I've got to admit, I thought I'd be well past the point in posting my reviews from Fantasia where I talked about how I saw something else because this was already listed as a coming attraction at the Coolidge so I knew I'd be able to see it and could thus prioritize something that might not come around Boston - the "no time during the festival/tough getting back into writing about it" funk has hit early this year! I'm trying, though!
Anyway, as it turns out, I didn't go to the Coolidge because, smug as I was about being out of town while the Red Line was shut down, the MBTA whacked me with a major Green Line shutdown once I got back, and that made a lot of shows there tricky - it's a long enough movie that they're running it at about 6:15pm, which would be right on the border of getting there from my apartment on the Green Line, much less the 66 bus (shuttle buses are Right Out). Surprisingly, though, it was playing Boston Common - "surprising" in that his last couple horror movies played the Brattle and director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's last mainstream film, Wife of a Spy, didn't play Boston at all (I was fortunate to see it while on vacation in Washington, DC) - and had a surprisingly full house for a mid-week screening of a 147-minute Japanese period mystery. I don't know what to read into that; maybe the Brattle's showing a fair amount of Kurosawa over the past year has raised his profile around here, maybe the trailers have played before anime; maybe everyone has seen Spider-Man and The Odyssey and the more mainstream releases that came out last weekend weren't of much interest. Heck, maybe someone at AMC realized that a lot of the local fandom is north of the river and weren't messing with the 66 this weekend.
Surprisingly, it doesn't look like it will be held over downtown - there is a lot coming out this weekend, and maybe they figure this is the sort of thing that has a steep dropoff after folks see it during week one - but it's going to continue at the Coolidge, and is well worth a trip.
Kokurôjô (The Samurai and the Prisoner)
☆ ☆ ☆ ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 August 2026 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or buy the novel or soundtrack at Amazon
I'm not sure exactly when I had the thought "this is pretty Kurosawa-esque" during my viewing of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's The Samurai and the Prisoner, but I had to laugh a bit and wonder if he had waited so long to do a samurai movie because he knew that his surname meant it would be compared to some of the greatest films of one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. That would be absurdly unfair, especially since it would be almost impossible for any Japanese director to not be influenced by Akira, so if you see any of the (unrelated) sensei in this movie, it just shows that Kiyoshi knows what he's doing, and that's no surprise.
The story begins in 1578, when Nobunaga Oda was seeking to unite Japan, and one of his generals, Lord Araki Murashige (Masahiro Motoki) suddenly broke from him, holing up in the impregnable castle city of Arioka. Oda sends an old friend, Kuroda Kanbei (Masaki Suda) as an emissary, but rather than sending Kanbei's head back as a refusal of Oda's proposal, Murashige locks him in the dungeon, which may leave Kanbei's hostage son forfeit if Oda believes he has switched allegiances. Murashige, it seems, is generally not keen on this sort of diplomatic murder, as he also imprisons one of his own hostages when his father joins Oda rather than executing the child. The boy soon winds up dead anyway, seemingly shot by a vanishing arrow, the first of four murders over the course of a year that seem like divine retribution for Murashige breaking with Oda and defying the code of the samurai, each sending him to the dungeon to see if the brilliant Kabnei can help him crack the cases.
The opening crawl notes that history does not record why Murashige broke with Oda; Kurosawa and Honobu Yonezawa (who wrote the original novel) have some ideas, but one doesn't need to know the ins and outs of Japanese military history to see that their Murashige, at the very least, finds the sorts of executions he is frequently called upon to perform wasteful and counterproductive: Oda's cruelty, he wagers, will make his reign short-lived as it will breed rebellion and deprive him of his best advisors. He's not exactly a pacifist, but his relatively modern ideas in this area certainly seem unpragmatic in the face of a remorseless enemy and allies who are part of a society that uses the threat of death as glue. Often, this is the story of a man whose nobility is revealed to be naive or even his downfall, but Kurosawa, to his credit, seems as interested in how it might work as in how it can't, examining how a smart man whose priority is avoiding casualties maneuvers in an arena where most are explicitly expendable.
I like the way Masahiro Motoki plays Murashige; there's the intelligence of a sharp tactician in unfamiliar territory to him, someone trying to change the world but accustomed to the deference that present circumstances give him, and occasionally the realization that what he's saying is going to sound like weakness as it comes out of his mouth. It's an exercise in whether or not you can have the air of a samurai without the threat of imminent violence. Masaki Suda is a fine contrast, whip smart, clearly deserving of respect though arrogant and enough of a true believer to be consistently angry over his survival rather than grateful and/or shamed. The respect but violent disagreement the pair share makes each time Murashige consults Kanbei fascinating, especially as Murashige is showing the wear of a slowly disintegrating situation above as Kanbei seemingly becomes both more feral and sharper, like he's spending months plotting potential next steps and losing his grip doing so.
The rest of the cast is fair, with Yuriko Yoshitaka the main standout as Murashige's wife Chiyoho. Once challenge a film like this has is that Murashige is going to have a bunch of subordinates, all very competent and pledged to a fairly rigid code, and on top of that, the film is broken into four chapters, with each murder mystery representing a season. Sometimes the writers can re-use characters, and sometimes a new mystery needs new ones, and sometimes they need to kill someone significant off to raise the stakes or thin out Murashige's base of support as time goes on. Munetaka Aoki and Joe Odagiri do a particularly nice job of making their particular retainers distinguish themselves, although a couple aren't quite up to the challenge of being briefly important in a long movie. That said, a lot of TV writers could probably take notes at how well Kurosawa (and presumably Yonezawa) structure a set of individual episodes that can be fairly procedural into an arc that builds to a finish.
Kurosawa often makes horror movies that play in the banal (or dark and hidden) corners of the present day, so it's a nifty change of pace to see him given the money for nice costumes and shooting on an impressively dressed location, although he often returns to the same locations, which feel tighter each time (the meeting room seems to shrink with Murashige's diminishing number of allies to the point where it seems difficult to get a camera in there). The interesting exception is the dungeon, which seems surprisingly vast with its undulating dirt floor, like Murashige is free when he comes to visit Kanbei, at least as far as expectations are concerned, even if his counterpart is pointedly kept anchored in one spot and well aware of it. Kurosawa, like his namesake, often seems to consciously stage meetings between samurai and flashbacks as theater, not quite making jokes out of the shuffling gates or the way characters will move about a room while sitting to respect hierarchy but making sure the audience recognizes the absurdity of it.
