In October 2025 the 69th BFI London Film Festival brought 247 films, series and immersive works from 79 countries to London – a dense cross-section of what cinema looks like right now, from studio premieres to tiny experimental hybrids. The official language speaks about “the incredible state of the medium in 2025 – brimming with formal innovations, provocations and essential roadmaps for navigating the world around us”, which in practice felt like a quiet renaissance: films working in very different registers (genre, essay, documentary, animation) but all testing how much the form can still stretch. 

This year we were there, moving between BFI Southbank, Royal Festival Hall and the smaller screens, watching, taking notes and arguing afterwards in the foyer. The texts that follow collect a few of our reviews from this year’s programme – a set of close readings of the films that stayed with us the longest.

This piece will be periodically updated as additional reviews from BFI London Film Festival 2025 are completed.

Grace and Jackson, a young, beautiful couple expecting a child, move into a dilapidated house on the edge of a tiny town. Both are attractive, ardent, and have many plans: Jackson intends to record a music album while Grace dreams of writing the “Great American” novel. To achieve their goals, they choose voluntary isolation: vast natural expanses surround their home, only rarely encountering people at acquaintances' parties or at the gas station shop where Grace goes to buy the quintessential American dish, mac and cheese. Jackson grew up here, his mom Pam still lives nearby; the house came to him from his uncle. Rats scratch in its rotten joists; Grace immediately says they need a cat.

Based on Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz’s 2012 novel Die, My Love, the film continues Ramsay’s long-standing preoccupation with fractured mental states and the psychic toll of motherhood, terrain she probed in her movies, We Need to Talk About Kevin, and, more broadly, the trauma-scarred portraiture of You Were Never Really Here.

From the jump, Die My Love upends the couple’s relationship: the passionate period they share gives way to an anxious, clinging viscosity after their baby is born. Grace slips into a borderline state of post-partum depression: she hardly sleeps, moves through the house in a jittery, half-asleep state, periodically freezing in angular poses. Jackson seems to exist in another dimension: he disappears into work, dodges conversations, avoids intimacy, and brings home a dog instead of the cat Grace had previously told him they need. As a psychological defence, he doesn’t fully recognise that something serious is happening to Grace (nor does she entirely admit it herself). The distance between them widens and grows heavier by the day.

To reveal its heroine, the film leans hard on the body and Jennifer Lawrence channels it ferociously: she barks, crawls on the floor, and writhes.

Everything eating her from the inside finds an echo in affective acts, as if she were trying to jolt herself awake, sober up, and drive away intrusive thoughts. In despair, she bangs her head against mirrors, splitting her forehead open; scrapes the bathroom wallpaper off with her nails; and turns the room upside down. In several scenes, Grace appears naked, her body grotesque — uneven, slightly stooped, skin traced with stretch marks. Low, hidden, bodily fluids keep breaching her body’s seal — dried blood on cut fingers, breast milk dripping onto paper, chewing gum drawn from her mouth and wound around a finger. Thus her image forms: alive, instinctive, desperate.

Jackson doesn’t know how to engage with this new version of Grace. At first, he withdraws, avoids sex, snaps at her, or reproaches her for masturbating. The deeper Grace sinks into her state, the more lost he becomes. He does the seemingly correct things — proposes marriage, sends her to a mental clinic for a while, takes up home renovations — but none of it brings Grace any relief. She feels that he doesn’t see her.

For Grace, dance is a language for engaging with people and with the world. Passionate, liberating dances give way to sensual, supportive ones, only to be replaced again by frantic flailing. The film in general is built on refrains, repeating structural elements to develop the conflict. Music follows the same logic: at times the leads dance together to their favourite guitar song, at other moments Grace says she hates guitars, as if out of spite, deliberately pushing Jackson away. Later, after returning from the clinic, she declares her love for guitars again, giving the viewer the illusion of a remission.

The sound design amplifies the film’s psychosis; sharp noises accompany Grace’s surges of feral impulse, keeping the viewer in a state of constant tension. The incessant barking of the dog Jackson brought home blends with the baby’s cries and drives not only Grace, but the audience, to the brink. Unravelling, she slips next door at night for Pam’s rifle and asks Jackson to put the dog down; he won’t, so she does. The loud shot intended for the dog lands like a long-awaited release.

