Dollhouse (2025)

The original title of this Japanese psychological horror-drama, directed by Shinobu Yaguchi, was Doruhausu. The film blends parental grief, psychological trauma and ancient Japanese spiritual folklore regarding the disposal of dolls. It is clearly quite low-budget, but the filmmakers have made the most of horror and suggestion, often leaving the viewer to piece things together with a surprised realisation. Having said that, it is all fairly predictable.

The film opens with Yoshie Suzuki (Masami Nagasawa), who leaves her five-year-old daughter, Mei, playing hide-and-seek with friends at their house while she quickly pops out to the shops for snacks. When she returns, there is nobody in the house; the other children have gone home and Mei is missing. The neighbouring mums all get together to search for her, but she is nowhere to be found until Yoshie, having given up for the day, finds her in the washing machine, where she has suffocated.

We leap a year forward, and Yoshie is in therapy for grief and loss. She cannot contain her feelings and pours out her emotion to her self-help group members and therapists. She seems to be beyond recovery: on medication and a fragile mess. Her husband, Tadahiko (Koji Seto), a nurse, copes by throwing himself entirely into his work, leaving Yoshie isolated.

One afternoon at an antique market, Yoshie spots a beautiful, life-sized antique doll that bears an uncanny resemblance to Mei. She buys it instantly. Back home, Yoshie begins engaging in what is known as "doll therapy" - but to an extreme, unsettling degree. She bathes the doll, cooks meals for it, buckles it into a pram for shopping trips and even poses with it for family photos.

It is worth seeing her husband's reaction the first time he spots it sitting at the dinner table, with Yoshie suddenly happy again. He leaps out of his skin, comically - it is worth tracking the film down just for that bit! I was clutching my sides! Anyway, the therapists tell him to play along with her, suggesting that she will, eventually, get past it and return to normal life. So he does. And the therapy seems to work. Yoshie's mental health stabilises and, shortly after, she becomes pregnant again, giving birth to their second daughter, Mai. With a real baby to care for, the emotional hole is filled and the antique doll is abruptly stripped of its "daughter" status, treated strictly like an inanimate object and shoved unceremoniously into a dark storage closet!

Another leap takes us five years on, when the second daughter, Mai, is about the same age as the first one was. While exploring the house, the young Mai uncovers the forgotten doll in the wardrobe. The doll introduces itself to Mai as Aya. It seems to talk to her, though not so any adults can see or hear - and spookily seems able to grow hair and nails like a real child. Mai and Aya become inseparable, but the doll is no longer just a passive toy. Harbouring a deep jealousy for being abandoned and replaced by a real child, Aya begins terrorising the household. Anyone who threatens Mai's bond with the doll is met with terrifying, covert supernatural threats!

Realising the danger to Mai, Yoshie and Tadahiko attempt to discard the doll, but no matter where they dump it, it magically reappears somewhere in their lives. It is at this point that they are both sold on the idea that something spooky and supernatural is at play, so they head off to seek help from some religious folk - but not before investigating the history of the dollmaker and the strange background and circumstances surrounding its creation.

That's enough scene-setting now; no spoilers. From here, we head off into an atmospheric, spooky journey of discovery and surprises. There are not really any jump-scares here; as I say, much of the "scare" stuff is slightly off-camera, or involves figures passing by the other side of doors or crossing the frame. For a low-budget outing, that is a really good decision, rather than spending money on second- or third-rate special effects. It uses the viewer's mind to create the horror. Well, not exactly horror, but certainly spookiness.

The rest of the story is very much about what they find, the people who help them, and the ancient history behind the tale. It is done pretty well given the budget, and although it isn't edge-of-the-seat stuff, it is thoughtful and smart at times. There is a half-decent ending to look forward to, though again, it's fairly predictable. We can also learn a bit about Japanese culture here - you have to love the process of the children getting on the school bus and everyone bowing to each other; so polite!

The cinematography uses subtle changes in lighting to reflect Yoshie’s state of mind. Her depression, for example, is bathed in heavy, dark shadows, which briefly turn bright and warm when the doll enters the frame, only to decay into ominous, dim colours when Aya turns malicious. The two main leads, and the little girls do a decent-enough job here, especially Nagasawa in suffering grief, but also the broader cast keep up nicely.

The most unsettling aspects of the film are often the organic ones - the slow growth of the doll's hair, the trimming of its nails and its expressionless face captured on security camera footage. It offers a creeping, atmospheric sense of dread that is actually quite cool. Recommended.

Pebble Time 2 (2026)

If you remember the original Pebble Watch from a decade ago, getting your hands on this new Pebble Time 2 (released via the rePebble/Core Devices reboot) will feel like a massive hit of tech nostalgia - but with a modernised hard/software experience. It uses Pebble’s e-paper display (a reflective kind of LCD). Specifically, a 1.5" 64-colour e-paper touchscreen with a flat Gorilla Glass front glass. It is optically bonded to reduce distracting reflections, meaning the brighter the sunlight outside, the easier it is to read - kinda like a Kindle!

The build quality is a big step up from the plastic, blocky steel Pebbles of old. It apparently features a CNC-milled 316L stainless steel case with a hardened, ceramic-like PVD coating! The buttons are also stainless steel with a nice, tactile cross-hatch texture. The big and chunky bezels from the 2015 era are gone and the screen fills the watch face to the edges nearly. On the back, we have various sensors, confirmation that it was made in China and also that it's water resistant to 30M.

It's certainly a small watch and (dare I say) might suit someone with femininity about them or a child - but certainly someone without huge limbs like me! But I could get used to it. I currently favour my Moto Watch Fit because it's slim and (what I thought) small, but this is even smaller. I do like the oblong shape of it (over a round watch) as it just makes more sense for those who can get away from a 'clock' needing to be traditionally 'round'. You can get much more data onto it and see things more clearly.

In the box, you get the watch and a little charging 'puck'. It connects to the back of the watch with magnets and pogo-pins. On the other end of it there's a USB-C port, so plug in a charger that you already have as there's not one supplied here. The box is a simple affair, reminding me very much of a Sony Xperia one - white cardboardy stuff which fits into a paper-like sheath sliding over it lengthways.

In a separate box (maybe it will be included in the same one when this gets to mainstream retail) there's a strap which appears to be made from that nasty silicone material, which I find slippery and irritating to my skin, but each to their own! It's a two-part strap with a choice of two lengths for different size wrists, so three-part really! Fortunately, the watch takes standard 22mm pins at either side, so, if you're like me, you can ignore that thing anyway and put your own quick-release strap on made of what you like!

The watch has three buttons on the right, running top-to-bottom and one on the left, very nearly at the top. The one on the left seems to act as a back-to-base button whatever the watch is doing and the three on the right, for navigating menus - top-up, bottom-down and middle-select/OK. The maximum amount of time you can set the blue-like backlight to stay on for (with no activity) is 8 seconds. I do think that could be longer, given that the battery life is clearly going to be super. I'd settle for about double that. You can set it to tap (or double-tap) or move to wake (for those 8 seconds again) though the 'move' is actually more like a 'shake' to get it to work (double twist like Moto's flashlight)! Update - see Shane Craig's video linked below for a geeky workaround to fix this. You can also assign long-presses on the right-side buttons to execute a number of functions.

