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Fantasia Festival ’26: Home Bodies; Godhead; Insectasy
HOME BODIES */**** starring Emma Ho, Ian Ho, Ess Hödlmoser written by Adrian Murray, Marcus Sullivan directed by Casey Walker
GODHEAD **½/**** starring Sarah Coffey, Kimball Farley, Luke Speakman, Al Warren written and directed by Mark H. Rapaport
INSECTASY ***½/**** starring Sadie Healy, Lyndall Huber, Jan Roeth, Emmett Roiko written and directed by Angus Silver
by Walter Chaw Casey Walker, producer of 2024’s breakout arthouse slasher In a Violent Nature, directs Home Bodies, a William Sleator-inflected two-hander starring real-life brother and sister Ian and Emma Ho. They play “Blue” and “Red,” respectively (their names also the colours of their respective jumpsuits), siblings holed up in a well-appointed, multi-room apartment with only each other and a CRT television that’s always broadcasting a puppet-based kids’ show as diversion. Is there any significance to the colours beyond their gendered connotation? Not that I could tell. Blue and Red have a “father” (voiced by Walker) who is a light in a closet that talks to them, and to whom they report their moods and activities now and then. And for a while, they have a mute “friend” called Pal (Ess Hödlmoser), who moves around like a person pretending to be a creepy robot. Is Pal a robot? Doesn’t seem to matter. One day, over a game of “hide and find,” Blue does an awful thing that makes Father angry with them, meaning he stops feeding them and (invisibly) maintaining their environment. Really, what Blue does is not that awful, relative to our understanding of this game’s poorly established rules.
Maybe if it were all more awful, Home Bodies would be more compelling–the lack of any convincing stakes also the anchor dragging down the rest of the film. If there are no characters to care about and the “puzzle” is easy to solve, there is no length the movie could be that wouldn’t feel like water torture. I looked for clues to a unifying theme in the puppet show. Something about how our entertainments are making us pliant and stupid? Nah. I wondered if there was a charged incest subtext in the brother/sister’s Blue Lagoon scenario. Something disturbing to say about human animals in isolation? Also nah. An AI metaphor in Pal (as in the PAL video format, perhaps?) and the kids’ weird relationship with it? No, not even. I was occasionally reminded of Sleator’s House of Stairs, a YA classic that smartly addresses the issues of human behaviour and sexuality it brings up–not because Home Bodies is anywhere near as good, but because there’s not a lot else to do during this film but dream a better execution. Credit where credit’s due, the final shot is simultaneously predictable and more ridiculous than you can imagine: a last gasp at tension that lands like a goose lands on a frozen lake–like that Jim Jordan-voiced goose in The Rescuers who sounds like Buddy Ebsen. Wait, that’s not a goose. Was it an albatross? Sorry, what were we talking about?
Though stagebound and no less unnaturally bloated, Mark H. Rapaport’s Godhead nevertheless boasts comparatively gorgeous cinematography–reminding at times of the stark, high-contrast images in Béla Tarr films–as well as a few arresting dialogues concerning faith and morality. A voluble three-hander (there are four central characters, but one hardly figures in the action until the very end), it would be a natural for an intimate one-act live-theatre experience or, better yet, a killer short story that behaves like a gut punch rather than an odyssey. Godhead centres on a rural Catholic priest we know only as “Father” (Al Warren). Father is intense. He jerks off (hilariously) to Raphaelite cherub paintings when he’s not Dogtooth-ing foundling Boy (Luke Speakman). Father has raised Boy from the day he was left on Father’s doorstep as an infant. His parenting strategy is to keep Boy captive in the rectory, windows opaqued and doors locked.
Father tells Boy terrifying stories of an apocalyptic wasteland looming outside–another film after Home Bodies that has children “protected” at the expense of their joy. Are they pandemic parables? It’s possible we’re past the sell-by date on that, but considering they dragged Fauci into the town square for an Inquisition just last week, maybe not. It’s all a lie, of course, Father’s tale of the apocalypse. Or, at least, an exaggeration. Father is merely afraid the world is full of people as twisted and dangerous as he is, and because he genuinely loves Boy, he wants to keep him safe. (It’s sort of a Happiness situation where the pedo has a kid he doesn’t appear to be molesting.) Father’s justified in his fear, as one day twins Firstborn (Sarah Coffey) and Secondborn (Kimball Farley, giving Darren E. Burrows) show up at his church with a wild tale…and a proposition. One of them, Secondborn says, is the manifestation of the Christian Holy Ghost and must be freed from its earthly shell. They can’t kill each other–they’ve tried–but Father can and should, if he’s serious about this Christianity stuff. But first, Father has to figure out which of the siblings is the spirit of the divine. A “Holy Ghost” shouldn’t be trapped in a body, right? Like a boy shouldn’t be imprisoned in his own home.
