Fantasia 2025.03: "Sounds of Glass", The Bearded Girl, Nyaight of the Living Cats, and Find Your Friends

Check it out - North American guests!

Up first is Morgan Abele, who stood up quickly to introduce her short film "Sounds of Glass", playing before The Bearded Girl. It's pretty nifty! She didn't have a lot of time to tell stories about the shooting, but did mention that their location had apparently been a meat market before closing not long earlier, and shooting was interrupted a few times as people would see activity in the shop and walk in to try to buy steaks and the like.

Here, we meet The Bearded Girl director Jody Wilson, producer Amber Ripley, and cast members Anwen O'Driscoll & Harrison Browne. It was a fun conversation: O'Driscoll was apparently cast as the title character in part because there was riding involved and she grew up with horses, while Browne was very excited to explore what sort of masculinity his Masked Cowboy embodied. One other fun fact they mentioned was that Jessica Paré, who plays the title character's mother, was one of the last people cast because the film was set to be a Belgian co-production until just weeks before shooting and they'd maybe had ideas of Lady Andre being European, but once that fell through, the whole cast and crew had to be Canadian (and mostly from British Columbia) as part of their funding. I tend to think of Canada as having a deep talent pool, but apparently it was tricky to find women in it who are the right age and appearance that someone says "yeah, obviously Anwen O'Driscoll's mother" that are willing to have the make-up team give them a beard for the entire film.

(Tying into that, Wilson also mentioned that while she envisioned this as kind of taking place anywhere in North America, if anybody from Telefilm was in the audience, it was obviously set in Alberta. Canadian!)

After that, it was across the street for Takashi Miike-produced anime Nyaight of the Living Cats, which is kind of cute, but I think the best part was the introduction by "general director" Miike and actual director Tomohiro Kamitani sort of deadpanning around how this is a very silly show, and that maybe DIsney will call them ("like that'll happen"). It was kind of neat seeing Miike wearing regular glasses and relaxed, with salt-and-pepper hair, because when he came to Montreal to accept a lifetime achievement award, he was kind of funny, promising that he'd make enough new movies for them to give him another one in time, but he definitely had the sunglasses-indoors/black-hair-dye thing going.

Finally, programmer Carolyn Mauricette welcomes Find Your Friends director Izabel Pakzad, actor Jake Manley, and producer Allison Friedman. Pakzad's film was based on an incident that happened to her on her first visit to Joshua Tree, although in the film everything obviously goes much farther. They talked a bit about life imitating art during the shooting - there's a local-annoyed-with-kids-visiting-to-party character in the film played by Chris Bauer, and they would occasionally get interrupted by locals who were annoyed with the hubbub of a film shoot - and getting specific locations: Apparently one house they used is kind of famous, and getting to shoot in certain beautiful spots meant negotiations with both reluctant land-owners and the National Park Service.

Also, a lot of talk about prosthetics!

So that was Friday. Saturday would be the Anime no Bento 2025 program, The Devil's Bride, Blazing Fists, and Good Boy, although the end of the day got hairy. Sunday's plans are the sci-fi shorts, either The Battle Wizard or Terrestrial, and Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark.


"Sounds of Glass"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)

Morgan Abele's "Sounds of Glass" has a kind of nifty idea - a store that sells "soundscapes' in liquid form - with the key being that today it is minded by Enna (Zoe Wiesenthal), who is feeling depressed and not really comfortable with these sounds acting as memory triggers, until an an accident gives her a new perspective. It's a neat fantasy hook that nestles into a familiar world better than most, even if there is a bit of "has nobody done this before?" toward the end, and it makes the shop into a colorful, fantastical setting that's still grounded in the familiar.

Also, Wiesenthal has a great, expressive face, which is necessary for this sort of dialog-free story but not all it needs. Her expression dances between vaguely low, irritated, and wondrous, and she's also well-able to make the lack of dialogue feel more like people naturally not talking than pantomime (though her customers sometimes being awkward may be more on Abele's script working too hard rather than their performance). On the other side, Abele and company do nice work with the finale, smartly not leaning any further into synesthesia than they already are but letting the sound do the job.