The screen is much like you'd expect an e-paper screen to look like, really. Very much like any e-ink/paper screen and has the feel of such (not physical, it's just glass, but the style). The blue 'glow' when backlight is active is a lovely 'Pebble' thing which is very attractive. It is a colour screen, as I said above, with 64 of them! Most of them are 'muted' though - again, very much as you'd expect from the modern trend of OEMs having put colour into e-book readers and tablets these days - people want colour! It's also fair to say that if you're dwelling in the shadows indoors, you'll probably not be able to see what's on the screen - but in every other situation, outdoors for sure, but also under any kind of lighting, the more, the brighter it'll be for you!

First thing to do is to download the Pebble app and pair the watch up to your phone by Bluetooth, which was a simple affair here. For those who can't type and search in the Play Store, there's even a QR Code on the outside of the box which you can get your phone to scan! Open up the app and explore the very old-fashioned, retro-feeling software UI. It reminds me very much of what Nothing Phone are doing in many respects, even utilising the orange/black/white accents throughout.

You're invited to add some watchfaces from a few options and similarly, some apps - Compass, Stopwatch, Obilisk (game), Timer and Home Assistant have been picked for the initial intro. You can also here add a Language Pack to ensure that everything is localised. It seems to default to USA English (but of course!) but I was able to change it to English (general), whatever difference that makes!

You're then led through the setting of some basic options like 12/24hr clock, Enable Health Tracking and Heart Rate Monitor as well as how often various functions will 'sample' the biometric data. Activity Insights, Sleep Insights, a switch for Imperial Units and setting of age, height and weight. You can allow it to talk to "your phone's health platform" or not, so I said OK (and gave permissions) for the new-look Google Health and Offline/cloud Speech Recognition - so I guess one can talk to the watch, which I hope to explore the parameters of later.

We're then offered an App Homepage with two main 'tabs' for Faces and Apps. Faces is the landing page of the two and offers a horizontal list of My Watchfaces (ones that you've downloaded and used/tried) then a link out to the Pebble App Store with thousands more! Some of which are paid-for, bought via the Play Store. The Apps 'tab' is much the same but for Apps, obviously, instead of Watchfaces! One thing to note is that you can filter the options via a button at the top, to only show Watchfaces and Apps that have specifically been designed for the new era of Pebble. Leave it unselected, and you get all the historic ones too, which they say still work fine.

Down the bottom of the page, we have Devices (a list of connected-to-phone devices), Health - with a basic overview of collected data, graphs and charts, by the day, week or month, Notifications - which is basically a clone of Android's Notification History, with toggle-controls to turn any one (or all) of them off, mute them, and a list of contacts - which can 'allow through' (or not) one-by-one. Lastly, there's Settings, which, as you'd expect, allows for a detailed drill-down of all sorts of settings and adjustments for the app and watch. I shall highlight some of these as I go rather than hope to cover each one!

I like the Battery data - again, graphically presented with pie charts and options and all sorts - very nerdy/geeky which many will find fun and informative. General permissions throughout of course, keeping your data under your control, but also the ability to open things up to the default Calendar data that the phone has access to. Then there's that aforementioned Speech Recognition, inside which you can opt for Cloud only, Local only, Cloud with Local fallback or Local with Cloud fall back! This service is apparently provided by Wispr Flow. There's Weather data controls, though I'm not sure where it comes from (or perhaps it uses one's default data of what the phone is using). Anyway, yes, loads of settings to tinker with.

Physically then, on the back there's a heart rate monitor, a compass sensor and that basic step/sleep tracking via Pebble Health (shared with your default Heath App if you want it to). The watch features a speaker and dual microphones (the second mic is intended for environmental noise cancellation) that benefit from that 30M water resistance and a new linear, resonant actuator provides a much tighter, quieter and premium vibration alert than those buzzy motors of old.

Because this is a community-driven, independent reboot under the open-source PebbleOS, there are a few crucial nuances. The hardware is apparently engineered to hit a huge 4-week (30-day) battery life. However, it looks like from those already using it with the current early software builds, real-world usage is averaging around 14 to 18 days. That is still oodles better than most, but yes, further power optimisations are still being pushed out via OTA updates (via the App of course).

Some hardware features are physically present but not fully enabled in the software yet. For instance, the second microphone's noise cancellation and advanced speaker functionalities (like reading text aloud or custom developer tones) are still being ironed out in the firmware. It is a touchscreen, but right now the OS relies almost entirely on the 4-button layout (one on the left, three on the right). Currently, the touchscreen's primary function seems to be to tap it for that backlight.

As I hinted above, the watch launches with out-of-the-box compatibility for the entire legacy catalogue of 10,000+ existing Pebble apps and watchfaces via the rePebble platform, and CloudPebble is officially back for JavaScript developers. The founder, Eric Migicovsky, has noted that due to OS restrictions, Android users will get far more functionality out of the watch (like actionable notification replies and deep system integration) compared to iPhone users.

Delightfully (but basically) Pebble have made the App Store available online too, for browsers - which is great! Everyone should do this so it can be accessed on a big screen for workflows and easier viewing other than just mobile (or watch)! You can sign in with the same account established on the watch/mobile app and jump between Watchfaces and Apps. It's very barebones, but the whole catalogue is available, with a good search facility. You can select Watchfaces and Apps then 'send' them to the App and watch (presumably relying on being signed into the same account)! It all works really quickly, select something new, click on it, then nano-seconds later it arrives on not only the phone's app but also the watch! In fact, all the actions and communications work instantly and perfectly between my test devices here and the app/watch. Impressive and a sign of mature Bluetooth coding, I guess.

I downloaded a Mini-Golf app which works with the touchscreen too, thus proving that developers are working to make the touch experience more useful. I guess that Pebble themselves will in time start adding that functionality if it's clearly something that indie developers can do readily. Incidentally, you'd need very sharp eyesight in order to play this game! Obviously the screen is very small and yes, my 63-year-old eyes don't make that an experience I'd want to continue for more than a few minutes to see it working!

The search engine produces a stunning array of options, more than often. As an example, I searched for "Casio" and got a bunch of, sure-enough, Casio watch retro faces. But more interestingly, I tried "Bowie" and sure enough people, presumably fans, have put together various watchfaces with David Bowie AlbumArt, icons and more. So it's either pretty easy to code for this or there's a dedicated-to-Pebble bunch of clever geeks out there. I'll see if I can find out! Here, I find the Pebble Developer Website with all sorts of options to get started by getting the SDK, via PebbleCloud, build with JavaScript or C with all sorts of open source guides, examples, Blog and (clearly) a dedicated community. How hard can it be, I wonder! An exploration project for a rainy day.

So now, in practice - minute-by-minute use. You should be aware that I’m no gym-dweller, nor exercise freak, so most of what I’ll be testing will be the stuff I use (and will leave those who know about higher-end health antics to their reviews). Not saying that I won’t touch on it - I do steps and can work through the sleep stuff, but don’t expect me to be abseiling!

First up, the battery life. And testing so far pretty much upholds Pebble’s claims I think. I’ve had it connected to my phone now for 4 days and the charged-up battery is still showing 92% remaining. The display not being ‘always on’ clearly helps with this (and I always select that on any watch I use if I can) but don’t forget that it’s e-paper too, sipping at the power - and one could argue that the display is always-on, rather than always lit. So in most ordinary daylight (or artificial lighting) situations one can expect to be able to see it well enough to make out what it says. Again, think Kindle. Sitting in bed at night with no lights on, a Kindle needs a light of some sort, build-in or not. Same here. Fortunately, a light is a tap (or two) away if it really is that dark around you. Update after a week and, the way I'm using it, I'm getting 50% left, so it looks like (for me) it's a 2-week battery life. But, as I say, for those less cavalier with functions, they might get further towards the ultimate Pebble claim of a month. Interestingly, I watched a YouTube Video by friend of our Phones Show Chat podcast, Shane Craig - Pebble Time 2 Review: Perfectly Imperfect - which is a really useful 22-minute dive into so much of this stuff. He concludes that, for him, it's also a 2-week battery.

