Film Festivals Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

SDAFF ’24: Viet and Nam

November 26, 2024****/****, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Philippines, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Singapore, Vietnam

Trong lòng đất
****/****
starring Phạm Thanh Hải, Đào Duy Bảo Định, Nguyễn Thị Nga, Lê Viết Tụng
written and directed by Trương Minh Quý

by Walter Chaw They find one another in the earth and the pitch black more by instinct, I think, than by feeling. Like animals born in the dark and orienting themselves towards heat. We are all born in the dark, guided by need and the mysterious vicissitudes of subterranean rivers and tides. Because Truong Minh Quy’s Viet and Nam is a love story, it’s first about lovers meeting and then about how their identities flow into each other like mercury, in constant flux and only ever itself. When Viet (Dao Duy Bao Dinh) and Nam (Pham Thanh Hai) are twined together, there’s a memory of wholeness they represent–a solidity their country has never really enjoyed, annexed and colonized as it has been since its inception. They are a memory of something that never was, a dream of completion. In the credits, they’re listed as “Viet/Nam,” and over the days we spend with them, they try to uproot themselves from the trauma and division of the ground that grew them. But disconnecting yourself from the place that is your history and culture is like learning to fly by lifting yourself in defiance of gravity.

SDAFF ’24: Love Lies + Dead Talents Society

November 20, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, Horror, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Taiwan

LOVE LIES
我談的那場戀愛
*/****
starring Sandra Ng, Cheung Tin Fu, Stephy Tang
written by Hing-Ka Chan, Miu-Kei Ho
directed by Miu-Kei Ho

DEAD TALENTS SOCIETY
鬼才之道
*/****
starring Chen Bo-lin, Gingle Wang, Sandrine Pinna
written by John Hsu, Kun-Lin Tsai
directed by John Hsu

by Walter Chaw I want to grant that comedy is difficult to translate. But it’s not impossible–there are enough examples to the contrary to make this a specious argument–so I’m willing to give Hong Kong film Love Lies and Taiwan’s Dead Talents Society the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they play better in their native cultures and tongues. Maybe they’re better with an audience–some films are, you know. Or maybe not. Maybe this middlebrow, low-aspiring, derivative dreck receives the same kind of derision everywhere and we’re not so different after all. It’s not a matter of cultural superiority, mind; in suggesting the delicacies of humour can be lost in translation, I’m not saying that Chinese people are incapable of detecting garbage when presented with it. I have to tell you, though, that both of these films are multiple nominees at this year’s Golden Horse Awards (frickin 11 for Dead Talents Society by itself)–our cultures are not so far apart when it comes to giving out movie awards. I’ll also acknowledge some personal bias in reviewing Asian pictures: a toxic brew of barely understood self-loathing and the deep-rooted desire not to be lumped in with behaviours that could be coded as racially humiliating or even, at times, identifying. It’s like using the word “honoured” around white people: I try not to do it. This is a long way of saying Love Lies and Dead Talents Society are technically well-made films that vibrate at frequencies I can, incongruously, neither hear nor tolerate. Your mileage may vary.

SDAFF ’24: Bitterroot

November 15, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival

***½/****
starring Wa Yang, Qu Kue, April Charlo, Gia Vang
written and directed by Vera Brunner-Sung

by Walter Chaw Vera Brunner-Sung’s Bitterroot opens with an epigraph in Hmong: “Please come back to your house spirits and no longer experience pain and sickness come as pure as water and as green as the forest,” it says, with the cadence and intimation of Yeats’s invocation to his peculiar muse in The Stolen Child. (“Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild/With a faery, hand in hand,/For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”) The one is a plea for a child’s conditional homecoming, cured in the fire of experience and returned somehow to the state of purity the home and the hearth represent. The other is an invitation to oblivion, a rejection of experience into a state of perpetual ignorance–the promise of Eden as a malignant choice (more trick than choice, ultimately) between sentience and non-sentience. In both, there’s an irreducible tangle in the concept of home. Home is either where you are clean or where you learn you are not. I think it’s a matter for the individual to decide if it’s better to live knowing you will die and whether anyone will know you’ve come home after some time in the world.

