I'm kind of amused at Roy answering a question about how she kept the time period vague by avoiding phones and mocking up computer screens that looked like their from the 1990s with "I hate seeing cell phones in movies". Like, maybe you're older than you look, but you don't appear to have spent that much time with phones on the wall rather than in the pocket. Sure, it's harder, but I kind of wonder how many folks a hundred years ago were setting movies in the 1890s because they hated seeing automobiles in movies.
I noticed Kostanski thanked in the credits of another, not-particularly-fantastical Canadian indie a few days later, and get the impression that he's mostly just a really solid guy. I suspect that you don't become a mainstay even in wacky cult film circles if you are not, on some level, a person who just gets work done without a lot of fuss or being abrasive enough to alienate collaborators while the egotistical "geniuses" burn bridges and burn out.
I was hoping to get this posted before the end of the festival, but I wound up drained enough that I am, instead, posting from the airport a few days later. I'lll at least be trying to get rest of these out fairly quickly; there's enough banked on Letterboxd that I hope I can knock out shorts and expand features by the end of August or sometime in September.
"Ring Neck"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)
An underrated thing that happens in horror stories is when someone who should know looks at the protagonist early on and is like "why would you even do that?" Indeed, one of the more oddly satisfying things about this short is that it is more or less bookended by this: The tattoo artist (Andrea Pavlovic) at the start saying "you know, I don't think we should use this much ash" and on the other saying "no, get to a hospital, this is weird and I don't want to have any part of it!" David (Antoine Olivier Pilon) doesn't listen, of course, and she caves, but it's a neat pivot to say the premise is kind of dumb but make you believe the characters would go through with it anyway.
That's kind of more interesting than what's going on with the rest of the movie, which at times feels like it's built out of the pieces writer/director/producer/set decorator Vasili Manikas had on hand once he and his team locked down the prosthetics work, because it's all kind of scattershot. David's got a girlfriend (Sarah Swire) because the movie needs someone upset about his retreating, and Swire does more than go through the motions, but it never feels like a relationship with a history or anything in common. His work in a recording studio feels off. The recently deceased pet that has him depressed is a pigeon, and not only is that one of the most expressionless creatures alive, but there's something weird about mourning the unconditional love you get from a pet you keep in a cage.
The transformation work is nicely done, and Manikas and his crew stage the movie in a way that creates a strong mood. You can enjoy that work for what it is, but the bigger thing it's part of doesn't quite hold.
Kryptic
* * (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)
Usually, when I remind myself to review the film I saw, rather than the one I wanted to see, it's about putting aside impressions I'd formed even before entering the theater; but I suppose it applies to Kryptic too. In this case, I can't necessarily say I was baited and switched, but I did find that the vibe changed enough that what had me excited near the start was gone by the end, and that's a lousy feeling to get from a movie.
It opens with Kay Hall (Chloe Pirrie) joining a nature hike, nervous about meeting new people; at one point a guide mentions that this is the area where cryptozoologist Barbara Valentine went missing while trying to catch a glimpse of the local cryptid, the Sooka. Kay goes off the trail and encounters the creature, which leaves her shaken, goop coming out of her ears, and amnesiac. When she arrives home, nothing looks familiar, and trying to research the Sooka reveals something shocking: She is, at the very least, a dead ringer for Valentine, whose husband Morgan (Jeff Gladstone) has apparently been using her disappearance to raise his own profile. She's already shaken to the core when someone attempts to break into her home through the front widow. Not sure what else to do, she flees back to the trail and across Western Canada, trying to find others who have encountered the Sooka, often using Valentine's name.
I found Kryptic engrossing for its first leg, as Kay is searching for answers and expressing revulsion at her life, but eventually attempts to actually solve the mystery fall by the wayside to be replaced with random drifting and gross-out bits that don't excite or repel or intrigue. It just abandons its hook, wandering from place to place until it finally alights somewhere that might be kind of interesting, and is likely actually the natural place for the movie to land, except that the route to get there is so convoluted and full of likely-unintentional red herrings that it might not mean anything when one arrives.