He also makes a valiant effort to fight how this sort of film can bog down in the later episodes, as well as how a man's efforts to avoid violence in a violent world can wind up feeling less that cathartic; you can feel history start to box him in a bit toward the end, when the specifics of various military/diplomatic tactics start to become a bit more important. The movie doesn't really fizzle, just reaches a point where it's hard to re-energize for a third or fourth time, and thankfully Kurosawa can see when it's about to break and wraps things up without it seeming rushed.
Kurosawas, it turns out, are pretty good at samurai movies, and I wouldn't mind seeing Kiyoshi try another one now that the seal's been cracked.
Wednesday, August 12, 2026
Friday, August 07, 2026
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 7 August 2026 - 13 August 2026
Having arrived back home with no particular difficulty, I am actually kind of relieved that studios are still giving The Odyssey and Spider-Man a bit of space, so I can watch some suddenly-good baseball and write movie reviews.
- I opted to skip The Samurai and the Prisoner at Fantasia once I saw that it was booked at The Coolidge Corner Theatre; so I'll get a chance to catch the new one from Kiyoshi Kurosawa, which stars Masahiro Motoki as the man defending a castle under siege who must also solve a series of murders with the perhaps-untrustworthy help of someone being held in the dungeon (Masaki Suda). It's also at Boston Common.
The Coolidge also picks up three documentaries: Cookie Queens, an IFFBoston alum that follows four girls aiming to be top-sellers, is kind of delightful; I've got to admit, the exhausted-looking girl in the trailer lamenting that it never ends speaks to me (also at Boston Common). Bernstein's Wall tells the story of Leonard Bernstein in his own voice and with a great deal of archival footage; it mostly plays evening shows but there's a special presentation on Sunday with filmmaker Douglas Tirola there in person. Finally, Wild Inside takes the day shift, looking at the saga of Flaco the owl, born in captivity but escaping his enclosure to explore Manhattan in February 2023 (also at West Newton all day).
Camp Coolidge midnights feature the pretty entertaining The Final Girls on Friday and a 35mm print of Heavyweights on Saturday. Midsummer Stick-Ups include The Great Muppet Caper Sunday morning, Kubrick's The Killing Tuesday evening, a 35mm print of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three on Wednesday, and a late "cult classic" screening of Danger: Diabolik on Thursday. There's a sold-out CatVideoFest show on Sunday afternoon; a "Panorama" show of documentary Do You Love Me, which examines Lebanon entirely through local archival footage, with a panel of Lebanese folks to discuss their own memories afterward; and a Big Screen Classic screening of King Hu's Dragon Inn with a pre-film seminar by Cass Clarke on Thursday. - The widest release is One Night Only, whose trailer kind of hides that it's set in an alternate reality where sex outside wedlock is only allowed one night a year, maybe because it opts to play it as a romantic comedy rather than dystopian satire. Word is bad! It's at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Causeway Street, Kendall Square, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Arsenal Yards.
Also opening is Super Troopers 3, which comes 25 years after the first! I had no idea Broken Lizard was still a thing. It's at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Causeway Street, Kendall Square, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Arsenal Yards.
Boston Common also opens Olmo, following a teenager whose crush has asked him to a party on the night when he's expected to watch his ailing father.
My eyebrows were up at the release of Eli Roth's Ice Cream Man since it looked like Vinegar Syndrome already had it listed on disc, but that's apparently the Clint Howard-starring original; the remake looks rough and apparently uses a lot of generative AI to boot. Late shows at Boston Common and Causeway Street; regular schedule at CinemaSalem.
The annual Grateful Dead Meet-Up at the Movies is at Boston Common, Kendall Square, and Assembly Row Saturday & Monday; K-pop visual album Ateez: Light the Way plays an encore at Boston Common on Saturday; music doc Katseye: Wild Hearts starts a weekend run at Boston Common and Assembly Row on Wednesday & Thursday. There are "My First Movie" previews of PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie at Boston Common, the Seaport, South Bay, and Assembly Row on Saturday; the preview at Boston Common, Causeway Street, Kendall Square, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Arsenal Yards on Monday is a surprise; and Nimrods (aka Idiots) has a preview with bonus features on Tuesday at Boston Common and South Bay. There are summer matinees of Muppet Treasure Island at South Bay Monday & Wednesday; a re-release of Practical Magic plays Boston Common, Causeway Street, the Seaport, South Bay, and Assembly Row on Tuesday. - After a quiet couple weeks, there's a bunch of South Asian cinema opening at Apple Fresh Pond and elsewhere this weekend. Korean Kanakaraju (also at Boston Common) is a Telugu-language horror comedy about a man possessed by a spirit trapped in an urn he picked up in South Korea; G.D.N. is a Tamil-language biography; DC is a Tamil-language crime film (also at Boston Common); and Thudakkam is a Malayalam-language action movie. Telugu-language action movie Dookudu plays a 15th-anniversary show on Saturday; Nepal-language drama Gauthali plays one show Monday night.
Vietnamese comedy-drama Mr. Hero opens at South Bay, with a single dad creating a larger-than-life hoax to help raise money for his ailing daughter.
The week's Studio Ghibli Fest entries are Tales From Earthsea, at Boston Common, Assembly Row dubbed Sunday and subtitled Monday, and Only Yesterday, playing the same venues dubbed Sunday and subtitled Monday. - The Somerville Theatre picks up I Want Your Sex downstairs while The Odyssey continues in 70mm on the main screen (except Monday, when it's downstairs because of a live show on the stage). The Midnight Special Friday is Inland Empire for its 20th anniversary.
The Capitol Theatre gives CatVideoFest 2026 a full one-week run; it also plays the Seaport Friday/Saturday/Sunday/Wednesday, The Regent Theatre Friday/Saturday/Sunday, and the Coolidge on Sunday (sold out). - The Brattle Theatre has Funny Girl on 35mm for the Friday Film Matinee before picking up two new restorations: I Shot Andy Warhol plays Friday to Monday, with Tally Brown, New York playing Saturday & Sunday.
There's a craft-along show of Donnie Darko on Monday, which is also when they get back to the vertical calendar: The War of the Worlds '53 plays Monday & Tuesday, with Earth vs. The Flying Saucers as the special added feature on the latter day. Broadcast News is the "TV Goes to Movies" show on Wednesday. My Night at Maud's is one of Eric Rohmer's Six Moral tales on Thursday, with Angel Heart for the Carolco late show that night. - The Seaport Alamo picks up Kore-Eda's Sheep in the Box after it leaves Boston Common, and have Mikey and Nicky in case you missed it at the Brattle last weekend. The Kid's Camp show Friday & Wednesday is Marcel the Shell with Shoes On; De Palma Summer continues with Raising Cain Saturday & Wednesday. There's a "Terror Tuesday" screening of the Final Cut of Michael Mann's Manhunter, with a sold-out preview of Tony on another screen.
