Starfish

A young woman is plunged into a chilly (and chilling) predicament when the apocalypse seemingly arrives the day after the funeral of her best friend, Grace. This hallucinatory horror mystery from director AT White starts sedately with Virginia Gardner's Aubrey holed up in her late gal pal's pad until her melancholia is interrupted by an overnight snowstorm, the disappearance of the townspeople and terrifying, feral creatures roaming the deserted streets. But are these surreal flights of fancy brought on by grief and guilt or has the real end of days arrived? The answer lies in deciphering a bunch of mixtapes that Grace has left in their favourite spots - supermarket, library, cinema - but outside lurks danger. Peppered with mind-bending images, White's visually impressive feature debut takes cues from genre flicks like The Signal, Pontypool, The Endless and Cloverfield, as well as producing jolting shocks and a manga-style animated interlude. But this is as much a languid meditation on grief and forgiveness (drawing on the director's personal experience) as it is a hardcore horror flick, so those keen on a full-blooded monster movie may be disappointed.