For instance, the day started with the power going out for my AirBNB's building at around 10am, which I initially noticed because I suddenly lost my internet connection. I'm on the seventh floor, and that meant no elevator and no emergency lights in the stairwells. Leaving the building, I hoped it was fixed by the time I got back, because I didn't have any sort of key, just codes to type in, and the touchscreen was off.
Which was fine, as it got me out and looking for my sister-in-law's book (A Resistance of Witches by Morgan Ryan, available now) on bookstore shelves. Only the big chain had much of an English-language section, and they had plenty, so, if you're up here and looking for something to read between showings, go get it! No French-language edition in Canada yet, though - my brother says it'll be out in France in September, so maybe then. I'm thinking of picking one up just so folks can ask what I'm reading and I can reply "oh, this…"
Then I picked up my badge and a program and started marking the schedule up with Plan A/Plan B notes. I then immediately deviated from Plan A although I didn't have to: Though usually there's a line on the badge about it not giving access to Opening/Closing Night, that wasn't the case here, so I could see Eddington. But, given that the movie is 148 minutes long and would probably be preceded by various festival and government officials opening the festivities, I wasn't sure I could take it even if I was a big fan of Ari Aster, since my prostate has apparently decided to claim a lot of the space in my abdominal cavity that my bladder had previously occupied and I'm only a week into my new meds for that. So it was across the street for Fragment and short film "Last Night Together".
I got back onto Plan A by crossing the street for The Verdict, which is probably decent but not spectacular on the merits, but something went wrong on the way to its world premiere at the festival, because what played was clearly not finished - a lot of blank green walls, some unfinished compositing, a visible boom mic, and messy ADR/foley work, especially toward the end, and that just completely killed the tension as the audience laughed. Hopefully it's in better shape by the time it opens in Indonesia, because there's an entertaining-enough movie in there, but I don't think most folks are going to appreciate the accidental lesson on how even movies that don't seem to need them have more VFX than you might expect.
To keep things even more odd, all three were Korean movies of a sort - The Verdict is Indonesian but has a Korean co-director and is produced by Korean company Showbox - but the expected Nongshim commercial wasn't before either screening! They're a longtime sponsor of the festival and the audience's reaction to their venerable, extremely sincere pre-roll ad is part of the festival rituals, and I kind of wonder if it's going to take a couple days for folks to really notice.
After that, it was back to the AirBNB, where the elevator was working but the front door intercom panel wasn't, so I was lucky that someone with a keycard showed up not long after I did. Hope that's fixed by the time I get back tonight, after (hopefully) Reflet Dans Un Diamant Mort, The Wailing, and Noise.
"Last Night Together"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
I feel a little generous toward "Last Night Together" because it doesn't particularly feel like a first run at a feature and it does a fair job of fleshing out its group of friends and how they can crumble. I can kind of cavil about the turn it takes toward the end, but it's kind of on me: I want that sort of thing to represent something, and it kind of feels random. On the other hand, I wasn't exactly in that sort of situation or group growing up, so maybe it hits better for those who were.
The film introduces the audience to five young folks either in college or not long out riding in a car, with hot mess Seyoung (Baek Yerim), vomiting something black up out the window. She's dating Yoonjo (Ju Yijun), whose birthday they've been celebrating. In the back seat with her are sensible Lisa (Ko Soo-yoon) and her boyfriend Dojun (Seo Myeonghwan); single Jaemin (Park Chan-yong) is driving. They agree to meet the next day for a picnic, but after the night goes badly for Yoonjo & Seyoung, only three show up - and things get worse when they go to Seyoung's apartment.
It's a nice young cast that you could see populating something more long-form, but who also manage to build a lived-in friend group quickly; they feel like friends but maybe the school experiences or the like that initially threw them together aren't there any more, and they're starting to drift and fray. Co-writer/director/editor Koo Jaho does fair work playing things out without dropping a lot of exposition, whether quickly-related backstory or hints at what's to come, into the movie, with cinematographer (and co-writer) Paik Wonjo handling five people in tight spaces like cars and college apartments while still giving things a little room to breathe even as they suggest these folks may need to get out of the same space.
As to the sharp turn, it looks pretty darn good (for certain horror-adjacent interpretations of "good"), and Baek Yerim goes for it in a way that has room for "she's been holding this back" and "she's having fun now that she's not holding it back". It does kind of feel like there's less thematic heft to this than horror-movie fun, but, again, this sort of thing isn't what I relate to, so it may work on top of how enjoyably messy the apartment gets.
Fragment
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Fragment feels like it's got two points of view in part so that both can be in limbo without the audience getting impatient about nothing happening, as they might were the focus limited to just one. That these kids are in untenable positions between what are (hopefully) better situations is the point, but it can be tough to build a whole movie around that.
The first kid is Kim Jun-gang (Oh Ja-hun), a 15-year-old middle-schooler who is fairly popular but has less time for his friends now that he's got to look after his little sister Jun-hui (Kim Kyu-na) himself due to their father's absence, though he's seemingly reluctant to accept the help of homeroom teacher Mr. Park (Jang Jae-ho). Not far away is Kang Gi-su (Moon Seong-hyun), who has more or less stopped eating and has done little more than sleep since his parents' murder that his aunt (Gon Min-jeung) has had to check him into the hospital to be fed via IV.