I had a reasonable amount of fun even though Godhead betrays the pressure-cooker it establishes in its first 30 minutes with wholly unnecessary flashbacks that feel more like padding than edification. And it runs out of steam with an entire act to go. When it comes to spiritual acid tests for flawed men of the cloth, I tend to be on board. I especially enjoy Catholics getting called out for their atrocious track record of holding their clergy to the proverbial fire for sins against humanity. I know fascists hate Catholics because a large percentage of immigrants are Catholic, but I think part of the traditional animus comes from a rooster’s recognition of another rooster in the hen house. You can’t fuck ’em all if one of you’s fuckin’ half of them. I also appreciated the gendered representations of an esoteric theological concept: If Jesus is the manifestation of God, would the Holy Spirit manifest as a woman? As a boy with developmental issues? Father’s choice of who to kill—and, obviously, if to kill–would be so much more interesting without any sort of backstory for Firstborn and Secondborn. I was rooting for Godhead. I wondered if it could maintain the tension of “will he or won’t he” and “who will it be if he does” and “are they crazy or is he” for its duration, and damned if it doesn’t hum along right up until a conclusion that becomes so repetitive and desperate the film comes apart from the strain of holding together too long. The template for this kind of thing is Michael Tolkin’s still-astonishing The Rapture, which tackles God and doesn’t let Him off the hook. Again, I can’t help but think that if this were a hot 20 minutes, it would be a masterpiece.
In a just universe, Angus Silver’s cheeky, frank, envelope-obliterating Insectasy would be a breakout moment for not only Silver but also star Tirion Healy (from Silver’s Church of the Flying Saucer), who delivers the most courageous performance I’ve seen in the year of Inde Navarrette. Healy plays Sadie, front-desk receptionist at a doctor’s office in a strip mall. Sadie spends her days quietly peering at the hunk working next door, quietly peering at the patients she despises in the waiting area, and quietly peering at the world passing by while fantasizing being alone with her insects. She’s not a collector, though. Her kink is bugs…and looking. Silver insinuates us into her headspace not just by allowing us to see what her fantasies look like and hear her internal monologue (an erotic stream of consciousness), but also by shooting her sessions of self-abuse in the fracture of multiple mirrors. She is a voyeur of herself.
Sadie buys crickets from a pet store where the clerk, Honey (Lyndall Huber), picks up on Sadie’s peculiar frequencies. “Do you have a lizard?” she asks. “No,” Sadie says. “Are you a pervert?” Honey asks, the obvious follow-up question to a customer purchasing a bag of crickets, and Sadie doesn’t know how to answer. Is she? I love the note of doubt in Sadie’s expression as she considers the question. It says, “Maybe everyone else is perverted for not being horny for insects.” Honey wonders if Sadie is bisexual. She’s detecting a definite vibe of insecurity and difference. What she does not intuit is that Sadie likes to masturbate while a bug scratches around on her chest from beneath a glass cup, nor that she smashes the bug at the moment of climax, flinging the cup away as an act of taboo, even criminal transgression, like the tossing aside of a condom. I would be hard-pressed to classify Insectasy as folk horror, but it’s definitely interested in rituals around fucking.
Like many kinks, Sadie needs to “level up” the intensity and shape of her proclivities. An amalgam of Secretary and May, Insectasy is that process of “levelling up,” a celebration of letting one’s freak flag fly, no matter how freaky or high. To augment the weirdness of it, Silver shoots Sadie’s skylarks in super8, or some approximation of it. For the duration of those moments, Insectasy feels like a Guy Maddin joint in its hallucinogenic, fevered surreality. Sadie’s the princess fair in them, traipsing through a Sylvan, Victorian fairyland wearing a garland of candles at magic hour, brushing her raven hair in a lighted window while stop-motion fish swim past outside. In her dreamlife, she often resembles Angel Blake or, more specifically, Edwige Fenech: goddesses of 1970s erotic Eurohorror. At one point, Sadie frees a peach pit from the fruit’s flesh and places it on her vanity. A tiny version of herself curls up on it to sleep. Later, Sadie procures the wrinkled egg sac of a rare bug that looks a lot like this peach pit, and employs it in arcane onanism. I don’t know if that’s on purpose–if the peach is an intentional reference to J. Alfred Prufrock’s lament about missed sexual opportunities, I mean–but it functions as both Chekhov’s gun to her awakening sexuality and a literary Easter egg pointing to the same.
Insectasy is sharp, in other words, and begs scrutiny. In another dream, Sadie’s a 1920s-era flapper wearing a fur shawl and picking an apple from a tree growing near the ocean. She wakes upon taking a bite. The thrust of this movie is a young woman finding her voice–and it’s progressive in that sense. It’s about no longer being ashamed of who you are nor what makes you feel good, as long as it isn’t harming others. Sadie tries to be “normal,” and normal doesn’t fit her; I don’t think it fits anyone with much of a soul. She stops feigning interest in her boring friends’ boring problems. She stops debasing herself with average and disappointing partners. She does start going out with crickets on, and in, her person like Patricia Highsmith used to go to parties with her purse full of snails. As one does. You go, girl.