- WBUR's CitySpace has a "Set in Boston" show of The Heat on Friday night with the station's Sean Burns & Erin Trahan chatting with casting director Carolyn Pickman afterward.
- The Museum of Fine Arts continues their Boston French Film Festival with Case 137 (sold out Friday night), Bazaar (Saturday, with an added early show replacing the canceled The Grand Arch), and The Little Sister (Sunday afternoon).
- Landmark Kendall Square has The Tenant on Tuesday for "Art House Essentials" and Tony Scott's Days of Thunder on Wednesday for "Great Scotts".
- Outdoor screenings via Joe's Free Films this week show Chicken Run at the MIT Open Space and How to Train Your Dragon (live action?) at the Hatch Shell on Friday; Shrek 2 at Aeronaut Brewing on Saturday, Crazy Rich Asians at TimeOut Market on Monday; and Zootopia 2 at Seven Hills Park in Somerville on Thursday.
- The Museum of Science has The Odyssey on the Omnimax Screen at 7pm Friday & Saturday.
- The Lexington Venue is closed Monday & Tuesday with Spider-Man and The Odyssey playing the rest of the week. French crime flick 11.6 has a free show Saturday morning.
The West Newton Cinema opens Wild Inside, continuing The Floaters, Spider-Man, The Odyssey, The Invite, Minions & Monsters, The Sheep Detectives, and Hadestown. Citizen Kane plays Thursday for Ty Burr's movie club.
The Dedham Community Theatre opens The Odyssey with The Invite continuing.
Cinema Salem has Ice Cream Man, Spider-Man, The Invite, >Rose of Nevada, and The Odyssey Friday to Monday. There's a Whodunnit Watch Party on Sunday, The Wednesday Classic is Ben-Hur, with Weirdo Wednesday down the hall and short film "Sprinkles" with director Andrew Koreznik for a wide-ranging discussion afterward.
Sunday, August 02, 2026
Fantasia 2026.05: "Pimple", Our Effed Up World, CineMapsosa '26, Beasts Clutching at Straws '26, "Best Friends with the Devil", and Penny Lane Is Dead
Back to the "de Sève in the afternoon, Hall in the evening" grind (for one of the more pleasant definitions of "grind")!
We start off with composer Freya Berkhout, actress Jess McLeod, and writer/director/producer Alice Maio Mackey for Our Effed Up World (with host Justine Smith), which feels like an interesting turn for Mackey in that the trans and nonbinary characters are supporting roles and there was a lot of wanting to see folks like herself up front in her previous films. Maybe not that big a deal, but interesting in terms of whether she's going to have a more commercial career at some point; she mentioned "an IP thing" as part of what's next at the end of the Q&A.
She mentioned that they lucked out finding a video store that could be used as a set, including the genuinely sketchy basement which apparently smelled terrible, but you don't have time or money to clean it on an indie budget. The range of influences for this one was an odd mix, more Kevin Smith and Australian soap operas than the genre elements. I must admit that it's kind of odd to hear "gen-X" as more of an aesthetic description than "the people you grew up with", and folks from Australia talking about something as CW-inspired is kind of like seeing "Black Friday" sales abroad; it feels like it should be a specifically American term since they would be connecting it to something else within their culture, right?
(Also, did Mackey have a tremor last year? She had this thing where she was swinging the microphone back and forth in front of her mouth and it wasn't quite like we could only catch the syllables where it passed in front of lips, but it was oddly distracting!)
After that, I took a meal break because I have not see Pontypool since its original release and wasn't really up for a Bruce McDonald/Steven McHattie talk (though some friends back home would have loved it). After that, it was back to de Sève for the Korean shorts block, with filmmakers Lee Chang-bee ("I Love Your Alter Ego"), Lee Min-hyun ("Wish You Were Dead"), and Park Jung-yoon ("TROPIC") between the Fantasia hosts/translators. Very fun group of shorts!
Then, across the street for Beasts Clutching at Straws and Penny Lane Is Dead, with writer/director Mia'Kate Russell and actresses Alexandra Jensen & Sophia Wright, the latter of whom create very different impressions without the costumes and hairstyles from the movie, with Wright joking that half of being able to be Kat was wearing that outfit, and also joking about how the days when it was an all-woman set were different than when men were around, even if it was just as violent and gory.
Then to bed. Tuesday wound up being Big Break, Levitating, Hayop Ka!, a good burger because I was very late to the pass line for Someone's Daughter, and Los Vampires. And, man, I can't believe this has taken me so long to finish that today's the festival's last day, where you'll likely find me at The Peril at Pincer Point, City War, The Fox, Freaks Part II, and Jim Queen. Kind of half tempted to rearrange things to see Gozu, but also trusting that it playing here means some midnight shows back home and a spiffy new disc are on the way.
"Borbulha" ("Pimple")
☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia Underground, DCP)
A pretty simple but entertaining gross-out short from Portugal with Tiago Rodrigues as a kid with a really noticeable pimple getting picked on by bullies until they decide to pop it and, man, they are not going to like what comes out.
I'm pretty sure that this isn't the first pus monster I've seen, but it's impressively gross and filmmaker Fernando Alle uses an impressive combination of gore effects, stop-motion, and puppetry to have it manifest and take out the little brats. The movie is just four minutes long, but Alle crams every beat needed from Rodrigues being sullen to the three victims having individual reactions and a funny denouement. Simple idea exceptionally well-executed!
Our Effed Up World
☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia Underground, DCP)
Alice Maio Mackay has been making micro-budget genre movies that festivals pick up even when they were very rough since she was a teenage girl, and even without the way she spoke in the Q&A after the screening, this is the first time that I find myself wondering what kind of filmmaker she's going to wind up being. She's clearly still learning and straddling the line between making a movie for a broader audience and making it for herself, but Our Effed Up World is fairly watchable.
