A macabre romance that sees an isolated and depressed young man develop a morbid fascination with dead women, this adaptation of Japanese author Kei Oishi’s novel In Love With the Dead is a brave and disturbing exploration of loneliness. Obsessed with suicide his entire life, Ian (Robert de Hoog) begins to collect bodies from a forest popular for suicides. Finding the dead and dying to be better company than the living, Ian begins to haunt the traumatised, depressed, and – crucially – potentially suicidal Naomi (Pollyanna McIntosh). An uneasy relationship develops between the pair, and indeed uneasiness and uncertainty is characteristic of a film shot in Bray but set in an unlocatable European town. Brendan Muldowney’s direction straddles boundaries between comedy, romance, and horror, leaving uncertain how far Ian is willing to go in pursuit of his morbid passion.