Glasgow Film Festival 2025: The best of the rest of the fest
The 21st edition has been another great Glasgow Film Festival. Here are some more of the highlights we didn’t have room for in our main coverage:
Ghostlight
After a tragedy strikes his family, construction worker Dan (Keith Kupferer) is recruited to act in an amateur production of Romeo and Juliet – later, his teenage daughter Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) signs up too. The play gives them space to process the feelings they’d tried to bury.
The central family of Ghostlight is played by the actual Kupferer-Mallen family (Tara Mallen plays Dan’s wife, and Daisy’s mum). Their natural chemistry gives the movie a grounding in authenticity, and helps makes the tender, wrenching story even more powerful.
Ghost Killer
Fumika (Akari Takaishi) finds herself alternately haunted and possessed (it’s a long story!) by the ghost of dead hitman, Kudo (Masanori Mimoto). He can’t be exorcised until she’s helped him avenge his murder – to do that, they enlist the help of another hitman, Kagehara (Mario Kuroba), who is both very scary, and very much still alive.
Goofy, violent, thrilling, funny… but also unexpectedly sweet, Ghost Killer balances its divergent tones deftly, and presents us with a truly lovable (albeit, murderous) trio. The fight choreography is sublime.
Peacock
For a fee, Matthias (Albrecht Schuch) will be whatever you want him to be – boastworthy son for your 60th birthday party, boastworthy dad for show and tell, handsome escort to a classical music concert. The world is your oyster. The problem is, he’s so used to being someone else, he’s forgotten how to be himself.
Peacock is a very funny comedy-of-manners in the same vein as the work of Ruben Östlund (Triangle of Sadness, Force Majeure), only both warmer and more melancholic. The surprisingly moving finale should be a call to arms for us all.
Neon Dreaming
When 8-year-old Billie (Maélya Boyd) discovers that the woman she’d thought was her mother was actually a famous ballerina, she goes on an expedition to try and find the truth, running away from home and terrifying her father (Fred Loranger) and grandmother (Geneviève Langlois).
Beautifully directed by first timer Marie-Claie Marcotte, with a barnstormer of a central performance from little Maélya Boyd, Neon Dreaming is a sensitive, absorbing exploration of how the lies we tell our youngest to protect them often do more harm than good.
The Luckiest Man in America
Loosely based on a real scandal, The Luckiest Man in America, tells the story of Michael Larson (Paul Walter Hauser), who had a record-breaking run on eighties American game show, Press Your Luck – the problem is, he was cheating. Kind of.
Taking place almost entirely over the taping of the game show, the movie has a terrific cast (Hauser, David Strathairn, Patti Harrison, Johnny Knoxville, Shamier Anderson, Walton Goggins), all working on top form. And reading all that happened to Larson after that notorious taping, don’t be surprised if there’s a sequel in the works!
