Fantasia 2025.09: Redux Redux, The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, Anna Kiri, and Transcending Dimensions

This is the last post before flying back south, not quite reaching halfway on the blog during the event, and I don't know how much more I'll get through before everything is just too far in the back of my head to finish if I hold true to form, so I just want to say it's been great seeing you all again, we saw some pretty good movies, dealt with a decent AirBNB in a building that kept making things a little difficult (okay, maybe that's just me), and generally had a good time.

I got a late-ish start on Thursday because I saw Fragment opening night, so for me, the day kicked off with the second screenings of Redux Redux. I was a little disappointed that the McManus clan wasn't there, although it turned out my bladder wanted me out right as credits rolled and just got this picture of actor Jeremy Holm ®, who played the villain, starting his Q&A and saying that he got the role by freaking the McManus brothers out, sending them poetry he wrote in-character. I'm torn over whether that was just the start or whether it couldn't get any better.

Next up in De Sève without guests was The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, which has odd in playing late afternoon at the midpoint of the festival and at night on the second-to-last day, when the schedule is usually night then matinee a couple days later. Good for flexibility.

Then I crossed the street for Anna Kiri, the second time in three days where I kind of consider myself lucky that the French-Canadian film listed as having English subtitles actually had English subtitles. I've gotten trapped in the center of a row for something I barely understood before and while that wasn't happening tonight (I am choosing seats with escape routes this year), it would still mean eating a slot. Anyway, there wasn't much of a Q&A afterwards but pretty much everybody involved in the movie was there. That's director Francis Bordeleau in the eye of the storm with a mic.

And, finally, we end the night with Transcending Dimensions director Toshiaki Toyoda. I must admit, I don't know if I've heard his name specifically before, but he's a guy that certainly has a following. among some at the festival. He gave a pretty cheerful Q&A, although one laced with jokes about how difficult it is to make an independent film these days. He also mentioned writing to the cast which meant having to be very fortunate for windows of availability to line up, and that he took a chorus at a buddhist retreat for the specific purpose of getting to blow the conch shell.

I must admit: I zoned out during his movie, so it's a good thing I fell behind enough to see it on the next Monday before writing a review. I was going to see it then in any case, but I'd opted to skip the big Adams Family movie across the way because my experience with their stuff was that it was a fun novelty once, but diminishing returns thereafter. That movie won the Cheval Noir, but I don't regret the decision to zone out during the trippy mystical sci-fi versus the gifted-amateur horror movie.


Huh, no shorts on Thursday the 24th? Unusual! Friday would be The Serpent's Skin, I Live Here Now, Forbidden City, and New Group. Yesterday (the last day!), I was able to run from Burning to A Chinese Ghost Story III, then finished with Holy Night: Demon Hunters, >Fixed, and Tanoman: Expo Explosions.


Redux Redux

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Redux Redux is the sort of genre movie that I arguably go to film festivals looking to discover: Quality, lean sci-fi action that makes sure to deliver the goods right away and then keeps up an impressively steady pace all the way through. It twists and world-builds a bit, but keeps its eye on the prize.

It opens provocatively, with Irene Kelly (Michaela McManus) murdering a man (Jeremy Holm) in ways designed to make him suffer, before the last one goes awry and has her leading the police on a desperate chase before she can return to her hotel room, where she has what looks like a steampunk coffin. It's a machine for jumping between realities, and she's been doing that for some time, taking out every iteration of the serial killer that killed her daughter and 11 other girls. This time, though, something is different - she arrives just in time to find a 13th victim, Mia (Stella Marcus), still alive, and the street-smart orphan wants a piece of this revenge even before discovering Irene's secret.

Michaela McManus Irene gives off some Sarah Connor vibes as her universe-hopping avenger, but a lot of the fun comes when Stella Marcus enters the picture and the movie transforms into something snappier and perhaps more entertaining without lowering the stakes or the melancholy. McManus's Irene is plenty capable as the film's antihero, but one of the things that comes across even during the opening badass imagery is that she's tired; not in a way that seems to have her sluggish or unable to meet a challenge, but questions about the point of all this are starting to kick around in her head. Marcus, meanwhile, is playing Mia as someone who was already a smart-ass teen and this is all turbocharging it. The neat trick is that McManus never makes Irene seem like she's regarding Mia as a new daughter, but that she has had a teenage daughter and knows what she's dealing with enough to parry and appear to relent.

The film in general manages to be very funny without abandoning a grim plot; the universe-hoping often means that narrow escapes are followed by awkward entrances, and filmmakers Kevin & Matthew McManus find ways to ease into heavy situations by finding the absurd in Irene's encounters with new-but-not-so-new people and places. It's never a thing that gives the viewer whiplash, but greases the wheels and reminds the audience that there is this spark of humanity left in Irene and Mia despite her self-imposed missions of revenge.

The whole thing moves, too, offering up quick action that finds new ways to challenge Irene even though the audience is well aware of the escape hatch, doubling down and adding mythology in a way that doesn't distract or diminish what had come before. The finale circles back around to the start but also shows how Irene has expanded her intentions.

It's nice work without being overly flashy, a lot like the original Terminator: A simple but striking sci-fi premise that lends itself to human-scale action and elevated through strong execution.


La Virgen de la Tosquera (The Virgin of the Quarry Lake)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is described as adapting two stories in a collection by Mariana Enriquez, and I kind of wonder how it branches out from this: Up and down the line of Natalia's life? Following side characters? Thematic similarities? And, most curiously, is there more magic compared to the hints we see here, because its placement is pretty convenient but not nearly as cringe-inducingly so as other tales of this type can be.

Natalia (Dolores Oliverio) is a teenager, or just out of school but not yet looking to leave the home of her grandmother Rita (Luisa Merelas), where she's been since her mother left for Spain; it's not like there's a lot of opportunity in turn-of-the-millennium Buenos Aires. She's probably the prettiest girl in the neighborhood, the one everybody presumes will end up with handsome Diego (Agustín Sosa), at least until Silvia (Fernanda Echeverría) enters the picture. Silvia's not quite so pretty as Nati, but she's a bit older and more experienced, with tales of traveling extensively to Mexico and Europe, and it threatens to bring out the worst in Nati.