SDAFF ’24: A Traveler’s Needs + By the Stream

November 13, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

A TRAVELER’S NEEDS
여행자의 필요
**/****
starring Isabelle Huppert, Kwon Haehyo, Lee Hyeyoung
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo

BY THE STREAM
수유천
**½/****
starring Kim Minhee, Kwon Haehyo, Cho Yunhee
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo

by Walter Chaw At this point, it’s not that one watches a Hong Sang-soo joint so much as one sits with it companionably, like a chaperoned Victorian date, a slightly alcoholic drink in hand to lubricate the passage of unpredictable chunks of awkward chit-chat. Free of exposition or any narrative of consequence, his stuff is just suggestions of hints of scenarios given to his cast of regulars; then Master Hong sits back to watch how the various elements fall into place. There’s occasional magic among the literal obfuscations (one of his 2023 films, In Water, was shot entirely out of focus on purpose), those tiny sparks between people that define human attraction and other sundry frictions. You’re paying such close attention that a hitch of breath or glint in the eye can feel like revolutionary insight. More, you’re so desperate for meaning that you will attach it to gossamer inference, a will-o-the-wisp made of listlessness and… Is it boredom? It’s not free of boredom.

TIFF ’24: Conclave + Emilia Pérez

September 20, 20242024, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Crime, Film Festivals, France, Musical, Thriller, TIFF, UK

CONCLAVE
**/****
starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini
screenplay by Peter Straughan, based on the novel by Robert Harris
directed by Edward Berger

EMILIA PÉREZ
*/****
starring Karla Sofía Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz
written and directed by Jacques Audiard

by Angelo Muredda Knives Out at the Vatican: That’s the basic elevator pitch for Edward Berger’s Conclave, which follows the politically loaded secret process to elect a new Pope following the death of his predecessor under shadowy circumstances. Adapted by Peter Straughan from Robert Harris’s novel of the same name, Berger’s follow-up to the very serious and very loud All Quiet on the Western Front promises a frothier, pulpier good time, and for a while, it delivers one, having some fun with its cloistered setting of hushed hallway meetings, its colourful cast of red-draped snippy cardinals, and its tight 72-hour timeframe, where anything seems possible. Before long, though, Conclave begins to sag under the weight of its pretension to justify the effortful production design (including an ambitiously but pointlessly recreated Sistine Chapel), overwrought musical and editing flourishes, and fraught setting, and to say something–anything, really–about current affairs: gender diversity in the Church, the war between nativism and pluralism, you name it.

TIFF ’24: Young Werther + Friendship

September 18, 20242024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

YOUNG WERTHER
*/****
starring Douglas Booth, Alison Pill, Iris Apatow, Patrick J. Adams
screenplay by José Lourenço, based on the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang Goethe
directed by José Lourenço

FRIENDSHIP
**½/****
starring Tim Robinson, Paul Rudd, Kate Mara, Jack Dylan Grazer
written and directed by Andrew DeYoung

by Bill Chambers Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s 1774 semi-autobiographical novel The Sorrows of Young Werther made Goethe a global literary sensation practically overnight. José Lourenço’s Young Werther dares to poke a hole in the fourth wall by splashing this factoid across the screen in introductory text, comparing the book’s impact to that of Beatlemania. It’s certainly a choice, explaining the success of The Sorrows of Young Werther as if today’s audiences have no sense of history while simultaneously drawing an analogy to a fad from the ’60s. A more current reference would, I suppose, throw off the film’s Luddite chic. This is a modern-dress adaptation, yes, but there’s a strong whiff of Wes Anderson in how it translates the novel’s epistolary form into a fondness for the quaint and the bespoke (those opening titles are presented with filigreed borders, silent-movie style)–not to mention the picture’s formalist approach to shot design, which at least gives Young Werther more visual élan than one expects of a Crave Original. Citing the book’s fame at all, though: what’s the point? It feels like insecurity at best, overpromising at worst. Can you tell I didn’t care for Young Werther? It’s just so in love with itself that I felt like a third wheel.

