Fantasia Festival Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Fantasia Festival ’23: Birth/Rebirth

August 15, 2023****/****, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

****/****
starring Judy Reyes, Marin Ireland, AJ Lister, Breeda Wool
written by Laura Moss & Brendan O’Brien
directed by Laura Moss

by Walter Chaw In this year of the distaff Frankenstein riff, sandwiched between Bomani Story’s exceptional The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster and Yorgos Lanthimos’s upcoming Poor Things, find Laura Moss’s fucking awesome Birth/Rebirth, which, like Story’s film, manages to smuggle in a sharp, eloquently deployed payload of social and philosophical issues alongside just enough satisfying gore and a gratifying amount of real terror. I wonder if the key to the success of these films, Story’s and Moss’s, has to do with filmmakers who aren’t white men taking their shot at interpreting what is and always has been an essentially, perhaps the essentially, progressive genre text–one authored by a woman, no less, the daughter of one of the most important figures in the early women’s-rights movement, Mary Wollstonecraft (who published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman), and political philosopher/anarchist William Godwin. First-time readers of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein might be surprised by its political sensitivities–its critique of a carceral state in which there is no forgiveness, only the presumption of guilt based mainly on appearance and social status. By how the Monster’s fate is predetermined as he’s cast off to educate himself with pilfered books and shelter amongst others whom polite society has labelled “misfit” and “outcast.” Frankenstein is a story of class war. Mary and her husband didn’t even eat sugar because of its role in the Caribbean slave trade. The Monster says, “I heard of the division of property of immense wealth and squalid poverty of ranked dissent and noble blood.” He was woke as fuck, and this was 1818.

Fantasia Festival ’23: Pandemonium

August 10, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, France, Horror

***/****
starring Hugo Dillon, Arben Bajraktaraj, Manon Maindivide, Ophelia Kolb
written and directed by Quarxx

by Walter Chaw French multidisciplinary artist Quarxx’s sophomore feature Pandemonium is relentless miserablism presented handsomely and with neither of the usual pressure valves of archness or irony. It’s punishing. Although it doesn’t share much in terms of approach or narrative with Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, they have a similarly slick surface, and it did make me feel uncomfortable in the same way. And, ultimately, almost as unhappy. Films like this–such as most of Lars von Trier’s and Michael Haneke’s respective filmographies–are generally provocations without much more on their mind than to upset expectation and a perceived general apathy, but Pandemonium did get me thinking about how I’m raising my kids, so there’s that at least. I wonder if the function of the film-as-endurance-test isn’t ultimately as a lens with which to focus one’s empathy. That is, to say that for as lousy as your life feels at any given moment, it can and almost certainly will get worse. How consistently I enjoy movies that make me feel awful (and now I’m thinking of Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor, which made me feel bad for months–and topped my best-of list of that year) says something about our desire for confirmation bias, I suppose. I want to be reassured that my Hobbesian outlook is rational. I’m addicted to that reassurance.

Fantasia Festival ’23: New Life

August 8, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

**½/****
starring Tony Amendola, Hayley Erin, Sonya Walger, Nick George
written and directed by John Rosman

by Walter Chaw I respect the directness and simplicity of John Rosman’s New Life, the way it addresses a double-edged problem through two women in separate storylines who represent the point and counterpoint of a debate without an easy answer. How does one balance the individual good versus the interests of the collective? Easy enough to say that any individual must be sacrificed for the sake of society until one humanizes the individual. Plenty of films tackle this question: John Frankenheimer’s The Train measures the value of a man’s life against a priceless work of art; Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s extraordinary 28 Weeks Later and Breck Eisner’s remake of The Crazies wonder how many people must be sacrificed for the greater good, no matter how heroic the lengths they’ve gone to survive. New Life‘s stakes are similarly big, although its focus is smaller–the “Trolley Problem” where one of the hero’s choices is to kill a person she likes in order to save a planet full of strangers. Complicating it all is that the hero herself, Elsa (Sonya Walger), is afflicted with a progressive neurological disorder, meaning her time is limited regardless of what she chooses. If she does the difficult thing, in other words, she’s not even doing it for herself.

