Puffball

2007 Directed by Nicolas Roeg

Powerful supernatural forces are unleashed when a young architect becomes pregnant after moving to an isolated and mysterious valley to build a house.

Kelly Reilly Miranda Richardson Rita Tushingham Oscar Pearce William Houston Donald Sutherland Tina Kellegher

120 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by Hollie Horror ★★★

Nicholas Roeg's last film Puffball is curiously strange, featuring old rituals used to conceive a male child in an isolated village set in modern day Ireland. It's pregnancy horror with a solemn look at birth, life, death, rebirth and all the magic we create along the way, the lengths some will go to stop/prolong/create/recreate a life, to control their own destinies by any means necessary.
The sex scenes are intermixed with interior vaginal intercourse footage and it's so bizarre but also sort of beautiful??!? Illustrating that the human act of procreation isn't just biological reproduction but also the beginning of the beginning, the end of the end, life creating life.
I mean, there's also a condom full of cum that…
Review by Gregory⛧Joseph ★★★★½

Cosmic Pessimism disguised as Pagan horror/rural panic. Puffball is the lonely, mysterious final film of Nicolas Roeg, as underrated and/or ignored as everything else in the latter half of his filmography. Suggestive, but ultimately difficult to decipher. Has a lot in common with early Larry Fessenden movies in its big style, beguiling tone and expressionistic use of music. There's an odd tenderness here, as if Roeg had let his usual detachment from the material slip in his old age.
Review by Cliff ★★★½

Puffball is a strange film which spends most of its running time acting as though it's a witchcraft-themed horror film, but once it's finished you realise that it's merely a drama about a woman who gets pregnant. One extended nightmare scene aside, it never actually tips over into proper horror, although it does have a bit of an obsession with sticky bodily fluids, and I don't just mean blood. For this is as much about sex as it is witchcraft, and the nicely choreographed sex scenes are among the film's many delights. Others include the performances by leads Kelly Reilly and Miranda Richardson, the latter playing a woman whose desperation for a fourth child gets the former into a bizarre…
Review by The Lost City Of Gray

Stylistically, it's a Roeg film through and through. Couple of good edits and transitions. One of a bleeding woman dissolving into a rock with a hole. Another of a sex scene intercut with the inside of the uterus with the the semen blowing through. Twice.
Otherwise it was pretty rough. The first 2/3s set up for some supernatural Roeg weirdness, but it devolves into a surprisingly simplistic and straight forward finale. Doesn't really deserve the subtitle The Devil's Eyeball. There's some good Irish forests and landscapes but otherwise it looks like a TV movie, and the actors aren't any better. Aside from a three scene Donald Sutherland, reuniting with Roeg long after Don't Look Now
Puffball was forgotten immediately after it's release in 2007/2008, and it's easy to see why. This isn't one last masterpiece in Roeg's career.
Review by Nuno Costa ★★½

Viewed on Hollywood Suite
Hoop-Tober 7.0 #43
Criteria:
- Country: UK/Ireland/Canada
Puffball (2007) AKA Puffball: The Devil's Eyeball is famed director Nicolas Roeg's final film. Nicolas Roeg was never shy to delve into the weird and Puffball (2007), is definitely that.
When a young couple buys an old isolated cottage in Ireland and begins to reconstruct the building, their closest neighbours take a keen interest.
Mushrooms, copulation, pregnancies, tragedy, witchcraft and architecture all play their part in a story by Fay Weldon.
As you are watching Puffball (2007) you will quickly question all that is happening, but if you do make it to the end of the film, and their is no certainty that you will, you will find a relative cohesive story at the end of Puffball (2007).
Review by Richmondhill ★★½