A large part of it might be a specific sort of misinterpretation built on my own perspective, a "you'd get it if you were a woman" thing, but I also tend to think that writer Paul Bromley and director Kourtney Roy are often too cavalier with their usage of genre: The cryptid, the goop, and all the mysterious disappearances of the people Kay meets in her travels, are signaling something paranormal, a possession or doppelganger story, enough that I at least never considered the idea that Kay had been Barbara all along and had escaped an abusive home life. It perhaps makes the most sense thematically and with what she does, but not only is there so much else going on, little is done to indicate that Kay may be a recent creation - her house looks lived-in, nobody mentioned she moved there recently, she's got a career that requires professional accreditation, and she stayed in a place and went on a hike where people might be looking for Barbara Valentine. It's a lot of clues pointing in what is probably the wrong direction and it doesn't seem like Roy and Bromley ever considered where all the conflicting information might lead someone else.
(They're also apparently really into these gross, mucus-intensive sexual interludes and, okay, if that's your kink, go for it, but don't be surprised when folks find it unpleasant or want to know what the deal is because it is seemingly affecting the story.)
I did kind of like Chloe Pirrie's central performance; I'm not sure it holds together, but the actress certainly gives 100% of what's asked, from the nervous opening voice-over to a great line-reading when Kay finds out what she does for work to the ever-more-gonzo final act, where she plays off Jeff Gladstone just barely putting a good outward face on Morgan's sliminess. There's certainly a genuine but eccentric feel to everyone she meets across a number of environments.
The generous interpretation is that Kryptic is very much not for me, made with a different audience in mind and running from what I enjoy most. Even beyond that, though, it feels very much like the work of creators more skilled at vibes than narratives, too confident that they've done enough of one to compensate for the other's shortcomings.
FAQ
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)
There are two or three moments in FAQ that can hit a person in the gut and the odd thing is that I don't know if they're exactly a big part of the main story; or at least they don't feel like they are in the moment, and maybe not until one has had the chance to think on the film a bit. They probably are, though, with filmmaker Kim Da-min mostly making her point so gently and with such whimsy that the logical conclusion is surprising.
It introduces the audience to Kim Dong-chun when she's five and already enrolled in English kindergarten by mother Hae-jin (Park Hyo-ju), although she freezes up in an English-speaking demonstration. By the time she's nine (and played by Park Na-eun), she's still introverted, but how can she not be - her after-school time is filled with activities her parents think will get her into a good college, the only common element the daughter of one of Hae-jin's friends who is too competitive to treat Hae-jin like a friend. She often slips into reveries with two supportive imaginary friends, although she soon happens on something stranger: A bottle of rice wine falls out of a cabinet and rolls to her feet, and she picks it up. Having built a morse code key in science class, she hears patterns in the bubbles, but they don't match Korean or English. The next class she's enrolled in gives her the necessary information to interpret it, though, and she soon finds that it is giving her instructions.
This is the sort of whimsical premise that might often get the Wes Anderson treatment, or be presented as a bright, colorful sort of live-action anime where all the bits of oddity in Dong-chun's life are presented in heightened fashion, but it's telling that Kim Da-min presents anything like that as an obvious, explicit fantasy that Dong-chun pointedly outgrows. Her world is small and relentlessly ordinary in some ways; Hae-jin's brother who has escaped from the rat race (Kim Hee-won) is disheveled and the boring sort of hippie, and the world doesn't shift to something brighter and more full of childlike wonder when Dong-chul goes on adventures to help her bubbly new friend. It's the same as it was, somewhere between indifferent and hostile to a young girl.
There is, ultimately, a pretty explicit message about striving going on - between the families pressing their 9-year-old girls to build a good resume for college, the uncle who lies about being a corporate big shot, the mother who worries about having fallen behind at work because she had a child, and Dong-chun having no control over her life, it's clear that everyone is working to get ahead, with even the ones who enjoy it only doing so when they succeed, which by definition can't make everyone happening. So what we've got is a girl is pointedly not lazy but someone who enjoys figuring things out, but isn't what the folks want her to be, and who grasps at something that lets her find another way to use what she's capable of.