Fantasia Festival ’23: Sympathy for the Devil

August 1, 20232023, Action, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Nicolas Cage, Thriller

½*/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Joel Kinnaman, Kaiwi Lyman
screenplay by Luke Paradise
directed by Yuval Adler

by Walter Chaw A History of Violence for Dummies, Yuval Adler’s slow-moving, never-ending Sympathy for the Devil is a Nicolas Cage vanity project in which America’s slavering hambone tries on some kind of accent, a scarlet dye-job, and a half-assed high-concept that’s familiar to everyone, it appears, except those responsible for carrying it off. Cage is The Passenger, a mysterious lunatic with a gun who carjacks father-to-be The Driver (Joel Kinnaman) in a hospital parking garage and forces him to drive down the Las Vegas strip to a neon-lit Edward Hopper bar where screaming fits can be engaged in for the bemusement of the easily bemused. “There he goes again,” one might say of Cage as he bares his teeth, bangs on the table, flashes his eyes, and raises his voice. Lest one think he’s merely punching the clock here, he’s also listed as one of the producers, so I have to believe that phoning it in, all dials turned to “11,” is the creative choice he’s making at this point in his career. Cage can be an exceptional actor when he wants to be, don’t get me wrong. I just wish he wanted to be more than once every ten years.

Fantasia Festival ’23: Raging Grace

July 29, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, UK

***½/****
starring Leanne Best, Jaeden Paige Boadilla, Max Eigenmann, David Hayman
written and directed by Paris Zarcilla

by Walter Chaw What sets something like Paris Zarcilla’s Raging Grace apart from similar servant/master, immigrant/colonizer stuff like Lorcan Finnegan’s Nocebo is how it offers glimpses of joy amid the suffering. We see a community at play and worship, united in song, celebrating one another, exultant and safe–at odds with how their oppression is generally centred in otherwise sympathetic texts. Jubilation, it turns out, is a useful tool to ratchet up the tension in a film about isolation and domestic enslavement. When you grasp what can be lost, the stakes become unbearably high. Raging Grace isn’t a happy film, but there’s happiness in it, starting with the hopefulness of its hero’s name, Joy (Maxene Eigenmann). Joy’s a homeless Filipino house cleaner on an expired visa to the UK struggling to care for her impetuous daughter, Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla), on very little money and under the constant threat of discovery and deportation. The two survive by squatting in clients’ homes while they’re away, and Zarcilla has a lovely touch with the stolen days where mother and daughter pretend to have a place of their own. The rest of Joy’s life is a hustle: to get more work, to hold onto existing work, to keep her kid entertained and hidden, and to try to leave the panic out of her voice when she talks to family she’s left behind in the Philippines. Before Raging Grace becomes a horror film, it’s already a horror film.

Fantasia Festival ’23: Aporia

July 28, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

**½/****
starring Judy Greer, Edi Gathegi, Payman Maadi, Faithe Herman
written and directed by Jared Moshé

by Walter Chaw Titled after a word meaning “irresolvable internal contradiction,” Aporia is a tragicomedy of errors à la The Butterfly Effect in which three well-meaning suburbanites figure out a way to change the past but can’t quite figure out how to avoid causing unexpected temporal fuckups in addition to the ones they’re trying to cause. For what it’s worth, their always remembering their former timelines isn’t addressed in any meaningful way–nor, I guess, does it need to be, given that this is soft sci-fi and not Primer, but I did think about it. I also thought about how the title is probably fair warning against trying to Neil deGrasse Tyson the thing, and so: fair enough. What happens is that grieving widow Sophie (Judy Greer), seven months out from losing husband Malcolm (Edi Gathegi) to a drunk driver, does her best to manage the trauma she and her daughter Riley (Gaithe Herman) are going through, but it’s a losing battle. She confides in her friend Jabir (Payman Maadi) that things are spiralling, and Jabir tells Sophie that he and Malcolm had been working on a time-travel device that could fire a burst of energy to a specific time and place in the past. If they were to kill the drunk driver, they figure, maybe all would be well again in their world. So they do it, and at first it seems like this Monkey’s Paw is one of the rare benevolent Monkey’s Paws. But then Sophie starts feeling guilty over the financial plight the drunk driver’s wife, Kara (Whitney Morgan Cox), suffers in the absence of her lout of a husband.