TIFF ’24: Megalopolis + Oh, Canada

September 17, 20242024, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Directors: Paul Schrader, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Israel, Sci-Fi, TIFF

MEGALOPOLIS
***/****
starring Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf
written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola

Oh Canada
***/****
starring Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Jacob Elordi, Michael Imperioli
written by Paul Schrader, based on the novel Foregone by Russell Banks
directed by Paul Schrader

by Angelo Muredda Here at last is Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s long-delayed, triple-XL-sized work of utopian science-fiction, in development since the late 1970s and emerging nearly 50 years later not as the mid-career capstone once intended, but as a kind of valedictory address on the importance of family and the timelessness of unrestrained baroque aesthetics. Funded at last by 120 million dollars worth of the filmmaker’s stake in his winery (presumably diminishing the future inheritance of several Coppola cast members in the process), the film is impossible to divorce from its outsized origin story. The making of Megalopolis is allegorized in a pleasantly goofy way in its fable of an uncompromising and misunderstood architect named Cesar (Adam Driver), whose radical vision of the titular hypothetical city, rising from the decadent rubble of the downtrodden New Rome, clashes with the more conservative urban planning of his arch-nemesis mayor, Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). The war between the two men for what will become of New Rome, mediated by yellow journalists like Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), decrepit financiers like Cesar’s uncle Cassius (Jon Voight), snivelling populist politicians like Cesar’s spiteful cousin Clodio (Shia LaBeouf), and Cicero’s dilettante socialist daughter–and Cesar’s eventual lover–Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), becomes a proxy battle for what’s to come of the human race: stasis and tedium or dynamic big swings. The future, Coppola suggests, is an unknown country that we may be so lucky to dwell in: It can either give in to conservative values about the status quo and fall into permanent decline, or welcome with open arms the next generation, in the form of Cesar and Julia’s child–not to mention films like Megalopolis, ostensibly a proof of concept that bold ways of seeing and doing are worth the investment.

TIFF ’24: The Substance

September 15, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, TIFF, UK

***/****
starring Margaret Qualley, Demi Moore, Dennis Quaid, Hugo Diego Garcia
written and directed by Coralie Fargeat

by Walter Chaw Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance starts as David Cronenberg’s The Star before transitioning into Frank Henenlotter’s Black Swan. Toss in a pinch of Paul Verhoeven as well. Yet even at that, the picture suffers not for a lack of conviction but for a lack of breadth. The Substance carries a message warranting righteousness, no doubt, lamenting how women, especially in Hollywood, are valued for their sexuality and little else and how this trope eventually metastasizes within the victim as self-hatred and self-harm. But once eloquently expressed in the first (mesmerizing) 20 minutes, The Substance, in its dedicated mashing of its single outrage button, misses a few opportunities to broaden its scope, losing sight of its high concept. At least with Revenge, Fargeat’s straight-line rape-revenge flick (which ends with the pulverizing shotgunning of one antagonist’s scrotum), there’s no elaborate pretense it will engage in a broader dissection of male sexual violence. Its eventual bloodbath is less liberating and uncompromising than it is a shrine to the tradition forged by genre predecessors like I Spit on Your Grave and Ms. 45. Fargeat seems like a genuinely gifted filmmaker with a sense of humour skating on the outer edges of good taste. She wears her influences on her sleeve. She is, in other words, awesome, but her films so far are largely just slick celebrations of her Letterboxd favourites.

TIFF ’24: The Shrouds

September 15, 20242024, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Directors: David Cronenberg, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Sci-Fi, Thriller, TIFF

***½/****
starring Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt
written and directed by David Cronenberg

by Angelo Muredda David Cronenberg is no stranger to illness and death, from the synchronized degeneration of the Mantle twins in Dead Ringers to the sickly corporeal canvas of performance artist Saul in Crimes of the Future. But the aftermath of death has never felt more personal than in The Shrouds, where the filmmaker plants his most explicit authorial doppelgänger in Vincent Cassell’s Karsh, a cryptically described “producer of industrial videos” who shares Cronenberg’s career interest in the body, his trim white hair, his puckish sense of humour, and his grief, which is so palpable it’s rotting his teeth. Made in the aftermath of his wife’s long-term illness and 2017 death, The Shrouds isn’t Cronenberg’s elegy for the dead so much as an exquisitely sad and bitterly funny reflection on the desperate, illogical, unfulfilled ways the people they leave behind–in this case, a filmmaker with a fixation on his deceased wife’s body–mourn them.

