Great to be back in Montreal, and not just because it is expected to be stupidly hot in Boston with unexpected apocalyptic air quality because of wildfires in Manitoba. We're looking at a nice 18 days of moves here!
Getting here was a bit of a thing, though - I had a 10:40am flight that was supposed to get me here by noon, and was out the door at around 7am or so, but two Red Line stations later, I realized I had forgotten my passport. By the time I got back to the apartment, I figured I should get a ride to be sure, but the first one was 12 minutes away for a half hour and seemed to be getting a block further away each time I checked. Canceled, got another one. When I arrived at the airport, I had trouble checking in at the kiosk, and the departure board said my flight was leaving early, at 10:30am, which I did not realize was possible. Apparently they both oversold it and the check-in cutoff was an hour before the flight. They got me on the next flight, which entailed a transfer in Toronto, but which didn't leave until I was stopped to arrive, which killed any plans I may have had about spending an afternoon and evening visiting favorite spots and restaurants.
Got to sit in business class on that second leg, though, which is nice, but kind of like when they started putting recliners in theaters, an almost unreasonable amount of space compared to what I'm used to. The Puritan New England's in me almost disapproves.
The lesson: Put your passport in your pants pocket the night before!
Oddly, the first press screening was before you could pick up badges; it's absolutely surreal that I can occasionally get away with writing "Jason Seaver, Jay's Movie Blog" on the sign-in sheet for one of these things. That's opening film Her Private Hell, which regular press passes don't get into anyway, and while I didn't see the director presented with an award as a result, that's fine (honestly, probably got the best). It means getting up stupidly early tomorrow will just be my habit of late rather than necessity.
Because that meant I could start the evening with Tunnels: Sun in the Dark, rather than catch the 10:45am show Friday, then head across the street for Kung Fu, crossing my fingers that Larry Fessenden would stay to host Friday's Trauma encore.
Which is where we have the plan for Friday: Trauma, or Monsters All, Dance Freak, Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant, and then Blaise, figuring Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma will be everywhere in a couple weeks. Tunnels is worth a look (if I post this in time).
Her Private Hell
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2026 in Cinema du Parc #2 (Fantasia press screening, DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)
The opening shot of Her Private Hell is fantastic, the sort of thing the rest of the films in the festival will have a hard time topping, but also something that the rest of this film will have a hard time building on. Nicholas Winding Refn's movie is never less than visually striking, but as is often the case with the director, his storytelling is not up to his vibe creation.
Once he's set the scene, we meet Elle (Sophie Thatcher), a glamorous young movie star whose wealthy family lives in the penthouse apartment of the dizzying Tower Hotel. She spots Hunter (Kristine Froseth), one of her co-stars in the movie shooting the next day, sleeping in the lobby because her room was given away, and invites her up. There, she'll meet Elle's stepmother Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), another co-star who was once Elle's best friend, and Elle's father Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), who says he is leaving town during the shoot so Elle and Dominique can fix things between them. Before that, Elle and Hunter witness a neighbor murdered by the monstrous Leather Man, who is being hunted by revenge-seeking Soldier K (Charles Melton).
The look and feel of all this is impeccable, a vaguely futuristic city either distinct from K's reality- which is seemingly postwar Japan - or located hundreds of stories above it. The crystalline planet where Elle's retro sci-fi movie takes place blends into both and the mythic space which seems to spawn the Leather Man and a pair of mysterious young women. Refn's team designs and shoots the heck out of it and the music has a driving bass line, with the effect that this world which has been fragmented and abstracted in different ways holds together extremely well.
The same can't be said of the stories and characters, though. The movie gets by for a while on Elle's aloof cynicism clearly being at war with her still loving the people who have hurt her, but Refn's story is all over the place; Hunter doesn't really have a place in that, K is all over the place, and the folks who are introduced and shuffled off for narrative convenience just feel like so much filler. The places where there's a lot going on are too busy to be interesting, and the time in between are slogs. Refn can't quite balance telling the audience that the glamorous are shallow, petty people while relying on holding the audience's interest by playing on how fascinating they're supposed to be.
Sophie Thatcher almost can, though; Elle is full of melancholy and anger and just enough damning self-awareness to know that she's too privileged to garner much sympathy. Kristine Froseth is a fun contrast as Hunter, for a while; she wears nice clothes and makeup well but is not high-class in the way Elle and Dominique are and Refn eventually doesn't have anything to do with that conflict (there are a couple scenes that feel like terrible overacting before clicking as Hunter trying to be melodramatic in the same way Elle and Dominique are, when they do). Havana Rose Liu eventually has more to do but has little enough toward the start for it to be a problem. Charlie Melton plays his cipher well enough, but Diego Calva's Niko is clearly there so that the dynamics between the girls don't feel entirely like lesbian drama (and, to be fair, a lot of young actresses have done sex scenes to keep movies with three male leads from seeming too gay).
