Ghostly mysteries, egotistical has-been TV detectives and the entire history of the universe – this year’s Glasgow Film Festival had it all! Join me as I run down my favourite films that I saw over the course of the festival

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Personal Shopper

Long gone are the days of Kristen Stewart being known as just “the girl from Twilight”. She continues to make fascinating role choices and is utterly hypnotic at the heart of this deeply unsettling psychological thriller from director Olivier Assayas (re-teaming with Stewart after Clouds of Sils Maria). She stars as the personal shopper to a glamorous European fashion model who, while working in Paris, uses her gift as a medium to investigate a haunting at a remote mansion. It’s almost uncategorisable in its switching up of tones and genres; at once a ghost story, identity mystery, claustrophobic drama about grief and loneliness and so much more. A thoroughly impressive piece of work that’s tense, disquieting and provocative in equal measure.

Katie Says Goodbye

Katie (Olivia Cooke) is an eternally optimistic 17-year-old who lives a hard life in a small town in the American Southwest, working like hell in a diner and even turning to prostitution to fund her dream of starting a new life in San Francisco. Most directors would be happy with this as their third or fourth effort but for this bold and absorbing drama to be writer-director Wayne Roberts’s first makes it all the more special. It’s not what you would call a cheery watch – often playing like a more downtrodden version of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky – but at the same time it never feels exploitative. Cooke (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) gives a stunning performance in this striking, powerful debut about enduring optimism through trying circumstances.

Folk Hero & Funny Guy

Another festival highlight that’s also a debut feature (GFF continues to be a great event to discover exciting new filmmaking talent), Jeff Grace’s breezy comedy follows stand-up comic Paul (Girls star Alex Karpovsky) whose stage routine has become stale. Just as he’s on the brink of taking a break from it all, in walks his estranged friend and successful folk singer Jason (Wyatt Russell) who suggests that he joins him on his tour as the opening act. On the road they meet and befriend musician Bryn (Meredith Hagner) for whom they both develop affections. The film more than overcomes its whiff of familiarity with an immense dose of likeability, lashings of insightfulness about love and friendship and a gentle, easy-going charm that makes it a huge joy to experience.

Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey

If ever there were a director that splits audiences its Terrence Malick, whose films like The Tree of Life and The New World are as masterful to some as they are utterly pretentious to others. This artful, almost entirely plotless film feels like an extension of the creation scene from The Tree of Life, as Malick boils down everything from the beginning of time to modern-day life into one 90 minute odyssey. It’s not going to convince anyone who isn’t already a Malick believer; we’re given little context to the imagery outside of Cate Blanchett’s purposefully vague voice-over, left instead to grasp onto our own sense of meaning from what we see throughout. But its sense of visual wonder and thematic ponderings are a treat for those who do love Malick’s inimitable style.

Mindhorn

Imagine a mashup of Alan Partridge, The Mighty Boosh and those cheesy ‘80s cop shows about egotistical, pleather-wearing detectives and you’re somewhere close to this bizarre British comedy. Co-written and starring Boosh co-creator Julian Barratt alongside Simon Farnaby, we follow washed-up actor Richard Thorncroft (Barrett) who used to be the star of the fictional detective series Mindhorn. His glory days are seemingly behind him but then he’s suddenly called in by Isle of Man police to help stop a killer obsessed with his former telly persona. With a gag rate that would put most other comedies to shame – from clap-worthy celeb cameos to meta jokes about the very medium of television – this is an eternally, wonderfully daft Brit comedy through and through.

The Lost City of Z

The honour of being this year’s Surprise Film fell to this historical action adventure about early 20th century English explorer Col. Percival Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) who became obsessed with finding a long lost city in the Amazon jungle. It’s far more contemplative and slower paced than some might be expecting (and, indeed, as the trailers have been suggesting). But director James Gray (We Own the Night, The Immigrant) conjures an absorbing, all-encompassing atmosphere and sense of scope and visual beauty that marries really well with a fascinating story of one man’s ambition and drive to achieve a seemingly insurmountable goal.

The Chocolate Case

The titular case at the centre of this unendingly surprising documentary started back in 2003 when a group of three Dutch journalists and part-time pranksters unwittingly stumbled upon the fact that a surprisingly high amount of the world’s cocoa beans are produced using child slavery. The documentary takes you on quite a wild journey of the group trying to stop this injustice; craziest of all one of them attempts to get at the big companies by turning himself into police for being complicit in the slavery. The unconventional investigation manages to shed light on a topic in a way that’s illuminating, shocking and at times surprisingly funny.

The chocolate bars handed out before the screening were rather nice, too.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe

Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch star in this creepy gem of a horror about a father and son mortician team who one night receive a body of an unidentified woman. What starts out as a routine autopsy soon turns far more sinister as the body doesn’t seem to function the way it should. Making the most of a limited budget (location, effects, number of actors), this skilfully constructed clinical horror repulses and horrifies you as much as it draws you in with its hair-raising atmosphere and fascination over its central mystery, cleverly weaving revelations and a welcome thematic depth among the mounting tension. That’s not an easy mix to achieve but Trollhunter director André Øvredal pulls it off with aplomb.