Fantasia Festival ’23: Vincent Must Die + Blackout

July 25, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Werewolf

Vincent doit mourir
***½/****
starring Karim Leklou, Vimala Pons, François Chattot, Karoline Rose Sun
written by Mathieu Naert
directed by Stéphan Castang

BLACKOUT
***½/****
starring Alex Hurt, Addison Timlin, Motell Gyn Foster, Barbara Crampton
written and directed by Larry Fessenden

by Walter Chaw I’ve been angrier lately, angrier than I ever remember feeling in my life–and I was a teenage boy once. I am either more keenly aware of how broken the world always was, or the world is more broken than it’s ever been. Likely a little of both is true. I am frustration unrelieved. I am catharsis in eternal, trembling abeyance. The bad win and escape consequences; the good lose and lack the commitment to fight. The Earth is on fire, and only a handful of Scandinavian teens gluing themselves to paintings seem to have the will to do anything about it. I feel like I’m going to crack at every provocation, however minor or unintended. I wonder if I’ve lost my mind. It’s the old man’s fate to lament the growing incivility of every generation, but I didn’t expect to have so much rage going into my sixth decade. I didn’t expect to be the source of the incivility. I think the fallout from the cascading traumas of the last several years will continue to expose fault lines in our society for decades to come. Fallout is inevitable after an apocalypse, after all, and fault lines cause earthquakes. There’s nothing special about us.

Fantasia Festival ’23: Introduction

July 14, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals

by Walter Chaw I love Fantasia Festival. More than love it, I think it's an important showcase that has provided at least a couple of titles that end up on my Best of the Year list every time I've covered it. Its programming is consistently on point, its courage to wade into deep and hostile waters laudable. This year, I'm most excited to catch Oh Dae-hwan and Jang Dong-yoon in Kim Jae-hoon's Face/Off-inspired debut, Devils, and Jimmy Laporal-Trésor's rise-of-fascism period piece, Rascals. Quarxx has a new flick inspired by Milton and Dante called Pandemonium, and there's a new '80s Satanic Panic documentary called Satan Wants You that dates me, I'll admit. A small part of me still believes I'll start speaking in Aramaic and crawling up the wall every time I spin an Iron Maiden vinyl. I feel a similar mix of nostalgia and dread about A Disturbance in the Force, which dives deep into what exactly was going through everyone's heads while making the "Star Wars Holiday Special".

Fantasia Festival ’21: Prisoners of the Ghostland

August 28, 20212021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Nicolas Cage, Thriller

*/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Sofia Boutella, Nick Cassavetes, Tak Sakaguchi
screenplay by Aaron Hendry, Reza Sixo Safai
directed by Sion Sono

by Walter Chaw A theory I’ve been kicking around about certain pre-made, fast-fashion auteur demimondes like, say, Sion Sono: there are those who are anointed cult filmmakers because they have idiosyncratic tastes; and there are those without any real taste who aspire to be cult filmmakers because they’ve figured out that idioscyncracy can be marketable and have thus taken it on as an affectation. The former make films the only way they can make them, driven by a purity and persistence of vision; the latter make stuff like Prisoners of the Ghostland, because they’ve seen films by the former and wonder what could be so hard about that? It’s why Sono’s work is only spoken of in reference to other films and filmmakers, or even to earlier entries in his own filmography, back when he was doing what he felt was right rather than what he thought he should. Prisoners of the Ghostland is a facile affectation, in other words, a slapdash collection of somebody else’s cool without a genuine, native bone in its body. Douglas Adams includes instructions for how to fly in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books: you fall and miss. You can’t fly on purpose, you see. You can’t make a camp movie on purpose, either. It took me three tries to get through Prisoners of the Ghostland. 102 minutes of someone not meaning it is incredibly boring.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Dreams on Fire

August 23, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Japan

***/****
starring Bambi Naka, Akaji Maro, Ikuyo Kuroda, Masahiro Takashima
written and directed by Philippe McKie

by Walter Chaw I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a film quite like Philippe McKie’s Dreams on Fire. Not for its story of a young dancer looking for her big break while jumping from humiliating job to humiliating job; Flashdance and Fame are two of the picture’s obvious touchpoints, although the Step Up franchise is the obvious headwater. Rather, Dreams on Fire is distinctive because of its focus on how each failure is a gift if you can manage somehow not to quit. The movie opens in a familiar place as young Yume (Bambi Naka) declares her dream of being a dancer to the violent disapproval of her tradition-bound grandfather (Akaji Maro), her mother (Ikuyo Kuroda) hiding to avoid the conversation. I’ve learned something, hopefully not too late, after thirty-some years in corporate America: that everything my parents taught me was a measure of success was a lie. Education, climbing the ladder, home-ownership, money as the end-all/be-all of happiness–lies, obvious lies. I have achieved everything I was supposed to achieve and it didn’t make me happier for even a moment. No one comes to the end of their life wishing they’d worked more. I made the decision to be happy, and my worst days now are better than my best days then.