When notifications arrive, they seem to come onto the screen, the screen lights up (for, in my case, 8 seconds), then stay there until you do something about it. I’m OK with this, though as Craig points out, some joined up thinking about dismissing them with the phone (and vice-versa) needs attention from Pebble. If you press the middle-right button, 'OK' we’ll call it, you get a bunch of options pop up - dismiss, reply (using voice - which works really well), open on phone, mute the source of the notification (temporarily or for good) or start Quiet Time. This is basically a stop-notifications option which can, yes, be actioned here, but also in settings (on the watch or phone’s app). You can up/down through the options with the up/down buttons, the OK button to execute.

Back on the homescreen, if you press the 'up' button, you get a page telling me how many steps you've done today, then up again for current heart rate, then up again for sleep data overview. For any one of these you can then press the OK button for a deeper dive - then top-left button to step-back. Back to the homescreen and 'down' button, it gives me a list of my appointments for the day and two more, press again to get more if there are too many, with weather and sun-up, sun-down data interspersed.

Back again to the homescreen and press the OK button, which lands me in the list of system-type options, so Settings, Music, Notifications, Alarms, Weather, Health, Workout, Watchfaces, Timeline (list of Calendar events) and then any apps that are installed. So they can be launched from here via the OK button and each has drilled-down options. In Settings, we have Bluetooth, Notifications, Sounds and Haptics, the aforementioned Quiet Time, Timeline, Quick Launch, Time and date, Display, Health, Background App and System. Under System we have Information, certification, standby mode, debugging, shut down and factory reset. Phew! And inside all those, there’s plenty more for the curious!

The haptics are not bad - a little buzz on the wrist which I’m sure most people would be happy with - it can be set to low/high (or off), you can change the size of the on-screen text too, though I think that the default is a good balance between size and amount of scrolling needed. One of the good things about the forthcoming touch-screen expansion will be not having to reach around to the left side to go back, which is a bit cumbersome. I guess you could wear the watch on the right wrist, but then it would be even worse to access all 3 right-side buttons. Hopefully someone at Pebble is coding a 'Back' button for the screen somehow as I type! Or maybe one of these clever developer bods have already done it!

The Music app/function is nifty - not for playing music on the watch’s speaker like a Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra - but for direct control of the last-used Music app on the phone. You get a little red progress bar, cute icon of a cassette tape, name of artist and track title, then on the right, aligned with the three buttons, next track (bottom), previous track (top), three dots on the OK button - press it and you get a play/pause pop up for that OK button and the next/previous track buttons turn into volume up/down. It’s been very nicely thought out and works brilliantly well. Only thing missing for my pleasure is AlbumArt! A step too far maybe, but who knows, being open to developers. The use of colours throughout seems quite sparse for/with the built-in apps, but yes, they pop up now and again - as I said above, kind of muted because of e-ink, but that’s fine. That little golf app I downloaded and installed certainly looked very green for the grass, so it shows that with careful testing in development the colours can be more impactful.

Still exploring, but for now, that's it! I shall come back after a while if I can add anything. Certainly keeping an eye open for more touch adjustment - it'll no doubt come soon as updates fly in thick and fast, sometimes daily! It feels much more like a fun gadget than anything that's going to challenge WearOS or the like anytime soon! It leaves deep sports analysis alone and trades it for a charming, fun, retro yet premium-feeling device that nerds and geeks will love! The battery life, though maybe not quite what they claim, is still stonkingly good and if you can live with the muted colours and physical buttons, you'll love it.

Rich Flu (2024)

This is an intense, high-concept dystopian allegory that tackles wealth inequality, capitalism and human greed by Spanish director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, who also brought us The Platform (2019). The core premise functions like a dark fairy tale, really - a mysterious disease emerges that selectively targets and kills people based entirely on their net worth. Sounds a bit daft, and is really, leaning towards some sort of (unrevealed) supernatural intervention to make it happen - so don't expect rationale!

So yes, Rich Flu (the disease of Greed) is a virus which continuously recalibrates its parameters! It begins by killing billionaires. Once the billionaires are gone, it shifts its threshold down to multi-millionaires, then to anyone with over a million dollars - and continues dropping. The primary physical sign that someone has been 'infected' by the flu is that their teeth begin to glow a strange, bright white colour! The world seems to be treating it like an outbreak of Covid with officials gowning up, tented analysis with scientists at hand and military units trying to maintain control and isolate those who get it - or are likely to - not realising that it's not really biological.

This brings us to our main character, though - Laura, played flawlessly by Mary Elizabeth Winstead (but you knew I'd say that!). It is a good job, too, because frankly the first half-hour of the 1-hour-45-minute runtime was a bit of a bore, rescued only by her performance. The film spends far too long setting the scene, milling around Laura's world of Hollywood filmmaking at lavish events, rubbing shoulders with the elite and defining for the audience who was rich and who wasn't. I really think we could have got the idea clearly enough in five or ten minutes, tops!

Anyway, yes - we follow Laura, who is fighting a custody battle with her estranged husband, Toni, played beautifully by Rafe Spall (The English, A Room with a View), whilst trying hard to connect with her 16-year-old daughter Anna (Dixie Egerickx). At the same time, she is trying to climb ever higher up the wealth ladder, jet-setting here, there and everywhere, spending huge amounts of money left, right and centre in the process. Incidentally, Rafe's dad, Timothy, is also in the film for a few scenes, playing one of the uber-rich bods (and Laura's boss) in that slow first half-hour.

So, having money is a death sentence, it seems, and as the wealthy folk get the idea about what's going on, they all desperately try to offload their assets by signing them over to others or giving them away - thus lowering their stock value and net worth to survive. Or so they hope! The film flits between London, America and Barcelona as Laura tries to convince Toni that their daughter would be better off with her in the UK.

Unfortunately (as it turns out) Laura gets news of the promotion of a lifetime, and Timothy Spall's character hands her billions of dollars worth of company stock. Laura initially celebrates her massive new fortune, but the horrifying reality soon sets in - he didn't promote her out of kindness, but realised the virus was about to lower its threshold to his wealth bracket, and by dumping his billions onto Laura, he effectively passed her the death sentence to save himself. Or so he hoped!

So now, just over a half-hour in, things become much more interesting as the film turns into a survival yarn. The banks close down, global supply chains collapse and the stock market freezes - leaving Laura stuck with her massive net worth, at least on paper. She can't get rid of it now, so she basically awaits her white-teeth moment! Will it come?! Survival mode kicks in; Laura, Toni and Anna flee the city and head deep into the countryside. They seek refuge on a remote, commune-style farm - a money-free environment owned by Laura's hippie mum, Martha (Lorraine Bracco), with whom she, of course, doesn't get on!

As society falls apart, the rich are hunted down by the poor and the virus continues to lower its threshold toward everyday middle-class wealth. So I'm not sure why, by this stage in the tale, Laura hasn't got her Colgate Grin! Survival becomes a brutal nightmare and the nuclear family have to flee again, this time on Mum's small boat heading towards Africa and away from wealthy Europe.

