Fantasia 2024 in Theaters This Weekend: Cuckoo, Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, and Oddity

"Cuckoo Walled-in Oddity" feels like it's kind of a horror premise of its own, right?

Anyway, as I'm sort of running behind on what started out as "Fantasia Daily" posts back in '05 (and have been since Day 4), I'm going to try to not let regular releases get too far ahead of me. I often don't really have to worry about it - I'll mostly try and avoid things that I'll have a chance to get to in regular theaters - but Cuckoo played against a streaming series that would have a second screening and felt appropriate to see at the festival because I was part of the crowd that got gobsmacked by Tilman Singer's student film six years ago; Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In was up against a set of shorts that I figured i could do without (and Hong Kong films, even those filled with stars, can be more hit-and-miss about getting a release in Boston); and Oddity... Well, Oddity came and went in Boston during the festival's first week, so this was actually the chance I had to see it on the big screen.

They are all pretty dang good; you can have a good time in Boston theaters (or theaters elsewhere, obviously) this weekend, and for all I know Oddity will be hitting SVOD around the same time.


Cuckoo

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

Tilman Singer just absolutely goes for it in his first post-student film, which feels like someone taking a case that Quatermas might have been involved in back in the day, going spook-a-blast on it, and dropping a thoroughly overwhelmed teenager in the middle. Just a big, loud, science-fictional take on something that seems like it belongs in the domain of slow-burn folk horror.

I kind of love it.

After establishing its weird bona fides, it introduces us to Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), pointedly riding with the movers in a van rather than her father Luis (Marton Csókás), stepmother Beth (Jessica Henwick), and half-sister Alma (Mila Lieu), who is mute though not deaf, as they take up residence in a unit provided by Herr König (Dan Stevens) on his Bavarian resort property as Luis oversees an expansion. Gretchen would really prefer to be home with her mother, friends, and band, but that's not possible, and while König offers her a job working at the hotel, he's also insistent she not try to bike home at night. She draws the attention of a couple of guests - Ed (Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey), who floats the idea of the two ladies running off to Paris together, and Henry (Jan Bluthardt), a cop who says there definitely is something screwy going on with König and Dr. Bonomo (Proschat Madani), who operates a nearby clinic, and looks for Gretchen's help.

Like Singer's remarkable student film Luz, Cuckoo takes place in an isolating but still contemporary location, where even the people under the sway of something apparently paranormal are still modern and thinking in such terms. For Singer and his young heroines, the dangers in the world outside one's normal field of view may have deep roots but the ways they are monstrous are familiar: König is a developer who thinks himself a philanthropist, and there's not necessarily anything else behind that particular sort of ego, which is perfectly capable of doing catastrophic damage on its own. When Gretchen and her new allies are attacked, it's more a sort of sensory overload/déjà vu that knocks them off balance enough that they sustain conventional injuries rather than mysterious scars, and if Henry fills the void of the mysterious monster hunter, he's also basically a cop with guns. There are secrets to be uncovered, of course, and they're not just normal creepy-men things, but weird in the way the natural world can be weird and dangerous.

What's maybe most impressive is that Singer often has this simmering while the difficult relationship the Gretchen has with her father and his new family is in the foreground, circling back around a week later, a lot of the most memorable scenes involve her forlorn calls to her mother's answering machine and how Alma clearly adores her big sister despite Gretchen's resentment. It's so much the movie that the extremely impressive job Singer does in the last act of making the weird thing going on clear is kind of amazing: He's got to get a lot of explanations out in the middle of a great deal of action. It's screwy as heck, but audiences who came in expecting a normal horror movie are going to come out knowing what its deal is rather than shrugging and saying "that was, uh, something".

It's also fun to watch Hunter Schafer and Dan Stevens run with it. Singer never calls for them to be subtle, so Schafer is wearing her character's heart on her sleeve the whole time while also being a moody teenager who slacks off at work and spending much of the movie having to pull off various injuries. Stevens, meanwhile, is smirkingly manic that the energy level jumps every time he enters a scene, giving off this charisma that doesn't lessen how he's all kinds of dangerous.. Others get in on the act later, and by the time the finale is going, everyone is sort of in overdrive but approaching the chaos from a clear direction.

By the time it's over, Singer has thrown a lot at the audience, from crazy camera angles and oddball music choices, people who are very much not combat-trained trying to extricate themselves from shootouts, and revelations that say they take the title "Cuckoo" seriously in every way they can. It's a blast of modern action-horror that's fun in large part because it's so contemporary.


