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2022 · 10m · Ireland
Directed by Derek Ugochukwu
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
Two young African brothers, Ikenna and Chima, housed in squalid direct provision accommodation in Ireland, are plagued by nightmarish images and an ominous mould spreading through their room, and fear reporting it in case they are labelled troublemakers or deported.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Ugochukwu hijacks the immigrant-crisis narrative and does something genuinely unsettling with it — blurring the line between psychological horror and systemic dread so completely that you can't untangle them, which is exactly the subversive move most filmmakers are too timid to attempt.
A formally rigorous horror-drama that situates itself deliberately within post-colonial cinema and the British social-realist tradition, wielding surrealism and body horror as precise tools rather than flourishes — the kind of film that demands a second screening to parse its visual and thematic architecture.
The mould itself becomes a character through incremental visual escalation and sound design, but the masterstroke is the moment the brothers stop reporting it entirely — a single narrative choice that transforms the genre from external threat to internalized paralysis, and everything clicks into place because of it.