From hereon in, the story is very much about the collapse of society, how they negotiate travelling the coast of Africa on a small boat and what it's like to end up with refugee status, hunting and fighting others for a crust of bread. By this stage, they are realising that there are more important things in life than the acquisition of wealth, which you can't take with you anyway! They end up owning nothing and relying on each other to find a way out of this harrowing situation.

It is, of course, an absurd notion for a story (unless you're going to introduce the supernatural, as I said at the outset), presented much more as an allegory to talk about class, capitalism and greed. It's fairly nicely shot and produced, with the best of it coming in the second half of the film as things get tough for the family. Most of the players around Winstead do a decent, if not good, job, but it's really her show. And she looks great. Now arriving on streaming platforms in the UK.

Animale (2024)

This is a French feminist body-horror film, directed by Emma Benestan, about a woman breaking into the traditional men's world of bull-running as the first female razateur. This is the non-fatal (for the bull) style of bullfighting in which the participants try, on foot, to snatch prizes from between the bull's horns without getting gored in the process. Arguably, it is still pretty cruel, as the bulls are taunted and exploited much the same as ever before.

The story follows Nejma, played by Oulaya Amamra, a fierce 22-year-old woman working as a ranch hand on a cattle ranch in southern France. Nejma is ballsy and determined to break through in this arena and show that a woman can do as well as any man. She's clearly a more than competent horse rider, having ridden her whole life, and she works hard. She is not interested in any of life's other trappings, like marriage and raising a family, much to the chagrin of her mum. We spend a fair bit of the film right alongside her as she experiences this world filled with sexism and objectification, but also the fragile egos of the men around her.

Despite the macho atmosphere, most of the men are quite nice to her on the face of it, including her in their world and social events as they let off steam together after each 'race'. Nejma makes a pretty good first outing in the arena, earning herself some respect from the blokes. To celebrate this, Nejma joins them for a chaotic night of heavy drinking, drugs and partying out in the swampy pastures where the wild bulls roam free. Pressured and taunted by the men, Nejma winds up past the safety fences, having pretended to them that she was used to recreational drug use. The next morning, she wakes up in the soil with severe memory loss, a hazy recollection of a chaotic struggle and a bloody gash on her arm. Her friends tell her she was attacked and mauled by a rogue bull.

Following this incident, Nejma begins to experience unsettling physical and psychological changes. Her senses heighten, her eyes occasionally turn wide and pitch-black, and she experiences hallucinations and nightmares - including a sequence where she physically feels the sear of a hot iron branding her skin, directly mirroring how we saw her do it early on in the film to a bull. Over time, she even notices her toes fusing and hardening into a kind of webbing that resembles hooves!

Simultaneously, a wave of terror grips the community. A mysterious, rogue bull begins brutally hunting, goring and stomping the males to death under the cover of night. As the bodies pile up, the local men form a posse to hunt down the killer. They pin the blame on Nejma’s favourite bull, Thunder. Despite Nejma's desperate protests, the men slaughter Thunder. However, after Thunder is killed, Nejma continues to black out at night, waking up covered in fresh blood that she is forced to wash away in secret. She realises she can feel the bulls and hear them screaming inside her head.

Amamra in the lead, appearing in pretty much every scene, is superb. She is totally convincing and great to watch. The direction, production and cinematography have been beautifully orchestrated with great use of shadow, texture, lighting and colours. The blazing white of the arena contrasts hugely with the scenes back at base, which are often at night with red glows inside the convincing sets. Then there are the nighttime, sinister-looking shots of the bulls amongst the mist and great long-shots and panning when Nejma heads off to the beach riding her horse.

It's an interesting film and well worth tracking down if you can find it. It's on limited release, mainly in Europe, so some smart VPN shenanigans might be needed. I suggest starting on Amazon Prime Video in Germany! Or wait. Or track it down at an arthouse cinema in Paris!

To round things off, spoiler alerts apply to this last paragraph.

It turns out that all was not quite as it seemed the night she passed out and the men of the group (or at least one of them) brutally raped her. Enter the body-horror element and Nejma taking matters into her own hands in order to right the wrongs done to her throughout the story - especially that night - through violent vengeance against man and/or beast, you could say! There's a shape-shifting transformation sequence in the style of An American Werewolf in London as she changes into a half-human, half-bull creature to snuff out the offenders!

Fuze (2025)

This is a thriller brought to us by director David Mackenzie (Hell or High Water, Outlaw King) which is initially about an Army bomb disposal squad in central London headed up by Major Will Tranter, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson (28 Years Later, Nosferatu). A group of workers on a building site uncover what seems to be a WWII bomb, so they stop everything and call in the police, who in turn call in the Army.

We get to know the key players in the police and army teams as the story and its backdrop unfold. It is going to be hard to review this without spoilers, but the best way to head into it is to suspect everyone of some sort of involvement!

The police evacuate the area so nobody gets hurt, but we see that there are four men in a flat who are lying low and ignoring the evacuation order. When the coast is clear, they leap up and put into action what is clearly a very well-planned bank heist, tunneling between the cellar of the block of flats and the vault of the bank next door. They have all the drilling equipment and power they need, even when the authorities cut the local grid for safety reasons relating to the bomb. This isn't really a spoiler, as all of this happens in the first 10 minutes as we jump feet-first into the action!

Chief Superintendent Zuzana Greenfield, played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Belle, Beauty and the Beast), is in charge and liaising closely with the Major in order to keep the public safe and let his team get on with defusing the device. As the Major inspects the bomb, it becomes clear that it's not just a simple WWII relic after all, but rather a highly complex device with a live trigger. Putting two and two together, it doesn't take much brainpower to work out that something fishy is going on between the two scenes of action!

Anyway, the Major tries all sorts of technical tricks to slow down or stop the timer from ticking down, buying him time to find another way into it. Meanwhile, we get to know the robbers a little: Karalis (Theo James), a cool diamond expert, alongside muscle-and-tech guys code-named X (Sam Worthington), Y (Shaun Mason), and Z (Nabil Elouahabi). With the surrounding streets completely abandoned, the guys are free to go about their crooked business.

However, Zuzana is no fool. She spots the heat signature of a generator (which the robbers are using) on the overview maps on her screens and starts to smell a rat. That's it now - no more spoilers from me, because the rest of the film twists and turns, keeping you on the edge of your seat with chases through the streets and sewers of London and loads more as the plot unfolds. Yes, of course, it's extreme and far-fetched, but it's all good fun - an action-adventure yarn taken to the extreme!

The tale all comes together in the final act as we find out who's who, how people are involved, the extended network of characters in the mix, and, ultimately, who gets away with what - if anything or anyone! It's chaotic in the end, with car chases and nasty people doing nasty things to one another amidst the realisation that pretty much all of what has gone before wasn't quite as it was presented! We also get some flashbacks in the final scene to fill in the missing links that hold the story together.

It's rip-roaring fun, well-directed, produced, and shot. The acting is pretty good from all the players and, far-fetched escapism though it might be, it's a great thrill-ride that I can't imagine anyone not enjoying for its 100-minute runtime. Well worth a look, and it's now just appearing on streaming services in the UK.

The Dead Don't Hurt (2023)

Viggo Mortensen’s Western is a mellow, character-driven film set in the 1860s. Mortensen directed, wrote and scored it, but the star of the show is certainly Vicky Krieps' character, Vivienne. It's a simple love story in many ways, focusing on two people - her, and Olsen, played by Mortensen - who happen to meet out in the old Wild West. She is a fiercely independent French-Canadian woman working as a flower seller in San Francisco, and he is a practical Danish immigrant carpenter who has travelled to San Francisco just to 'see the end of the world'!