It follows Sheri (Sara Thompson), who works in a supermarket with bestie Poppy (Annapurna Sriram), hanging out afterward with Finn (Jess McLeod) and Ash (Karis Oka) at the video store Finn's uncle left them. She's just resolved to dump boyfriend Harry (Jordan Dulieu), who doesn't take it particularly well, wandering about until he comes upon a strange and dangerous meteor - the sort of thing Sheri's astronomer father Hank (Scott Major) knows about because it's his job to watch out for such things.
A major part of the growing pains here are that, both by the amount of time spent and from what she said in the introduction, Mackay is mostly trying to make a hangout film with alien zombies to spice things up, and the latter almost feels like a crutch: The sci-fi/horror is not particularly memorable, and rather than resonating with the characters, mainly seems like an excuse to have them do something other hanging around and saying catty things. That's enjoyable enough in large part because Mackay has a more seasoned cast than usual - Sara Thompson has plenty of higher-profile credits, Scott Major is a bona fide veteran actor, and Annapurna Sriram is a natural goofy best friend - who are mostly able to slip comfortably into character rather than just recite lines on cue.
Those lines are sometimes more than a bit in need of a polish - the scene where Sheri dumps Harry especially makes her feel mean rather than frustrated or fed up - and It's kind of important to remember how young Mackay is because, although she's become a staple of festivals and other programs that want to showcase trans filmmakers, she's actually just now at the age where young filmmakers start working professionally, and only starting to actually be good. This movie still clanks, but not as often or as badly as the last one, which wasn't as rough as the one before that.
Which means I'm not sure whether I'd rather see her continuing to hone her skills or see how she does directing someone else's script, because you can really feel how this film lacks a lot of the connective tissue that ties one moment or aspect of a character to another, or does it awkwardly. Working with a more professional cast helps, but this is still very much someone learning the ropes and feels like it.
"SPEEDY!"
☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia: CineMapsosa 2026, DCP)
"Child learns the awful truth that adults lie" isn't necessarily a plot that scale to a feature-length film, but it's something that can certainly sing at the length of a short, and this one is charming as all get-out, getting a lot of great mileage from how ridiculous this speed-reading scam can seem when it's not held up by folks you should be able to trust, but, hey, Jung-min might have a bit of a crush on the teacher's prodigy son. The actress NAME turns in a really delightful performance as a bright girl who is shouldering a lot and but still feels like a kid.
The movie also hits its period marks nicely on top of being very earnest about what it can be like on a family that's striving for better but knows it might take some luck, or suddenly finding yourself complicit in something that's maybe not a crime but isn't right.
"Soulmate" '26
☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia: CineMapsosa 2026, DCP)
There may be one too many alter-egos in this movie, between Ji-eun (Jeong Ji-eun), "hot girl Ji-eun" - the persona she adopts as a young actress - and Eun-ho (Kim Mi-ran), the result of dissociative personality disorder brought on by her stepfather's abuse. I spent an embarrassing chunk of this 20 minute movie thinking it was going to be a teenage actress trying to find a way to form a friendship/relationship with the boy next door who mostly knows her screen image.
That's not what this is, though there's a bit of it; instead, it's about Ji-eun being exiled to a mental landscape based upon the spot in the middle of nowhere where her abuse took place It's got all the pieces that go with that, from the taunting internal dialog to the enabling mother, to ultimately deciding to assert oneself, and for the most part done pretty well. Writer/director Lee Chan-bee does a very nice job finding the details that drive certain points home, particularly how there's this sexualization of teenage girls that's not entirely imposed by older men even as it often caters to them, and how Ji-eun's mental prison is abstracted but not cool in any way: It's empty and undeveloped and the sort of thing a city girl like a young actress would find boring.
"Ijen jugeosseumyeon jokenne" ("Wish You Were Dead")
☆ ☆ ☆ ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia: CineMapsosa 2026, DCP)
Lee Min-hyuk and co-writer Park Kyu-eun know how to make a good short film: They kick off with a neat premise that has some resonance, kick off in media res, and build a lot of beats around jumping straight to the result of a bad move rather than playing out the bits that are going to require a lot of tricky effects work. You could probably build a feature around a funeral for the controlling patriarch that has him coming back as a zombie and continuing to destroy the family after his death, but this really reduces it to its essentials.
It's got a lot of neat little bits in it, as well: The fact that the male heirs who can deliver offspring are privileged feels annoying and arbitrary as a zombie-movie rule (down to Seo-hyun's father being vulnerable in the way her brother isn't because Dad's had a vasectomy), but it's also annoying and arbitrary in everyday life; Seo-hyun taking a Go board and using it to try and plot an exit - visually, it's a sort of Go/Clue hybrid - is fun improvisation. And Park Seo-yoon is sneakily great as Seo-hyun in part because, while she's clearly the smartest member of the clan and the one with the best chance of figuring out an exit and probably running the family business afterward, there's something a bit unsympathetic about her, like she's not that upset that the family members who treated her as less important than her dimwit brother and cowardly father are being murdered as they try to execute her plans. This isn't a woman who needs to prove herself to her family so much as one whose potential doesn't have to be linked to their approval.
There's a pretty good path to a longer feature if director Lee wants it, and I suspect a feature would look a bit different from the short, which is why this film is worth twenty minutes whether it leads to something bigger or not.
"TROPIC"
☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia: CineMapsosa 2026, DCP)
Anything can be a metaphor if you work at it enough, such as an aloha shirt, which reminds Choi Sun (Bae Min-su) of both how her sister Seou (Kim Da-a) committed suicide and how she really wanted to get to a happier, more carefree place, even if neither she nor Sun could make it happen. It kind of suggests the Swamp Thing-looking monster and headspace that Sun finds herself in as writer/director Park Jung-yoon bounces her between the present and the past, her two young actresses playing two people with no-one closer even though being together isn't easy.
I really love how Park ends the movie, with Sun wearing a shirt that is clearly faded, either from far too much detergent or repeated washings. That's probably how you have to remember a loved one who has ended her life like that, and it's a nice visual for how Sun will keep as much of Seou with her as she can, even if she can only handle part of her.
Wara Nimo Sugaru Kemonotachi (Beasts Clutching at Straws)
☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream the Korean version (Prime link for Korean version), or buy the disc for the Korean version at Amazon
I must admit to being curious about both previous iterations of this story: I recall the Korean film from 2020 being entertaining but also being kind of a miserable viewing experience (the festival streaming platform used in 2020 was terrible), and there are just enough differences between the two movies to make me wonder if this Japanese adaptation of a Japanese novel is closer. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be an official English translation - more mysteries and thrillers from that country are crossing the Pacific than ever before but there are so many! - but both adaptations being pretty good suggests good things about the source material.
