February’s double bill was all about love and all the odd ways it can manifest. My suggestions to the hat were Punch Drunk Love and Harold & Maude. The end choices out of the hat were a proper contrast: an Iranian drama about a lonely widow rediscovering romance, and an American comedy-horror about a woman whose inner rage takes the form of a literal monster in her closet. One quiet and sad, the other loud and (to me) a bit rubbish.
My Favourite Cake
My Favourite Cake (2024), directed by Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha, opens with these lovely wide shots. A kitchen, a garden, the sort of domestic beauty that doesn’t need to announce itself. We learn almost in passing that Mahin (Lili Farhadpour) has a dead or absent husband and two small kids who’ve grown up and moved away. It’s glanced over, the film doesn’t dwell. It just lets you absorb her world.
The loneliness hits hardest on a family video call. You know the type — everyone cheerful and distracted, talking at you rather than to you. Mahin smiling along and saying the right things whilst clearly being desperately alone.
There’s something bigger going on, though. The film works as a kind of analogy for Iran itself. We see old photos – plunging necklines, high heels, a different country. And now it’s all old age and glum. The regime and the ageing overlap in a way that’s hard to separate.
Then she meets Faramarz, a taxi driver, and invites him home for dinner. This is where it gets properly lovely. They’re cute together, like teenagers. Nervous, awkward, giddy. There’s a line about it being thirty years since she’s seen anyone naked, and it’s funny and sad at the same time.
The morality police are always lurking. There’s an earlier scene where they’re referenced – a comment about music and noise, and it works as foreshadowing. It raises the tension. You know these people are watching, and every small freedom Mahin takes is a risk. Dating with the morality police is not the same as dating with butterflies in your stomach. She manages both.
The relationship develops quickly, maybe too quickly? There’s a Midsummer Night’s Dream quality to it, a sense that this one evening is charmed, outside normal time. The moment you start to invest in the two characters, is exactly when the film starts tightening the screws on the tragic background tension. The orange blossom cake she bakes reminded me of the oranges in the Godfather. It worked with the slightly fairy tale feel of the film – a careful, ritualistic preparation.
The directors, Moghadam and Sanaeeha, were subsequently charged by Iran’s Revolutionary Court for making this film – “propaganda against the Islamic Republic”, “producing obscene content”, and screening without permission. They received suspended sentences. Their passports were confiscated before the Berlin premiere. The film’s specific crimes included showing Farhadpour without a headscarf and depicting an unmarried couple sharing wine and dancing. That context makes every frame heavier. The small freedoms on screen — the wine, the music, the bare head — are the exact things the state considers criminal.
7/10 — Quiet, beautiful, and angry underneath. The kind of film that stays with you for a few days.
Your Monster
Your Monster (2024), directed by Caroline Lindy and starring Melissa Barrera, has a decent enough premise. An actress recovering from cancer surgery gets dumped by her theatre director boyfriend, retreats to her mum’s large New York house (immediately signalling that money can’t buy happiness) and discovers a monster living in her closet. The monster is her inner rage, personified? Or maybe he’s real? The film is deliberately vague about it.
I liked that it gets into the creepy stuff fairly quickly. No endless setup. And there’s an 80s/90s vibe to the whole thing that’s quite enjoyable, even if it sits oddly alongside iPhones and Amazon Prime deliveries. “What’s up?” says the monster, like he’s in a John Hughes film.
The problem is it’s all a bit Mills & Boon. The monster is the perfect boyfriend versus the nightmare ex. Too fantasy-like, aping some “golden age of Hollywood” romance without earning it. Let me guess, I thought about twenty minutes in – an accident will happen to the lead actress and our heroine will get her shot. Reader, it did.
If she gets back with ex, I remember thinking, I will be cross. The Halloween party bit comes out of nowhere but at least lets the monster turn up in public without everyone screaming. Does the monster appear specifically in moments of need? The film doesn’t quite commit to its own rules.
Would have been nicer if the ex-boyfriend was more sympathetic. He’s such an obvious villain that you can’t really feel anything complex about the situation. There’s a reading where the monster is imaginary – she did it all, dropped the boyfriend through a hole – and that’s more interesting, but the film doesn’t lean into it enough. It feels a bit like the writer had this exact situation happen to them and needed to process it on screen. I just didn’t really care that much.
The Carpenters song montage. And then they sleep together again – Jesus, they are both really unlikeable. I much prefer Rose Byrne’s unlikeable character in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, where you can at least see the human underneath the terrible behaviour. The plot here is clichéd. Go away and it goes away. No real sharp bite. She’s a bit of an entitled arsehole, frankly.
There’s also the issue that she’s coming off chemo. She isn’t ready for a leading role? The show itself is terrible – “musical theatre fucking kids” – which is perhaps unkind to musical theatre but felt accurate in the moment. The ending was crap. No monster, just her with a stick. That nudged it down a point. Even with the “she imagined the monster” reading it’s still a bit shit. If the point was supposed to be “romantically love yourself,” it doesn’t land.
4/10 — Some decent ideas buried under cliché and characters you don’t root for.
Two kinds of constraint
The interesting thing about this double bill is the contrast in what constrains the characters. In My Favourite Cake, the constraints are political and real: the morality police, the state, decades of imposed restriction. Mahin’s small rebellion of inviting a man for dinner carries genuine risk. In Your Monster, the constraints are personal and fantastical: a bad boyfriend, suppressed anger, the imagined monster. Laura’s rebellion is punching through a musical theatre ceiling that the film itself doesn’t make you care about.
One film’s restraints make you feel something. The other’s don’t. Maybe that’s the difference between a 7 and a 4 – whether the stakes feel real or whether they feel like someone working through their own stuff on your time.
[Minor AI assistance in tidying up from rough notes.]
Robotic Ape 