Straight Outta Crouch End

How does the voice of a singer speak to you? What is it in their phrasing, their control of volume, the timbre of their voice, their register, that occasions something in you? I listen to Aretha and I hear a voice that seems to be striving for something, a voice that feels as if it is somehow reaching upwards - and in her phrasing, in her repetitions, the way she runs up to a particular stretch of melody, or tackles it in a different way from one chorus to the next, I get the sense of someone giving all her fervour to her music. These notes, when Aretha hits her stride and unleashes peals of melisma, and joyous near-shrieks that flirt with the top of her register, cause a kind of high inside me, an uplift, an astonishing sense of soaring that I don't feel to the same degree with any other vocalist. Think about the beautiful run up the notes on "for me - there - is - no - one" in the bridge of I Say A Little Prayer, which she has a stab at twice and which only becomes ...

(This piece contains a whopping spoiler) Daniel Kokotajlo's Apostasy is surprising, subverting our expectations and pulling a rug from under our feet on so many occasions: it's this brilliance in his storytelling, abetted by a total formal mastery, that makes his tale of women struggling with their faith so compelling and powerful. I'd like to talk about some of the shocks and surprises along the way, and how Kokotajlo creates them through a highly effective shot selection and by playing on received ideas and genre tropes. A key theme of Apostasy is displacement: it's there in the way the film is at pains to guide our looks in one direction (namely, towards the initial protagonist, Alex), so that we are startled and overwhelmed when the focus moves on, half-way through the film, when Alex dies. Kokotajlo takes pleasing liberties with perspective, showing Alex in the centre of the frame, and her sister, Luisa, often displaced to the fringes, sometimes in blurred ou...