Jiu Long cheng zhai · Wei cheng (Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

After a trilogy of Monkey King films amiable for their ambition but a mixed bag (to say the least) in their execution, "Soi" Cheung Pou-Soi made a hard shift, directing two contemporary crime films whose vision veered more to the dystopian than the mythic in Limbo and Mad Fate. He doesn't exactly split the difference here, so much as he finds a way to infuse a dark urban vision with big, wuxia-style action. The end result is something that feels like an entertainingly elevated classic triad movie.

It's adapted from a long-running comic book series, so it starts by getting the audience up to speed of how Cyclone (Louis Koo Tin-Lok) became the main godfather in the Kowloon Walled City early in the 1970s. By the time refugee Chan Lok-Kwan (Raymond Lam Fung) arrives some years later, his control is unquestioned, although Mr. Big (Sammo Hung Kam-Bo) runs other parts of Hong Kong. He's impressed by Lok's abilities in underground fights, but when he tries to fob a lousy fake HK ID off on Lok, the latter grabs a bag and runs, thinking it was money rather than drugs, leading to Mr. Big's #2 King (Philip Ng Wan-Lung) chasing him through Hong Kong all the way to the Walled City. King stops there, but Cyclone's lieutenant Shin (Lau Chun-Him) picks up where he left off, thinking Lok was trying to sell without giving Cyclone a slice. Eventually, things get sorted out, Cyclone takes Lok under his wing, and Lok becomes friends with Shin, underground doctor "AV" (German Cheung), and Twelfth Master (Tony Wu Tsz-Tung). Things are good for a while, but this isn't the sort of environment where that can last.

As might be expected from the last two movies, Cheung's vision of the Kowloon Walled City is something else, a mess of buildings that blur into a black monolith when seen from the outside, so tightly-packed and shabby that the distinctions between streets and alleys and hallways collapse. Cyclone's barber shop may be open air, or maybe not, because the Walled City is both a bunch of tiny rooms and one place. It almost leaves no room for wall-climbing action despite the three-dimensionality of the place, although these guys will find a way. There's nostalgia to it, an almost magical sort of stasis but violence is never far off; it's soon clear that old grudges are never truly buried here, leading to a set of explosive confrontations.

Then it's time for revenge and retribution, and for all that the action in the first couple of acts has been elevated, the climax is at another level. Make no mistake, those action sequences that kick the movie off often feature Raymond Lam fending off a half-dozen guys while on the run, with everybody taking a lot of hits in a way that sells that they are all exceptional fighters. Action choreographer KenjiTarigaki (often Donnie Yen's go-to guy) gets people up in the air and otherwise on wires so that each blow feels twice as powerful and being of this city becomes a distinct advantage. By the final stretch, what basically amounts to a four-on-one battle, it's like a set of mortals battling an enemy who has sold his soul for the power of the gods, wire fu that seems utterly detached from limits even as it still hits hard and looks like it hurts. It's eye-popping action that keeps escalating until it can seemingly go no further.

The melodrama of it all is maybe a bit wobblier; the movie is at its strongest when it's about the here and now, with Raymon Lam maybe not having a complicated character in Lok but getting across that, capability for violence aside, he's a simple man who wants to live by some sort of rules, the sort of orphan who slides into a found family easily. You see Louis Koo maybe seeing some of himself in the younger man (there's like a five year difference between the actors but it's exaggerated by Koo going gloriously silver in a more period-appropriate haircut and a lot of charm to the group of friends. Sammo Hung seems to be having a good low-impact time as Mr. Big, chewing scenery more than punching holes in it, although that's nothing compared to what Philip Ng eventually gets up to as King.

Admittedly, one has to laugh a bit at the misty-eyed montage of what was lost when the Walled City was demolished and redeveloped in the 1990s; the aftermath of a gang war that involved smashing people through concrete walls face-first is maybe not the best time to go "but at least neighbors looked out for each other. It's unusually sentimental for the run that Cheung has been on, but maybe not for the guy who spent the previous few years making films about legendary heroes.


Oddity

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 4 August 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)
Available for digital pre-order on Prime; where to stream when available.

Not every filmmaker who tries it can manage what writer/director Damian Mc Carthy does with Oddity, which is essentially to say that they are going to start out in fairly weird territory and establish that as a sort of baseline which a viewer is going to have to accept to understand the logic of the rest of the movie. It's a tough stretch - the movie requires one to simultaneously accept and be surprised by the bizarre - that Mc Carthy manages, no matter how difficult that sounds.

