At The Movies: Confinement delivers stillborn horror, The Pigeon Tunnel nails John le Carre’s story

Confinement (PG13)

95 minutes, opens on Thursday
2 stars

The story: A new mother is tormented by much more than sleepless nights in Kelvin Tong’s home-grown horror.

Rebecca Lim stars in Confinement

as 34-year-old Wang Si Ling, a first-time single mum recently installed in a vacant house where strange incidents occur upon the arrival of the confinement nanny played by Cynthia Koh.

She hears whispery voices and sees fleeting shadows. Her baby vanishes from the cot.

Especially bothersome is the haunting presence of a mysterious ghost girl with long black hair.

The two Mediacorp veterans are barely challenged in their joint feature lead debut.

Koh is consigned to cradling the newborn and cooking in the two-hander psychological chamber piece, while Lim prowls through extended silences looking tense when there is, in fact, no tension to the proceedings – whether or not they are Si Ling’s paranoid hallucinations as she begins her month of claustrophobic post-childbirth confinement.

Tong’s craftsmanship is assured, there is no faulting that nor the contributions of his crew.

The local film-maker is an Asian horror aficionado, having written-directed the 2008 Hong Kong crime noir Rule #1 and the 2016 American co-production The Faith Of Anna Waters.

This $1.5 million Mandarin collaboration between Singapore production company Clover Films and China’s online entertainment platform iQiyi is most like Tong’s award-winning 2005 hit The Maid, in its lonely heroine isolated by the rules and superstitions of an ancient Chinese custom.

It has a distinct cultural identity. And still, the post-partum melodrama manages to be utterly derivative.

The scares are hackneyed – the limp-haired ghost girl has company in a phantom dog — and the textbook theme of Si Ling’s repressed childhood memories gets a third act exposition as breathlessly convoluted as the rest of the movie is torpid.

Hot take: The story is stillborn.

The Pigeon Tunnel (PG13)

92 minutes, premieres on Apple TV+ on Friday
4 stars

The story: Academy Award-winning documentarian Errol Morris pulls back the (iron) curtain on the life and career of the late British spy David Cornwell – pen name John le Carre, masterful novelist of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1963), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) and The Night Manager (1993).

Set against the tension of the Cold War leading into present day, The Pigeon Tunnel spans six decades as Cornwell in his final interview – he died aged 89 in 2020 – opens up on-camera about his complex relationship with his awful conman father.

This Apple Original Films profile documentary is an interrogation into fact and fiction, primarily how Cornwell’s childhood legacy of duplicity conditioned him to entwine the two for an extraordinary dual career as a spy-author.

“A writer’s task is to steal from life,” he says.

He was an MI6 agent deployed to East Germany during the 1961 erection of the Berlin Wall and wrote his experiences into his books.

American director-screenwriter Morris intersperses Cornwell’s narration with clips from movie adaptations of these bestsellers, as well as archival footage and dramatised vignettes.

The testimony, which draws on Cornwell’s 2016 same-titled memoir The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life, is a genteel affair.

He is suave and articulate, too much in control of the narrative for it to rattle like Morris’ Best Documentary Feature Oscar winner The Fog Of War (2003).

It is not top-drawer Morris, whose 1988 landmark The Thin Blue Line exonerated a wrongly convicted murderer in Texas.

Regardless, Cornwell, with his insights into the disillusionment and moral bankruptcy of the espionage apparatus, is a fascinating subject in his own right, spinning yarns to the last.

Hot take: This intriguing and richly narrated biography may be the closest a civilian will ever get to real-world spycraft.