It starts with Kanji (Ouji Suzuka), who doesn't seem like much of a "beast"; he's trying to make it as a Vtuber without really having a hook as he works in an internet cafe with private booths and looks after his grandmother with severe dementia in the apartment above her late husband's shuttered barbershop. Things potentially change when a guy who rushed out without paying his bill leaves behind a bag of money. Elsewhere in Tokyo, Ryosuke Ebato (Hiroki Narmiya), a corrupt cop deep in debt to the Goda syndicate, has a line on a college regent who has defrauded his employer. Is that the man who dropped the bag at the internet cafe, or the one who recently started visiting sex worker Mina, who has made a new friend in femme fatale Maria. Speaking of Maria, she seems to know the drill a bit too well when Mina needs to dispose of her abusive husband's body.
There's a twist or two to this, of course, which isn't completely surprising when you get to it, although to be fair I may have had the Korean version in mind when it happened. One thing director/co-wirter Hideo Jojo does fairly well is keep Kanji just busy enough, considering that most of the other threads are more obviously connected. They're not going to collide for a while, but his various frustrations at home are worth watching and entertaining for being darkly comic in a different way than the folks less innocently connected to various crimes. It means the tone doesn't really cause whiplash but the audience doesn't get completely mired in the pure cynicism of backstabbing and threats elsewhere, and there's just enough of that lurking around the edges that it doesn't feel completely separate.
It doesn't hurt that there's a nice supporting cast of characters around the main folks; Kanji's got a cute co-worker who might be a potential partner but doesn't have to be, and his grandmother is out of it in a way that plays as chaos comedy from a remove but which is also a pure nightmare from up close. Ebato's often paired with a driver who seems to haplessly wind up deeper than he intends because he (perhaps unwisely) considers Ebato a friend and a new partner investigating the very fraud he's trying to cover up, with the Goda chief having a hulking and horrifically eccentric good on hand. Mina's got an avid younger client, and Maria's lone-wolf status is fitting but things also lock in when her other connections are revealed. It's not a huge, messy ensemble, but it's one where the "hubs" are very solid indeed and none of the folks in their orbit are entirely one-note jokes.
There's also something very pleasant about how Jojo and company often seem to have come out on the other side of trying to chase the kind of cool that many were after with their intersecting crime narratives in the wake of Pulp Fiction - Kanji's streaming is small-time enough to be kind of pathetic, and everyone bit Maria is more dork than badass, with Maria explicitly pretty awful. The repetition of a zipper splitting a black screen as a scene transition renders it cute rather than too-clever, and there's fun knowing chaos to how the opening gag is used later.
It's always an odd experience to catch a remake of something after just long enough that the original isn't fresh in one's mind and not know whether good surprises are legit or differences and need bits are not quite pulled off versus vaguely remembered. I'm leaving towards this basically being well done, a chaotic but generally fun caper.
"Best Friends with the Devil"
☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Hugo de Sousa comes up with a neat idea for a short here that's really well-positioned between innocent mayhem and something sinister, as Lola (Ellyn Jameson), worried about the disappearance of her friend Amy (Kailee McGee), files a missing person report and follows her trail to David (de Sousa), the last person to see her on a hike. Maybe not wise on the face of it, but when you're starting from the premise of "unfortunate accident" rather than "foul play", not indefensible!
I like how de Sousa plays this both as writer/director and actor, not really tilting the tone into obvious danger but also recognizing that the world can be especially dangerous for women on their own and letting the audience see various red flags without actually waving them in one's face. He gives out new information in ways that recognize that this is a short and maybe shouldn't be too vague for too long, forcing the viewer to really evaluate the situation without it being a slow-down/nod-sagely beat. The end's a mess, but it's a mess from how things started out.
I also always dig when a concussion is an actual big deal.
Penny Lane Is Dead
☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
You've got to hand it to writer-director Mia Kate Russell for the title "Penny Lane Is Dead", because when you stand back a bit and look at the movie, it's not necessarily terribly different from others like it, but centering the title character like that sure makes the movie feel like people don't fit into the roles they're supposed to. The movie delivers impressive blood, guts, and women in peril, but feels a lot more off-center than it might.
It starts by introducing us to Penny herself (Bailey Spalding), a pretty blonde with a nice family who just graduated after being accepted into a good school and who genuinely seems to acknowledge and enjoy her good fortune without trying to exploit it. She's heading out to her grandparent's cabin for a girls' weekend with her best friends: Toni (Tahlee Fereday), a tall and sporty girl whom the Lanes took in when her own parents couldn't handle her coming out as gay, and Amy (Alexandra Jensen), mousy and maybe autistic, which is probably not something you'd use to describe an Australian girl in 1986. Not invited is Kat (Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn), Penny's cousin and a constant source of drama, but she shows up anyway, with drugged cupcakes and her boyfriend Angus (Ben O'Toole) not far behind. Angus is a bad'un, the son of a crime boss, and has two goons in tow, with Merrick (Fletcher Humphrys) and old pro who would rather deliver the drugs they have with no fuss but Rodowsky (Steve Le Marquand), like Angus, more inclined to have a little fun with Kat's cousin and her friends, whether they want it or not.
Penny's the title character and Toni's the conventional protagonist, but the movie's center of gravity is Kat, who kind of fascinates in that she's clearly a monster from the word go, but Russell and actress Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn seem to have a pretty good handle on how girls like her get like that. There's not a moment when the movie stops and she explains her sad origin story, but every time Russell finds a way to remind the attackers (and the audience) that these sexy young girls are 17 or 18, you can't help but remember that this applies to Kat as well as Penny, and she's an outcast for what she did as a teenager. Wright dives into the role with abandon, fully committed to Kat's awfulness, but there's always a streak of desperate need to her bad behavior and skimpy outfits, and there are moments when Angus treats Kat terribly and it's very clear she knows this and one wonders if this might be the time she wobbles.