TIFF ’24: Anora

September 14, 20242024, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Palme d'Or Winner, Romance, TIFF

***½/****
starring Mikey Madison, Yura Borisov, Ivy Wolk, Karren Karagulian
written and directed by Sean Baker

By Angelo Muredda Early in the second act of Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winning Anora, Toros (Baker staple Karren Karagulian), a rumpled Armenian fixer arriving on the scene of what ought to be a straightforward extraction job, notices the broken glass and smashed furnishings before him, and asks what happened. Baker’s camera follows Toros’s perspective as he takes in the fruits of the expertly crafted, lengthy screwball set-piece preceding his arrival, with the grim visual punchline of a young woman bound with a phone wire, gagged with a scarf, and propped up on one of his colleagues’ laps. The joke, at the expense of his ignorance and our knowledge of eponymous heroine Ani (Mikey Madison), the bound woman, is that the bulk of the damage hasn’t been done by his meathead colleagues but by her, in a feral act of self-defense that falls somewhere between the survival tactics of Road Runner and Kevin McAllister.

TIFF ’24: Aberdeen + Seeds

September 11, 20242024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF

ABERDEEN
**/****
starring Gail Maurice, Billy Merasty, Liam Stewart-Kanigan, Jennifer Podemski
written and directed by Ryan Cooper and Eva Thomas

SEEDS
***/****
starring Kaniehtiio Horn, Patrick Garrow, Dylan Cook, Graham Greene
written and directed by Kaniehtiio Horn

by Bill Chambers It opens on a manipulative but striking juxtaposition. A First Nations girl, Aberdeen (Ashlyn Cote-Squire), and her little brother Boyd (Lucas Schacht) go fishing with their grandparents at a lake–a sun-dappled tableau that fades out on young Aberdeen’s bright smile and fades back in to find middle-aged Aberdeen (Gail Maurice) passed out on a bench, being kicked awake by the turtleneck Gestapo on park patrol. Across town, Boyd (Ryan R. Black) is at the doctor, receiving the devastating news that he’s terminally ill. As he’s taking this in, his phone rings: could he come get his big sis out of jail? There’s an implied “this time” when the police inform Boyd that Aberdeen’s lucky they’re not pressing criminal charges, but Boyd, espying a Bible on the officer’s desk, appeals to the man’s religious convictions (and gambles on his latent racism) in blaming her actions on a “beer demon,” saying he’s been trying to get her to church. The Indigenous people we meet in Aberdeen have to be nimble code-switchers to navigate the world, and that’s something our proud, mercurial heroine steadfastly isn’t. She’s all out of fucks to give–that is, until Boyd informs her of his cancer, which has forced him to place her grandchildren, who became Aberdeen’s responsibility after her drug-addicted daughter ran away (and then Boyd’s when flooding left Aberdeen unhoused), in foster care. With a white family, no less, something “Abby” resents more than Boyd, who was raised in a white home, apart from his sister. For Aberdeen, it feels like nothing is ours and everything is theirs. What follows is a Dardennes-ian narrative in which an anxious Abby attempts to clean up her act faster than the ticker of red tape will allow.

TIFF ’24: The Room Next Door

September 10, 20242024, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, Spain, TIFF

***/****
starring Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, John Turturro, Alessandro Nivola
written by Pedro Almodóvar, based on the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez
directed Pedro Almodóvar

By Angelo Muredda Nobody dresses a set quite like Pedro Almodóvar. The tasteful, colour-coordinated accoutrements of a bourgeois life well-lived–elegant throw pillows and couches, the right Pantone mug and the perfect bookshelf, beautifully draped and brightly saturated garments–have lent his later films an air of aloof, upper-middle-class refinement at odds with the sexual frankness and messy spectrum of human emotions that were once his stock-in-trade. But in his latest, The Room Next Door, the tastefulness that sometimes feels like a late-style diversion from his singular traits as an artist is the point, an expression of his protagonists’ moral imperative to surround themselves with beautiful things to face the end of life with dignity.

