Paid subscribers to my Shiny Things newsletter might recognize the guest on this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, since I reviewed Kourtney Roy‘s Kryptic a couple of weeks ago.

Everybody else, meet Kourtney! She’s a photographer and filmmaker whose first feature is an eerie, unsettling mood piece starring the Scots actor Shannon Pirrie as a woman who becomes entirely unmoored after an encounter with something inexplicable in a Pacific Northwest forest. It’s newly available on VOD in North America, but if you’re in Toronto you can also catch it at the Imagine Carlton Cinemas at least until Thursday.

And Kourtney wanted to discuss another story of transformation: District 9, the alien-apartheid allegory from South Africa that introduced the world to Neill Blomkamp and Sharlto Copley, and which still packs a punch a decade and a half later … even as it makes clear that the flaws that hindered Blomkamp’s subsequent films were always a part of his toolkit. Kourtney loves it without reservation, though, and I let her exuberance steer us. I regret nothing.

Check it out! Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it as you wander amongst redwoods, trying to figure out what else might be out there with you.

And then you can get back to Shiny Things, where I was especially busy last week, writing up the new Criterion editions of Withnail and I and How to Get Ahead in Advertising from Criterion, 4K discs of The Andromeda Strain, Jason Goes to Hell and Jason X from Arrow Video, and a new 4K restoration of Scent of a Woman under the Shout! Select banner. There’s even more coming this week; maybe subscribe so you don’t miss anything cool? It’s appreciated.