The Bearded Girl

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)

You can't really miss what the filmmakers are doing here, but they do it in such amiable, low-key fashion that it comes off as just about as natural as the high concept can. Indeed, most of the time The Bearded Girl manages the trick of playing it straight without being too deadpan, which can be tougher than just making absurdist jokes.

Ten years ago, young Cleopatra felt the first bits of peach fuzz on her chin, which may sound alarming, but in the community of sideshow performers where she lives, bearded ladies like her mother Lady Andre (Jessica Paré) are sword-swallowers, magic users, and leaders, going back 80 generations. Now, Cleo (Anwen O'Driscoll) is about to be invested as leader, but the two have been constantly at odds, with Andre ignoring Cleo's desires to modernize the show and her arguments that her beardless sister Josephine (Skylar Radzion) is much more suited to the role. On the eve of the ritual, she snaps, shaves, and runs away from home, developing a major crush on Blaze (Keenan Tracey), who isn't particularly excited about being part of his family's business either. What she may not realize is that the deed to the family's land and theater transferred to her on her birthday, and if she doesn't claim it, a local businessman planning a casino resort (Robert Hakesley) will be able to scoop it up.

There are bits that maybe don't quite work for me; for a story about a frustrated kid who must find her own way, it could maybe give going full circle a slightly wider radius. The story is also such that nobody really has to do anything, which is sort of fine - it's got pleasant and eccentric enough characters to keep the audience entertained as they banter and interact in unusual ways shaped by the world they live in, but the film ends with a soft a landing as it can have. Did anyone actually accomplish anything, or really have to struggle to accept themselves and each other, or did they just get put in places where they couldn't do anything else?

It is enjoyable enough, though. Jessica Paré and Anwen O'Driscoll are especially good as the bearded mother and daughter, very much capturing the vibe where they've got clashing personalities and ways of expression but clash because they are very much alike underneath. It's a bit of a shame that the boyfriend played by Keenan Tracy is kind of bland, the sort of motorcycle-riding bad boy who you never see actually do anything bad but isn't far enough off center to feel like he could fit with Cleo's family and friends (it doesn't help that he's got to try and sell an exceptionally dumb thing to create a misunderstanding). He really can't compare to the oddball supporting characters back at the sideshow, whether they be Skylar Radzion's live-wire sister, Linden Porco's short-statured clown who probably holds everything together, or the various folks in the background.

The film does look pretty nifty, considering its makers are on a tight budget, with the beautiful vistas and stylized locations creating a nostalgic image of small-town North America where everyone took pride in their specialties, though the filmmakers are keenly aware of just how much these groups would come into conflict. There are times when I wondered if there was a draft of the screenplay that had a larger scale at some point, one where the sideshow seemed like some sort of viable business or the talk of magic and adventure was more than idle references not followed up on. That road can lead to pointless CGI that takes a viewer into the uncanny valley rather than the movie's world, but it's a bit of a tease here.

Still, the family dinner scenes feature lines about clowns being a viral part of the community, and the film is filled with other genuinely odd moments. Indeed, it's got enough charmingly screwy moments to fill a movie right up to the point where you go "huh, we're done?" instead of a grander finale.


Nyaito obu za Ribingu Kyatto (Nyaight of the Living Cat) Episodes 1-4

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser digital)
Where to stream it (when available) (Prime link)

It's not terribly surprising that Nyaight of the Living Cat reveals that there's not necessarily as much potential to its jokey premise as one might think fairly quickly, but it's still nevertheless disappointing in execution: It's the kind of self-parody that chooses to underline its gags rather than trusting in a deadpan commitment to the bit, and after four episodes, I can't say I'm particularly tempted to subscribe to Crunchyroll to see the rest.