Thoroughly mediocre in most respects, this turns over the hoariest of cliches and digs in nothing new in their stead (that this is based on an older novel is telling).
As much as I enjoy tales of ancient stones or folkloric superstition, I prefer them done with at least some tang or atmosphere - of which this film lacks both. It isn’t poor, but it certainly isn’t great; it’s stuck right in the middle of conventionality and could easily be weekday viewing on television looking like - and this is no mean slight - anyone else’s work.
That it was directed by someone who blasted the skies forty years before with intricate textures and abstracted side-glances is a disappointing coda indeed. …
Review by Thorkell August Ottarsson ★★★½ 1

There is a scene early on in Puffball where Liffey is walking with her husband Richard and eating an apple and Richard says that the story did not end all that well, referring to the story of Adam and Eve and then asks for a bite of the apple. According to the story of Adam and Eve women would suffer in childbirth as a punishment for their misbehaving. But still, even though women feel pain in childbirth (and during childbearing), they want to have children. Why? Because nature wants it.
This film is all about childbearing and birth and our connection to nature. When Liffey becomes pregnant she realises that she and nature are not two different and separate things…
Review by Tom Prankerd ★★★½

A welcome comeback from Nicolas Roeg at the time (and, at eight years old with the man himself aged 86, possibly the last film he'll make), this moves away from the work for hire the director took for the nineties and back into more idiosyncratic territory. The result isn't perfect, with a somewhat standard issue mix of occult and don't-trust-the-locals tropes, but it's certainly individual, a shifting, layered work buttressed by fine performances and arresting visuals.
Review by Jenna Ipcar ½

I'm trying to think of words to describe this movie without being disrespectful... maybe "Shitball: The Devil's Shit"
Just god awful, how could you Nicholas Roeg? I trusted you. Though to be fair, I should have realized after the 6th sex scene that it wasn't going to get any better.
Review by trolleyfreak ★★★

As a fervent admirer of the audacious films he made in the '70's, I have to say that I found this last film Nicolas Roeg has made (to date) to be an interesting disappointment.
Some traces of his old abilities are on show and it's always nice to see a turn from Donald Sutherland, but the story is uninteresting and the quality of the performances varies wildly throughout.
I sincerely hope the old Roeg has another good film in him..
Review by jimmyjone ★★★½

The daughter of a would-be witch gets jealous of the new neighbor, a younger woman who is more fertile.
Review by weehunk ★★★

So Roegian. It's a little bit of a mess, but a fascinating mess. The trademarks of his directing craft are there. He's added a couple of Lynchian touches.There's bodily fluids, witches, and crazy times. It seems to go on and on forever. This place that they moved to is making them quite lustful indeed. I always get Kelly Reilly mixed up with Katherine Parkinson. I wonder what she'd be like in that role.

Recent reviews

Review by NewNormal Elliott

THIS FILM DID NOT HAVE RED TITLES OVER A BLACK BACKGROUND.
Who knew Nic Roeg made a folk horror movie in 2007? Not me! I do now! It’s just okay! Title is distracting! So is the music!
Review by The Lost City Of Gray

Stylistically, it's a Roeg film through and through. Couple of good edits and transitions. One of a bleeding woman dissolving into a rock with a hole. Another of a sex scene intercut with the inside of the uterus with the the semen blowing through. Twice.
Otherwise it was pretty rough. The first 2/3s set up for some supernatural Roeg weirdness, but it devolves into a surprisingly simplistic and straight forward finale. Doesn't really deserve the subtitle The Devil's Eyeball. There's some good Irish forests and landscapes but otherwise it looks like a TV movie, and the actors aren't any better. Aside from a three scene Donald Sutherland, reuniting with Roeg long after Don't Look Now
Puffball was forgotten immediately after it's release in 2007/2008, and it's easy to see why. This isn't one last masterpiece in Roeg's career.
Review by Nuno Costa ★★½