Anyway, the two share an immediate chemistry, but Vivienne is being aggressively courted by a wealthy, pompous art collector called Lewis, played by Colin Morgan. Weary of his suffocating, upper-class expectations, Vivienne is delighted to bump into Olsen, who represents the exact opposite. So Vivienne, rebellious spirit in hand, walks away from Upper Class Twit of the Year, leaves the civilisation of the city and heads off to make a life with Olsen in his remote cabin in northern Nevada, near a frontier town called Elk Flats.

The film jumps about the timeline a lot, but it's obvious where we are at any given point, even without captions to guide us. In fact, the film opens with Olsen hunched over Vivienne's deathbed as she drifts away - and most of the film flashes back to before that, focusing very much on their relationship building, their bond and growing love. There are some scenes later on which depict the aftermath, but it's mostly done to mop up the loose ends and round the story off.

Vivienne is initially shocked by the remoteness of Olsen's cabin and living situation, hating that there are no trees and greenery, so she works hard to bring colour to the shack by planting roses, bushes and trees. She also takes a job in the town's saloon to help them build a life and fund her desires for their home. She's clearly artistic and, in many ways, ultimately wants more from life than Olsen. In order to preserve her independence, she even refuses to marry him, try though he does.

Elk Flats is a corrupt town entirely under the thumb of a powerful land owner, Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt), the weak-willed Mayor Schiller (Danny Huston) and Jeffries' sadistic, alcoholic son, Weston (Solly McLeod). The sleepy town's peace is broken when the American Civil War breaks out. Driven by a sense of duty to fight against slavery and a need for the $100 enlistment payout, Olsen impulsively decides to join the Union Army. Vivienne is deeply hurt and angered by his choice, which echoes a childhood trauma when her own father went off to war and never returned.

So Olsen clears off, leaving poor Vivienne to her own devices. The spirited Vivienne manages on her own, of course, continuing to work at the saloon. Weston Jeffries turns out to be a violent sociopath who terrorises the town's folk with drunken outbursts, taking the law into his own hands. During these spells, it becomes clear that he has fixated on Vivienne - and with Olsen out of the picture, he fancies his chances! But Vivienne fights him off at every turn, remaining faithful to Olsen, deeply in love. It doesn't stop Weston trying though and behaving badly.

Meanwhile, some time after Olsen has gone away, she gives birth to a boy she calls Vincent, raising him with unconditional love and tenderness. Olsen eventually returns and they resume their life together as a family until, as we found out at the outset, Vivienne gets sick from a fatal illness. Olsen sits by her bedside as she takes her final, wheezing breath, slipping away while hallucinating an image from her childhood dreams - a medieval knight in shining armour riding through a green forest. Olsen takes young Vincent away on his horse following this and rides as far West as the land will allow, eventually stopping where the frontier meets the crashing waves of the Pacific Ocean, reflecting on Vivienne's legacy of love and resilience.

It's a powerful, moving and interesting film, held together perfectly by the quite brilliant Vicky Krieps, previously seen in The Colony (2015), Old (2021), Father Mother Sister Brother (2025), and loads more. She's clearly a very talented actress who can turn her hand to many different roles and speaks multiple languages. Mortensen - Psycho (1998), The Road (2009), The Two Faces of January (2014) is not far behind her, but it is she who steals the show.

Very nicely shot with the scenery looking after itself - dry and dusty mostly, as you'd expect out West - the San Francisco sets are also nicely done, as is the cinematography with great camerawork. This is clearly a bit of a one-man show in terms of production from Mortensen, but he has the sense not to try and hog the limelight, resulting in a very nicely balanced, quiet, but engaging story. Recommended - now available on streaming services in the UK.

Red Rooms (2024)

This is a complex story and film to review as it has so many threads and meanings, some left to the imagination or one's own interpretation. But I'll have a go! It feels as though it is to do with our fascination as a species with true-crime podcasts, televised trials and the dark side of humanity. Red Rooms (original title Les Chambres Rouges) provides us with a psychologically tense film from French-Canadian filmmaker Pascal Plante. It is a piece that questions our morbid curiosity with all that stuff, via a chilling thriller - which you might well need to watch twice!

The film starts in a clinically-furnished Montreal courtroom at the beginning of a highly publicised trial. In the dock - or glass cage, in this case - is Ludovic Chevalier, an apparently emotionless man accused of the brutal murder of three teenage girls. The killer filmed their actions and broadcast them live to wealthy, anonymous bidders on a dark web 'Red Room' (an internet urban legend where the ultimate depravities are sold to the highest bidder).

The prosecution has got hold of two of the three videos, but the third one, featuring a girl named Camille, is missing. While they start the trial based on the available footage, the event becomes a total media circus, attracting grieving families, ambitious journalists, and, yes, a morbidly curious public. But rather than focusing on the lawyers, the cops or the victims, Red Rooms forces us to watch the entire trial through the eyes of the beautiful Kelly-Anne.

But Kelly-Anne is not your typical true-crime enthusiast - she is actually a wealthy, highly successful model, a cyber-security expert and a high-stakes online poker player who lives in a sterile, glass-covered block of flats as clinical as the courtroom itself. She is so deeply consumed by this trial, though, that she sleeps on the pavement outside the courthouse every night just to secure a front-row seat in the public gallery every morning.

Enter Clementine! A naive and vulnerable girl who has travelled to the city because she is utterly convinced of Chevalier’s innocence. Clementine is a Serial Killer Groupie - one of those people who befriend inmates on Death Row and hero-worship the likes of Charles Manson. Perhaps she is looking for somebody broken to fix. She argues his corner at every opportunity, including to the TV news cameras outside the court and via phone-in television shows.

Anyway, the relationship between these two forms the strange focus of the first half of this two-hour film. Unlikely as it would seem, Kelly-Anne feels sorry for Clementine having little money and nowhere to stay, so she takes her into her posh flat for the duration of the trial. Clementine acts very much like a child, with Kelly-Anne playing the role of a distant mother figure. It is all a bit odd and, yes, unlikely, but there will be more to unfold on that front later.

Back to the trial, and Kelly-Anne's behaviour changes from that of a clinically in-control observer to a slightly unhinged potential partaker in what is going on. Using her computer hacking skills, she begins dipping into the dark web, hunting for the missing evidence - the video of Camille - that the police failed to find. When Kelly-Anne interacts with the dark web, we don't see what she is seeing - the camera instead lingers on her face. We are watching her watching. Her reaction is not panic or disgust, but rather a trance-like, chilling fascination.

To understand Kelly-Anne, we are encouraged to understand her background in high-stakes poker. As she explains at one point to Clementine, her love for the game stems from a cold desire to see emotional people lose everything and to exploit their breaking points. She views the trial not as a search for justice, but as a complex, high-stakes game of poker against the killer, the defence and the law itself. She doesn't want to do good, she wants to win the game at all costs. Her online persona is Lady of Shalott - a nod to the Tennyson poem about a woman cursed to view the real world only through the reflection of a mirror from her isolated tower.

Juliette Gariépy plays Kelly-Anne with a gripping terror, really. She's ice-cold, clinical and thrilling to watch. Laurie Babin as Clementine plays a very different role but she, too, is convincing and does well. The rest of the cast all do their jobs faultlessly, but our two leads steal the show. The cinematography is always interesing and very nicely done with angles, lighting, focus and colour. Colour that often glows across the frame. Often the light emitted by a computer screen as we look at faces impacted. Often red, as you might imagine!