Part of the trouble is that the series not only succumbs very quickly to "this stretched-out limited series could have been a good movie" syndrome, where the opening that throws the audience into its crazy world and teaches the audience what's going on quickly is followed by three and a half episodes that barely take it full-circle, never really creating a lot of suspense about how the characters get to their previous situation or surprising twists along the way. A large part of the rest is that the group by and large seem like anime tropes - the stoic/emotional modern samurai, the schoolgirls, the often-silly tough guy - rather than actual personalities. Indeed, all of them have a personality of "I really, really, really like cats, you guys", and that means there's not a lot of contrast between them in one situation or their reactions to different situations. It's a very one-joke show.

That one joke - there's a virus going around where people who touch a cat are turned into one, which kind of short-circuits a cat-lover's survival instinct in what's essentially a zombie movie situation - is pretty good, and the creators hammering it constantly results in them hitting one or two really good riffs for every ten "meh" ones and spread them out rather than using them all up at the top. The animation is decent (although the static backgrounds and the kinetic, computer-assisted action work against each other), and when things slip into absurd-horror mode, you see how clever this could be if the character work had clashing tones that worked nearly as well as the wordless bits do.


Find Your Friends

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Confession: Even when I was these characters' age, I probably would have hated the parts of the action that they were supposed to find fun, much less the rest of it; I was a boring kid. As a result, I spent much of the first half torn wishing they'd get to something interesting, or at least waiting for the promise of the title to kick in, not sure whether the film's target audience felt like they were killing time or getting invested for when things went pear-shaped.

That first half has five college seniors going to spring break and a big concert in Joshua Tree, California: Amber (Helena Howard), just out of a long-term relationship; Zosia (Zión Moreno), tall, friendly, and mostly nice; sporty tattooed Maddy (Sophia Ali); Lola (Chloe Cherry), a blonde who revels in her crassness; and Lavinia (Bella Thorne), the curvy ringleader who knows one of the musicians. During a stopover at a yacht party, Amber spots her ex and her spiral isn't helped when the guy flirting with her goes further than she wants once their alone together, and once at their rental, there's a hostile neighbor and the party leads her to both a musician and some locals who make her feel endangered.

I admit, acting like I didn't like the first half is unfair, because I did actually enjoy the film when it zoomed in on Helena Howard's Amber being more openly fragile than her brash friends and trying to keep up, while maybe realizing she's outgrowing them. Howard communicates her discomfort and how she's trying to ignore it well, without words much of the time, and it maybe hits even better for how much the film seemingly attempts to smother her with noise and strobes and her louder, crasser friends. Writer/director Izabel Pakzad builds things up well underneath the cacophony, building it so that the audience is very sympathetic to Amber even though one can't entirely say her friends are wrong when they later throw her own actions back in her face.

Granted, those friends are portrayed broadly enough that they're going to seem callous anyway, for better or worse. The other four actresses understand the assignment, and despite playing it big, they play it big in a way that feels natural for young people who have had enough privilege and good fortune to have so far partied hard and remained relatively unscathed. Pakzard does seem to run out of material for them, though - for all that a viewer will look at them all and say they know or knew that girl, Sophia Ali winds up playing "the other one" compared to Chloe Cherry's approaching trainwreck, Bella Thorne's rich bitch, and Zión Moreno's wide-eyed people-pleaser.

It takes a more overtly, physically-violent turn on the way to the end, even with some material off-screen and/or random to keep folks from enjoying someone who is just unpleasant rather than deserving monsters getting their comeuppance or whooping at gore effects. There's a terrific white-knuckle chase, though it's followed (after a weird jump-cut) by a sequence that feels a bit like it's there more to be gross and chaotic than anything that springs from what we've seen from the girls, even when the point is supposed to be the ones who project squeamishness have spines and vice versa. It's violent and visceral and seems like it should be satisfying, but doesn't feel right in a movie, especially since these guys are just anonymous marauders and it almost feels like this sort of violence can be meaningless in real life but not in a movie where there's been something to what we've seen otherwise.

That said, I know I've never been where this movie starts from and have to sort of analyze my way into something visceral. This movie just isn't for me, but for women half my age, which is a good thing; I'd rather see a dozen horror movies like Find Your Friends starting from what young women fear than slasher retreads built on nostalgic tropes.