It's a great performance, but doesn't push the rest off the screen; the girls especially are a strong ensemble. Tahlee Fereday and Bailey Spalding are impressive as Toni & Penny; there are early scenes where they discuss the possibility of being more than friends and while they're maybe a bit nervous about letting Amy or Penny's parents in on this, they're both likably confident in who they are and trusting in each other, even if Toni's future isn't quite so certain as Penny's seems to be. Alexandra Jensen's Amy isn't the same - she's seventeen and carries an emotional support stuffie around - but I really like how Jensen doesn't play Amy as a collection of tics and nervousness; she seems to take a second to think before speaking even if she misjudges her words. On the boys' side, Ben O'Toole is entitlement unleashed as Angus, ninety percent repugnant but with the sort of self-assurance that one can see why he might be kind of appealing to someone like Kat or go unquestioned by someone like Fletcher Humphys's Rodowsky who doesn't allow any sympathy into how he helps himself to Angus's scraps. Steve Le Marquand does really well with one of my favorite archetypes, the unrepentant criminal who nevertheless wants to be friggin' professional both for what he tells himself and because leaving a bunch of corpses around is bad for business.
And there will be corpses; it's a pretty gnarly movie where folks are likely to get maimed before being outright killed, and Russell is adept at using that to both make Angus & Kat seem more vicious and Toni's wins more satisfying. The gore team is on point throughout but Russell doesn't entirely lean on them to make the movie work: She doesn't exactly do a slow build but she tends to add momentum more than stopping for a breather, and she's crucially aware that Penny unconscious or dazed is going to create a lot more tension that the audience can grasp than various nasty injuries that much of the audience is going to read as "fun" special effects, and she's good at making sure there's really nothing sexy about it without making things more outwardly grotesque.
Indeed, I think what's kind of exciting about Penny Lane Is Dead and makes it feel noteworthy more than the setting or the quality of the gore is how the screenplay seems to reflect all the toxic forces at work in good balance: It is absolutely older guys preying on younger girls and even the surfer dudes at the local shop who are basically unproblematic don't serve as a "not all men" counterweight to that, but the engine that drives much of the violence is the jealousy and resentment among young women that is its own real thing even if Penny and her friends are great and casually supportive. Russell doesn't exactly bend things toward a definitive statement here, but she mixes these various impulses together in ways that give the movie a ring of truth even though it is, also, a revenge thriller with a ton of bloody action. It's good stuff, apt to satisfy the gorehounds but play like a real movie to those who want more.
She mentioned that they lucked out finding a video store that could be used as a set, including the genuinely sketchy basement which apparently smelled terrible, but you don't have time or money to clean it on an indie budget. The range of influences for this one was an odd mix, more Kevin Smith and Australian soap operas than the genre elements. I must admit that it's kind of odd to hear "gen-X" as more of an aesthetic description than "the people you grew up with", and folks from Australia talking about something as CW-inspired is kind of like seeing "Black Friday" sales abroad; it feels like it should be a specifically American term since they would be connecting it to something else within their culture, right?
(Also, did Mackey have a tremor last year? She had this thing where she was swinging the microphone back and forth in front of her mouth and it wasn't quite like we could only catch the syllables where it passed in front of lips, but it was oddly distracting!)
Then to bed. Tuesday wound up being Big Break, Levitating, Hayop Ka!, a good burger because I was very late to the pass line for Someone's Daughter, and Los Vampires. And, man, I can't believe this has taken me so long to finish that today's the festival's last day, where you'll likely find me at The Peril at Pincer Point, City War, The Fox, Freaks Part II, and Jim Queen. Kind of half tempted to rearrange things to see Gozu, but also trusting that it playing here means some midnight shows back home and a spiffy new disc are on the way.
"Borbulha" ("Pimple")
☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia Underground, DCP)
A pretty simple but entertaining gross-out short from Portugal with Tiago Rodrigues as a kid with a really noticeable pimple getting picked on by bullies until they decide to pop it and, man, they are not going to like what comes out.
I'm pretty sure that this isn't the first pus monster I've seen, but it's impressively gross and filmmaker Fernando Alle uses an impressive combination of gore effects, stop-motion, and puppetry to have it manifest and take out the little brats. The movie is just four minutes long, but Alle crams every beat needed from Rodrigues being sullen to the three victims having individual reactions and a funny denouement. Simple idea exceptionally well-executed!
Our Effed Up World
☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia Underground, DCP)
Alice Maio Mackay has been making micro-budget genre movies that festivals pick up even when they were very rough since she was a teenage girl, and even without the way she spoke in the Q&A after the screening, this is the first time that I find myself wondering what kind of filmmaker she's going to wind up being. She's clearly still learning and straddling the line between making a movie for a broader audience and making it for herself, but Our Effed Up World is fairly watchable.
It follows Sheri (Sara Thompson), who works in a supermarket with bestie Poppy (Annapurna Sriram), hanging out afterward with Finn (Jess McLeod) and Ash (Karis Oka) at the video store Finn's uncle left them. She's just resolved to dump boyfriend Harry (Jordan Dulieu), who doesn't take it particularly well, wandering about until he comes upon a strange and dangerous meteor - the sort of thing Sheri's astronomer father Hank (Scott Major) knows about because it's his job to watch out for such things.
A major part of the growing pains here are that, both by the amount of time spent and from what she said in the introduction, Mackay is mostly trying to make a hangout film with alien zombies to spice things up, and the latter almost feels like a crutch: The sci-fi/horror is not particularly memorable, and rather than resonating with the characters, mainly seems like an excuse to have them do something other hanging around and saying catty things. That's enjoyable enough in large part because Mackay has a more seasoned cast than usual - Sara Thompson has plenty of higher-profile credits, Scott Major is a bona fide veteran actor, and Annapurna Sriram is a natural goofy best friend - who are mostly able to slip comfortably into character rather than just recite lines on cue.
Those lines are sometimes more than a bit in need of a polish - the scene where Sheri dumps Harry especially makes her feel mean rather than frustrated or fed up - and It's kind of important to remember how young Mackay is because, although she's become a staple of festivals and other programs that want to showcase trans filmmakers, she's actually just now at the age where young filmmakers start working professionally, and only starting to actually be good. This movie still clanks, but not as often or as badly as the last one, which wasn't as rough as the one before that.
Which means I'm not sure whether I'd rather see her continuing to hone her skills or see how she does directing someone else's script, because you can really feel how this film lacks a lot of the connective tissue that ties one moment or aspect of a character to another, or does it awkwardly. Working with a more professional cast helps, but this is still very much someone learning the ropes and feels like it.
"SPEEDY!"
☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia: CineMapsosa 2026, DCP)
"Child learns the awful truth that adults lie" isn't necessarily a plot that scale to a feature-length film, but it's something that can certainly sing at the length of a short, and this one is charming as all get-out, getting a lot of great mileage from how ridiculous this speed-reading scam can seem when it's not held up by folks you should be able to trust, but, hey, Jung-min might have a bit of a crush on the teacher's prodigy son. The actress NAME turns in a really delightful performance as a bright girl who is shouldering a lot and but still feels like a kid.
