Another day, another short film package at the Museum seemingly scheduled with the intent of overlapping everything else in the schedule. But first,
Niko.
Director Julien Birban Levy is French, apparently spent a fair amount of his youth in New York, lives and works in Tokyo, and decided that this particular film needed to be set in Seoul. I can't necessarily say that it captures that place specifically, although I kind of understand him saying Tokyo and Paris were too "cute" for it. I suspect that even the sections of those cities that were the appropriate sort of working-class-but-not-blue-collar might be too familiar or have some sort of quirky shorthand that makes them as today rather than a vague future. Interestingly, the neighborhood they found in Seoul was kind of emptied out, which really helped the vibe of the movie, though it's kind of odd: You make a movie that's partly about how capitalism is squeezing folks to death, and the best place to shoot it is a spot where capitalist redevelopment and gentrification is getting folks out of the way.
A couple hours later, I'm at the Museum for the sci-fi shorts, with "Echoes of Time" writer Charlie Clausen & director Gemma Lee; "Soulmate" writer/director/editor Jens-Julius Dall; "Noise of Waves" writer/director Tomasz Wróbel; "Idyll" producer/co-star Mina Sundwall & writer/director Austin Cauldwell; and "Horse Fly" writer/director Alex Park & D.P Adam LaPine . I've got to admit, the block made me feel kind of cranky after the claims that it was their best package ever, because, honestly can it really be that if not even one of the seven shorts was set in outer space? I kid, a bit, but it's kind of dreary to watch one short about someone getting addicted to a virtual reality app where every incremental upgrade comes with a pop-up saying it requires an additional fee or membership, and then have the second short be about someone addicted to a virtual reality app where every incremental upgrade comes with a pop-up saying it requires an extra fee or membership.
That wasn't the subject of all seven, but few of them felt like they were opening my eyes to something rather than rehashes of what I scroll past on social media daily. These are subjects worth exploring and on filmmakers' minds, but taken as a group, it just felt like such limited imagination, a lack of dreaming big, on top of all of them being European or English-language. Even the two that weren't about that sort of subject had filmmakers saying that they wanted to do a story about human relationships first and then worked in the fantastical elements to fit, but the upshot wound up being that it's less important to solve problems than to learn to accept them. Fair when the problem is "loved ones dying", sure, but combined with the rest…
All of these things are valid uses for the genre, and I've loved many stories along those lines. Some of the shorts were really good! But as a group, it's not just that this program was a bummer, but the implication that this is what folks working in the genre should aspire to seems wrong to me, like well-intentioned analysis about how great science fiction tells us about the here and now has diminished everything else about it.
Fortunately, I had time to sit around and grab some food before settling into Hall for the rest of the night. First up was
You Are the Film, which matches the broad strokes of the subnormal but was oddly different in the details. Writer/director Makoto Ueda has done the screenplays for a number of fun recent time travel/loop films from Japan, so there was a big crowd.
Last up for the day, Mitch welcomed Bob Colaers, director of
Attack on Paradise, and it's a shame star Said Boumazoughe wasn't here, because a lot was short of talking about what the film meant to him second-hand. Belgium has enough Moroccan and other MENA folks that he'd been frustrated not seeing anyone like him on-screen as a hero, so he came up with a sort, collaborated on the screenplay, trained like crazy, and then shot this movie in a building either very much like the place he grew up or the actual building, only doubled a handful of times during the action. It's kind of a crazy thing to will into existence, really.
Then to bed. Monday wound up being
Our Effed Up World,
Beasts Clutching at Straws, and
Penny Lane Is Dead. You might bump into me Saturday as I more or less camp out in Hall for
Bliss,
Drag,
AnyMart, and
The Last Temptation of Becky.
Niko
☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
It feels a little odd to note that
Niko could maybe stand to lose ten minutes or so and also suggest that it's one of the more interesting depictions of a slowly-decaying dystopia I can recall seeing, but there's pacing and what you're using that pacing to show, right? Both the title character and the odd nuances of the world she lives in are often fascinating to dig into, but there comes a point where director Julien Levy isn't really finding new things to examine, and his story doesn't quite sing as much without the thrill of discovery.