Refn is a good enough director and his cast and crew are talented enough that much of this is staged impeccably, with enough good bits that it is absolutely worth watching once. I'm genuinely curious what a second viewing will have me thinking, outside the minor caveat that the Japanese-language dialogue was subtitled in French rather than English (though my French was probably good enough to get the gist). It's entirely possible there will be layers I didn't spot the first time, but I'm afraid that it will appear more clearly as a pretty, hollow mess.
Dia Dao: Mat Troi Trong Bong Toi (Tunnels: Sun in the Dark)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2026 in Cinema J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
The first Vietnam War film that I've ever seen from Vietnam, Tunnels: Sun in the Dark is not exactly dry, but it can be rather procedural, a very clear take on how tunnel operations during the war worked that does not quite become the intense pressure cooker one might expect. Perhaps there is a sort of survivorship bias, in that you just wouldn't last in the tunnels and tell the tale unless you had a certain level of stoicism. Whatever the reason, Tunnels feels like an unusually muted sort of war movie, especially considering its domestic release was tied to the fiftieth anniversary of the war's end.
The action here takes place in 1967, starting with two noteworthy incidents in the ruins of the Binh An Dong hamlet of Cu Chi: First, Ba Huong (Thu Anh Ho) captures the lurking Tu Dap (Quang Tuan), a mechanic who claims their mothers were sworn sisters and a marriage had been arranged between them; second, local commander Bay Theo (Thai Hoa) welcomes Hai Thung (Hoang Minh Triet), whom he had previously been told would be guarding medical supplies but who in fact commands an intelligence operation that will be listening to American signals and relaying them, an operation that will bring increased attention and bombing to the tunnel system.
Western filmgoers have likely seen plenty of movies about the Vietnam War from the American perspective, and their structure and focus was often dictated by how Americans fought the war and many others: A focus on large operations getting mired down in an environment to which they are not well suited, a sort of incredulity that the most powerful fighting force the world had ever seen could get worn down and ultimately defeated by tactics that often seemed like madness. The flip side, it would seem, is the Vietnamese view of people hunkering down, literally inside their homeland, doing what they can to stop this invading juggernaut. This was never going to be a war of overwhelming victory in decisive battles, but persistence and digging in, laying claim to the land despite efforts to take it away.
What often takes center stage as a result is a story of community: The senior officers are uncles rather than generals, fretting about keeping secrets and managing the dynamics in their cells more than large-scale tactics. There are movie nights and singalongs that would play differently in the recent spate of Chinese movies about the Korean War, where the point would be reinforcing ideology rather than connections. Heck, there's a romance in there that feels genuine near the center.
It's not too cutesy, thankfully; especially compared to the other women in the tunnels, Thu Anh Ho's Ba Huong is not prone to nonsense or vanity. She gets most of the action-hero moments in the film, communicating the grim determination to do what's necessary without it having completely extinguished her humanity, and she seems enjoyably irritated that she's catching feelings for this guy who tried to use the possibility to manipulate his way into the unit. Quang Tuan's is a complement to her, a tinkerer who seems like he'd be a liability in the field but whose mind is unnervingly capable of designing weapons; there's a similar recklessness about Tu Dap's growing affection for his captor. Meanwhile, Thai Hoa is the steady bedrock of the film as Bay Theo, never off-mission but palpably concerned about the people in his charge, an uneasy contrast to Hoang Minh Triet's focused Hai Thung, who carries himself with the air of someone who knows how crucial their role is and won't let anyone suggest it's one notch less.
(That "especially compared to the other women" doesn't mean the other women in the film are stereotypes so much as they are young women clearly thrust into roles that would not be traditional and their performances reflect that it's not easy to simply turn deactivate who they were before signing up to fight and intend to be after the war.)
The film reflects the general level-headedness of the main characters; though the Cu Chi tunnel system is under constant attack by American forces over the course of the film, raised voices and panic are rare. Though quarters are tight and lighting is often appropriately dim, it's not exactly a claustrophobic sensation that emerges so much as one of known and understood limits. There are problems to solve and tension as the soldiers try to handle them, but the feeling is often akin to talking to veterans, "we had a job to do that couldn't be avoided, so we did it". The moments of actual fighting are often brief and pointed - without being lectures, they sharply highlight how trying to fight an opponent with firepower that's an order of magnitude greater is folly, or how monstrous American forces have become to try and use their resources against the Viet Cong - the bombing seems desperate, and the attempts to flood them out of their tunnels far more vicious and unsporting than the VC's guerilla warfare.