The movie also hits its period marks nicely on top of being very earnest about what it can be like on a family that's striving for better but knows it might take some luck, or suddenly finding yourself complicit in something that's maybe not a crime but isn't right.
"Soulmate" '26
☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia: CineMapsosa 2026, DCP)
There may be one too many alter-egos in this movie, between Ji-eun (Jeong Ji-eun), "hot girl Ji-eun" - the persona she adopts as a young actress - and Eun-ho (Kim Mi-ran), the result of dissociative personality disorder brought on by her stepfather's abuse. I spent an embarrassing chunk of this 20 minute movie thinking it was going to be a teenage actress trying to find a way to form a friendship/relationship with the boy next door who mostly knows her screen image.
That's not what this is, though there's a bit of it; instead, it's about Ji-eun being exiled to a mental landscape based upon the spot in the middle of nowhere where her abuse took place It's got all the pieces that go with that, from the taunting internal dialog to the enabling mother, to ultimately deciding to assert oneself, and for the most part done pretty well. Writer/director Lee Chan-bee does a very nice job finding the details that drive certain points home, particularly how there's this sexualization of teenage girls that's not entirely imposed by older men even as it often caters to them, and how Ji-eun's mental prison is abstracted but not cool in any way: It's empty and undeveloped and the sort of thing a city girl like a young actress would find boring.
"Ijen jugeosseumyeon jokenne" ("Wish You Were Dead")
☆ ☆ ☆ ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia: CineMapsosa 2026, DCP)
Lee Min-hyuk and co-writer Park Kyu-eun know how to make a good short film: They kick off with a neat premise that has some resonance, kick off in media res, and build a lot of beats around jumping straight to the result of a bad move rather than playing out the bits that are going to require a lot of tricky effects work. You could probably build a feature around a funeral for the controlling patriarch that has him coming back as a zombie and continuing to destroy the family after his death, but this really reduces it to its essentials.
It's got a lot of neat little bits in it, as well: The fact that the male heirs who can deliver offspring are privileged feels annoying and arbitrary as a zombie-movie rule (down to Seo-hyun's father being vulnerable in the way her brother isn't because Dad's had a vasectomy), but it's also annoying and arbitrary in everyday life; Seo-hyun taking a Go board and using it to try and plot an exit - visually, it's a sort of Go/Clue hybrid - is fun improvisation. And Park Seo-yoon is sneakily great as Seo-hyun in part because, while she's clearly the smartest member of the clan and the one with the best chance of figuring out an exit and probably running the family business afterward, there's something a bit unsympathetic about her, like she's not that upset that the family members who treated her as less important than her dimwit brother and cowardly father are being murdered as they try to execute her plans. This isn't a woman who needs to prove herself to her family so much as one whose potential doesn't have to be linked to their approval.
There's a pretty good path to a longer feature if director Lee wants it, and I suspect a feature would look a bit different from the short, which is why this film is worth twenty minutes whether it leads to something bigger or not.
"TROPIC"
☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia: CineMapsosa 2026, DCP)
Anything can be a metaphor if you work at it enough, such as an aloha shirt, which reminds Choi Sun (Bae Min-su) of both how her sister Seou (Kim Da-a) committed suicide and how she really wanted to get to a happier, more carefree place, even if neither she nor Sun could make it happen. It kind of suggests the Swamp Thing-looking monster and headspace that Sun finds herself in as writer/director Park Jung-yoon bounces her between the present and the past, her two young actresses playing two people with no-one closer even though being together isn't easy.
I really love how Park ends the movie, with Sun wearing a shirt that is clearly faded, either from far too much detergent or repeated washings. That's probably how you have to remember a loved one who has ended her life like that, and it's a nice visual for how Sun will keep as much of Seou with her as she can, even if she can only handle part of her.
Wara Nimo Sugaru Kemonotachi (Beasts Clutching at Straws)
☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream the Korean version (Prime link for Korean version), or buy the disc for the Korean version at Amazon
I must admit to being curious about both previous iterations of this story: I recall the Korean film from 2020 being entertaining but also being kind of a miserable viewing experience (the festival streaming platform used in 2020 was terrible), and there are just enough differences between the two movies to make me wonder if this Japanese adaptation of a Japanese novel is closer. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be an official English translation - more mysteries and thrillers from that country are crossing the Pacific than ever before but there are so many! - but both adaptations being pretty good suggests good things about the source material.
It starts with Kanji (Ouji Suzuka), who doesn't seem like much of a "beast"; he's trying to make it as a Vtuber without really having a hook as he works in an internet cafe with private booths and looks after his grandmother with severe dementia in the apartment above her late husband's shuttered barbershop. Things potentially change when a guy who rushed out without paying his bill leaves behind a bag of money. Elsewhere in Tokyo, Ryosuke Ebato (Hiroki Narmiya), a corrupt cop deep in debt to the Goda syndicate, has a line on a college regent who has defrauded his employer. Is that the man who dropped the bag at the internet cafe, or the one who recently started visiting sex worker Mina, who has made a new friend in femme fatale Maria. Speaking of Maria, she seems to know the drill a bit too well when Mina needs to dispose of her abusive husband's body.
There's a twist or two to this, of course, which isn't completely surprising when you get to it, although to be fair I may have had the Korean version in mind when it happened. One thing director/co-wirter Hideo Jojo does fairly well is keep Kanji just busy enough, considering that most of the other threads are more obviously connected. They're not going to collide for a while, but his various frustrations at home are worth watching and entertaining for being darkly comic in a different way than the folks less innocently connected to various crimes. It means the tone doesn't really cause whiplash but the audience doesn't get completely mired in the pure cynicism of backstabbing and threats elsewhere, and there's just enough of that lurking around the edges that it doesn't feel completely separate.
It doesn't hurt that there's a nice supporting cast of characters around the main folks; Kanji's got a cute co-worker who might be a potential partner but doesn't have to be, and his grandmother is out of it in a way that plays as chaos comedy from a remove but which is also a pure nightmare from up close. Ebato's often paired with a driver who seems to haplessly wind up deeper than he intends because he (perhaps unwisely) considers Ebato a friend and a new partner investigating the very fraud he's trying to cover up, with the Goda chief having a hulking and horrifically eccentric good on hand. Mina's got an avid younger client, and Maria's lone-wolf status is fitting but things also lock in when her other connections are revealed. It's not a huge, messy ensemble, but it's one where the "hubs" are very solid indeed and none of the folks in their orbit are entirely one-note jokes.
