A Constant Visual Feast

A little story from a long ways back, if you consider three years long*.

I did a little remote coverage of that year’s Tribeca film festival, and found myself let down by each movie I reviewed; the only one that didn’t let me down was Rounding, the sophomore film from Saint Frances director Alex Thompson. Give me big, wild, unexpected swings any day of the week; the former film is so unlike the latter, what with the psychological distress capped by the appearance of a seven-headed monster straight out of the Bible, that I admired it without much qualification.

When the publicist asked what I thought, I told him; roughly, a few places in the movie felt uneven to me, and unwieldy, but overall I liked it. Well, months after that, Thompson reached out to me personally to express appreciation for the analysis, even if it wasn’t publicly broadcast. We’ve kept in touch on and off ever since.

I say all this to acknowledge that I have a measure of bias when it comes to Thompson’s work, though this is not the reason I consider Ghostlight – sequentially his second movie to open commercially, chronologically the third one he’s made – one of 2024’s best films. The thing is: all critics have biases. Every journalist on every beat does, mind you, but art is a subjective “thing,” and as such, we all develop preferences and biases for artists over the years, and pretending otherwise would be horseshit. The other reason I mention this anecdote is that Rounding has sat with me for what feels like a lifetime, and covering it at long last, at an outlet I never expected to cover it for, is like catharsis.

You can dig into the piece, where I speak with the creature design team that brought that aforementioned monster to life, over at Fangoria.

*In the 2020s, yes, three years is in fact a long time. A lot can change in three years. Look how much has changed in just the last month.