Park Na-eun is kind of a delight in the part. It is, admittedly, the kind of role that one sometimes thinks might get over-praised, a lot of neutral-faced dismay or concentration that may be a case of putting the best shots where she's doing relatively little together in the editing stage, but she is given a chance to light up when it will have the most impact, and she's got a way of delivering perceptive lines or reacting to higher stakes that always impresses. She's also ably supported by the rest of the cast, particularly Park Hyo-ju as the mother, whose realization that she's one of those mothers is sadder for how low-key it is; she always finds the sort of tone where one can realize that Ha-jin is simultaneously part of the problem and a victim of the system.
Altogether, the film is a nice combination of deadpan, absurd, and mundane, and there's something not quite fearless about how sharp a poke the finale is, a reminder that while people often tend to couch these issue in feel-good terms that give a lot of credit to parents' good intentions, solving the problems might involve something as drastic as the fallout.
"Elves on the Edge"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)
"Elves on the Edge" is the sort of short where you point out that maybe it's got one joke but tells it well enough, often enough, to get through ten minutes, but I don't know that it actually gets that much mileage out of "two rocker chicks trying to make it big after leaving home to make it big in the Big Apple, except the home they left is Santa's workshop", except that it feels like there's a lot more they could do with this: For the most part, Candy and Cookie are pretty much clichés with pointy years, and it might be a lot funnier and sharper if they felt more like Santa's elves and "Elf culture", as Will Ferrell once put it, was a part of who they are despite their wanting to reject it.
Instead, Candy has a thoroughly bonkers (but, admittedly, Christmas-elf-appropriate) hookup.
And let me just say - this is such an absolutely gonzo moment, drawn out just the right amount, to get a whole bunch of laughs, and writer/director/star Abby Lloyd runs with it for the rest of the rest of the short for a few more laughs. It's a success - it gets those laughs - but it feels like it was set up to do a bit more, especially in the lead-up to the one big gag.
Carnage for Christmas
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)
There probably haven't been quite enough "Encyclopedia Brown returns home as an adult" movies to call it a genre, but it's a fun idea to play with: Kid detective stories are fun gateways to the mystery and thriller genres even though their appeals often tend to be quite the opposite. This one goes queer slasher with it, a pretty fun choice.
Lola (Jeremy Moineau), who gained some notoriety in her South Australia hometown back when she was an assigned-male teenager for actually finding the bodies in the local haunted house, is a college student majoring in forensic sciences who co-hosts a true crime podcast, is returning home for the Christmas break for the first time in years, happy to reconnect with her sister Danielle (Dominique Booth) but naturally wary: Like a lot of small towns, Purdan has gained some nice coffee shops and even a gay bar, but it's still not a great place to be trans like Lola or even gay like Danielle, which is made abundantly clear when one of the bar's regulars is murdered in the same way as the victims decades ago and the cops immediately start looking at Lola as the weird outsider. Well, most of them; Constable Kent (Tumelo Nthupi), assigned to keep watch, is actually a fan of the podcast and does his best to look the other way while she starts poking around, because most of the cops sure aren't going to spend a lot of effort on someone whose targets seem confined to Purdan's queer community.
Co-writer/producer/director Alice Maio Mackay crowdfunded and made this, her fifth feature, at the age of 19, and it's probably not hard to draw a line between her and Lola, young trans women diving into the things that they love and getting some recognition for it (a previous film, T Blockers, got a fair amount of attention on the festival circuit) even though they're still getting their formal education, if Mackay is even bothering with film school. It's probably not a stretch to call Lola a Mary Sue; Jeremy Moineau plays the part with self-assurance and a fair amount of wit, but the way she's almost always right and admired except by the complet bigots comes off as smugness in a way that seems unintentional, like the filmmakers are overshooting "cool".
Of course, part and parcel of all that is that this is the work of enthusiastic amateurs, and it feels like it, from a lot taking place at night but not being lit particularly well to maybe not having the time with the actual professionals or other resources that let you get a take where everything is good. There are a lot of stretches where they're stitching together the best they can do, which is at least better than taking refuge in "it's camp!".
There's at least a fun sort of vibe to the movie that meshes nicely with its homemade origins more often than not as Lola has this sort of effortless cool investigating her mystery rather than going for intensity. It's like a relaxed smart-ass attitude, not pandering or against anyone who doesn't deserve it but with some wit in her back pocket. There's also something really Gen-Z, I suspect, in bumping up against a decent slasher movie concept but already being kind of over it. Whatever, murderers with kind of cool masks are no big deal any more, and even Scream-style slasher mysteries are played out, but you can hang stuff on it.
