Home > Fantasy >

Puffball

Watch Now

Puffball (2007)

October. 28,2007
|
4.3
|
R
| Fantasy Drama Horror
Watch Now

Powerful supernatural forces are unleashed when a young architect becomes pregnant after moving to an isolated and mysterious valley to build a house.

...

Watch Trailer

Cast

Reviews

Clevercell
2007/10/28

Very disappointing...

More
Noutions
2007/10/29

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

More
MamaGravity
2007/10/30

good back-story, and good acting

More
Scarlet
2007/10/31

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

More
morrison-dylan-fan
2007/11/01

Despite having read praise for his work over the years,I have somehow only seen director Nicolas Roeg's work as a camera operator on the fun British Horror Doctor Bloods Coffin.Getting told by a family friend that he had recently picked up,what is currently Roeg's feature film,I felt that it would be a good time to read Roeg's final piece.The plot:Redeveloping a house which had been burnt down 5 years ago, architect Liffey becomes pregnant,after having sex with her boyfriend on a stone-which legend has it,is a shrine to Odin.Being called away on urgent work-related issues,Liffey is left to sort out the redevelopment of the house on her own.Since the death of her young son in the house fire 5 years ago,Molly has been desperate for one of her 3 daughters to have a son,so that a male entity can be in the family.With Molly's daughter Mabs being married to a strapping young man called Tucker,Molly decides to start performing black magik,in the hope that the child Liffey is carrying will turn out to not be hers.View on the film:Based on his mums own novel,the screenplay by Dan Weldon attempts to offer an intriguing mix of Kitchen Sink-grit with Supernatural Horror chills.Whilst the Irish village gives the title a suitable icy backdrop,Weldon is never able to make the mixture fully gel,due to Molly's witchcraft on Liffey lacking any sense of menace,which leads to the Horror elements falling (unintentionally?) into a heap of burnt- out Comedy splinters.Along with the dopey Horror elements,Weldon also fails to give the movie its much needed bite,by appearing to be unsteady over handling the Kitchen Sink dynamics,with none of the largely female cast being given a character with even the slightest hint of depth,that causes Liffey's struggle to be mashed up with Molly's boo-hiss witching.Whilst his early directing credits are infamous for sex scenes which crept extremely close to being "real" director Nicolas Roeg destroys any sense of sensuality in the sex scenes,by wrapping each of them up in a badly-designed New Age tapestry,and also shooting close-ups on the sex scenes in Digital,which despite being designed to shock,just come off as rather desperate.Keeping up with the plodding sex scenes,Roeg drags the film across a vast 120 minute running time,which ends up burning out at the half-way point,when Roeg appears to not know any route to expand on the characters relationships,which leads to this being an extremely disappointing puff piece.

More
MARIO GAUCI
2007/11/02

Ever since director Roeg's career went into irreversible decline in the mid- 1980s, he has intermittently been attempting to recapture shades of his former glory and this is surely another effort in that vein – what with its mystical/architectural themes and emphasis on sex, down to an irrelevant cameo by Donald Sutherland (from his masterpiece DON'T LOOK NOW [1973]). However, the result is only mildly compelling and as muddled as ever; at least, leading lady Kelly Reilly is most appealing – and physically reminiscent of Candy Clark, who had featured in the director's THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976). Like Julie Christie in DON'T LOOK NOW itself, he has recruited an icon of the Swinging Sixties, Rita Tushingham, to play the misguided 'witch' after the heroine (who is renovating the cottage in which the old lady's son had died in a fire years earlier). Aiding her in the 'cause' is Tushingham's middle-aged but still attractive daughter (Miranda Richardson, delivering the film's outstanding performance) and the latter's own reluctant offspring. Reilly is impregnated by her fiancé (who then summarily departs for New York) but miscarries soon after; realizing she is going to conceive once more some time later, the girl fears the father may be Richardson's younger husband (and so do Tushingham & Co.) – whom Reilly had seduced while drunk at her place! However, it turns out that she had originally conceived twins and one managed to survive the ordeal. Anyway, Tushingham's clan professes to befriend Reilly (while mixing disgusting potions ostensibly to assimilate her pregnancy onto Richardson, though the girl eventually exposes the others' scheme) – including giving a dinner at their house where the titular dish (dubbed "The Devil's Eyeball", actually this film's subtitle in the U.S.) is served; at the end of the day, in spite of Tushingham's death, the situation is happily resolved for the 'witches' as well when Richardson herself finally bears a son. For the record, among the remaining Roeg titles I have yet to catch up with, I own the following: INSIGNIFICANCE (1985), TRACK 29 (1988), SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1989; TV) and COLD HEAVEN (1992)

More
niklburton
2007/11/03

I watched Puffball last night, as a huge Fay Weldon fan who read the book quite a few years ago. I was surprised to discover it was a 2007 film, as the subject matter, and the atmosphere of the pic, would have suggested something many years older.Still, I thought it was quite faithful to the intent of the book, and is, despite some comments, very much a women's film. It deals with elemental forces, and the complexity of women's nature and women's power. The men are little more than sperm donors, penile life support systems to be acted on by women's emotions and a separate women's nature, almost echoing, (or prefiguring, more likely) some of Jane Campion's observations in The Piano, among others.This has always been the heart of Fay Weldon's work, a poke in the eye of naivité, of the "Eyes Wide Shut" variety, about the nature of women. The film doesn't really add to this narrative, but it doesn't diminish it either, which is saying something for a film adaptation of a novel, made by an auteur to boot.

More
benke_nandor
2007/11/04

I've seen the first screening on the Transsylvania Film Festival and I must say I was pleased. It strongly relays on Don't Look Now's and Straw Dogs' flavors (intellectual young couple in a new, strange place), but with more psychedelic and sometimes thriller elements. And it's got a really hot sex scene in it. It's old paced and sometimes quite nostalgic, but it's a treat for the eyes. There were a few unnecessary elements though, without which the movie could have been cut to, let's say, 15 minutes shorter and more quick-paced. Roeg could have easily put more emphasis on the scenery/landscape like he used to. But I'm happy to be one of the first people to ever see it.

More