TIFF ’24: The Brutalist

September 9, 2024Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, TIFF, UK

**½/****
starring Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Alessandro Nivola
written by Brady Corbet & Mona Fastvold
directed by Brady Corbet

by Angelo Muredda “I’m not what I expected, either,” Hungarian-Jewish architect Laszlo Toth tells the first of many resentful hosts he’ll encounter in his new land early in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, a super-sized historical epic that, despite its flashy, roguish presentation, tells a fairly old-fashioned story of capitalism funding, then strangling, art, interwoven with a fable about the ethnic roots of American innovation dying in a soil poisoned by white supremacy. It’s a good line, ably delivered by Adrien Brody in a nimble performance that flits from the depths of prostration to the confident delivery of treatises on the utility of brutalist architecture. Like a number of the film’s pronouncements concerning the titular artist (whose name, as fictionalized art-world stars go, is at least as good as Lydia Tár’s, evoking the Australian geologist who took a hammer to Michelangelo’s Pietà in 1972), it’s also a thematic tease. Protracted in length but paced like it’s in a hurry to get someplace, The Brutalist is prone to such dashed-off expositional asides about the self-alienation that ostensibly drives its protagonist, who would otherwise remain something of a cipher apart from his strong feelings on the literal and figurative endurance of concrete.

TIFF ’24: Paying for It

September 6, 20242024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Film Festivals, TIFF

**/****
starring Dan Beirne, Emily Lê, Andrea Werhun, Noah Lamanna
written by Sook-Yin Lee, Joanne Sarazen, based on the graphic novel by Chester Brown
directed by Sook-Yin Lee

by Bill Chambers Paying for It director Sook-Yin Lee is the ex-girlfriend of Toronto cartoonist Chester Brown. They broke up in the late ’90s when Lee fell in love with another man but continued living together. Overhearing the petty squabbles between Lee and his replacement, Chester gained a new appreciation for bachelorhood and swore off romantic relationships for good. To satisfy his sexual needs, he began to frequent prostitutes and, over the next few years, amassed enough material for a graphic novel. Part confessional memoir, part manifesto arguing for the decriminalization of prostitution, Paying for It was published in 2011 with an introduction by the king of porny cartoons himself, R. Crumb, who describes Brown as “a real connoisseur in the world of professional sex workers.” Now Lee has adapted the, er, fruits of Brown’s labour for the screen–which is quite the lede in itself (Woman Makes Movie of Ex’s Autobiography), but she also accounts for her whereabouts during Chester’s misadventures, fleshing out her ghostly appearances on the page into a full-blown character arc. Women have been consigned to the fringes of so many biopics that an artist’s former lover hacking into his autobiography feels nothing short of radically feminist. It’s also something of a tonic, as the book’s blunt assessments of the ladies Brown solicits can read as casual misogyny.

Fantasia Festival ’24: Cuckoo

August 2, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

**/****
starring Hunter Schafer, Dan Stevens, Jessica Henwick, Márton Csókás
written and directed by Tilman Singer

by Walter Chaw For the most part, Cuckoo is the species of movie people who don’t like Yorgos Lanthimos accuse Yorgos Lanthimos of making. It’s a deadpan, mordant, deeply affected comedy of bad manners that distills human interactions to their component, lizard parts. In Cuckoo, marriage is merely a state-sanctioned reproductive arrangement designed to secure the reproductive potential of women; children are evolutionary guinea pigs for rogue geneticists; and love is a label for a biological reaction rather than a spiritual one. The picture’s main selling point, and what lends it depth, is star Hunter Schafer, fresh from HBO’s “Euphoria” and, from what I can tell, a capable and empathetic actor. But what serves this film particularly, perhaps cynically, is her identity as a prominent transgender activist. For me, a horror/sci-fi flick about a kind of human/cuckoo bird hybrid that, with the help of a secret cabal of mad scientists, implants their fetuses in the womb of unsuspecting hosts, is primed to be read as a trans parable. Being born in the wrong body? Feeling alien in one’s skin? Ostracized by family and dependent on doctors? I get it. Indeed, even in an age in which a woman’s reproductive choice is up for grabs again in the United States, seeing Cuckoo as a metaphor for the trans experience is the only way I could read it. I’m still trying to parse whether that’s to its benefit–because it gives it purposeful subtext–or an unfortunate distraction too unsubtle to be subtext, thus making the film feel didactic at best and like an exploitative vanity project at worst. Probably, it’s a “me” problem.