Fantasia Festival ’21: When I Consume You

August 22, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery

**½/****
starring MacLeod Andrews, Evan Dumouchel, Libby Ewing
written and directed by Perry Blackshear

by Walter Chaw Living with addiction, Daphne (Libby Ewing) and Wilson (Evan Dumouchel) are siblings on the perpetual edge of destitution. They are each other’s only means of emotional and occasionally material support. As writer-director Perry Blackshear’s When I Consume You opens, Daphne spits blood and other viscera into a sink and yells through the bathroom door that she just needs a minute. She has a secret to hide, and her brother seems to be having a rough time of it, so maybe that’s why she’s not telling him whatever it is that’s going on with her. A lovely early scene that won me over, as it happens, sees Wilson having a panic attack and Daphne talking him through it. This depiction of the sibling relationship is intimate, empathetic, and authentic-feeling. There’ve been a few compelling sibling relationships anchoring horror films–I’m thinking of the brothers in The Lost Boys, or the brother/sister in Jeepers Creepers, and how those films similarly use threats to that relationship as empathy engine and maybe even as a metaphor for growing apart. A flashback in When I Consume You to, if not “happier,” at least earlier times, shows the pair working on a project together in a tight physical space talking about shared burdens and possible futures that we know are insurmountable on the one hand and doomed on the other. Affecting stuff, and it proves to be the central concern of When I Consume You after all the sound and fury burns off: It’s your siblings who know what you’ve been through; and maybe it’s your siblings who, for as much as they’re responsible for you holding on to your demons, will help you get past them, too.

Fantasia Festival ’21: The Sadness

August 20, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Taiwan

***/****
starring Regina Lei, Tzu-Chiang Wang, Berant Zhu
written and directed by Rob Jabbaz

by Walter Chaw Canadian expat Rob Jabbaz has had it. His hyphenate debut The Sadness is one of the bleakest, angriest films I’ve seen in a long time, made rarer still by being carried off with obvious chops. Its focus is to unequivocally cut through the bullshit of this, our shitty timeline. The first real conversation of the film is between our hero, Jun (Berant Zhu), and his neighbour across adjoining balconies, concerning how a virus causing some doctors concern is a hoax perpetrated by big business and the media. A talk-show host in the background speaks over a virologist who warns of the potentially world-ending evil of politicizing a pandemic, and…well, you get the picture. The scariest thing about The Sadness–a very scary picture–is that it’s the product of a Canadian filmmaker working in Taiwan, which confirms that Trump is a symptom not the cause of whatever the good fuck is wrong with us. In my darker moments, I like to say that we’re just monkeys in clothes, and every minute we’re not killing each other over protein and access to women is a miracle. The premise of The Sadness is a thought exercise in ironic magnification, one where you make the point by exaggerating the scenario slightly. The premise of The Sadness is that we’re all monkeys in clothes, and imagine if we stopped pretending that we aren’t.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Don’t Say Its Name

August 20, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror

***/****
starring Julian Black-Antelope, Samuel Marty, Sera-Lys McArthur, Madison Walsh
written by Rueben Martell & Gerald Wexler
directed by Rueben Martell

by Walter Chaw Colonialism is the monster in Saskatchewan (and Cree) filmmaker Rueben Martell’s Don’t Say Its Name, the “that which must not be mentioned” in a story set among Indigenous Peoples, battling the loss of its people to an inexorable malignancy. The Great Evil manifests as two things: white energy employee Donny (Tom Carey), representing European skullduggery through the fetishizing of Aboriginal women and the committing of all manner of atrocity upon the land and its people in the name of manifest right; and an invisible golem that announces itself with the cry of a crow and a vile stench before disembowelling the isolated residents of a remote Canadian backwood. The victims both bad guys claim are the people in this place–the one because he’s a representative murderous asshole, the other because its sense of outrage over Indigenous Peoples who have if not fully participated in the annexation of their land, are at least sympathetic to a policy of appeasement rather than resistance. Powerful, timely stuff in this age of the Keystone Pipeline and the discovery of scores of dead Indigenous children buried in Catholic schoolyards, made even more powerful by its centring of police officer Betty (Madison Walsh) and her new deputy, a former game warden and army vet named Stacey (Sera-Lys McArthur). Don’t Say Its Name isn’t fucking around.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes

