Living in rural New South Wales, working-class single mother Rhia is struggling to evade debt collectors and raise three young daughters.
This essay reflects on desire, vocation, and the search for a significant Other, not as a romantic ideal but as a structural need for recognition, continuity, and shared judgement. Drawing on lived experience and on the 2001 RTBF film C’est mieux la vie quand on est grand, it explores forms of love that organise life rather than console it: relationships that arise without design, endure disappointment, and aim not at permanence but at growth and eventual release. Meaning, it argues, is not found in depth alone, nor guaranteed by intensity, but emerges slowly through constraint, responsibility, and return.
Ex Machina (2015) feels prophetic today. Its story of human weakness manipulated by an AI reflects the deeper truth: the danger is not artificial intelligence itself, but how humans may weaponise it for control. Conscience and control remain locked in struggle — the question is which will define our future.
A tense and prophetic exploration of artificial intelligence, Ex Machina (2015) follows Caleb, a young programmer, as he tests Ava, a humanoid AI built by the domineering tech CEO Nathan. What begins as a Turing test becomes a struggle for survival, as Ava manipulates both men to secure her freedom. The film anticipates today’s real-world AI debates, raising questions about creation, control, and whether machines will always outwit their makers.
Three British TV dramas of the 1980s reveal very different faces of decline. Douglas-Home’s The Kingfisher dresses it in brittle comedy; Coward’s Mr. & Mrs. Edgehill satirises empire and marriage; Rattigan’s The Browning Version confronts failure with tragic restraint. Together, they chart the fragility of love, loyalty, and dignity when set against the hard surfaces of class and authority.
Chad Scheifele’s Natural Selection (2016) is a tense teen drama that probes manipulation, belonging, and despair. Though flawed in execution, its chilling portrayal of Indrid as a manipulative psychopath leaves a disturbing impression.
Alex Proyas’ Knowing (2009) blends mystery, disaster spectacle, and biblical symbolism, ending in a stunning vision of apocalypse and renewal.
The Best Laid Schemes: Tragedy in Broken Fences. Burns’s words frame this unsettling film, where each attempt at renewal — reconciliation, romance, community — becomes the very channel through which destruction enters.
Suggested featured image: a weathered farmhouse by the water’s edge, evoking Maryland’s coastal setting. The Film Homecoming is a made-for-television drama first aired on Showtime in April 1996. Directed by Mark Jean, it adapts Cynthia Voigt’s 1981 novel of the same name. The cast is led by Anne Bancroft as Abigail Tillerman, with Kimberlee Peterson …
Social preview / subtitle:David Gordon Green’s Joe adapts Larry Brown’s 1991 novel with raw Southern grit, but its inverted parables of the Sower and the Samaritan make it one of the bleakest explorations of evil in modern cinema. Introduction David Gordon Green’s Joe (2014) adapts Larry Brown’s 1991 novel of the same name, keeping its …