There's also something very pleasant about how Jojo and company often seem to have come out on the other side of trying to chase the kind of cool that many were after with their intersecting crime narratives in the wake of Pulp Fiction - Kanji's streaming is small-time enough to be kind of pathetic, and everyone bit Maria is more dork than badass, with Maria explicitly pretty awful. The repetition of a zipper splitting a black screen as a scene transition renders it cute rather than too-clever, and there's fun knowing chaos to how the opening gag is used later.
It's always an odd experience to catch a remake of something after just long enough that the original isn't fresh in one's mind and not know whether good surprises are legit or differences and need bits are not quite pulled off versus vaguely remembered. I'm leaving towards this basically being well done, a chaotic but generally fun caper.
"Best Friends with the Devil"
☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Hugo de Sousa comes up with a neat idea for a short here that's really well-positioned between innocent mayhem and something sinister, as Lola (Ellyn Jameson), worried about the disappearance of her friend Amy (Kailee McGee), files a missing person report and follows her trail to David (de Sousa), the last person to see her on a hike. Maybe not wise on the face of it, but when you're starting from the premise of "unfortunate accident" rather than "foul play", not indefensible!
I like how de Sousa plays this both as writer/director and actor, not really tilting the tone into obvious danger but also recognizing that the world can be especially dangerous for women on their own and letting the audience see various red flags without actually waving them in one's face. He gives out new information in ways that recognize that this is a short and maybe shouldn't be too vague for too long, forcing the viewer to really evaluate the situation without it being a slow-down/nod-sagely beat. The end's a mess, but it's a mess from how things started out.
I also always dig when a concussion is an actual big deal.
Penny Lane Is Dead
☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
You've got to hand it to writer-director Mia Kate Russell for the title "Penny Lane Is Dead", because when you stand back a bit and look at the movie, it's not necessarily terribly different from others like it, but centering the title character like that sure makes the movie feel like people don't fit into the roles they're supposed to. The movie delivers impressive blood, guts, and women in peril, but feels a lot more off-center than it might.
It starts by introducing us to Penny herself (Bailey Spalding), a pretty blonde with a nice family who just graduated after being accepted into a good school and who genuinely seems to acknowledge and enjoy her good fortune without trying to exploit it. She's heading out to her grandparent's cabin for a girls' weekend with her best friends: Toni (Tahlee Fereday), a tall and sporty girl whom the Lanes took in when her own parents couldn't handle her coming out as gay, and Amy (Alexandra Jensen), mousy and maybe autistic, which is probably not something you'd use to describe an Australian girl in 1986. Not invited is Kat (Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn), Penny's cousin and a constant source of drama, but she shows up anyway, with drugged cupcakes and her boyfriend Angus (Ben O'Toole) not far behind. Angus is a bad'un, the son of a crime boss, and has two goons in tow, with Merrick (Fletcher Humphrys) and old pro who would rather deliver the drugs they have with no fuss but Rodowsky (Steve Le Marquand), like Angus, more inclined to have a little fun with Kat's cousin and her friends, whether they want it or not.
Penny's the title character and Toni's the conventional protagonist, but the movie's center of gravity is Kat, who kind of fascinates in that she's clearly a monster from the word go, but Russell and actress Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn seem to have a pretty good handle on how girls like her get like that. There's not a moment when the movie stops and she explains her sad origin story, but every time Russell finds a way to remind the attackers (and the audience) that these sexy young girls are 17 or 18, you can't help but remember that this applies to Kat as well as Penny, and she's an outcast for what she did as a teenager. Wright dives into the role with abandon, fully committed to Kat's awfulness, but there's always a streak of desperate need to her bad behavior and skimpy outfits, and there are moments when Angus treats Kat terribly and it's very clear she knows this and one wonders if this might be the time she wobbles.
It's a great performance, but doesn't push the rest off the screen; the girls especially are a strong ensemble. Tahlee Fereday and Bailey Spalding are impressive as Toni & Penny; there are early scenes where they discuss the possibility of being more than friends and while they're maybe a bit nervous about letting Amy or Penny's parents in on this, they're both likably confident in who they are and trusting in each other, even if Toni's future isn't quite so certain as Penny's seems to be. Alexandra Jensen's Amy isn't the same - she's seventeen and carries an emotional support stuffie around - but I really like how Jensen doesn't play Amy as a collection of tics and nervousness; she seems to take a second to think before speaking even if she misjudges her words. On the boys' side, Ben O'Toole is entitlement unleashed as Angus, ninety percent repugnant but with the sort of self-assurance that one can see why he might be kind of appealing to someone like Kat or go unquestioned by someone like Fletcher Humphys's Rodowsky who doesn't allow any sympathy into how he helps himself to Angus's scraps. Steve Le Marquand does really well with one of my favorite archetypes, the unrepentant criminal who nevertheless wants to be friggin' professional both for what he tells himself and because leaving a bunch of corpses around is bad for business.
And there will be corpses; it's a pretty gnarly movie where folks are likely to get maimed before being outright killed, and Russell is adept at using that to both make Angus & Kat seem more vicious and Toni's wins more satisfying. The gore team is on point throughout but Russell doesn't entirely lean on them to make the movie work: She doesn't exactly do a slow build but she tends to add momentum more than stopping for a breather, and she's crucially aware that Penny unconscious or dazed is going to create a lot more tension that the audience can grasp than various nasty injuries that much of the audience is going to read as "fun" special effects, and she's good at making sure there's really nothing sexy about it without making things more outwardly grotesque.
Indeed, I think what's kind of exciting about Penny Lane Is Dead and makes it feel noteworthy more than the setting or the quality of the gore is how the screenplay seems to reflect all the toxic forces at work in good balance: It is absolutely older guys preying on younger girls and even the surfer dudes at the local shop who are basically unproblematic don't serve as a "not all men" counterweight to that, but the engine that drives much of the violence is the jealousy and resentment among young women that is its own real thing even if Penny and her friends are great and casually supportive. Russell doesn't exactly bend things toward a definitive statement here, but she mixes these various impulses together in ways that give the movie a ring of truth even though it is, also, a revenge thriller with a ton of bloody action. It's good stuff, apt to satisfy the gorehounds but play like a real movie to those who want more.
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