I am kind of interested to see where Mackay winds up going, though - she's got some chops and isn't exactly repeating herself.
"What the Hell"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024: Septentrion Shadows & Animation Plus, laser DCP)
Filmmaker Valerie Barnhart takes a kind of worn premise - the demons in Hell have everyday lives and concerns not so different from our own - and rolls with in, offering up a dissatisfied harpy saying that this netherworld isn't what it once was, with all the real torment happening on Earth, and her minotaur boyfriend being satisfied with the current state of things is part of why she can't take it there any more. No joke is particularly earth-shaking, but they are all well-executed, and she's built the familiar character types in a way that makes them fun to watch bounce off each other, and the way Hell is breaking down keeps things from feeling bogged down. Some of the character designs are nifty, especially Charlotte, who looks like a refugee from a fifty-year-old cartoon; the oddness of her proportions playing into Hell being populated by abominations while still making her a good protagonist.
Also, from the final scenes, I kind of like the idea that this is the flip side to some horror movie where a dark sorcerer has opened a portal to Hell, but instead of demons immediately spewing out, it's kind of a gradual migration.
Frankie Freako
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)
I've tended to like the work of Steve Kostanski and his gang best when they were not exactly playing it straight - I don't know that they've ever really done that - but leaning a little more toward highlighting what made a certain type of weird 1980s movie awesome rather than silly. There's overlap, of course, but this one leans very silly indeed, and the joke's kind of strained for a while before the movie gets around to awesome.
Set in the 1980s, it introduces the audience to Conor (Conor Sweeney), a dorky office cog with an improbably hot wife (Kristy Wordsworth) and a boss (Adam Brooks) warning him that his square, comically milquetoast proposals are putting his job at risk - although, if he comes in during the weekend and shreds a few documents while the boss stays out of view of the surveillance cameras before the SEC investigators arrive, he might be in good shape. He amiably agrees, since Kristina will be out of town anyway, but decides to loosen up a bit by calling a 900 number hosted by imp Frankie Freako, but gets much more than he bargained for: Frankie and two other little goblins ride the phone line into his house, and their partying leads to a mess that has Conor in a panic, and Mr. Buechler drops by to see why his patsy hasn't shown.
It does eventually get around to awesome, of course - there's little more reliable in improving a movie than this crew opening a portal - and the back half of this is delightful lunacy. Even those who don't default to finding something more magical to practical effects rather than digital will likely enjoy how Freak World logically should feel like miniature work, and even when it's nuts, it's nuts in a less painfully arbitrary way. Puppets work better as broad one-note characters than the humans, and the way Conor Sweeney gamely deflects or redirects a lot of period-appropriate queer-phobic jokes is one of the film's more clever bits, and gives Sweeney the chance to do the sort of dry oddball humor that Adam Brooks and Kristy Wordsworth were doing at the start.
There is, I guess, a certain sort of cleverness to the first half; it plays like a live-action cartoon not just in terms of slapstick and bright color but that this is some sort of vague approximation of what kids watching those cartoons would be thinking when they hear "Michaelangelo is a party dude!", only it's kind of dumb when you're not eight. The main character being "square" in the same kind of way is the rest of the gag, and while there are some good bits, it's not quite enough to hang 45 minutes or so of movie on. Everyone is game for it, and it's not really a bad joke, but I felt like I knew and appreciated what they were doing more than I laughed. Adam Brooks's deadpan villainy and Kristy Worsworth's mass of weird contradictions are great fun, but maybe because they're deployed precisely rather than constantly the way Conor and the Freakos are, and thus don't have a chance to wear out their welcome.
Make no mistake, there's a lot to like here; the animatronic stuff is very strong, the sort of 1980s throwback that Kostanski and his crew do so well, and there are lots of people who do much worse with this sort of joke. The dumb-to-awesome ratio is tricky to get just right for everyone, is all, and this would have worked better if about ten percent of its dumb material were awesome instead.