Everyone is primed to blow in this movie from the opening scene where a neighbor beats an unhoused person almost to death, especially at somebody who might be considered an outsider, and you don't really need the addition of apparent witchcraft to make that point; the abandoned shopping cart lurks in more shots than one expect, a reminder of the potential for evil that exists in everyone and an omen of worse to come. Indeed, for all that the fantastic elements seems to be a settling point, I kind of wondered if it figured more into the other stories from the adapted collection. It winds up a bit of an unarmed big finale though little more than a series of potentially-coincidental metaphors throughout.

The slow-ish burn getting there is good stuff, at least, as the strain on Nati builds and she finds it easier to be selfish. The filmmakers are well able to be empathetic even as it becomes clear that Nati is not a particularly good person, especially during a particularly brutal phone call where Dolores Oliverio's face reveals stunned surprise that someone could do this to her but also the genuine hurt of her first stabbing heartbreak. It is, we see, somewhat easy to think well of Nati because of her circumstances, and even understand as this young and angry girl does not necessarily respond maturely, but how does one cope when she doesn't always grow in the right direction.

Oliverio is great in the role, transmuting adolescent naivete to cool rage before the audience's eyes, retaining enough of what makes Nati the cool girl people flock to that it's hard to let go even when she's probably passing points of no return. The folks around her are pretty good, too, most notably Luisa Merelas as Rita, whose kindness seems to hold the neighborhood together but which has its practical limits. Agustin Sosa plays Diego as a sort of handsome cipher, possibly worth Nati's obsession but vague enough to emphasize that this isn't the point. Fernanda Echeverría intrigues as Silvia, coming off as someone who puffs themselves up and flaunts their good fortune at first but seeming more mature and well-rounded as one starts to question Nati's perspective.

The filmmakers do an impressive job of immersing this group in what feels like a very specific time and place. Folks around the world will probably grin at the precision of how they ground it in time with fashion, music, and how internet communication is just beginning to be a major part of teenagers' lives, but the rolling power outages, water shortages, and other infrastructure issues will undoubtedly strike a chord with Argentinians who lived through it. Even the quarry lake of the title, a beautiful oasis, requires leaving the city and walking from the last bus stop, and it's apparently haunted, both by the people who died digging it and the idea that there was once going to be a town where people could live a comfortable middle-class life there.

That's where the shocking finale happens, and while I'm normally not exactly fond of the way it plays out, there's no denying that the final line and the way it seems to set things into place are effectively delivered. I don't so much wonder what happened to these girls next, if that's where the book goes, but I sure felt the process of getting there.


Ana Kiri

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Les Fantastiques Week-Ends du Cinéma Québéçois, laser DCP)

I was wearing a watch during this screening, so I'm kicking myself for not doing a quick check to see how literally this movie is split down the middle for me when the time jump happened. Sure, things had been going well enough not to be tracking elapsed time, and you can't exactly know in the moment that this is when things are going to go downhill, but in retrospect, I certainly couldn't help but wonder.

It starts with how Anna (Catherine Brunet) and her brother Vincent (Maxime de Cotreet) had been on their own since childhood, and though Anna loves him fiercely, she recognizes that he's been buying into his gangster persona too much of late despite their group - Anna, Vincent, his girlfriend Cindy (Charlotte Aubin), and best friend Mirko (JadeHassouné) mostly being small-time crooks at best. And now, Vincent's gotten ambitious - the bowling alley they just knocked over was a stash house for crime boss Micky (Kar Graboshas). Anna loses her diary while fleeing Micky's bar, and it winds up in the hands of French Literature lecturer Phillippe (Fayolle Jean), who is impressed enough to offer Anna a scholarship. She initially refuses, but then realizes it would be a good way to break away from a life that's turned dangerous.

I really loved the grungy crime vibes of the first half, full of Anna's sarcastic self-aware narration, inevitable betrayals, and plenty of colorful small-timers and losers. It just looks and feels right, and even when Anna winds up catching Philippe's interest and visiting his office, there's this nifty tension of how she doesn't feel like she belongs there, whether this is worth sticking her head up for, and what happens when she steps back outside this university building. It's great heist-fallout stuff, and the way the action, Anna's narration, and the scribbled notes that show up on-screen like a telestrator reinforce and contradict each other makes the simple story feel dense and emphasizes just how many directions Anna's mind is being pulled in.

The second half, where Anna is in school and developing her diary into a novel, never quite comes together compared to the first. The filmmakers introduce a bunch of new characters it does little with and their take on the literary world feels broader than their take on crime tropes. The audience isn't given time to acclimate to Anna's new situation before her old life tears its head. And the ending... Oof. The potential is frustrating; there's little exploration over whether Anna fits into this world or not, or the idea that one can hide out in the same city they "fled" by changing social status and associations; working-class neighborhoods and academia can be a block apart and never mingle.

Also, I don't know whether this is a compliment or not, but when we first see Anna's new boyfriend using a laptop, I wondered how he had one because it seemed like this movie took place in 1983 or the like until that point, a pay-phone era crime flick rather than a smartphone-era one.

Catherine Brunet is plenty watchable as Anna regardless; she and the filmmakers do a fine job of capturing a woman who is a little too smart for the life of a small-time crook but too much of that world to truly fit into the art & lit crowd she finds herself in. There are some fun other characters around her - Charlotte Aubin's Cindy plays like a the sort of wannabe femme fatale that wears high heels to go bowling, and Nincolas Michone's Zhao is seemingly trying to work his way up to management of the bar where he sells drugs - though Maxime de Cotret gets a bit caught in between as Vincent, not quite charismatic enough to be as full of himself as he is, even considering that he's not entirely getting away with it..

There's half a good movie here, and half a movie with an interesting idea but not nearly the same execution.


Transcending Dimensions

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Seen 28 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

I ran out of gas during my first screening of transcending Dimensions - running the psychedelic movie at 10m works for an audience that rolls out of bed at 2pm rather than 7am - and came out feeling as though I'd missed a lot. The second time through, at a more civilized noon, I think that maybe I didn't miss quite so much as I thought the first time but was maybe just too tired to absorb it. It's actually more straightforward than the trippiness would indicate.