Fantasia Festival ’24: The Silent Planet

August 1, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/****
starring Elias Koteas, Briana Middleton
written and directed by Jeffrey St. Jules

by Walter Chaw Jeffrey St. Jules’s The Silent Planet, despite a small detail about hypoxia, doesn’t appear to be the long-awaited franchise adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s “Space Trilogy.” Rather, it occupies a space with Duncan Jones’s Moon, Walter Hill’s Supernova, David Fincher’s Alien³, and especially Jack Smight’s “Twilight Zone” episode “The Lonely,” in which poor James A. Corey (Jack Warden), a murderer sentenced to solitary confinement on a remote asteroid, is suddenly given a mysterious female companion (Jean Marsh) to ease the horror of his days. The aging murderer sentenced to Life in The Silent Planet is Theodore (Elias Koteas). Terminally ill and convinced that “alien gas” is making him revisit unpleasant episodes from his past, he carves out the monitoring device embedded in his chest, triggering an automated system to presume him dead and ship out his replacement: convicted terrorist Niyya (Briana Middleton). Niyya, orphaned as a child and raised by an alien race called the “Oieans” (who look vaguely like how C.S. Lewis described his pfifltriggi–but again, the film is not based on his Out of the Silent Planet), is understandably embittered about the human government sanctioning the oppression and genocide of her adopted people. Resigned to her fate, she’s unhappy to learn she’s sharing her interstellar oubliette with some nutsy old dude who’s clearly Going Through Something.

Fantasia Festival ’24: A Samurai in Time

July 31, 20242024, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Japan, Time Travel

***/****
starring Makiya Yamaguchi, Norimasa Fuke, Rantaro Mine, Yuno Sakura
written and directed by Junichi Yasuda

by Walter Chaw Jun-ichi Yasuda’s A Samurai in Time is a lightweight, nostalgia-streaked, deceptively sad little flick in which a bedraggled Edo-period samurai named Kosaka Shinzaemon (Makiya Yamaguchi) finds himself, at the moment of his most meaningful duel against the evil Kyoichiro Kazami (Ken Shonozaki), finds himself transported to the present and mistaken for an extra on a samurai television show. Guided by old-world decorum and generally astonished as a fish-out-of-water, he falls under the kind auspices of script supervisor Yuko (Yuno Sakura), who takes him under her wing and helps him get progressively better roles as the sort of fight extra–a kiraeyaku–who “gets slashed” in jidaigeki productions like hers. A Samurai in Time doesn’t break any new ground, but it trods those worn boards with a spring in its step. I loved a moment where Kosaka tastes a little dessert and, in horror, asks if they made a mistake giving it to someone as lowly as he. When told that anyone has a right to eat such miracles in modern Japan, he weeps and declares his relief that a country he left in war and on the brink of collapse would become such a generous, egalitarian society as to treat all its citizens, from top to bottom, as royalty. I appreciate science-fiction that’s aspirational rather than apocalyptic. It’s hard to see sometimes how far we’ve come.