He posits that in the fairly near future, Seoul will impose a digital curfew on top of a physical one, with the internet shut off after 9pm and only 30-second analog calls permitted. Clever young Niko (Tiffany Young) has figured out a way to monetize that with "Locked Out Company Service Niko", where she'll hang out and chat while someone waits for a locksmith, or perhaps anything else where someone might otherwise be fiddling about on their phones. That's how she meets Jiyoon (Kim Soy), and while she usually doesn't develop real friendships on the job, Jiyoon's an exception. Meanwhile, her boyfriend Jeremy (Sandor Funtek) is working at a highly-specialized travel agency - only serving a Seoul to Nairobi route - as a side gig to his "one week, one photo" project. He's surprised to actually meet a potential customer, whose husband is mad to see lions, though she's initially looking to go to Addis Ababa. Neither are really making enough money to pay rent, and there doesn't seem to be much point in planning for the future.
It's hard out there for a manic pixie dream girl at the end of the world, especially when the government is out there trying to make it difficult for people to connect, lest they organize. Perhaps accidentally,
Niko makes the argument that it's not the screens that are crushing our mental health, but the constant squeeze of existential dread and nobody having enough money to do anything while everything stops working around them. How often does the average person have to call a locksmith, for instance, and how far do things have to fall that
doors not working is a major problem? The characters are trying to carve out niches, in ways that are often foolish because they are young and only know the problems. It's not a fun world to live in, but it's one where Levy is able to find interesting new corners and ideas without having to spend much money on effects or making its characters difficult to relate to.
It can admittedly be kind of insufferable, like when Jeremy is giving his "one week, one photo" spiel, or any other time folks are coming off as twee and arch; it's not hard to sympathize with the unnamed young woman delivering an apocalyptic newspaper and raging at the triviality of the other characters' concerns. There's rather more of people bemoaning their lot in nothing but words than needed, an occasional excess of introspection and self-importance.
A one-two punch that refreshes a few elements of eccentricity as containing at least a germ of mental illness may have one reconsider one's feelings in that respect, and I like the way Levy gets a viewer thinking along those lines before introducing a pill bottle that solidifies the direction without specifying too much unneeded detail. He treats this respectfully, not going with wry observations about how this is a reasonable response to a dying world, and the overall tenor at the end is tragic, even if not literally or immediately so - Niko may have a plan, but it's probably not a solution, and there's little that these individuals can do to make life easier for those struggling.
It makes Tiffany Young's performance as Niko grow as the film goes on. She initially seems very mannered, a K-pop idol who may be out of her depth despite that background requiring the exact sort of charisma that Niko needs to have, but when she starts to crack midway through, a lot of the same tics start to seem more in-character. It gives Sandor Funtek a little more to respond to, and also highlights how Kim Soy really becomes the glue of the film as it goes on, managing because she's maybe got a slightly more solid foundation than the others, personally messy rather than existentially so.
Seoul is an interesting place for a French filmmaker based in Japan to make a mostly English-language movie; Levy finds areas that can feel kind of overstuffed but can also be starkly empty, like the life has been sucked out but what's left has been crammed too tight. It's a recipe for despair that, nevertheless, can still make you believe that maybe there's still something for you there.
"Idyll"
☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, DCP)
I went off a bit up top about how movies like "Idyll" feel kind of redundant as science fiction if you're following tech in any way, and I kind of don't know who is watching short sci-fi films that isn't, but it still hits its spots pretty well: The premise makes sense, the gags about how tech companies will create an addictive experience and then squeeze people for every upgraded hit possible are both funny in their timing and anger-inducing in how they ring true, and the whole thing clings together pretty well: It's not really a movie about how these curated channels create unrealistic expectations or how something sold as social actually separates one from their other friends in favor of bots and simulacra, but it fits in. That "Our Girl" (Mina Sundwall) is cute and name-checked as such works rather than seeming like something that would work against the movie, saying no-one is immune rather than trying to convince us she's a sad sack.
Being a short rather than a feature makes the end seem more than a bit rushed, though; writer/director Austin Cauldwell seems to be skipping to the most noteworthy events in chaotic fashion rather than using related ideas to reinforce each other like in the beginning. The end's a decent sting, but maybe not quite the one that follows from the rest of the movie.