It opens with Ryosuke (Yosuke Kubozuka), a sort of monk, sitting in nature, pondering; but soon it is visiting a retreat run my Master Ajari Hanzo (Chihara Jr.), who wears the robes but has a sadistic streak. He dares one visitor, Yazu (Masahiro Higashide), to cut off his finger because no knowledge comes without sacrifice; another, Teppei (Kiyohiko Shibukawa), sees where this going and tries to leave. Another, Shinno (Ryuhei Matsuda), is a hitman there at the behest of Nonoka (Haruku Imo), the monk Ryosuke was her boyfriend and disappeared here, so she wants Hanzo dead. But is Rosuke in the forest, at the end of the universe, or someplace stranger?

As all this goes on, the extent to which Transcending Dimensions just looks and sounds cool should not be overlooked. A lot of attention will be paid to the scenes in order space or the mirrored rooms, but it looks generally spiffy whether what's on screen is kaleidoscopic CGI or wide-open nature. The jazzy soundtrack with the diegetic sound of monks blowing on conch shells is excellent, and the sound design is terrific as well, whether it's ordinary but enveloping or built in such a way as to imply heightened senses and awareness of every time Ryosuke's staff raps on a stone.

What's maybe most surprising is the extent to which the assassin is perhaps the sanest, most centered character of the whole lot. While the monks and masters appear to spend their entire lives chasing enlightenment, he comes off as a guy who might actually be living outside of his job, separate from conventional morality but having instincts about how things connect. Enlightenment, the film suggests, is not a particularly important goal on its own; the process has not made Matter Hanzo a better man, and Ryosuke, meditating until the end of the world, will not contribute much to it. The cast is impressive playing this out, from Chihara Jr.'s gleeful sadism to Yosuke Kubozuka's earnest disconnection, with Kiyohiko Shibukawa's frustration hilarious and Haruka Imo eventually giving Nonoka perspective that is both human and ethereal.

Having that at the film's center probably makes it somewhat easier to tell a story when it's not quite so important to communicate something grandiose and spiritual. Transcending Dimensions has plenty of strange turns, unreliable narrators, sidetracks, and subtle revelations, but filmmaker Toshiaki Toyoda is good at using the time to let a joke or shock breathe so that the rest of the film can sink in as well, meaning that stitching it all together is more straightforward than you might thing.

Anyway, I'm very glad that the schedule worked out so I could see it with the director Q&A and the "what did I just watch?" sensation the first time, and give it a second chance a few days later when my brain was operating normally. It is, perhaps, how this sort of movie is best experienced.

Fantasia 2025.02: "Atom & Void", Reflet Dans un Diamant Mort, "Skulk", The Wailing '24, "Floor", and Noise

Are there very affordable flights between Montreal and Seoul right now? All the guests at my screenings have been from South Korea and that's a hike!

First up, producer Huh Youngjin and actors Park Tae-San & Lee Jong Eun from "Floor", an extraordinarily natural pairing with Noise and maybe a better riff on it for how its particular nuttiness spins out of something very relatable before escalating in crazy fashion. Very fun, since I didn't really know which direction it would be going from having only skimmed the description, and I like that Lee introduced himself as the "fighter", though maybe my messy French/nonexistent Korean messed this up.

Also here is Kim Soo-jin, director of Noise, a pretty darn fair first effort. One thing he mentioned is that he had the same sound crew as The Wailing (not the one from earlier in the evening, but the Korean horror masterpiece), and, yes, you can tell that those folks were at the top of their game.

With any luck, I've finished this by the time I'm off to Friday's films (The Bearded Girl, Nyaight of the Living Cat, and Find Your Friends) with enough time to spare for a late lunch because I had no time to eat between shows on Thursday and was hungry by the time I got back to the apartment. At least the front door was unlocked!


"Atom & Void"

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

A downright terrific short film where the beginning - a spider emerging from its cave lair and exploring its spooky environment - does not quite prepare one for all the twists and turns it will make in the next ten minutes. As near as I can tell, it's mostly an actual spider poking around a meticulously crafted environment, highlighting that these arachnids are odd creatures, visually; a clever filmmaker can make them seem monstrous or adorable with the cinematography and editing. Writer/director Gonçalo Almeida and his team are very clever indeed, with André Carvalho's score helping him play with scale - it encourages you to think big even though you know spiders are small.

I don't want to say too much - it's a delight to discover - but I will say that just as I was writing "getting some Alien vibes here" in my notebook, it took a nifty turn and became even more my thing. This feels like the sort of short that a producer sees and immediately signs the director up for a feature, or at least I hope it is.


Reflet dans un diamant mort (Reflection in a Dead Diamond)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available

If you know the work of Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani, you know the general shape of what's coming here: An ultra-stylish riff on favorite genres, in this case James Bond and all the European spy-fi that came with him, deliriously diving into meta territory as the film goes on. It's not going to take a straight line, but the look will be impeccable, and they will take great pleasure in using a few words as possible when they can.

It opens with elderly John Diman (Fabio Testi) sitting on the beach behind an old fashioned hotel, watching the surf and not exactly objecting to having a pretty girl come into view. She reminds him of his younger days, when he was a secret agent (Yannick Renier) tasked with protecting and investigating oil magnate Markus Strand (Koen De Bouw). But if it was difficult to discern what is real in a world where a latex mask can transform deadly assassin Serpentik (Thi Mai Nguyen) into seemingly anyone, it's even more difficult when your memory is failing and that pretty girl in the next room goes missing. Is it old enemies returned, or just a strange coincidence?

There's a part of me that kind of wants this to be "retired secret agent getting lost in his past" and nothing more, or having one last adventure as his mind starts to fail him, but that's not all Cattet & Forzani have in store. Reflections is a catalog of the idea of the super-spy that likely never existed outside of fiction, where reboots, loose continuity, and trend-chasing rendered every aspect of a story as malleable even as some remains stubbornly, frustratingly fixed, and the moral underpinnings are even worse than one might think. They draw from Bond, Diabolik, and many others - fans of Euro-genre pictures will likely have great fun combing through the picture for influences - with great affection, but they're also mindful of the cruelty underpinning the genre: Ian Fleming's literary Bond could come off as a sadist or a psychopath, and the genre often reflected the desire to do monstrous violence justified by the other side being worse, although what they were fighting for was less freedom than oligarchy at times.

The acting is not usually a huge factor in this team's movies, aside from the ability to play it very straight or imitate vibe of 1960s Euro productions, but I do like the vibe that the two men playing John have: Yannick Renier gives the younger version this sort of sexy square-jawed righteousness that is so charmingly certain of itself that it can justify anything, and Fabio Testi often seems to be assuming the mantle of the man John imagine he'd be when retired, a silver fox with an air of sophistication and mystery, but you can see why none of the people around him actually seem to respect him much (aside from one woman who will soon discover it's a bad idea). The pair don't quite echo each other's performances as their worlds collapse, but they push the audience in the same direction, flailing in a way that makes them foolish and dangerous as they discover their world isn't what it seems.

