Ab Film Review & The Last New Wave

To call Parish Malfitano's sophomore feature, Salt Along the Tongue, a straight up horror film feels like a disservice to the experience of watching this magnificent melodrama-adjacent film. Yes, there are most certainly horrific elements - blood features heavily throughout the film, upsetting tales about the symbiotic relationship between wasps and figs are told, bodies float in the air in unsettling ways, boils and scars emerge in haunting ways on the legs of characters, and of course, the thematic backbone of Italian witches that feature within the film - but Salt Along the Tongue instead feels more like a familial, motherly drama in the vein of Pedro Almodovar's work.Yet, even calling Salt Along the Tongue an homage to Alomdovar feels like it's doing a disservice to Parish's work here. This is, much like his first film, a distinct work syphoned from the mind of Parish Malfitano, and in the realm of Australian cinema, that is a blessing.Salt Along the Tongue follows Laneikka Denne's Mattia, a teen girl who