Viewed on Hollywood Suite
Hoop-Tober 7.0 #43
Criteria:
- Country: UK/Ireland/Canada
Puffball (2007) AKA Puffball: The Devil's Eyeball is famed director Nicolas Roeg's final film. Nicolas Roeg was never shy to delve into the weird and Puffball (2007), is definitely that.
When a young couple buys an old isolated cottage in Ireland and begins to reconstruct the building, their closest neighbours take a keen interest.
Mushrooms, copulation, pregnancies, tragedy, witchcraft and architecture all play their part in a story by Fay Weldon.
As you are watching Puffball (2007) you will quickly question all that is happening, but if you do make it to the end of the film, and their is no certainty that you will, you will find a relative cohesive story at the end of Puffball (2007).
Review by Richmondhill ★★½

Thoroughly mediocre in most respects, this turns over the hoariest of cliches and digs in nothing new in their stead (that this is based on an older novel is telling).
As much as I enjoy tales of ancient stones or folkloric superstition, I prefer them done with at least some tang or atmosphere - of which this film lacks both. It isn’t poor, but it certainly isn’t great; it’s stuck right in the middle of conventionality and could easily be weekday viewing on television looking like - and this is no mean slight - anyone else’s work.
That it was directed by someone who blasted the skies forty years before with intricate textures and abstracted side-glances is a disappointing coda indeed. …
Review by Gregory⛧Joseph ★★★★½

Cosmic Pessimism disguised as Pagan horror/rural panic. Puffball is the lonely, mysterious final film of Nicolas Roeg, as underrated and/or ignored as everything else in the latter half of his filmography. Suggestive, but ultimately difficult to decipher. Has a lot in common with early Larry Fessenden movies in its big style, beguiling tone and expressionistic use of music. There's an odd tenderness here, as if Roeg had let his usual detachment from the material slip in his old age.
Review by prow

one word? bogus. the film is not without its merits, but unfortunately it's a contrived mess and the music/sound design is especially bad.
Review by markmonday ★★★

Witchery, kitchen sink realism, the building of a new home, and the perils of motherhood in rural modern Ireland.
Nicolas Roeg's final film marked somewhat of a return to form after a lengthy creative drought that saw him trudging away in a range of unremarkable tv movies. The bland, "realistic" lack of style in many such films is still present in Puffball, along with the naturalistic acting, but it sits side-by-side a host of Roeg's hallmark hallucinatory sequences. Some are disturbingly effective (shots of a fetus growing, sperm exploding into womb) and others pretty embarrassing (terrible slow-mo). The result is an often discomfiting experience and at times a genuinely disturbing one. I'm not sure what the film is trying to…
Review by HugoNebula ★★★½

A very late return to film by Nic Roeg, this is a spooky and elemental tale with Reilly and Richardson both on form, though the script suffers from a lack of focus and the budget is shoestring. Sadly, you really couldn't tell this was directed by Roeg if his name wasn't on it.
Review by obersynthetics

Having seen the majority of his work, I would place Nicolas Roegs last feature, Puffball, in the same tier as other late era, fun-but-messy, efforts like Track 29, Castaway and Two Deaths. Definitely worth a watch for Roeg fans, and a fitting end to one helluva career.
DVD
Review by jimmyjone ★★★½

The daughter of a would-be witch gets jealous of the new neighbor, a younger woman who is more fertile.
Review by 𝐀𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐚 ★★★

Miranda, sweetie
Review by MurrMurr ★★

Roeg’s last film is an odd supernatural drama about fertility magic in Ireland. Though it finds him long past the peak of his powers, this at least feels like a Roeg film, unlike much of the work-for-hire he did in the 90s. It’s idiosyncratic and oblique and features some inspired visual ideas (along with regrettably cheesy ones, too — there are new agey dissolves and a nightmare scene that belongs in an 80s Elm Street knockoff).
Unfortunately, it simply isn’t all that good, suffering from a fatal lack of focus — it’s both overstuffed with incident and underdeveloped. I honestly have no idea what he was trying to do here, whether tonally or in terms of theme.
There are pleasures…