The filmmakers cram a tremendous amount of deconstruction into 85 minutes; by the end one starts to wonder how they keep having another angle or example they want to play with. It's almost exhausting. You can't argue against wanting to see all of them, though; by the time they've fully levitated above their original story and jumped into every form of media that the genre thrived in, all captured in a way that calls lovingly back to the faded film look of memory, there's not really, and they're filmed to be just explicit enough in their violence to thrill but also strongly representing a broader concept. Cattet & Forzani (with cinematographer Manuel Dacosse, production designer Laurie Colson and everyone else in their meticulous crew) will make one gasp at how perfectly constructed and artistic every single shot is, throwbacks that seem like far more than mere quotations.

It's beautiful enough to suggest that rewatching to catch every reference, develop one's theories, or to just try to figure out what's going on will be a great pleasure indeed.


"Skulk"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Director Max Ward and co-writer Carmen Fortea offer up an initial warning in the titles, that foxes walk the streets and howl to warn of certain creatures getting close, and at the start of the film, one wonders if that lore has been lost or if the young woman alone in her house (Elina Gavare) feels it in her bones, not sure if the fox or something else should make her nervous. She gives a nice, nervy little performance as irritation becomes shivers, while Ward and his crew do neat things with how the dark transforms the city. After all, what's eerie in an urban environment is the closeness of other people and the accumulated/buried history of the space, but get it dark and quiet enough, and the primal fears start to reappear, but can urbanites recognize the warnings that nature has for us?


El Llanto (The Wailing '24)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

The Wailing is one of those horror movies that I feel bad about shrugging off with "wasn't scary", but that's kind of where I wound up - there's a lot of things done well in it, and it doesn't take a lot of work to see what it's trying to do and even argue that all the pieces are in the right places, but ultimately, I wound up sitting through it mostly unshaken. All the good work and all the less-good but maybe unnervingly-incongruous material just didn't combine in such a way as to create a visceral reaction.

After a prologue, it introduces the audience to Andrea (Ester Expósito), a student in Madrid with a boyfriend (Àlex Monner) studying in Sydney who has recently learned that she was adopted, from a hospital in Buenos Aires. Except that when she receives her original birth certificate and adoption information, it says she was born in Spain, and that her birth mother recently died - after serving twenty years for murder, and right around the time shadowy figures started appearing in the background of Andrea's video calls. Perhaps the answers to her questions lie twenty-three years in the past, when film student Camila (Malena Villa) finds herself drawn to Marie Montand (Mathilde Ollivier), initially as a subject but soon as a friend and perhaps more, with the same mysterious old man appearing in Camila's Digicam footage.

You can see the pieces here, and what director Pedro Martin-Calero & co-writer Isabel Peña are maybe looking to have them add up to: Not just a family curse, but one visited upon the women of the family by an abusive and envious old man, something people dutifully ignore until they're looking at pictures and video and what's there can't be denied. It seems like rich thematic material, and I wouldn't be shocked if people closer to it than I am personally tell me it hits home. It's the stuff of horrors and Martin-Calero seems to have a nifty, underused angle from which to attack it.

I don't know that the story he built around it is ever more than an inch deep, or specific enough to really gel into a terrifying whole. Like, what's the deal with the sometime-empty, sometimes-not phallic building that appears in Madrid, La Plata, and maybe Buenos Aires? Why the adoption out of Argentina at all, especially since the reason given makes little sense with or without considering that geography is clearly not a limitation for this phantom? How far back can this be traced? Is the old man someone important enough to manifest this common evil supernaturally? Martin-Calero stages his jump scares all right - although there's some girls-lifted-by-an-invisible-assailant that looks wrong even if you don't expect the ghost to be as frail as he looks - but all the other good stuff about a horror movie, the pieces between the shocks and the underlying idea that let it all really sink in, just feels slapdash.

(It doesn't help that the filmmakers never quite figure out how to make present the idea that this old ghost is sexually molesting these women in a visually striking way beyond some clothing seeming to shift on its own as the women sleep; it maybe needs to be more lurid than something one squints at and says "I guess he's feeling her up, maybe?")

Kind of a shame, because Ester Expósito is impressive as Andrea, navigating this likable zoomer who spends a large chunk of her life online (and I like the bold, screen-filling letters past messages fading but not disappearing which highlight this text-speak as important and persistent to her rather than transitory like traditional subtitling) into anger, fear, and despair; she's also surrounded by a supporting cast that fleshes their characters out without a whole lot of exposition or distraction from Andrea. I'm a bit less enamored of Camila and Marie, especially since Malena Villa gives the more interesting performance as the former despite the story never really seeming to be enough about her before Mathilde Ollivier has a great run at the end.

Still, ultimately - The Wailing is just not scary for me, and no amount of breaking it down to its good pieces seems likely to make it so.


"Floor"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

"Floor" plays as a few odd ideas not exactly sewn together by arch, English-language narration (for a Korean film that doesn't seem to be any sort of co-production), but ultimately sort of held together by a frantic devotion to one idea and playing it out in as extreme a manner as possible: A married couple has just moved into a new place, which they mostly like despite it being kind of a dump, but the folks upstairs make too much noise, probably because they're violent gangsters. The husband (Park Tae-san) is sent upstairs three times by his wife (Jo Yura) - the first time he's ignored, the second time he's punched out, but the third…

Well, let's just say that there's something really delightful for action fans when a fight in a relatively low-budget short becomes a crazy freaking melee, smashing its way through multiple rooms featuring multiple combatants, shots held long enough for a whole exchange of blows and fewer chances to think they swapped a double in there, and just enough quick pauses for little jokes to keep the energy up as things escalate to absurd degrees. This movie is very silly, but it's very silly in a way that's consistent even while the action sometimes seems random.


Noijeu (Noise)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Noise feels like something that's right on the cusp of being a terrific little horror story if only its pieces fit together a little better. The filmmakers are building it out of bits that seem Lovecraftian on the one hand and Backrooms-inspired on the other, and that can work pretty well, but they often seem to be grasping at everything in such a way that the audience can feel like they're making obvious connections before them.