Fantasia Festival ’24: Kryptic; The Beast Within; Vulcanizadora; Animalia Paradoxa

July 30, 2024****/****, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Chile, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller, UK, Werewolf

KRYPTIC
*½/****
starring Chloe Pirrie, Jeff Gladstone, Jason Deline, Ali Rusu-Tahir
written by Paul Bromley
directed by Kourtney Roy

THE BEAST WITHIN
*/****
starring James Cosmo, Ashleigh Cummings, Kit Harington, Caoilinn Springall
written by Greer Ellison & Alexander J. Farrell
directed by Alexander J. Farrell

VULCANIZADORA
***½/****
starring Melissa Blanchard, Joshua Burge, Joel Potrykus, Solo Potrykus
written and directed by Joel Potrykus

ANIMALIA PARADOXA
****/****
starring Andrea Gomez, Daniela Ossa, Javiera Reyes, Hormazábal Rocío
written and directed by Niles Atallah

by Walter Chaw The problem with Kourtney Roy’s Kryptic is that its subtext is text. It’s well-shot, well-performed, even has some nice Yuzna-esque goop effects, but it’s so didactic that all that hardly matters. When the message becomes exposition, it indicates a lack of faith in both the audience and the material. I’m as tired of writing about this as you are of reading about it, I’m sure, and I must confess it takes a lot out of me nowadays to finish films like this, however well-made and however promising its director might be, should they ever get out of their own way. Kryptic would be less frustrating if it weren’t so good in so many ways. It opens with shy, socially anxious Kay (Chloe Pirrie) on her drive to a guided cryptid hike, repeating positive affirmations to buck herself up for meeting new people and maybe making new friends. In the woods, she strays from the group and encounters the terrifying Sooka (glimpsed only in flashes), sending her into a fugue state wherein she forgets who she is and what she does. “I’m a dentist?” she asks. “I’m a veterinarian?” Most likely, she’s a cryptozoologist named “Barb” who has been missing in these woods for some time. Also likely is that Barb went missing because she was fleeing her abusive husband, Morgan (Jeff Gladstone).

Fantasia Festival ’24: The Dead Thing

July 27, 2024Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror

***/****
starring Blu Hunt, Ben Smith-Petersen, John Karna, Katherine Hughes
written by Webb Wilcoxen and Elric Kane
directed by Elric Kane

by Walter Chaw There’s a scene in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse where one of the last surviving citizens of an apocalyptic Tokyo stumbles into a forbidden room–the sort of room Tarkovsky locates in his wastelands now and again–and meets a phantom who tells him that death is “eternal loneliness.” The Internet has become the kind of trap divers warn about: a technological rapture of the deep that presents a sanctuary for the wayward spirit, the parts in everyone that are lost, never mind that there’s no air in there and the pressures of continuing to exist as a version of yourself are obliterating. Elric Kane’s The Dead Thing has similar thoughts on its mind, 23 years down the electric road from Pulse (a gap which, if measured in terms of gadget generations, may as well be millennia ago), in considering what happens to the soul when courtship and physical touch is primarily, if not exclusively, mediated through viewscreens and algorithms. The Dead Thing wonders what would happen if you invested so much of yourself into an electronic web that when you died, an echo of you lived there forever. I mean, is that even science-fiction? It’s a good ghost story, in other words, but it’s an even better spiritual piece about the nature of eternity.

Fantasia Festival ’24: The Soul Eater

July 25, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Crime, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Thriller

Mangeur d’Âmes
*½/****
starring Virginie Ledoyen, Sandrine Bonnaire, Paul Hamy, Cameron Bain
written by Annelyse Batrel, Ludovic Lefebvre
directed by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo

by Walter Chaw Alexander Bustillo and Julien Maury’s first film, 2007’s Inside, is a prominent member of the brief but incandescent French New Extremity movement, and so fucking good it reverberates still, 17 years later, showing up in the fetus reaction shots of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part Two and contributing to the slight feeling of dread I’ve come to feel about changing lightbulbs and getting into fender-benders. Inside‘s stylishness, lawlessness, and formal gamesmanship left such a mark on me that I found an all-region release of Bustillo and Maury’s follow-up, Livid, before it secured an American release and did the same thing again with Among the Living. Neither was as good as Inside, but both were slick enough to suggest there might be more live rounds in the barrel. I was thrilled when they landed a prequel to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Leatherface, and disappointed when it failed to push any boundaries–a running theme, as it turns out, for their follow-ups: the monster film Kandisha and the underwater haunted-house flick The Deep House. They’re still promising filmmakers, but after setting the world on fire, their work has lacked danger and urgency.