"Réel"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)
This thing is four minutes long and much of it is its two characters just beating the hell out of each other, but you can't be anything less than impressed with how well filmmaker Rodrigue Huart does his thing: Without any real dialogue, you immediately get that (1) somehow a smartphone has fallen a couple hundred years into the past through a wormhole, (2) the farm girls who find it both want it for themselves, and (3) are not going to be demure about getting it out of each other's hands. It's moving incredibly fast except for the brief moments it slows down for audience reaction to an impressively hasty hit, more or less getting the entire story out based on its audience knowing context. Actresses Emma Gautier and Dorothée Quiquempois just let 'er rip, and Huart (as cinematographer and editor as well as writer/director/producer) makes sure that things are paradoxically clear enough that you can recognize the chaotic action and are able to discern the story.
Nifty work, and while I'm curious to see what Huart would do with a feature, I'm impressed at just how well he's taken advantage of what sort of burst of energy a short can be here.
Le mangeur d'âmes (The Soul Eater)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)
The borders between genres have been thin and getting more so for a while now, and The Soul Eater doesn't just straddle one of those lines, but the point where a few of them intersect. It can be a lot, pushing a viewer right up to the edge of grumbling that they didn't but a ticket to that sort of movie, but the filmmakers do fairly nice work of walking right up to the point where someone might roll their eyes and delivering a nasty little surprise instead.
It opens with two cops converging on a crime scene: Franck de Rolan (Paul Hamy), from the Department of Alarming Disappearances, is tracking a string of missing children; Commander Elizabeth Guardiano (Virginie Ledoyen) has been sent in because this small town's police force has no detectives, much less ones with experience investigating this sort of brutal murder. A classic "I work alone" type, Guardiano would rather de Rolan verify that the murdered couple's particular white van is not the one he's looking for, but it's de Rolan who finds the victims' son Evan Vasseur (Cameron Bain) in a hidden room. The case just gets weirder from that point, with bodies piling up, a mysterious figure on a motorcycle, and little figurines of "the soul eater", a local bogeyman said to live in the woods. Many of the local cops are more hindrance than help, the mayor would rather they just leave, and Dr. Carole Marbas (Sandrine Bonnaire), the child psychologist assigned to Evan who also wears a number of other hats around town, is perhaps being unusually resistant to de Rolan interviewing the boy.
Does it really matter that a movie where the killer(s) that a couple of cops are chasing may be a monster doesn't have a particularly memorable monster design? There's something to be said for the explanation of how every family in the area kind of has their own conception of it, but the soul eater winds up in this sort of no-man's land where the audience can't quite imagine anything lurking in the shadows but doesn't have that much to shake them, specifically. A lot is left vague even beyond the monster and "who's that on the motorcycle?", hinted at until ti's time to use them in the finale, and this movie could maybe use more of an anchor.
There's a lot going on, after all, maybe too much; the last act is impressive in terms of stitching things together but it's a lot, maybe more of an exercise in how you pull these threads together and have it make sense than making a statement or solving a mystery. The filmmakers do that well - there's nothing entirely new but there is a sense of one more thing being piled on top or spinning out of control until things are finally all out in the open, so it's a fun, messy ride that feels pretty satisfying afterward. Indeed, for a team mostly known for horror making a film that traffics in a lot of grim cases of child sexual abuse, Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury are good about giving the audience a finale that is exciting beyond seeing how nasty it can get and earlier moments tha get a viewer's motor running. It's impressively more than just grim.
There's also the enjoyable sensation of watching French actors that one normally sees in classy boutique-house dramas letting it rip in kind of fancy trash. It's neat to watch all of them as cops with different jurisdictions snap or smirk at each other and then play both cool and harried when stuff goes sideways. Virginie Ledoyen, it turns out is really fun to watch smirk and dismiss folks in what Guardiano considers lesser law enforcement agencies or look annoyed that people are worried after she empties her gun at someone; Sandrinne Bonnaire gets to have great fun chewing scenery as Marbas later on after being huffy that de Roan went behind her back. Paul Hamy, for his part, does well balancing the protagonist who is less abrasive while still being as intense as one expects a man hunting child predators to be, and Francis Renaud is always welcome when he shows up as the cop who does not have a chip on his shoulder.
The movie can swing between wearing an audience out and making them wish the movie would get on with it, but the willingness to be down for anything works in its favor more often than not.
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