The film is multi-layered and complex, but interestingly, it relies very much on implied horror. There are no cheap jump-scares or gory special effects here! It is shot in a claustrophobic aspect ratio with a sterile, cold colour palette that locks you firmly into Kelly-Anne’s restricted worldview. It is tragic, deeply unsettling and a film that will stay with you long after curtains-down. Then you can watch it again!

LineageOS 23.2: The Pure Android 16 Experience

Handheld by Gemini, I unlocked the bootloader on the Fairphone 5 and flashed LineageOS 23.2—based on Android 16—onto it, and I'm really glad I did. It is remarkably similar to a Pixel experience, without much AI guff. As an added bonus, I was also able to get an Always-on Display working, which Fairphone had previously stripped out in an update due to battery drain. I was hooked—for now!

The instructions are all on the LineageOS website, but I find it so much easier simply to be led by the hand by an AI assistant. Yeah, I know, data centres and AI and electricity are being sucked up—but in this case, it really didn't take long. It didn't go 100% smoothly, mind you. I had an issue with location services not playing ball with various apps, and Gmail refused to go into Dark Mode even though everything else was.

What I have discovered throughout all of this is that it is totally procedural; this is not rocket science. Someone (or something) clearly telling you step-by-step what to do—and even when it goes wrong, being resourceful enough to scour the web for solutions and, the important bit, turn it into layman's English rather than techy, nerdy, geeky gobbledygook—is, for me, the key to success.

So, I headed off to the LineageOS website, downloaded, saved, unzipped, unpacked, enabled, unlocked, debugged, navigated, commanded and ADB'd! Before long, I was up and running with a fresh installation of LineageOS 23.2, the latest version, complete with weekly updates for the foreseeable future. It had the May Google Security Patches installed, Android 16, and even May's Google Play System update. Peachy!

So that was all well and good until I decided that I'd finished with the experience and wanted back on 'stock' to, apart from anything else, get my financial apps and services back (which don't work under LineageOS). This is where it went pear-shaped. It was all well and good—reversed the process, no problem, Fairphone's software was onboard and booted up—until it came to the very last step of locking the bootloader again so that I could get back to those financials. But the AI couldn't do it. We fought and fought, and flashed and flashed, but it fell over in the end, leaving the only option being to send it back to Fairphone (in France, as it turns out).

The issue is a known architectural bug within the Fairphone 5’s Qualcomm security management layer. When you originally unlock the bootloader, you use fastboot flashing unlock, but the secondary command fastboot flashing unlock_critical was either not run or was overridden by a security patch. Once the phone boots into Android with an asymmetrical partition map, the low-level hardware security chip permanently caches the get_unlock_ability: 0 flag to protect the device from a theoretical "evil maid" attack. Because it is a hardware-level lockdown, no amount of standard fastboot commands or user-space factory resets can force that specific chip to clear its internal memory from the outside. To get the phone back to a 100% factory-sealed state where banking apps work without any rooting or workarounds, the security chip's cache must be cleared.

Because this specific bootloader deadlock is a recognised software state issue on the FP5, Fairphone's service centres deal with it regularly. They plug the phone into a specialised engineering box that triggers EDL (Emergency Download Mode) using a proprietary, digitally signed Qualcomm "Firehose" programmer. This completely bypasses the bootloader, wipes the security chip's NVRAM cache, forces get_unlock_ability back to 1, and reflashes the entire device to a factory-locked state. Hope you're keeping up! I wasn't! I put a ticket in and they told me it would cost about £30 plus P&P to France both ways.

So the choice was to do that or use the Community EDL Method. Apparently, there is a technical way to mimic what the service centre does at home, but it is complex. It involves downloading a leaked Qualcomm tool (QPST/QFIL) and a specific Fairphone 5 "Firehose programmer" file, forcing the phone into EDL mode (often by holding a specific button combination while plugging it in or using an EDL deep-flash cable), and rewriting the raw storage blocks. These tools are tricky and prone to Windows driver conflicts, and that is where you actually risk causing true hardware damage. So, I'm not sure what to do really. At the moment I'm sitting on it, able to use it for all but those financials. Other than that, it works perfectly well—and I didn't have financials on LineageOS anyway! So, I might just put LineageOS back on it!

In the meantime, I'm turning my attention to the Sony Xperia 10 Mk VII. That was another tale of woe, as I tried and tried and tried with the AI to get LineageOS on it, but it failed with some sort of technical hitch and I couldn't get it on. I thought I was doing pretty well with all this hackery, but it turns out I really wasn't! So, I sent it to our Phones Show Chat ROM'ing expert, Mike Warner, after all. I guess I could have tried with the online community or other digital assistants, but I was getting a bit weary of it now, particularly the prospect of starting all over again. Yet again! So, Mike took it in and fixed it. Of course he did!

He tells me that Sony seems to be a little odd in terms of not allowing unlocking by the normal Fastboot (Power + Volume Down) mechanism, instead having a separate "Blue *" boot type which went to a version of Fastboot that could unlock the bootloader, but which required a reinstall of the Windows driver. It's also a bit weird that it requires a Sony Unlock Code to unlock the bootloader. However, once you get your head together, it's fairly straightforward, he says. It took Mike a while to figure it out, as it was not really documented very well. It was only after failing to unlock the bootloader using the 'standard' way that he thought he'd best follow Sony's instructions to the letter and check the driver state. The blue star at the top left of the screen, rather than a proper Fastboot screen, threw him the first time so he tried the standard way, which was his undoing.

So anyway, my thanks to Mike, and I now have the little Sony with a freshly installed LineageOS 23.2 on it, which I'm hoping will give me a bit more (though yes, taking away those financials still) than the Xperia's out-of-the-box options. For one thing, an Always-on Display which, I'm hoping, will play with the battery better than the Fairphone 5 did, which drained it fairly rapidly. I guess Fairphone were probably right to have taken that away with a system update on the Fairphone 5 after all! The bigger 5,000mAh battery should do a better job with that, I'm figuring—but we'll see!

For anyone who wants a deeper dive into what the 'financials' blockage is, here is the breakdown. When you unlock your bootloader, you are essentially telling the hardware to stop verifying that the operating system is the factory-sealed version from the manufacturer. To detect this, apps use a Google security service called the Play Integrity API (which replaced the old SafetyNet). It tests the phone's security posture and returns three main tiers of verdicts to apps: MEETS_STRONG_INTEGRITY means the device uses hardware-backed checks (like the phone's secure enclave/TPM) to prove the bootloader is locked and running original factory software. An unlocked bootloader fails this instantly.

Google has a zero-tolerance policy for custom ROMs when it comes to contactless payments. Because Google owns both the Play Integrity API and Google Wallet, Google Wallet strictly enforces the highest security tiers. The moment Google Wallet checks the API and sees that your hardware attestation shows an unlocked bootloader, it shuts down card provisioning and NFC tapping. It does this because an unlocked bootloader theoretically allows a malicious actor with physical access to dump system memory or intercept cryptographic keys—even if you are just using it to escape Google's ecosystem.

Unlike Google, independent bank developers have to choose how strictly they want to enforce these rules. They typically fall into three camps:

The Strict Banks: (Who act like Google Wallet). Many major, high-security banks or fintech apps (like Revolut, Starling, or strict national banks) require that the phone meets device integrity. If you are running vanilla LineageOS with an unlocked bootloader, these apps will refuse to open, crash or display a "Device Uncertified" warning.

The Lenient/Good Enough Banks: Some banks only check that the phone meets basic integrity or simply run a crude on-device check to see if root access is present. Because LineageOS does not come rooted out of the box, these apps see a clean system and think "OK, no root detected, we'll allow it", ignoring the fact that the bootloader itself is wide open.