The film opens with Seo Ju-hee (Han Su-a) maniacally covering the ceiling of her apartment with sound-deadening foam to no avail, screaming that she's trying to find a way to make it stop. Some time later, after she's failed to show up to work for a week, her hearing-impaired sister Ju-young (Lee Sun-bin) is asked to check in, only to find Ju-hee has vanished without a trace, not even taking her phone. Ju-young move in to investigate - she and Ju-hee had meant to live there together, but the factory where Ju-young works has a dorm - but some of the building's other residents are at best unhelpful: The building supervisor (Baek Ju-hee) is worried that this talk of people going missing or dying in the building could imperil an upcoming reconstruction, while the man in the apartment below (Ryu Kyung-su) appears to be hearing the noise too, but assumes it is coming from the Seos' apartment and has started threatening violence. The single mom above on the 8th floor (Jeon Ik-ryung) seems nice, though, and Ki-hoon (Kim Min-suk), the boyfriend Ju-hee hadn't mentioned, is eager to help find her.

A day later, I can't say I recall what the noise in question was supposed to sound like - a rasp? my tinnitus? a low rumble? - but I can say that it's effective enough because I genuinely believe that it was driving Ju-hee and her downstairs neighbor to madness, although not just raging mania: Ryu Kyung-su gets to start an angry clenched fist and pull tighter as the film goes on, selling that he may once have been something like a reasonable person before he started hearing it, and for all that the main impression we get of Ju-hee is her wailing in torment, it's kind of fun that Ju-young keeps finding evidence that her sister was trying to attack the problem scientifically. It's probably the right choice - how do you make a film watchable with sound that will either drive a viewer to turn it off/walk out or not bad enough to be taken seriously - and he builds the reactions to it well enough to make it stand up.

There are a lot of other things that could maybe hold up better, though. There's not exactly a hole in the middle of the movie where the relationship between Ju-young and Ju-hee should be, but given what we see obliquely, it should be the beating heart of the movie. It seems so rich and fraught - we see that the car accident that orphaned them also disabled them in different ways, and that Ju-hee feels Ju-young abandoned her - but it seems to take forever to actually see the two actresses together, and the apartment never feels staged or shot like a place that is supposed to have two people in it instead of one. We also never see Ki-hoon and Ju-hee together, for that matter. It seemingly never occurs to the two people hearing the weird noise to say "hey, I'm hearing a weird noise too, let's figure this out", the audience waits too long for Chekhov's Basement Full of Garbage to come into play after the first mention that folks were not seen leaving the building, and after establishing Ju-young's hearing loss early, it seldom comes into play once she gets an upgraded hearing aid (though the sound design is excellent when it does).

(I also really want to know what the room full of weird equipment seen toward the end is about - it looks like fun lore!)

Director Kim Su-jin does decent work pushing through all this, though. It helps that he's got a star in Lee Sun-bin who has Ju-young come across as likably determined but also shows a fair amount of edge as she loses patience. He's good at cranking things up to the next notch several times as the movie goes on - you can feel the click as he moves the dial - and the script keeps the cast manageable rather than overstuffing so that they can drop bodies on the regular. Even if I'm not sure the whole thing adds up to something coherent, there's something really enjoyable about how Ju-young, Ki-hoon, and Ju-hee seem to take a smart approach to their problems rather than flailing or waiting for answers to fall into their laps.

It's just scary enough to work, especially since it doesn't have a lot of dead space to get a viewer annoyed at why they're not doing this smart thing instead of that dumb thing, but also just good enough to see that it could have been great.

Fantasia 2022.11: "Spice Frontier", Opal, Tang and Me, Anime Supremacy!, Vesper, "What Is in the Ocean", and Legions.

Day 11 is the midpoint of Fantasia - I think I noted online somewhere between Anime Supremacy! and Vesper that I'd seen 36 features and 23 shorts to that point - and I'm doing much of the write-up for it on Day 21, which I'll probably end with 73 features and 47 shorts, hitting publish on Thursday night (which would have been day 22 if they were still adding bonus days at the last minute).

There aren't any guests to take photos of or any particularly amusing stories, beyond how I made a mid-day change much like I did on Saturday, this time because Tang and Me ran a bit longer than I thought it would and the show across the street had already started when it let out. The result was similar; I wound up really liking Anime Supremacy! even though it hadn't looked like my thing at first. As a bonus, the Brattle has announced that Kier-La Janisse will be visiting with her House of Psychotic Women reissue and screening Identikit there in mid-August, so that works out for me.

Which gives me a chance to say, right as I'm feeling it, just how glad and grateful I am to have been back in Montreal for this festival through July and into August. The last two years of it being entirely or mostly virtual have not been the same, especially for someone outside of Canada fortunate to be given access to the screening library as press and thus not getting the introductions and Q&As that went with the timed events. We are still not really past the pandemic that made it that way - one of the hosts and programmers had to bow out of the last few days with a positive test, with something similar happening on the other end as well - so I've been masked up pretty much all the time I was inside. After all, even beyond not wanting to get sick, I have no idea what I'd even do, logistically, if I came down with a knock-you-flat case of Covid or tested positive at the end of my sublet; I'm not going to knowingly be a vactor on a plane or on a bus (for eight hours!), but I also don't drive so there'd be no obvious way to get back home while keeping my germs to myself. So folks probably haven't seen how often I've had a dumb grin on my face thie whole three weeks.

I've been very glad to see most of my friends that I've met at the festival this year - hey Kurt, Paul, Gabrielle! - and hope for the best for the people I didn't see, that they're either at a spot where they just can't make it to the festival any more (family obligations, moving to a new home) or just choosing spots when they go out. There's an older gent who always sat toward the front and on the left-hand side of the theater who I didn't see at all this year. Hope he's all right, because you never know.

I've probably spent a year of my life in Montreal at this point, or am coming up on it, and while I can't say I know the city much beyond a few areas, I do love what I know. It's been kind of a bummer to see places I've enjoyed in previous visits shuttered during this one, but I've also been discovering other places; cities are like that, even when there's not a pandemic accelerating the process. I'm looking forward to seeing some other parts of the city over the weekend, seeing how they held up.