"Soulmate" '26
☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, DCP)
This one also gets dinged a bit for playing right after "Idyll"; it's a lot of the same jokes and themes in less clearly polished form, and which you prefer might entirely be a matter of whether you like a movie that finishes with a rug-pull or a display of growth. I do kind of dig it for how relatively low-fi it is, not out of some knee-jerk preference for analog or DIY-style filmmaking, but for how most the the VR scenes being machinima using software that's not quite state of the art emphasizes that there's no way Jalte is fooling himself into believing the VR environment is real but that these bots and online-only experiences are giving him something he wants.
That extends to how Hampus Egelund spends almost the entire movie with VR goggles over his face that aren't exactly sleek and modern-looking, and you get a lot from his body language. He does really well walking around like this is something he's got plenty of practice doing even if it's not quite a person's natural state in this particular future. I kind of like that filmmaker Jens-Julius Dall kind of avoids showing other people's faces as well, at least for a bit, to disguise whether Jalte is a truly sad case or if we're looking at the future more generally.
"Algorithm"
☆ ☆ ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, DCP)
…and the internet is still awful and making it difficult to connect! Who knew?
There's kind of an interesting idea here, as filmmaker Emily Charlotte Poulter plays with how many of these social media sites/publishing platforms will tempt users with potential monetization, and there's a lot of potential in Evie (Leonie Federie) and Cora (Virginia Hartmann) finding that being split up has been bad for them financially even if they recognize that they really aren't good together. It feels like a really rich vein to mine between how this sort of thing is addictive and leads to one creating a sort of curated version of oneself, but the film doesn't get into much of that.
It might just be a matter of resources being thin and this being a pilot for a feature; there are one or two sets and the apartment set is especially barebones - it looks like Evie lives in a Big Green Room without any personality, bland and generically futuristic without many of the details that would make what seems like a pretty good premise sing.
"Szum fal" ("Noise of Waves")
☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, DCP)
Oh, so we're off the internet being evil and on to contacting people you love from the past?
In this case, the fun is in the details - everything about the Ghost Phone is hand-crafted analog/retro, from the machine itself to the online video which looks like it was shot on VHS decades ago and maybe not uploaded recently, to how its effects are generated in-camera using a CRT and affecting the magnetic fields as you touch it. The back and forth between 13-year-old Antek (Marceli Sikora) and his father Pawel (Andrzej Konopka) is quite charming and has the right amount of melancholy while letting them feel alive. Sebastian Pawlak is fun as the inventor who mostly wants to get rid of this cursed thing while still having a glimmer in his eye.
Once it gets into the bit about how both Antek and Pawel potentially get lost trying to contact Antek's late mother, the movie dries out a bit; despite the novel mechanism, filmmaker Tomasz Wróbel feels more bound by what has to happen than going anywhere unexpected.
"Horse Fly"
☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, DCP)
"Horse Fly" doesn't feel like a pilot for a feature so much as a short that excised a major chunk of what might make it interesting, to wit: Who are the targets of the drone missions that Cameron (Angela Wong Carbone) and Matteo (Brian Sutherland) are monitoring? Thematically, it would certainly hit harder if it were China, but I don't believe this is ever specifically stated, and the way the last scene talks about their base moving around suggests a United States at war with itself, and the checkpoints are also weird. During the Q&A, the filmmakers talked about preserving ambiguity, but I feel like ambiguity really works against this movie: Cameron seems torn up because she has been ignoring her Chinese heritage before meeting a family who immigrated from the same reason, and their shared ties work because they are specific, but the film's lack of detail makes it a sort of free-floating guilt.
Weird, because Carbone is good, as is Janet Hsieh as the shopkeeper surprised and delighted that the mixed-ethnicity customer who has been coming in for months speaks Mandarin, and the hand-made drone bunker is a really nifty little set. The folks involved all know their stuff, and having everything front and center feels like it would solidify the whole thing.
"HappyDeal"
☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, DCP)
And we end back where we began, with modern internet-enabled capitalism making everybody miserable with the really nasty bit being that most of the darkly satirical elements here are barely exaggerated. Here, Emma (Marie Kauffmann) is working at not-Amazon-wink fulfilment center that has been thoroughly gamified with the reward being an apartment and being taken on as a salaried employee. She's looking good until she twists her ankle, but that leads to another opportunity.
