Stuff I saw at this year's Fantasia Film Festival (Hong Kong viewings
here), listed in order of preference.
Great:
Steppenwolf (Adilkhan Yerzhanov): The best film I saw at the festival, an homage to
The Searchers by way of
Mad Max that I'm sure alienated as many viewers as it compelled. It's a horribly violent, beautifully photographed, absurdly humorous road film about a violent former police officer and a mentally challenged/neurodivergent/deeply traumatized woman searching for the woman's lost child in a post-apocalyptic Kazakhstan. Not to be missed. How such brutal wastelands could look so beautiful, I don't know.
Electrophilia (Lucía Puenzo): a woman wakes from a 6-week coma to learn she'd been struck by lightning, indeed marked by the electricity in the form of snaking scars. What follows is a disturbing, erotic, violent journey that usually avoids melodrama or suspense in favour of an floating, almost trancelike atmosphere. For anyone like me who enjoys movies about broken women exploring the edges of their fractured psyches.
Good:
The Silent Planet (Jeffrey St. Jules): a beautifully acted and emotional movie about two prisoners trapped on an empty penal colony on a far away planet, and how they negotiate their loneliness, guilt, and trauma. There is a large amount of world-building for such an intimate movie, all of it necessary context. Also: keep an open mind during the third act. The film appears to stumble before recovering beautifully. This might be Elias Koteas' best performance.
Darkest Miriam (Naomi Jaye): a broken, internalized woman working at a Toronto library has a number of fragmentary experiences that link past and present. It's a fun, sweet, dark romantic comedy told in a somewhat fragmentary style to match the fragmentary novel it was adapted from.
The Chapel (Carlota Pereda): The ghost story plot had a lame resolution, but this is all about the child actress, a brilliant and precocious Maia Zaitegi, and her interactions with the jaded, caustic woman who has to deal with her. A movie where the able horror elements are just trappings for the excellent character writing.
Animalia Paradoxa (Niles Atallah): An experimental, heavily symbolic story of an inexplicable post-apocalyptic world told in a mix of mediums, from live action, to stop motion, to marionettes. The story is not told conventionally; there is little in the way of context to help decipher the strange rituals and behaviours. A must for fans of experimental, demanding cinema, even if the movie doesn't quite sustain its 80 minute run time.
Fine:
The Tenants (Yoon Eun-Gyeong): The ending kinda ruined a very good anti-capitalist allegory. A Korean salaryman on the cusp of being renovicted exploits a loophole that allows him to rent out part of his one-room apartment to other tenants, only to find himself shackled to a pair of weirdos who choose to live in his bathroom. A lot to like here, just without the ambition to give its conceits that extra push they need.
Parvulos (Isaac Ezban): Again, lots to like here, including the goofy humour that'll no doubt put off a lot of viewers but which I thought was welcome and novel. The choice to desaturate the footage nearly to the point of black and white robbed the film of its visual interest, I thought, and while the film did a lot with its premise initially (a South American family living in the aftermath of some disaster has to care for a monster chained in its basement), it eventually tired of its own inventiveness and settled for a conventional third act. Also, the film's reveal will be obvious to anyone paying attention even a little. A somewhat unsatisfying film with a lot going for it.
Cockfighter (Monte Hellman): A screening of a restored print for its 50th anniversary (indeed screened on the exact day of its premiere, 50 years later). Kier-La Janisse was on hand to introduce it, and her passion for this weird movie made me wish I liked it more. I thought it was lax and sloppy. There was plenty of I guess documentary interest in its portrait of this subculture, with its own rules, rituals, and ethos, and the performances were across the board great, especially a Warren Oates who proves he could've been a brilliant silent film actor if needed. But the drifting, unstructured narrative (this is technically a sports movie, tho' you can't tell how or why the winner of the championship manages to be the winner) and endless animal abuse got in the way of my enjoyment.
In Our Blood (Pedro Kos): The gimmick here is that veteran documentary filmmakers have tried their hand at a found footage horror about documentarians. A young woman returns to her hometown to reconnect with her mother, now clean after decades of substance abuse, and chooses to film the return as part of a documentary. Her mother disappears after their first night together, and the woman and her cameraman/boyfriend are drawn into something sinister. The strongest part is the acting, the understanding of the ins and outs of documentary filmmaking, and the location shooting in New Mexico among homeless people and recovering addicts. But the horror elements generate little suspense, and the reveal is incoherent if you think about it.
Bad:
The Beast Within (Alexander J. Farrell): a fellow festival goer had a good summary, to the effect that he expected a good movie with a bad Kit Harrington performance and ended getting the opposite. This is not a good movie. It looks bad, its story is trite, and the filmmakers don't have the skills or sensitivity to pull off using werewolves as a metaphor for abusive relationships. To be avoided.