Also - I'm only at the halfway point of these recaps as the festival ends because the folks there are kind enough to accredit me as press, and the time involved trying to see everything eats into time to try and write about it. I do try to cover absolutely everything because while some media outlets are valuable to the festival because of a large reach, my value to them is presuably writing up the stuff that a larger outlet won't see enough clicks on to justify the ridiculously small amount freelancers often get on a pop culture website that expects to turn a profit. And even at that, I've expected to get dropped in a numbers crunch for a few years - even before it started experiencing day-long outages during the pandemic and then went down in March of this year with no sign of coming back, eFilmCritic wasn't a big outlet, and, well, I see the numbers on this blog and they're about what you'd expect from a wall-of-text movie review blog that is updated irregularly by a guy who doesn't self-promote much. If eFilmCritic doesn't come back, I wouldn't be surprised if I don't get a pass next year, and I'm fine with that; I'd buy one if they were put on sale to the general public and can probably afford tickets on my own, though it would be a chunk of change, since I do all right by my day job. Give it to someone younger/less male/less white, because it's not like online genre film talk needs more representation from guys like me.

I do like being in the line that gets to go in first and having the freedom to make last-minute decisions even when shows are close to sold out, don't get me wrong, so I'll continue to apply and take the pass if it's being offered. I'm a thrifty New Englander at heart, after all! I'm just saying that, in addition to this being a great festival in a great city, I am even more thankful that apparently these write-ups are valued a bit.

Anyway - I'll probably have more to say when we get to 2022.21 and along the way. For now, it's back to working my way through the schedule. Next up is Monday the 25th, with The Artifice Girl, La Pietà, The Mole Song: Final, and The Breach.

"Spice Frontier"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Axis, digital)

There was a filmmaker message at the end of this short that indicates it's the pilot for a series, and it could be a pretty fun one - the premise has Kent (voice of Brett Waldon), a refugee from a lost Earth, searching for spices so that he can show the rest of the galaxy the variety of human cuisine, aided by hyper-competent android (or cyborg) C-LA (voice of Laurie Catherine Winkel). In this adventure, they're breaking into an abandoned aquarium satellite to retrieve sea salt, only to find The Syndicate has also arrived.

As proofs of concepts go, this is pretty slick, with a real 1990s animated sci-fi/action feel to it and characters that play kind of broadly, but it's the nature of shorts like this; the filmmakers want to make an entertaining adventure story for people who encounter it in the wild but it's also fairly important to show the folks who might be investors why they should sink enough money for thirteen 22-minute episodes into the project, maybe in sharper or plainer terms than they might use for that larger canvas. It's fun, maybe a little bit overstuffed trying to establish more than this short itself needs, but I would enjoy watching more of it, and I suspect 10-15-year-olds really would.

Opal

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Axis, DCP)

Opal is impressively ambitious considering the shoestring budget one likely has to make an animated feature in Martinique, if perhaps occasionally misguided and oversimplified, though I am somewhat tentative saying that, as it's not exactly material I have a lot of first-hand experience with. Even so, its intentions and unique influences made it a bit more than expected, worth a look as it sneaks headier material than expected into what looks like a kids' fantasy.

It takes place in a magical kingdom, where young Princess Opal (voice of Dawn-Lissa Mystille) is a reservoir of magic and summer never ends. Lately, though, the magic has weakened, making the place less prosperous, leading a farming family to summon The Great Iroko (voice of Alain Bidard) to investigate. In the palace, Opal is asked on a daily basis to give her magic to her father, so that the King can be rejuvenated to fight the monsters in the underworld. The Queen (voice of Heather Mystille) initially resists the Iroko's investigation, but an enchanted toy horse (voice of Kaori Ravi) soon reveals that this is not right, though the Queen's difficulty believing this of her husband may mean that she is too slow to react.

This is the sort of plot device that can sometimes be portrayed as natural and okay in fantasy settings, especially ones with a few miles on them, but hopefully register as some patriarchal and abusive garbage when looked at with clear eyes, and multi-hyphenate filmmaker Alain Bidard is thankfully very clear about it being the latter, structuring his metaphor with enough clarity that even the youngest members of the film's presumed audience can't miss. The main issue comes when the story and symbolism moves from describing situations which are often broadly similar to more personal reactions, as when Opal confronts her reservoirs of "negative emotions". "Negative emotions" is a pretty loaded term, especially when you're talking about an abused child.

That being what's underneath the story makes for a rather odd film, one that uses the language of the children's adventure but which is obviously pretty darn dark for them. Even beyond the scripting, it's also often very deliberate, every motion and change of expression carefully plotted and delivered, not quite to the point of being patronizing but such that one notices how intentional everything is. It's animation that looks smooth but does not exactly feel natural, or stylized in such a way that heightens specific things.

It's still fairly a delight to look at. The Afro-Caribbean sci-fi aesthetic is unique; full of bright colors and plenty of non-European influences in design. I especially love things like the hair that the Iroko and other members of his order sport; it looks like both a tree and antlers, and possibly lightning rods with which to draw power, making them even more larger than life than they already do. The paradisiacal fantasy kingdom is its own beast, floating islands that nevertheless feel connected rather than isolated.

Opal is a film very few would make like this, and worth a look to expand one's imagination a bit.

Tang (aka Tang and Me)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Folks have likely seen a lot of movies like Tang; for folks of a certain age, it's hard to finish reading the description aloud without yelling "Short Circuit!" It's a likable enough take on the material, though: Nice cast, a kid-friendly story that emphasizes adventure more than action, what I presume are fun cameos for J-pop fans, and straightforward sincerity as it hits its expected notes.

Ken Kasugai (Kazunari Ninomiya) is in a long funk as the film opens, having skipped a job interview his sister Sakurako (Mikako Ichikawa) set up the previous day and irritated wife Emi (Hikari Mitsushima) with his video game habit and dismissed her interest in the latest model robot assistant. She also wants him to get rid of the weird robot that has wandered into their backyard, a cobbled-together thing that calls itself Tang and speaks more like a child than a machine programmed for a task. It won't stay with a local scrapyard, but seeing that it has an "Autobit Systems" chip and that the company is offering an upgrade, he figures he might trade Tang in, flying from Sapporo to Fukuoka to do so. The designer there (Taiga Kyomoto) says Tang's not one of their models, but also notes that, childish behavior aside, Tang's artificial intelligence seems to be tremendously advanced, capable of self-direction and general learning, and refers him to Dr. Rin Ohtsuki (Nao Honda) in Shenzhen. That's where they discover that, wherever Tang wandered in from, there are folks who want to get their hands on the little guy and don't seem inclined to just walk up and ask politely.