August 18, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Japan, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

Droste no hate de bokura
****/****
starring Kazunari Tosa, Riko Fujitani, Gôta Ishida, Aki Asakura
screenplay by Makota Ueda
directed by Junta Yamaguchi

by Walter Chaw Junta Yamaguchi’s directorial debut Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is zero-budget high-concept done right, a fastball-down-the-middle of a time-travel movie landing right when the concept seemed to have been wrung dry. Logging in at a lean 70 minutes, it doesn’t have a trace of fat on it. More, it manages in that brief span to paint fully-fleshed characters, conjure and pay off a romantic-comedy subplot, and juggle a couple of sharp tonal shifts. It’s so good because it’s so…simple. A strange thing to say about a premise that’s kind of mind-breaking as a pair of connected, closed-circuit monitors accidentally creates a temporal wormhole across the span of two minutes, but there you have it. This little masterpiece proves the truism that whatever the plot might be, as long as the characters and their motivations remain legible and relatable, baby, you got a movie. Simple.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Hotel Poseidon

August 15, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Esoterica, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror

****/****
starring Ruth Becquart, Steve Geerts, Anneke Sluiters, Tine Van den Wyngaert
written and directed by Stef Lernous

by Walter Chaw An art director’s fever dream, Stef Lernous’s Hotel Poseidon is a sequel in spirit to Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s Delicatessen and a film that would comfortably complete a trilogy with Jeunet & Caro’s City of Lost Children. Here, Lernous says that we’re all the product of our shadows, those unexamined parts of us shoved into the crannies of our unconscious, and he packs every frame with florid, fulsome, grotesque manifestations of this idea, which is matched by a genuinely exciting dedication to going for it. It’s not unlike a David Lynch film in that way, and like Lynch’s work, its unpredictability and willingness to do anything make it both very funny and occasionally existentially horrifying. Sometimes in the same moment. Hotel Poseidon is set in a single building bathed in a sickly sepia palette and suffused with themes of submersion. It follows a vignette structure of sorts that finds a different psychodrama, a different element of the subconscious, played out in each room of a decaying apartment hotel. The film is a tour through the unconscious–a Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in which each new horror plumbs personal depths of grief, guilt, and shame most of all. (Its closest analogue may actually be Barton Fink.) Hotel Poseidon, in other words, is difficult to describe.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Giving Birth to a Butterfly

August 13, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Road Movie

*/****
starring Gus Birney, Annie Parisse, Paul Sparks, Judith Roberts
written by Patrick Lawler & Theodore Schaefer
directed by Theodor Schaefer

Fantasia Festival runs from August 5 to August 25, 2021. For more details, visit their website.

by Walter Chaw Theodore Schaefer’s Giving Birth to a Butterfly is in love with doubling and other broad metaphors deployed to speak, Kieslowski-like, to the winsome possibilities of unlived lives. Trapped in a loveless marriage with oaf Daryl (Paul Sparks), Diane (Annie Parisse) is mother to wry Danielle (Rachel Resheff) and a dreamer of a boy (Owen Campbell) who has just brought home a girlfriend, Marlene (Gus Birney), pregnant by another. Marlene needs a place to stay, and against Diane’s wishes, everyone’s planning to impose Marlene upon Diane’s household. It’s weird, you know, because Marlene doesn’t even seem to want to be there. That’s the essential premise of Giving Birth to a Butterfly: that women aren’t in charge of their own fate–ever, but particularly when they’re in the process of expressing their biology. That is, when they’re mothers. The best part of this film is the first part establishing a tense family dynamic, with Diane maybe the only adult in the room. The men and the pre-motherhood teen girl are silly and unmoored to the cold realities of existence.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Baby, Don’t Cry

August 11, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Romance, Thriller

*/****
starring Zita Bai, Boni Mata, Vas Provatakis, Helen Sun
written by Zita Bai
directed by Jesse Dvorak

Fantasia Festival runs from August 5 to August 25, 2021. For more details, visit their website.

