Five must-see films at the 2024 Edinburgh Film Festival - as chosen by Scotsman critic Alistair Harkness

Saoirse Ronan in The Outrun PIC: Roy ImerSaoirse Ronan in The Outrun PIC: Roy Imer
Saoirse Ronan in The Outrun PIC: Roy Imer
Scotsman film critic Alistair Harkness on the movies he’s most excited about seeing at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival

The Outrun Kicking off this year’s festival in style, Scottish author Amy Liptrot’s best-selling memoir gets the big screen treatment with quadruple Oscar-nominee Saoirse Ronan taking the lead as Liptrot stand-in Rona, a young woman fresh out of rehab who returns to Orkney to reconnect with the landscape of her childhood in an effort to heal herself following a decade of addiction in London. Adapted by Liptrot and German director Nora Fingscheidt (System Crasher), produced by Ronan and Jack Lowden, and co-starring Paapa Essiedu and Stephen Dillane, it’s had good reviews out of Sundance and looks like a fine compliment to the festival’s 2022 opener Aftersun.

The Substance The big talking-point film of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, this body horror satire from French director Coralie Fargeat (Revenge) gets its UK premiere in the festival’s new Midnight Madness strand. It stars Demi Moore as a fading Hollywood actress turned exercise guru who, in an effort to maintain her career, starts using an experimental beauty product that generates a younger, more beautiful, more perfect version of herself. The delicious conceptual twist, though, is that both versions must share time by alternating weeks in the world, which leads to all hell breaking loose when the new version (played by Margaret Qualley) starts breaking this rule. Reportedly as outrageous as it sounds, it co-stars Dennis Quaid as a misogynistic slime-ball media executive called “Harvey”. Don’t expect subtlety.

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Timestalker Alice Lowe co-wrote and starred in Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers and method-directed herself in the prenatal slasher movie Prevenge while heavily pregnant. Her sophomore directorial outing sounds no less ambitious. A time-hopping blackly comic romantic fantasy in which a woman (Lowe) searches for love across the centuries and keeps falling for the same wrong guy (Aneurin Barnard), it’s a film in which love doesn’t so much hurt as prove absolutely torturous. Kicking off in Scotland in the late 1600s and jumping through time all the way to 1980s New York, it certainly seems like one of the more ambitious British features in the festival.

A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things Prolific filmmaker and cine-essayist Mark Cousins returns with this intriguing film about the Scottish abstract painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, whose geometrically minded work reflected her unique perspective on the world, one driven by her own synaesthesia (she saw colours as numbers) and her incursions into nature, most notably a hike up the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland in 1949 that was to prove transformative. Cousins recreates the hike in the film as part of his own abstract look at her life and work, eschewing the standard tropes of biography in favour of putting us inside her head. Regular collaborator Tilda Swinton provides additional context narrating from Barns-Graham’s letters and diaries.

Phantom of the Paradise/The Untouchables Brian De Palma fans rejoice. The veteran movie brat’s campy 1974 rock musical horror film Phantom of the Paradise gets a rare big screen outing to celebrate its 50 anniversary. Meanwhile, to celebrate the Sean Connery Foundation’s involvement in the festival (and in tribute to the late Scottish movie star’s lengthy patronage of the event), there’s a special screening of De Palma’s glorious 1987 blockbuster The Untouchables, the movie that won Connery the Academy Award.

For more information and to book tickets visit www.edfilmfest.org

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