The film is based upon the novel A Robot in the Garden by English author Deborah Install, which appears to be quite popular in Japan as it has also been the inspiration for a stage musical there. It has mostly been localized, but one thing that struck me early on is just how Western pieces of it seemed - it starts in an American-style suburb and often has English labeling before Japanese, and I wonder if it's made with the idea that it might travel more than a lot of Japanese movies do. For all that the film seems to involve Ken and Tang racking up a bunch of air miles, each segment sort of feels like it could take place anywhere, give or take a local landmark or two popping out of clean, utopian future cities.

On the other hand, one shouldn't sell those cities short; the brightness of this movie's future world is a major plus, and though there may be conspiracies and danger, the vibe is generally hopeful, with Ken able to hop a few planes on short notice, kids enjoying museums, and Tang himself being cute as heck but also feeling quite functional - there are probably quite a few scenes where he's practical, although the ones where he's digital fit in fairly seamlessly. The effects work is quite good, and the filmmakers deploy them well, building up and enhancing the world but seldom actually building important scenes around a VFX overload - where a lot of blockbusters would expand the scale with dozens of evil robots and a crazy showdown on the top of a skyscraper or the like, director Takahiro Miki and screenwriter Arisa Kaneko keep things down at a level where Ken and Tang won't get lost when the stakes are highest.

They make a fun odd couple, with Kazunari Ninomiya managing to portray Ken as an underachiever who occasionally wallows in his least impressive traits, but not so far behind the audience in warming to Tang that they turn on him, while the animators, techs, and voice actors performing the little guy give rhim personality without being screen hogs. There's a mostly-fun group of supporting characters - I'm sure there's some J-pop rivalry story behind why some in the audience were laughing hard at Ninomiya and Taiga Kyomoto needling each other, but it's a fun group of scenes even without that, with Nao an energetic part of the Shenzhen sequence and Tetsuya Takeda a fine late entry as Tang's creator, although it is unfortunately one of those movies where playing the disappointed spouse doesn't give someone like Hikari Mitsushima much interesting to do.

It's an enjoyable little movie that feels built to play anywhere, especially if whoever picks up North American distribution gives it a good dub for younger audiences. That's a big if - the pipeline for these sort of big live-action adventures from Japan is built to serve a specialty crowd while this is aggressively mainstream, and for some reason the parent company never bothers spending a bit on these Warner Brothers-Japan movies even though it wouldn't take much to assure a modest profit - but it's fun enough for someone to give it a try.

Haken Anime! (Anime Supremacy!)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, ProRes)

Anime Supremacy! has the poster and maybe the premise of a zany comedy (or maybe a romance), enough that one may spend the early going waiting for it to take that path, but the filmmakers have something else in mind, something a little more straightforward. Rather than the world of anime being a backdrop, the film shakes out as an often-fascinating ensemble piece about creative, dedicated people putting their heads down and trying to make something entertaining and meaningful in a high-pressure, commercial environment. It's serious, though not grave, probably made far more palatable than the reality because it's made by people who love anime regardless.

It opens with a flashback to when Hitomi Saito (Riho Yoshioka), a young woman with a promising career as a civil servant, made a career change to start working in animation, nailing the interview by saying she wanted to make something better than Chiharu Oji's relatively recent master work. Seven years later, her first series as main director, Soundback is about to premiere in the network's prime Saturday 5pm timeslot - and another network is counterprogramming with a new series by Oji (Tomoya Nakamura). The rivalry ignites when a joint interview at a convention leaves Saito feeling belittled and ignored by the crowd, challenging Oji to a competition in the ratings, but then the actual work begins. Saito's producer is Satoru Yukishiro (Tasuku Emoto), domineering and business-first, saddling her with pop idol Aoi Shono (Marika Kono), who would not have been Saito's first choice, as lead voice actor; Kayako Arishina (Machiko Ono), a longtime production assistant just promoted to producer, is charged with keeping the difficult-to-work-with Oji on task. Both series will be using the services of rising-star animator Kazuna Namisawa (Karin Ono) and taxing the studio she works for as both series start their 12-episode runs before the finales are completed.

At times, one wonders if the film might work a bit better if it was a little less sprawling; with a tighter focus. The filmmakers clearly know that Saito is the story more than Oji; even if she is competing with and measuring herself against him, the filmmakers will almost always choose to focus on Saito and Yukishiro if scenes between the two threads would be redundant, and there just seems to be more drama there. Saito is the one discovering the compromises that must be made between vision and commerce, bearing the pressure of potentially not getting a second chance should Soundback fail, especially as a woman in a very male-dominated industry - Oji certainly isn't getting backhanded compliments like "almost cute" during a promotional photoshoot! The competition aspect gives the film some structure and adds a couple good supporting characters, but it's not balanced, and the way that the audience gets to know Saito's project so much better means that there's some weight her creative struggles with her network while Oji's are less well-defined.

This puts the job of carrying the movie on Riho Yoshioka, and she does an impressive job of making it look like a weight, at least for Saito, right from the "I must be crazy" whole-body-clench of the opening interview to every time she has to deal with some further indignity. It's not all tension and frustration - she captures the flow state where a person can feel strangely peaceful even though she's swamped in work if it's going well and rewarding - and gives Saito a slight sense of being an outsider who came late to enjoying anime. Tooya Nakamura's not foregrounded quite so much, but he's able to dig into what makes Oji an interesting character - he's got a sense of rebellious cool and probably acts out to cultivate that image at times (buying into his own press at others), intrigued by what Saito is doing with her show but not outwardly supportive. Taskuku Emoto and Machiko Ono make good foils for their directors and contrasts to each other, even though their paths cross relatively little (beyond an early meeting where Yukishiro, who produced Oji's previous series, gives her a very polite good-luck-you're-gonna-need-it). One could probably cut Namisawa's subplot from the movie, but Karin Ono supplies a vein of earnest enthusiasm the story kind of needs, and her crush on a co-worker that she fears would never work out because he's a "normie" non-fan leads to a really sweet scene.