by Walter Chaw Zita Bai stars in and scripts Baby, Don’t Cry, a film by Jesse Dvorak that follows a rough few weeks in the life of troubled teen Baby (Bai). Unsuccessfully navigating a dysfunctional home and hostile high-school environment, she meets bad boy Fox (Vas Provatakis) and, in the tradition of stuff like Badlands and Gun Crazy, falls in love and engages in some very bad things–not necessarily in that order. The promise of the piece is that Baby initially seems unfamiliar: a heavily-accented Chinese-American who consoles her loneliness with a habit of filming people and things–perhaps to contextualize them, though more likely to hold them in digital amber, thus negating their immediate threat. The problem is that this promise is largely squandered in a series of repetitive conflicts and resolutions punctuated now and again by hints of magic realism (like her mother sprouting pig ears, or a cartoon fox pacing a car) that, again, are suggestive of a deeper exploration of alienation and loss without the muscle to provide an adequate reckoning with them.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Agnes

August 10, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror

***½/****
starring Chris Browning, Mary Buss, Sean Gunn, Ben Hall
written by Mickey Reece & John Selvidge
directed by Mickey Reece

Fantasia Festival runs from August 5 to August 25, 2021. For more details, visit their website.

by Walter Chaw Agnes (Hayley McFarland) and Mary (Molly Quinn) are young nuns at the tightly-run convent of Mother Superior (Mary Buss). The two are friends, and they both have terrible stories about their lives before they, separately, sought out this place–less, we think, from a desire to be wed to the Almighty than to find shelter from the sorrows of the big, wide world outside. One night, Agnes calls all of the other sisters “whores” over dinner while the table shakes and a coffee cup hovers around. Of course they strap her to her bed and call Rome, and of course Rome responds by sending an old/young priest pair in Father Donaghue (Ben Hall) and soon-to-be Father Ben (Jake Horowitz). Trouble is, Father Donaghue has been recently accused of being a pederast (a charge he has not denied), while Father Ben has just passed his coordination period as Deacon and is not nearly prepared enough to be in the company of an entire nunnery, much less perform an exorcism. They’re being set up for failure. Perhaps Father Donaghue dying during an exorcism will save the Bishop the trouble of transferring him to an unsuspecting diocese.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Introduction

August 10, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals

by Walter Chaw Fantasia Festival is special. Every time I cover it, I see something I love.

Into the Wildland: FFC Interviews Jeanette Nordahl

September 27, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Denmark, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Interviews

Jeanette Nordahl’s Wildland (a.k.a. Kød & blod) doesn’t feel like somebody’s directorial debut at all. Where so many first features are packed to the gills with every idea the director’s ever had for fear they’ll never get another opportunity to make a movie, this one is indicated by an extraordinary reserve, a sense that for as much as made it into the film, there was more left on the table. Its connective tissue is diaphanous and reliant on the experience the viewer brings to it. Some veteran filmmakers could stand to learn from this–that an active viewership is a state to which one should aspire in art, not actively avoid. Wildland is a mature piece done by a filmmaker with a gratifying faith in both herself and her audience.

Fantasia Festival ’20: The Five Rules of Success

September 1, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Thriller

***/****
starring Santiago Segura, Jonathan Howard, Isidora Goreshter, Roger Guenveur Smith
written and directed by Orson Oblowitz

by Walter Chaw X (Santiago Segura) is just out of jail, looking for a fresh start and finding an “essential” entry-level job in the service industry in the employ of restaurant owner Avakian (Jon Skarloff) instead. He cleans up, shows up, refuses drink and drugs, and does his best to steer clear of the malign influence of Avakian’s wayward kid, Danny (Jonathan Howard). Though he’s successful for a while, the system is wired for him to fail. His parole officer (Isidora Goreshter) is corrupt and opportunistic, sure, yet the real problem facing X is that this culture promises happiness in the form of material acquisition and public adulation and nowhere else. So X wants more and goes about getting it the way he’s been conditioned to: by any means necessary.

Fantasia Festival ’20: Wildland

August 30, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Denmark, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Thriller