If you've read anything about what working an Amazon warehouse or delivery route is like, there's a lot in this movie that will have you nod, thinking "yeah, that's probably the next step", and the film more or less runs on each of them seeming like they should be beyond the pale even as you can see unaccountable billionaires and corporations doing them as soon as possible. It works a lot more often than not; Kauffmann's Emma is easy to root for, and she does very well at communicating that she knows this is insane and soul-destroying but rationalizing it because she and her daughter need to eat and sleep, without a lot of laying it out plainly. Filmmakers Alexis & Jeremie Lopez do very well handling the frustrating details, as well, such as how online polls are less about gathering reactions than getting a chance to signify loyalty, or how something meant to be awful will be presented as helping veterans.
The story is kind of built to fizzle, because ending it on a riot or Emma winning the competition or losing it because someone else was more committed or anything, really, is going to be either unsatisfying or undermine the point. It probably couldn't end any other way but how it does, but it's abrupt but not quite ironic enough to be an absolute gut-punch.
You Are the Film
☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
You Are the Film is slight and anything-goes to the point of eventually becoming nonsense, but then, those are arguably also this movie's virtues. It's 67 minutes long and has a pair of absolutely insane final-act twists that will get some folks laughing out of sheer incredulity, but it's been meta from the start, so there's no arguing that this isn't what you signed up for.
It opens by introducing the audience to two young people in similar situations: Madoka (Marika Ito) manages and writes for a small theater troupe that mostly performs in a small pub but is on the verge of playing a large venue; Kazuma (Kai Inowaki) is the glue holding a rock band that plays in a nearby bar together. The proprietors of the establishments give them flyers for movies playing in the theater next door, but when they arrive, rather than meeting each other in person, they see their opposite numbers on the screen, and get kind of annoyed that the film appears to be interactive, before reading the synopses to each other reveals that two of Madoka's cast are about to quit and some hamsters are threatening the other members of Kazuma's band over money their guitarist stole.
From there, things mostly proceed in real time with Madoka and Kazuma rushing in and out of the theater to deal with their respective issues, occasionally returning to the theater to consult or talking over their shoulder. These challenges, by and large, aren't exactly intractable on their own, which means the crossing over is more fun chaos than the movie becoming an interconnected moebius strip of a plot. It's fairly shaggy, maybe unavoidably so given the meta nature of the story, where cinematic logic is going to be invoked rather than drawing charts.
It can go pretty far on how amiable its two leads are, though, and their performances parallel each other nicely enough for the premise to work while also feeling distinct enough that they're not repeating themselves. Marika Ito and Kai Inowaki manage the neat trick of having chemistry while spending most of the movie only seeing each other on a film screen, impressing with their commitment to their art even as they acknowledge what a mixed blessing it is to do so with their friends. Ito probably has the stronger general ensemble around her, but Inowaki plays off, the guitarist, nicely.
(This all takes place in what looks like a delightfully cozy theater surrounded by a fish & chips café, vintage shop, and rock bar; I'm envious!)
It eventually becomes chaos, and I'm kind of torn between wishing Ueda has a big budget to work with for the last act and appreciating the shoestring absurdity he goes with. There's fun in both approaches, but the one Ueda chooses shows how his reach exceeds his grasp, and for as high-energy as the last act is, you can kind of feel him flailing and maybe wish that this was a more cohesive film, more the ouroboros his previous works managed to be while still feeling like anything could happen.
This isn't quite the magic trick that
Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes and
River were, but it's cute, goofy, and finishes quickly rather than wearing out its welcome.
"175"
☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
This is an impressively nasty little short without a whole lot of overt violence, in large part because its edge is baked into its politics, with its characters' humanist goals in direct opposition to the violent, inhumane actions they will use to achieve them. The screw-turning is nice - cops in the café where those trying to prevent a vote on exclusionary immigration policy are holding a representative's son, the captors being a bunch of amateurs who aren't all sold on the plan - but what's really effective is how the filmmakers know this clearly cannot work: Good people will choke doing bad things, from taunting the cops because they've become too assured to being lax with the weapons they don't want to use. Evil will more directly beget evil.
