Tag Archives: jack dignan

Movie Review: Puzzle Box (2023)

16 Saturday Sep 2023

Posted by in A Night of Horror Film Festival, Movie review

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When Jack Dignan launched his directorial debut feature, After She Died at A Night of Horror International Film Festival last year, it came with a bold, well-structured, pot-boiler of a movie that etched out the pangs of grief with minute detail. It was enough to make one sit up and take notice, eager to know where Dignan would go next in his creative celluloid venture.

This year, he has chosen to serve a familiar tale woven through the theme of a broken psyche. Choosing to self-rehabilitate at a secluded house in the woods (always a troublesome sign), a young drug addict, Kate (Kaitlyn Boyé – The Furies) is accompanied by her older sister, Olivia (Laneikka Denne) to aid her through the process, As the night unfolds, and they unpack the shared and isolated trauma that the siblings have gone through, the inadvertently fall through the cracks of time and dimension, trapped in a continuing vortex of sequences, fighting to find their way out of their turmoil.

The Puzzle Box is a metaphor for the predicament that the sisters find themselves in as each door within the remote house opens and slides different sections of time and dimensions, in a convoluted vessel of complexities that will force the pair to search deep within themselves and solve the paradox.

Dignan hones his visual prowess in this film, choosing to use a found footage approach to the narrative through his cinematography to convey his concept. The result is an unsettling, and nauseating feel to the final product to deliberately set the viewer off kilter. To double the sense of dread, we’re also presented with a screaming, ‘banshee-like-woman’ (Gotta love a good banshee!!) to hound and barrage both Kate and the audience in a relentless pursuit, that seems to have no end. 

The Prognosis:

Jack Dignan comes out swinging for his sophomore feature and delivers a haunting and harrowing journey into a paranoia filled rabbit hole. The shifts and turns are deliberately jarring and part of Puzzle Box’s charm is the unsettling way he drags the viewer down and pulls you along the disturbing pathway into a perpetual void.

– Saul Muerte

Puzzle Box is screening at A Night of Horror International Film Festival on Friday Sept 29th at 7pm.

Plus Q&A with writer/director Jack Dignan and actors Kaitlyn Boyé, Cassandre Girard and Laneikka Denne 

It also screens with short feature, Merger

Movie review: After She Died (2022)

21 Friday Oct 2022

Posted by in A Night of Horror Film Festival, Movie review

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It’s no mean feat to transition from short films to feature length stories, but Sydney-based writer, director, producer, Jack Dignan has taken the bull by the horns with his first foray, After She Died. Billed as part of A Night of Horror International Film Festival’s line up, Dignan has the opportunity to showcase his talents before a genre-loving audience.

The tale he has chosen to tell is one of grief, loss and heartache. Jen (Liliana Ritchie) has always had a strong bond with her mother Isabel (Vanessa Madrid), so she is thrown into a world of misery when her mother dies. What Jen doesn’t fully comprehend though is that things are going to get steadily worse. 

Jen is already estranged from her father, John (Paul Talbot) whom she believes was an abusive husband, but through their grief they will share an intense pain. One that is solidified through a curious, paranormal event; namely the arrival of John’s new girlfriend, the spitting image of Jen’s mother. Is there more to this uncanny likeness than meets the eye? And has Jen’s father dabbled with the dark arts to keep his suffering at bay? Whatever the answers, there is a festering wound that will only amount to a sickening torment, simmering to the surface where it can no longer be contained.

The Prognosis:

This may be Dignan’s debut feature length movie as a director, but he manages to carve a well-structured, pot-boiler of a movie, slowly wrenching up the tension along the way. 

The performances from his two leads, Ritchie and Madrid are solid, drawing out the angst felt by both parties. A mother, daughter relationship, ripped apart and trying to heal in the most unusual of circumstances. Above all else though, Dignan casts a light on grief and how it can tear up the soul, damaging any essence of light right to the core of hope. It’s a subject well-trodden but ventured into a terrain that allows the topic to resonate and leave questions about the roles we play in accepting one of humanity’s most natural-yet harrowing experiences. It’s not about the healing process, it’s about how we heal and what remains of us at the end of the experience.

  • Saul Muerte

After She Died will have its Australian premiere at A Night of Horror International Film Festival on Saturday, October 22, 7pm.