The Server-Side Believers: A handful of financial institutions design their security around the philosophy that the mobile client is always untrusted. They rely entirely on robust server-side cryptography, multi-factor authentication and SMS/push tokens to secure transactions. To them, a custom ROM is a minor variable, so their apps rarely check Play Integrity at all.

If you are currently running LineageOS and need these apps to work, the community bypasses these restrictions using root frameworks (like Magisk or KernelSU) paired with modules like Play Integrity Fix or Tricky Store. These tools trick Google's API by spoofing the identity of older phones that didn't support hardware-backed security checks, forcing Google to fall back on basic software checks that can be faked. However, because Google frequently patches these loopholes, a bypass that works today might break tomorrow.

So after all that, I get to the LineageOS experience under Android 16 and it really is a nice one. Firstly, it feels really odd after all these years living with Google to have to install even the most basic and 'stock' Google Apps. Yeah, I know—that's the point! But I'm not in this for 'stepping away from Google'; rather, I liked the look of the 'clean' LineageOS on top of Android. No bloat, no crap (for those of us who don't count the Google apps that I'm purposely adding) and an AOSP-like, Pixel-like experience in many ways.

There is a bunch of apps included for those who do want to stay away from Google's: AudioFX, Browser, Calculator, Calendar, Camera, Clock, Contacts, Files, Gallery, Messaging, Twelve Music Player, Phone and Recorder. There is no doubt at all that for a person wanting to stay away from mainstream apps and services, the phone has enough onboard out of the box to get on and use it like a very basic phone. But most people, in reality, are going to need some apps on top. Once that decision has been made (and all the following is based on using the Play Store and not other apps/stores workarounds to keep away from Google), for my money, I might as well use the familiar ones and sideline the above, which end up doubling up the options. If you're going to install the Play Store and trust Google, you might as well make it comfortable.

That's not to say that the included apps are not capable. They certainly are, and mostly do the job. One could choose to favour them over Google's offerings. AudioFX works nicely with any audio, but excels with the built-in Twelve Music Player. There are lots of presets and customisation options to make the sound as you like it, whether it be with the built-in speakers or headphones (3.5mm here, and/or USB-C). All this responds well. The Music app searches quickly (especially given that I have all my data on a microSD card) and plays nicely—with lots of options, playlists, filtering, searching and even album art. It's a nice, clean player which sounds great, but it is totally unconnected, so say goodbye to streaming!

The Browser app is apparently Jelly—a lightweight, open-source browser developed by the team. Out of the box, it is set to start up into Google's search engine, and you can sign into your Google account if you like, but you can switch to any one of 11 others (or just install your own browser app and make it the system default). There are plenty of privacy settings in there if you want to use them, though there is not much point if one is signing into Google, I guess! One could argue that approaching it as I do, I might as well just install Chrome and use that! But yes, there are options for de-Googlers and the more privacy-minded.

The Calculator actually looks very much like Google's own, though it is standalone and doesn't share one's data with The Big G, of course. It is 100% local and asks for no permissions. There are scientific functions, though no currency or unit conversions—and frankly, who needs a 'connected' calculator?! You can always ask an AI for that on-the-fly, unless you're staying away from that too. I chose to uninstall Google's Calculator (which I had put on).

Calendar looks neat and simple with Day, Week, Month, and Agenda views. Settings allow for notifications, sync (in my case with Google), theming, search, go-to and plenty more. It seems to work well, talking nicely with whatever service it's hooked up to (or working standalone on-device). It has a nice kind of old-fashioned look about it—feeling like it's an app from 15 years back, which is nice, refreshing and functional.

The supplied Camera app, Aperture, can be opened by assigning a long-press to the shutter button on this particular device, and the shutter button can be used to fire the shutter—so the developer has mapped that nicely. In fact, the only thing missing from that button is the very handy short-press for screenshots, which is a shame. The workaround is to make sure it's selected in Button Settings so it appears in the Power Menu. Long-press the Power button, tap Screenshot, and it gets the power menu out of the way then takes the shot. Not quite as neat, but apparently Sony has that short-press on the shutter button locked down.

Aperture handles multiple lenses well, includes manual controls, features a built-in leveller, and even has a QR code scanner that doesn't ping a remote server to decode links. Of course, you don't get Google’s proprietary computational photography algorithms (like Night Sight or advanced HDR+ processing), so photos look more natural and less artificially boosted, which some will prefer—but it won't magically brighten up a pitch-black room the way a Pixel or standard Xperia stock firmware does!

The UI is simple and neat enough, with the usual side-scrolling buttons and labels across the bottom of the screen with various buttons, a deeper dive into Settings, gridlines, location, sounds, RAW - and an even deeper set of options relating to sharpening, de-noising, colour correction, distortion correction and more. So, there are some 'smart' tools available after all! I tried downloading the Pixel Camera app from the Play Store, but it crashes whenever I tap on Settings. Otherwise, it seems to work OK. But yes, for those not wanting to use Aperture, or wanting more, it's likely a visit to Celso Azevedo's GCam Repository!

Clock is next, and while the layout is incredibly minimal, it doesn't feel much different from Google's Clock app. The built-in one requires no permissions, so it's pretty much standalone. Google's app, of course, talks to the servers to track sleep stuff and integrates with Google Assistant and account data, triggers smart lights when the alarm goes off, handles Bedtime tracking, cough/snore detection (requiring microphone access), offers audio options integrating directly with YouTube Music to stream playlist alarms and oodles more! On the other hand, staying away from all that gives you the basic tools—local alarms, snooze, fade-in volume, custom ringtones and more. For those de-Googling, the app does just what a clock should do without requiring access to your microphone, your streaming accounts or the internet. On the other hand, if you're not de-Googling, I guess you might as well use Google's app!

When it comes to Contacts and Phone apps, my guess is that they're best used in tandem, whichever way one is jumping. Go with Google, use Google Phone and Google Contacts. Stick with LineageOS and use their two apps. I don't think mixing and matching them will work well. The two apps tend to be very tightly integrated at the system level, certainly in Google's case. You can, if you want to, swap them about, but I think I'd rather not, being a pessimist! Obviously, the standalone apps have no cloud integration again, only working with data on the device (unless you hook them up with another service) and also working closely with their Messaging app. Naturally, with Google (or any other cloud-based sync), you get much more cross-sync action and backups off-device. For me, it'll just feel disjointed after living with Google for so long now. But yes, for those de-Googling, the apps look and work fine.

Messaging is in on the sync act as well, even if locally. There's no RCS support in their Messaging app, so forget that one! It is strictly an SMS/MMS tool. If one wants typing indicators, high-res photos, read receipts and chatting over Wi-Fi, they are pretty much forced onto Google’s playground—but even then it won't work! If one decides to download the official Google Messages app to get RCS, Google will actively block it because it utilises a security framework called the Play Integrity API. This framework checks the phone's system to ensure the operating system hasn't been modified, like the financials trap above. The moment the Google Messages app detects an unlocked bootloader, it silently disables RCS functionality and the app reverts to SMS/MMS. Even though Google Messages > Settings > RCS Chats reports it as connected, it's not true! But at least it gets through! This could be a bit of a stumbling block, much like Google Wallet, for those who want the latest and greatest convenience tools.