In some ways, the ending seems a bit too abrupt and not what the rest of the film was leading to, but in others, it couldn't be otherwise: All the strong performances and nail-biting cutaways to television coverage of the vote is always going to lead to a mess, and likely one that plays as unfair and random.
Paradise (Attack on Paradise)
☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
There's got to be a great book in looking at the "fight your way in/out/up/down" genre, which seemingly hit its apogee in
The Raid, likely the first movie people can remember to being all-in on the idea, though it likely has antecedents back to the silent era in film and a whole host of video game brawlers.
The Raid hit at just the right point to be hard to top in terms of sheer action, so something like
Attack on Paradise has to lean a bit more on personality, which it has in bunches even if it's often sort of messy.
It opens with Suleyman "Solo" Akhari (Saïd Boumazoughe) being pulled over on a garbage traffic violation only to have the racist cops who try to beat him discover he's got martial arts skill they don't, with one left dead or incapacitated enough that Suleyman spends seven years in prison. When he gets out and attempts to return home to Paradise Apartments, he finds a great deal has changed for the worse: Not only has his diabetic mother (Fatima Khanfour) lost her husband and other son while Suleyman was locked up, but she has been moved to a smaller unit on a lower floor because the upper two are now occupied by "Prince Hanza Haddad" (Achmed Akkabi), a gang kingpin who has decided to make the building his fortress. It's also his lousy luck that the cops have decided this is the day they're going to take the Prince, and not only are they none too concerned about the residents of the building, mostly poor immigrants, but they've severely underestimated the firepower Prince has. It's not too long before Suleyman winds up thrown together with Yasmine (Clara Cleymans), a single mother on her first mission as a member of SWAT, where the only way out appears to be fighting their way up to take the Prince down.
Attack on Paradise is a labor of love for star Saïd Boumazoughe, and while "extremely violent brawler" might be an odd dream project for someone not particularly known for action work, it clicks into place a bit when you learn that he grew up in an Antwerp high-rise much like the Paradise (if not that actual building) and seldom saw other Moroccan immigrants in this sort of role. He's certainly done the prep, getting into great shape and training to at least sell the moves he makes on-screen even when he's paired up with a much larger MMA-fighter type. Of course, part of that is that he's willing to take a beating on-screen in the way that some action specialists aren't; he's got no problem selling that he's running on fumes at points, looking sort of knowingly ambivalent when thugs praise him as a cop-killer (he's obviously not proud but not going to contradict these guys), or engaging in different sorts of amusing banter with his mom or the old friend who runs the convenience store at ground level.
He's given a fine counterpart in Clara Cleymans, who plays Yasmine as equal parts "only woman on the team who has to act extra-tough to deal with the meatheads around her" and just being like that; Yasmine and Suleyman are both Not Screwing Around in different ways but there's something very fun about how she's got the tough-guy energy and he's the put-upon partner, even if that's not their roles. It would be nice if they had adversaries who were on their level beyond selling fights; Achmed Akkabi makes the Prince ruthless but not quite intimidating, while Jamal Ben Saddik and Soroush Helali don't have much personality as his toughest enforcers. Imanuelle Grives is entertaining as the lieutenant (and Suleyman's former lover) who is there in part to serve as Yasmine's final boss, and there are some colorful opponents, but no-one who plays as much more than an obstacle to the heroes.
Which is fine; the point is to make Suleyman and Yasmine run a gauntlet, with director Bob Colaers and the action team going as hard as they can for as long as they can. Boumazoughe does a lot of his own stuntwork and I suspect that a lot of his opponents were cast for their ability to move as much as look threatening, so fights look pretty darn good for a relatively modest Belgian flick, with a few sequences feeling at least a bit inventive and unusual. Colliers and company don't stint on the blood and guts even when it might raise some eyebrows - does Belgian SWAT go straight for headshots before announcing their presence generally, or is that something reserved for immigrants, or artistic license because the filmmakers know what their audience came to see? - just blasting the hell out of everything as they throw their heroes against increasingly larger-than-life bad guys.
It's a fun stretch of no-messing-around action, and I certainty wouldn't mind seeing Boumazoughe and/or Cleymans back for round two, especially if they get some more charismatic villains.