Kød & blod
***½/****
starring Sidse Babett Knudsen, Sandra Guldberg Kampp, Elliott Crosset Hove, Besir Zeciri
written by Ingeborg Topsøe
directed by Jeanette Nordahl

by Walter Chaw Opening like a film from the New French Extremity, what with its phantom images of a deadly car accident set as a framing event for everything to follow, Danish director Jeanette Nordahl's Wildland (originally Kød & blod, or "flesh and blood") resolves as a domestic implosion in the vein of David Michôd's Animal Kingdom. The accident has claimed the mother of pretty, taciturn 17-year-old Ida (Sandra Guldberg Kampp), leaving her at the mercy of social services, who deem in their wisdom to place Ida with her Aunt Bodil (Sidse Babett Knudsen). Bodil has three grown sons who, at her direction, are involved in a criminal enterprise of sorts, and Wildland's MacGuffin is the collection of a debt from a recalcitrant client. What the game is is never terribly clear, but it's obvious that this is not an ideal environment for Ida following her recent trauma. Neither is it clear whether Ida was complicit in the fatal accident, though her dreams and fantasies–and the claustrophobic way Nordahl shoots her film in general (and Ida in particular) in long, unbroken closeups–certainly suggest Ida feels guilty about something. I don't mention these opacities as a detriment: far from it. Nordahl's picture isn't interested in the sundry details of its MacGuffins because they are MacGuffins.

Fantasia Festival ’20: Lucky

August 27, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

*½/****
starring Brea Grant, Hunter C. Smith, Yasmine Al-Bustami, Kristina Klebe
written by Brea Grant
directed by Natasha Kermani

by Walter Chaw When you make the subtext the text, you have text and no subtext. I’m uncomfortable saying that things like Natasha Kermani’s Lucky (from a script by star Brea Grant) are not good, because sometimes that’s taken as a comment on the text rather than the execution of the text. More often, and I’m not even sure this isn’t fair to say, it’s taken as evidence that men can only review films made by women as men would see films made by women. That’s literally true. When I watch something like Sophia Takal’s Black Christmas, the second reboot of Bob Clark’s seminal slasher, I’m starkly confronted by the divorce between what I’m watching and my knowledge of what its messages mean to so many. I think it’s imperative that women speak out about men and have the means to do so. That said, Black Christmas, the reboot of Rabid, and now Lucky move me only as intellectual exercises and not as calls to action. They’re rally speeches, not poetry. At least, they’re not poetry I can understand.

Fantasia Festival ’20: Fried Barry

August 25, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Sci-Fi, South Africa

***½/****
starring Gary Green, Chanelle De Jager, Bianka Hartenstein, Sean Cameron Michael
written and directed by Ryan Kruger

by Walter Chaw South African hyphenate Ryan Kruger’s debut Fried Barry is just really fucking delightful, an amalgamation of The Greasy Strangler and John McNaughton’s unfairly-forgotten The Borrower. The glue that seals the grimy, appalling parts together is, of all things, E.T.. It’s in that juncture between the obscene and the profound where Fried Barry finds its singular genius as a creature so foul that when it suddenly, briefly, becomes Save the Green Planet! but with the victim/protagonist/antihero the saviour of a group of girls held in a pedophile’s torture dungeon, what already defied description suddenly becomes… Is it art? At least it’s useful, cogent, maybe brilliant surrealism in that by turning into something familiar, all of the bizarreness racks into focus as a critique of the conventions of our popular entertainments. Why, for instance, is E.T., a film about an alien symbiote attached to a child nearly to the point of killing the child, so beloved a family classic? Look, you’re either with it, or you’re decidedly not. But if you’re in, so is Fried Barry. Oh, mate, Fried Barry is emphatically in.

Fantasia Festival ’20: Crazy Samurai Musashi

August 24, 20202020, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Japan

*/****
starring Tak Sakaguchi, Kento Yamazaki
written by Sion Sono
directed by Yuji Shimomura

by Walter Chaw I’m going to be indelicate here in a second; I hope you’ll bear with me. It isn’t when I say that Yuji Shimomura’s Crazy Samurai Musashi is terrible, but when I say that Crazy Samurai Musashi is terrible like those world-record-setting gangbang pornos are terrible. It’s tedious, repetitive, boring almost immediately, and its only purpose as a venal spectacle demeans the participants as it eventually demeans the viewer. When an act is repeated until ground into a quintessence of dust, the act, whatever the act, is demystified utterly. I get it: sex is literally just mechanical pistoning. I would stop short of saying Crazy Samurai Musashi is exploitative in the same way, though it’s perhaps exploitative in maybe not so different a way as you would think. The draw of it is to present, as the bulk of a 90-minute feature, a 77-minute “one take” action sequence featuring legendary swordsman Miyamoto Musashi (Tak Sakaguchi) murdering 488 not-legendary swordsmen in the middle of one of those Japanese woods where things like this happen in their 17^th-century video game way. That sounds amazing, doesn’t it? It does. A lot of things sound amazing. Very few of them are amazing in practice.