Either thread could probably be a movie on its own, but writer/director Kim Sung-yoon opts to spend half his time on each, with occasional intersections, doing a fine job of making sure the two teenage boys feel different sorts of hopelessness rather than let either situation define despair for the audience. There's just enough room to hold back and then examine what's going on without having to invent unlikely situations or delve into a lot of backstory to explain things. I'm impressed by how he spends a fair amount of time on how Gi-su occasionally wields his victim-hood as a weapon without it becoming too much of an ironic center for the movie, while also allowing Jun-gang's good intentions to regularly come into conflict with relative immaturity. Being a victim does not automatically make one noble.
The trio of young actors at the center are all impressive: Oh Ja-hun and Moon Seong-hyun often feel like mirrors of each other but very much individual, with some things snapping into place with a brief flashback to how Jun-gang was once the "class cool guy" and how it maybe makes him think he's more capable than he is. Kim Kyu-na is a delight as Jun-hui; she's a great little kid with adulthood seeming to find its way to her early. I especially like that the adults around them are not portrayed as ignorant or unsympathetic (with one notable exception who makes the most of his one late scene; I'm sure he's a bigger-name cameo even if I can't quite recall his name). It's a situation where it would seemingly be easy to focus on a callous system, but these kids are probably going to feel lost no matter how well or ill they are treated, and the film knows where its attention needs to be.
Director Kim does very nice work with his young main cast, and also does well finding a path between these kids being problems to solve and detached observation. It's easy to see how this could feel either too plot-driven or too slice-of-life, but the middle path he finds and his down-to-earth framing of the kids' lives are hallmarks of quality indie dramas. Sometimes, the feel that he's making an effort not to be purposefully elaborate can be a little strong - plain-spoken becomes on-the-nose, and the score calls attention to its simplicity at times - but it generally works pretty well.
The Verdict '25
* * ½-ish (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
As mentioned above, it's kind of unfair to assign a star rating to or pass judgment on The Verdict given that the festival wound up with a DCP that was missing a fair amount of post-production; you never know how much some of the invisible VFX and sound work holds a film together even if their absence didn't change the vibe in the theater. There's a skeleton of a decent movie here, although I'm not sure the detail work gets it to "great" rather than "watchable".
It starts with a promising flash-forward as Raka Yanuar (Rio Dewanto) of the Jakarta Police Department pulls his flak jacket and sidearm out of his locker, seemingly about to begin his regular duties as a bailiff in the courthouse, but instead locks everybody inside as we hear the judge (Vonny Anggraini) start to talk about the burden of proof for this heinous crime not being met. When the folks in the courtroom realize what's going on, it's time to see how things got that far: That would be another case where another son of a rich man, Sadam Diragimia, got off by having his lawyer Timo (Reza Rahadian) fraudulently argue that he was schizophrenic and not responsible for his actions. Raka prevented the victim's mother from attacking them, leading Sadam's father to press a coupon for a restaurant for a hotel he owns into his hands. Raka uses it to celebrate his pregnant wife Nina (Niken Anjani) passing the bar, but when Sadam's friend Dika (Elang El Gibran) decides to one-up him, Raka will be back in the courtroom as a grieving witness as Timo defends Dika, eventually deciding to take matters into his own hands as Timo's legal trickery and the deep pockets of Dika's family threaten to set him free.
It's not a bad premise - one can imagine Denzel Washington making a meal out of the Raka role twenty years ago - but it's one where one might like to see a lot of things done just a bit better: The sleek, efficient opening gives way to a flashback that seems to have an idea or two about how to develop these characters into something really interesting - Dika seems kind of disgusted with Sadam letting people think he's mentally ill to get off the hook, and Raka is somewhere on the cynical-but-not-corrupt spectrum where he knows how everything he witnesses in court is slanted to the powerful but resists the free meal initially - but the path there is obvious and rote. After the audience catches up, it all gets kind of silly, with Raka an ex-spy with ex-spy friends gathering evidence in real time and the judge deciding, sure, I'll roll with the "trial" Raka wants to lead without a lot of resistance.
Similarly, the cast isn't bad: Reza Rahadian, in particular, makes Timo the sort of smoothly self-aware villain who is eminently hissable even when we enjoy him putting his less civilized clients in their place. There's a nice bit of steel to Rio Dewanto's Raka and even if Dewanto doesn't quite elevate the material, he works well with every other member of the cast. Jessica Katharia (I think), has the sort of scene-grabbing charisma as Raka's former Bureau of Intelligence colleague Wati that makes me think that an action movie with her at the center would be pretty enjoyable.
And some of the action here is pretty good. Directors Yusron Fuadi and Lee Chang-hee have a slick way of staging their chases that draws one's eye to both the pursuer in the foreground and the pursued in the background. It makes one wonder, a bit, if they've been composited in a way that indicates the movie will look pretty good as a finished product. The movie's got some strengths that offset its obvious weaknesses, but it's hard to focus on the former when the whole audience is roaring at the unintended camp.
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