgh venues, 15-21 Aug
Full programme at edfilmfest.org