It's an unusual war film in that way, not the grinder one may expect from decades of American films but interesting nonetheless. It's fascinating how the different perspective doesn't just change the meaning of the film's commentary, but its structure and design.
Kung Fu '26
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
The introduction to Kung Fu at the festival implied that director Giddens Ko was adapting a comic book series he had written rather than a novel, which would track - there is a lot going on here, enough that Ko has to move at crazy speed to get it all in, and it often seems built around the visual rather than something that would work in print. It might work better as a television series than a movie, but I don't know that Taiwanese TV has the budget for the scale he wanted for the action. It's too much, really, but I don't know that it could have been otherwise.
It follows two high school friends, You Soo-Yuan (Kai Ko) and Chen Ming-Yi (Berant Zhu), who try to stay out of trouble but get bullied anyway, with Yuan nursing a crush on pretty but quick-tempered classmate Yi-Jing (Gingle Wang Ching) while Yi has a thing for her mother (Tseng Wan-Ting). A little kindness to what appears to be a mentally-ill vagrant at the bowling alley has the man, Huang Jun (Leon Dai) reveal himself as an ancient kung fu master, eager to take the boys on as disciples. They eventually accept, with Jing the first to realize something is very much off about them as they gain Chi power, but it's soon revealed that Huang Jun is not alone, with former friend Lan Jin (Liu Kuan-Ting) cutting a swath through the underworld, hoping to consolidate power and rule, and he seems a lot more capable and focused than Huang Jun. But things are not entirely as they seem!
Indeed, things are really not as they seem, with the sort of audacious twist at roughly the midway point more often seen in Indian films where the filmmakers can use the intermission to reset and restart with the surprisingly altered premise. It's a potentially great spin; the issue is that by that point things are moving so quickly that Ko has a hard time slowing things down enough to explore the implications or poke around the lore he's just introduced. There's really nothing to do but fight at this point, because things have already built to a fever pitch and there's not a lot of room for nuance or the kids finding new allies, even though what Ko has introduced deserves some time as a thriller before becoming a brawl.
The brawling is fun, though - Ko and action team Triple A are aiming for the sort of larger-than-life wire fu that gave Stephen Chow international hits in Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer (fingers crossed for Kung Fu Soccer in a few weeks!), though with some bloody splatstick mixed in. It's high-flying action that doesn't exactly have much interest in looking realistic, as the impossibility of it is in some ways the point of the whole thing, the focus more on how these guys have so much raw power that their bodies are running hot and wailing on each other is going to cause a lot of collateral damage, rather than the sort of impressive, precise movement that indicates years of training and mastery. Ko moves fast to be able to move from one fight to another without a lot of room to rest, and while he doesn't always succeed in balancing the broad comedy and the gruesome combat, it's kind of exhausting rather than frustrating, a constant stream of high energy rather than whiplash that would have a viewer upset that he replaced the thing one was enjoying with something else.
An amiable cast helps; Kai Ko plays Yuan as a sad-sack dork with a fair amount of resentment and anger underneath, and it's kind of an impressive balancing act: There's clearly something ready to be unleashed upon his frustrations and worse, but he never quite comes across as the sort of nasty incel that would be a bad boyfriend if Jing decided to look at him that way. Gingle Wang is a good match for him in that way; her Jing is brimming with hostility and there's a certain delight in seeing how learning Ultimate Kung Fu gives her a way to vent but also a way to have friends. Berant Zhu doesn't quite play a sidekick so much as the film's glue, a likable presence that keeps a lot of scenes going and jokes flowing.
It's Leon Dai who is billed first, though, and he's the one who gets a lot to do, a lot more than just "ancient magic warrior not coping entirely well with the present". Huang Jun is kind of nuts, and it manifests in several different ways, and yet all the various facets revealed by the plot twists and in flashbacks feel coherent even as they're scattered and contradictory. The movie is built in such a way that he's the sort of character you might expect to be sidelined toward the end so that the kids can step up, but this isn't that movie, and Dai handles the challenge adroitly even as the film requires him to be manic.
I must admit, Kung Fu is kind of an exhausting movie to see at the end of a long day, and the mix of broad comedy and cruel violence had me wishing it would pick a lane at times. I still might be interested in catching it again in other circumstances ,to see how it plays when I've got a little more room to breathe even if the film doesn't.
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