It opens with Dani Timmins (Carolyn Bracken) working on renovating the peculiar old house she has purchased with husband Ted (Gwilum Lee), a doctor who works the night shift at a Cork mental hospital. It's an odd one, a square around a courtyard, currently without power or heat - but perhaps with ghosts; Dani has set up a tent to sleep in and a digital camera taking regular pictures so she can hopefully see what kind of spirit she's dealing with. That's when one of Ted's patients, Olin Boole (Tading Murphy) approaches the door, saying he saw someone else enter, but, well, Declan is in the hospital for killing his mother in a rage. A year later, on the anniversary of Dani's death, Ted complies with an unusual request by Dani's twin sister Darcy Odello (Bracken again), bringing Declan's glass eye to their mother's old shop, where every item is alleged to be cursed. She takes Ted's offer to maybe have dinner sometime and shows up at the house a week later, freaking out Ted's new girlfriend Yana (Carline Menton) even without the chest containing a bizarre mannequin that somehow seems to set itself up at the kitchen table when Yana isn't looking. Darcy is going to use her psychic powers to find out the whole truth of what happened to her sister, and Yana, who can't find her car keys, is stuck there with her.

If folks say the star of the movie is the mannequin, I won't argue - whether it be Mc Carthy, production designer Lauren Kelly, art director Conor King, someone working in their departments, or a true team effort, somebody came up with a spectacular design which looks big and hulkling, threatening even though it is obviously inanimate in part because of its gigantic open maw. You can get a good jump stare just out of it changing position while one isn't looking. It looks lifelike if completely immobile from a distance, but when Yana gets up close, one can see seams that suggest it can be posed, even if it seems unlikely to actually move about, and other details that make a certain, unnerving sort of sense.

That, of course, understates what Carolyn Bracken is doing, from initially presenting Dani as someone whose sincere belief in ghosts makes everything else not-ridiculous to how, at the end, Darcy can say she did something and the audience can fill in the absurd mechanism of it with placid acceptance. In between, she and Mc Carthy are taking a character who under normal circumstances is the eccentric occultist supporting character that adds spice to a movie that is really about Yana and Ted, even if it's later revealed that Darcy was some sort of canny manipulator, and making her the protagonist. Darcy's silver hair, spinster's outfits, barbed words, and passive-aggressive attitude, indicate someone who should be stealing scenes from the more relatable Yana and Ted (and, make no mistake, Caroline Menton's increasingly exasperated Yana is the reaction shot that makes a lot of scenes work); instead, the audience is with this oddball and her increasingly peculiar plan, and she's able to get the absolute most out of moments that focus on her sadness and regret. She does nothing conventionally, but the sadness of this woman who lost her sister is palpable.

Meanwhile, Mc Carthy is well aware that the audience is not there for some sort of quiet pondering on the subject of grief, and has a grand old time deploying jump scares and drawing out scenes where you're meant to just marinate in the sheer peculiarity of it. I'm not sure to what extent the film was built around the location as opposed to the opposite, but it's a terrific place for this sort of movie; you'll not only absolutely believe the house was haunted even before Dani died, but every corner of it invites the audience to study how the two floors interact, the halls with the ninety-degree turns, and even the bright yellow camping tent so that it's in their minds as a scene starts to play out there.

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I also kind of love the epilogue, even though it works a bit contrary to how I approach horror movies. The whole thing has, in a way, been a duel between Darcy, whose way of understanding the world is through the occult (the "unseen") and the impressions that strong emotions make on it, to the point of accepting that she will pay for Olin's murder, and Ted, who has made a study of the mind and cool consideration of everything marks him as a manipulative sociopath. It's not just that he has seemed to have won at the end - Darcy is dead and he has successfully placed the blame on Ivan because he is a more emotional psychopath with less self-control - but his way of thinking has won out: He is arguably able to burn the wooden man because he does not believe in it; his rationality has triumphed over Darcy's spirituality.

But, of course, Darcy was dying already, so that's no great victory, and, ultimately, she shows that she understands him far better than he understands her. She knows that he will not be able to help but ring the bell and summon the Bellhop, if only to prove it does nothing. As soon as he does, she's won so completely that the film can stop at just showing the Bellhop next to him savoring the empty victory that has cost him two women who loved him and saddled him with the house that the first wanted but he considered a millstone.

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That finale is a beautiful capper on a movie that has somehow taken a bucket of nothing but the strangest, most irregularly-shaped building blocks and built something that's not just scary, suspenseful, and surprisingly funny but also an impressively solid story.