Files is the default file manager and it's pretty bare-bones. That means that for the de-Googler there's total 'sandboxed' privacy, as it treats local storage traditionally. There are no smart categorisations trying to guess what you want, no cloud tie-ins, just local directories. So, it feels pretty rigid and old-fashioned without stuff like a network share shortcut to pull files from a PC, or native archive extraction tools. It's fine for casual users of course (who probably never use a files app anyway), but others will probably want to add a meatier app. Again, you can use Google Files if you're going the open way, so you have all the benefits that brings. Google Files crawls every item on the storage to categorise them into Memories, Clean Up Suggestions or Large Files. The LineageOS app does none of this background data-crunching. What one sees is strictly what is on the device. It treats the internal storage or microSD card like an old-school, offline flash drive. But, there is no sharing—if you want to transfer a music track or a document from your PC over Wi-Fi, the stock app cannot see your local network. You are forced to physically plug the phone into a computer via a USB-C cable. It can't zip or unzip compressed archives without jumping through hoops, meaning handling email attachments or local backups requires an external tool. But there is middle ground in the shape of unconnected but more capable third-party apps. Plenty of them. I favour X-plore when I need stuff like that.

We're up to G, and so Gallery is next—Glimpse! On the face of it, the app looks clean, tabbed, and pretty similar to Google Photos. But under the bonnet, Glimpse is essentially a file browser that favours media. Google Photos is basically a 'cloud viewer' that happens to show local files too. Glimpse is a 100% local storage viewer. When you open Google Photos, the home tab isn't showing your phone’s folders—it is showing a cloud-synced timeline of all your images and videos. So again, it depends on what you want—the convenience of an always-connected, backed-up experience or a severed, local, old-fashioned, private and controlled one. Which is what a lot of this comes back to as we plough through. Do you need to have the convenience of searching a potentially huge archive for the "day I took the dog to the beach", or the locked-down 'know your filenames' offline and local experience (which, incidentally, to search for, you have to use the Files app—there is no search engine with file-indexing inside Gallery)! But Gallery works fine, and has Albums and Library filters. And what's yours stays yours, rather than being given away for data-harvesting!

The built-in, very bare-bones voice Recorder app can record in high-quality formats, allows you to track visually with a live 'waveform', and runs entirely in the background. But, again, it completely lacks any real-time clever AI transcription features that others provide via cloud-first apps and services. Once recorded, there are no tools to do anything with it other than play it back (in the app of your choosing). Any further and smarter use of the audio would need to be sent to another app or service, likely cloud-based, to get, for example, summaries or notes from a lecture or talk. It's quite restrictive when one has got used to the other tools out there which do so much more. But yes, as we are discovering, it is private and secure.

In digging down into Settings to see what's different and interesting, don't forget that I'm using a Sony Xperia 10 Mk VII here—so I'm not guaranteeing all of what I find will work on other hardware. I'll try to highlight what I find that is noteworthy or different from the usual stuff. All the Network and Internet options seem present and correct, including Hotspot, eSIM, and VoIP, if your operator supports it. Bluetooth seems to work as expected with the usual options, having paired up various devices without a hitch. There's a nice, simple Screen Time implementation under Apps and various Android 16 standards like Notification History, Summaries, Cooldown, Organiser and Bubbles under Notifications. Nothing of note or unusual in Sound & Vibrations or Modes, but there is that Always on Display option in Display. The Sony Xperia 10 Mk VII didn't have this, so I was most excited to see it here. There are zero options for the clock or layout—you get just the one which brings time, day, date, notification icons, and battery percentage at the foot. I'm really happy that this has been added but hugely disappointed that it's barely legible in anything but the near pitch dark. So, as a night clock it's fine, but in almost all other situations it can't be seen. Well, just about. I have dug around in settings, played with Adaptive Brightness on/off, lighting levels, LiveDisplay—but nothing changes it. What a shame. Still, better to have something over nothing I guess—it just could have been much better.

The Wallpaper & Style is basic Android 16 with Home Screen and Lock Screen options, Clock (though with only that one available, as above), Widgets on Lock Screen, a more basic Wallpapers picker, very AOSP, but theming colours, contrast, and icon shapes are present—and a better bunch of 'layout' options than Pixel, from 6x6 through to a bonkers 2x2! All the battery-saving options are available: Saver, Manager, and so on to protect its life. The System menu throws up a few notables, like Buttons, including an assignable Edge Long Swipe Action—I set it to be Gemini and with 20 attempts swiping up the side of the screen I got it to work twice! It's obviously an art that needs practice (or a phone with bigger bezels)! All sorts of options on the Power Menu, more so than most; keyboard cursor control (for the standard AOSP keyboard if not using Gboard by this stage). You can use the volume up/down buttons to move the cursor, like long-pressing the spacebar on Gboard. You can move the volume panel left or right on the screen, which is a nice touch for 'lefties', and make loads of adjustments to the Status bar—assigning which icons are shown and which are not, including even the clock (with seconds showing or not) and battery percentage or icon. So, plenty of thoughtful and some unique features—it all feels very CyanogenMod. Which is great! Good work, developers.

I've been testing the battery now for a couple of days with, specifically, attention to the Always on Display (for 'tis why I'm here)! The bad news is that even though it's barely legible in all but darkness (as above), using it kills the battery. It drains at about 5-10% per hour—making it unusable to get through a day (and pretty pointless anyway if it can't be seen)! A drain of 5-10% per hour means that I'd certainly be charging it in the middle of the day again—and these tests were conducted whilst not doing anything else with the phone, so it would make it even worse! With an OLED panel, the AoD is supposed to only light up the pixels it's using, so I don't get it. Particularly if it barely lights them up anyway. And especially when, if the AoD is turned off, the phone under LineageOS 23.2 sips the battery, making it at least an all-day phone, even with heavy use—and even two days at a push. Nope—the AoD is caning the battery. No idea if that's something the developers can do anything about, but I shall feed back, of course.

LineageOS 23.2 under Android 16 delivers a really interesting and different experience in software minimalism, reviving the enthusiast-driven spirit of CyanogenMod. Free from mainstream bloatware and aggressive Big Brother AI tracking, the ROM converts your device into a beautifully clean, deterministic tool. Its suite of lightweight, open-source AOSP utilities operates with speed and total, offline data security (if you want it). Furthermore, for those who crave granular control, the settings menu remains a playground—allowing you to customise status bar metrics, relocate volume interfaces for left-handed use and micro-manage display parameters to a degree completely forbidden by mainstream operating systems.

However, this living on an island approach demands a lifestyle compromise. Stripping away big tech means forfeiting the seamless automation of the modern cloud ecosystem. The moment you cross over into custom ROMs, Google's hidden power strikes back. Through strict Play Integrity API attestation, critical everyday tools like Google Wallet and mainstream banking apps are instantly locked down. Communication pipelines suffer too; without a proprietary Google backend, you lose rich RCS messaging and computational camera wizardry vanishes in favour of natural, unassisted processing. Even unlocked hardware enhancements, like the resurrected Always-on Display, frequently suffer from a lack of low-level factory optimisation, resulting in catastrophic standby battery drain.

Ultimately, LineageOS 23.2 is a super operating system, but it is not a casual sanctuary! If your intention is simply to install the Play Store and force Google's heavy cloud stack back onto the device, the resulting hybrid experience will feel clunky and double-optioned. LineageOS shines brightest when fully embraced as an independent, file-first operating system. It remains a great, secure achievement for tech-savvy purists willing to trade effortless convenience for genuine ownership of their digital canvas. But it's been a very useful and interesting experience to have ploughed through it and hopefully my notes here might be of use to some folk reading by blog.