A photographer’s road trip into the Californian desert takes an unexpected turn in director Joshua Erkman’s interesting feature debut

Director Joshua Erkman’s feature debut manages to deliver an impressively creepy horror exercise that’s also a bit of a send-up of horror conventions. At the same time, it feels like a weird dodge into borderline-abstraction and unknowable mystery that drains all the realism away, making this a mannered film-making exercise. But there’s no denying the level of craft on show, or the original way Erkman throws together practitioners of highfalutin art-world discourse and skeevy low-lifes, with bloody results. In generic terms, it definitely feels of a piece with other recent highbrow-meets-lowbrow scare-’em-ups, the kind of grad-school horror you might see in the queer-eyed I Saw the TV Glow , David Lowery’s stripped-down A Ghost Story, or director Ari Aster’s Hereditary . In other words: interesting for sure, but perhaps a bit pretentious for hardcore gorehounds.

In A Desert, we first meet photographer Alex (Kai Lennox) as he drives around the desiccated terrain of California’s Yucca Valley , listening to smooth contemporary jazz on his fancy SUV’s sound system and pulling over to take pictures of abandoned buildings. He shoots his images on a fancy 8x10 inch apparatus that uses photographic plates that need to be exposed for 10 second intervals. His subjects include disused cinemas and the ghost town remains of abandoned military bases – although in a voicemail he leaves for his wife Sam (Sarah Lind) he suggests he might shift over into portraits for a while. Clearly, he’s not especially interested in the people who live here, although when the trailer-trash-style couple (Zachary Ray Sherman and Ashley Smith) in the motel room next door come a-knocking, offering turpentine-tasting hooch and a chance to party, Alex is too polite/weak to resist.

Edna O’Brien on her sofa, Joseph O’Connor in his garden, Seamus Heaney surrounded by books … British photographer Steve Pyke on capturing the greats of Irish literature

The author of The Employees goes back to 17th-century Denmark for an intensely poetic portrait of everyday sorcery and female solidarity

On 26 June 1621, in Copenhagen, a woman was beheaded – which was unusual, but only in the manner of her death. According to one historian, during the years 1617 to 1625, in Denmark a “witch” was burned every five days . The first time this happens in Danish author Olga Ravn’s fourth novel, the condemned woman is “tied to the ladder, and the ladder pushed into the bonfire”. Her daughter watches as she falls, her eye “so strangely orange from within. And then in the heat it explodes.”

The child is watched, in turn, by a wax doll who sees everything: everything in this scene, and everything everywhere, through all space and all the time since it was fashioned. It sees the worms burrowing through the soil in which it is buried; the streets of the world in which it was made. It inhabits the bodies that walked those streets: “And I was in the king’s ear, and I was in the king’s mouth, and I was in the king’s loose tooth and in the quicksilver of his liver, and did hear.”

Secret cameras roll as Amira Smajic advises criminal groups. Plus: artist Yinka Shonibare tells his deeply affecting story. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC Four
Denmark has been named the least corrupt country in the world for the past six years, but this astonishing documentary series by film-maker Mads Brügger shows a darker side to the nation. Secret cameras film the lawyer Amira Smajic, a once trusted adviser to notorious gangs, and her undercover meetings with criminal clients – starting with a double bill that follows cases including dumping illegal toxic waste and managing bankruptcy without scrutiny. Hollie Richardson

‘Parasocial’ crowned Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year as ‘unhealthy’ relationships with celebrities rise

If you’re wondering why Taylor Swift didn’t respond to your social media post offering congratulations on her engagement , then Cambridge Dictionary has a word for you: parasocial.

Defined as “involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know”, parasocial has been chosen by the dictionary as its word of the year, as people turn to chatbots, influencers and celebrities to feel connection in their online lives.

They can be garish and ostentatious, or a sign you are softer than you might first appear. From the catwalk to the high street to the big screen to the rugby pitch, you just can’t miss them right now

Wuthering Heights is a story about pain, revenge and the Yorkshire moors as a metaphor for bad life choices. But if Emerald Fennell’s forthcoming adaptation is anything to go by, it’s also about bows.

In the two-minute trailer for the film, Cathy wears red bows and black bows, navy bows and pink bows. There are bows around garden pots, and bows around “baddy” Edgar Linton’s throat. Some bows flutter in the fell wind, others are unlaced at speed. In one memorable shot straight from the Jilly Cooper precoital playbook, a pretty white bow is cut from Cathy’s bodice using a labourer’s knife, which would be unforgivable hamminess were it not incredibly hot. Never mind that Emily Brontë rarely mentions bows in the book; that one is an entire plot device.

Eminem claims consumers may mistakenly think he is linked to the Sydney beach brand – but Australia is no stranger to lawsuits from US rappers

Eminem has launched legal action against the Australian beach brand Swim Shady, alleging its name is too close to that of his trademarked alter ego, Slim Shady.

The 53-year-old rapper, real name Marshall B Mathers III, filed a petition to cancel Swim Shady’s US trademark days after it was successfully granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in September.

Mortified documentarian James Blake meets young men who have drifted towards misogynist influencers – and finds them lonely, heartbreaking and on ‘semen retention journeys’ to control their sex drives

Just as you can accurately measure the quality of a documentary about pornography by the number of examples of its subject that it does not show, so too you can judge a programme about “incel” culture/the manosphere/toxic masculinity by the amount of time it does not devote to the noxious leaders of the subculture. Porn documentary makers often seem to use their commission to indulge their own murky fascinations, or at the very least fill the screen with naked women as an easier way to hook viewers than constructing a decent programme. Similarly, stuffing any programme with footage of the poster boys’ diatribes, generally about pussies (female, metonymically; males metaphorically), power and the need for men to wield one over the other is a titillating opportunity and an easy shortcut to engagement.

Belfast broadcaster James Blake admirably avoids this trap in his hour-long film Men of the Manosphere. It has snippets of the loudest, vilest voices, doing their loudest, vilest thing, telling young, disaffected, vulnerable men what they want to hear: that the problems in their lives are the fault of women, feminism, woke society, beta men and anyone who is not full of ambition, independent spirit and willing to subscribe to the influencer’s latest course on how to be a successful man. If you have spotted any inconsistencies here, you are probably a blue-pilled cuck and not the target market, so please move along.

Rapper to give address on Tuesday after supporting Trump’s post condemning Nigerian government

The US-based Trinidadian rapper Nicki Minaj will work alongside the White House to highlight claims of Christian persecution in Nigeria .

Minaj is expected to deliver a speech at the United Nations headquarters in New York on Tuesday, according to a Time journalist who first posted about the collaboration on Sunday, adding that it was arranged by Alex Bruesewitz, an adviser to Donald Trump .