The film feels like a fevered vision: time sticky and slow, the camera convulsive, scenes echoing one another, the emotional register lurching.

The effect is heightened by somnambulism; Grace cannot sleep and roams the forests and fields at night, Pam sleepwalks through the streets, clutching her late husband’s rifle, and on waking in the middle of the road bursts into hysterical laughter. Certain plotlines feel like visitations; whether Grace truly had an affair with the neighbour or whether it was her dream remains unclear to the audience, as their encounters follow the logic of sleep without beginning or end. In the finale, Grace walks into the thicket of a burning forest — a semi-real image in which the pain, anger, heat, and apathy she has carried throughout the film.

Die My Love is relentlessly brave cinema that suffocates with its candour. Lynne Ramsay leads us by the hand along the fault line in a couple who love each other but no longer know how to be together. But what makes it cinéma is its realism: Grace and Jackson feel too real and that turns the story severe. We tend to frame breakdown through extremes or stylisation; Ramsay stays with mac and cheese in a gas-station shop, a sagging house with peeling wallpaper, familiar two-lane roads and scrubby fields, a dog that keeps barking, and a body that reads as fully human. Through this mundanity, I find a fever-mind in myself — an animal-edge surge that can take over and beg for relief — and I’m sure many people feel it too. The abyss here belongs to people, and its nearness is what unsettles me.

The film is set for a UK theatrical release on 7 November 2025.

The Knives Out franchise has done it again. In Wake Up Dead Man, we find a story that will thrill the masses’ love for good entertainment, satisfy a cinephile's love of film and a well-constructed narrative, and provide those who enjoy cinema with a movie that combines brilliant storytelling, a well-thought-out script, screenplay and extraordinary comical performances by a powerhouse plethora of actors that include Glenn Close, Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Jeremy Renner, Mila Kunis, Josh Brolin, Kerry Washington, and Andrew Scott amongst a fantastic ensemble cast. The Knives Out franchise enjoys

a current golden spot in the context of filmmaking, solidifying a status within the film industry that sits at the intersection of Hollywood’s pure entertainment and complex, sophisticated storytelling.

Knives Out benefits from always packing a stellar cast of actors for each story and furthering the legacy of Daniel Craig’s character, Benoit Blanc, as the world's funniest, wittiest and most charming detective in the contemporary world with each new instalment of the franchise.

 In the same manner, we have seen countless detectives from Sherlock Holmes to Hercule Poirot grace pages and screens alike, yet the Knives Out series has successfully invigorated and renewed the genre and the love for the genre. Bringing in modern and contemporary elements to the stories and their characters and featuring a new witty detective where, if Sherlock Holmes is all about the “what” or the cold, hard facts and scientific evidence, Benoit Blanc is all about the “why” with a focus on human nature and an acute study of people’s characters and personalities to form his observations and conclusions. Blanc makes full-on breakdowns on human behaviour and uncovering characters for who they really are, not who they are trying to convince us (the audience) they are. And so, we enjoy the ride alongside Benoit Blanc, who usually spends a lot of time on the side, observing, like us, only for him to then come in and walk us through the crime and everything that our eyes missed.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. Daniel Craig in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2025

Wake Up Dead Man relishes its fooling of the audience more than ever, providing a second plot twist, then a third and a fourth. In doing so, it brings back what made the first instalment so popular, then takes it up a notch. Director Rian Johnson and his team were influenced by Edgar Allan Poe and John Dickson Carr, who inspired them to achieve a look, setting, production design and cinematography that feel wonderfully gothic, dramatic and haunting, which perfectly suit the smooth yet complex narrative we witness on screen. Ultimately, Wake Up Dead Man is a reflection on ambition, ill-managed power and influence, faith and the soul-healing importance of letting go and forgiveness, all packed within a wickedly fun murder mystery that deceives and rewards the audience equally.

 © perediza 2025