Mostly, though, it's fun enough to watch the sausage get made. Many films of this ilk focus on how a TV show, movie, or the like must be both art and product, setting up conflict between idealistic artists and bean-counting suits, and there's some of that here, certainly enough to drive conflict toward the end as both Saito and Oji push for unconventional finales. The thing that stands out here is how, up and down the line, the film emphasizes that creative work is, in fact, work, where a visionary has to manage a team, there are thousands of details that must be tended to, and deadlines that must be met. It's not just the executives that have their eyes on the bottom line, but all of the folks working 60-hour weeks and because even their small apartments need rent paid. It's rewarding but also terrifying - you don't have to work in this industry to find the dead silence during a test screening of Soundback nerve-wracking - especially since all the behind-the-scenes stuff about how a series goes from storyboard to script through five kinds of animation to voice-over all has the ring of authenticity.

I do kind of wonder about the themes of it all, in the end - both anime are, at various points, about young heroines sacrificing years of their lives and autonomy for their quests, though the filmmakers don't make a highly visible point of connecting that to the massive amount of self-sacrificing crunch that goes into making them. An American film might be more ambivalent about this, depending on where it was made, though this project finds more nobility to it. It's there, at least, and the clash between heroic ideals and workplace exploitation probably represents reality more than fans of any form of entertainment care to admit. Anime Supremacy! is fairly honest when it's on point, and it's on-point a lot.

(Though, as an aside, I do wonder a bit about when Mizuki Tsujimura's original novel was written and to what extent timeslots and the DVD/Blu-ray sales mentioned in the coda are still a major driver in Japan - the film mentions streaming but seems to take place in a television industry that seems a few years out of date, at least in the US!)

Vesper

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Vesper often seems like a bunch of interesting post-apocalyptic world-building looking for a story. Some of its details are novel, some are rote, and at times the fact that the former are so impressively realized is all that's keeping a viewer from losing interest in yet another grimy dystopia where life is cheap and even moving in the direction of a better situation happens very slowly, if at all. It's not a bad bit of science fiction, just dark and grim and not marrying that to a particularly exciting story.

The character Vesper (Raffiella Chapman), a 13-year-old who is a prodigy with genetic mapping the way a modern teenager might be a computer wiz or gearhead, because that's a necessary skill in a world where mutated plants and animals dominate the ecosystem and the seeds sold by the oligarchs in their mushroom-shaped Citadel arcologies have highly effective terminator genes. It also lets her make tweak the life support system for her father Elias (Edmund Dehn), who came back from serving as a Citadel soldier paralyzed, though they gave him a hovering probe drone he can teleoperate (her mother, like many, has broken and joined a group of silent nomads). Some ingredients need to be sourced from Elias's brother Jonas (Eddie Marsan), who runs the nearest settlement with an iron fist and has a monopoly on trading with the Citadels. Into that falls Camellia (Rosy McEwen), a girl traveling to another Citadel with her father when their glider crashed, and whoever can get them back, whether it be Vesper and Elias or Jonas, stands to profit - for one reason or another.

There's a lot of fun-sounding sci-fi concepts in that description, but the fact that half the characters are related doesn't actually increase the melodrama - which is already not what it could be with Elias basically lying in bed, writhing in pain - and for better or worse, filmmakers Kristina Buozyte & Bruno Samper don't exactly jazz up Vesper's experiments so they look more cinematic than actual science, other than placing them in a dark room partially lit by bioluminescence. Citadels sometimes loom in the background, but most of the story takes place in run-down outbuildings and a swamp with exceptionally dangerous plant life. It's dangerous, but feels small, and there's a real shortage of ambition, not just in the story, but among the characters. Jonas is the most villainous local figure, but he's the sort of mean and petty that calls itself pragmatism, not grandiose. Elias seems to be begging for the sweet release of death. Vesper's primary project - reversing the seeds' terminator genes so that farmers don't have to pay the Citadel through the nose every year - is extremely important but not similarly exciting. And for a large chunk of the movie, Camelia kind of gets left behind in Vesper's shack as she sneaks out to steal something, just sort of waiting for something involving her to happen.

It is still gorgeous, for certain conceptions of that word - not everybody is going to be into nasty biological stuff, after all, and this is a movie where even things that seem like they would logically be purely mechanical have some sort of squishy material inside. It's all effectively designed and deployed well, as are the Citadels' exteriors, what we see of their tech, and the visuals of the ultimate direction the film takes. On top of that, most will probably agree that the drone is the film's breakout star - a seemingly plain cylinder with a face apparently painted on by Vesper when she was just a little kid, audiences will dig it even before the filmmakers make it clear that Vesper's robot sidekick is actually her father, trying to protect her more aggressively that either his failing body or this easily-damaged machine will allow, and then this simple thing becomes poignant.

It's not hard to grow fond of Vesper herself or Camellia - Raffiella Chapman and Rosy McEwen form a quick friendship that doesn't rely on obvious friction because of their different backgrounds, with Chapman hitting how Vesper is smart and daring but also acutely aware of how dangerous everything around her is. Eddie Marsan is probably the most familiar face in the cast, and he's a good choice for Jonas - he's a lean guy who doesn't dominate a scene physically but can conjure up something truly monstrous when asked, and that's what he does here. Jonas could be more interesting, but Marsan gets the job done.

I wish Vesper as a whole were more interesting; it's designed so well for what it is and that hovering drone could be a sci-fi icon if more people were aware of it. This sort of post-apocalyptic world calls for an epic quest or a genuinely grand conceptual hook, and the movie just doesn't have one.

"What Is in the Ocean?"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, digital)

Preston Moss's "What Is in the Ocean?" starts out as a pastiche of mid-century educational films and quickly breaks the fourth wall with the surreal idea that the scientist delivering facts on marine life realizes that his life is a few short minutes restarted every time someone watches the movie, fleeing despite the narrator and the editor being able to catch up with him. Moss and actor Christopher Wiley are clever to skip past this being kind of curious or funny to him, quickly shuffling toward a confused existential crisis that he can't really begin to comprehend that's tragic and pitiful. The comedy is the arch narration trying to help, after a fashion, absurdity distracting from horror.

This sort of story more or less has to zoom out at some point, and when it does - well, it's ultra-weird with some winks at this actually being a relatable situation. It's not necessarily a great bit - it's foreshadowed to not be totally random but might be better off coming totally out of left field. Definitely screwy enough to be funny but not necessarily guaranteed to actually hit an audience that way.

Légions

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Not, perhaps, the best films with which to conclude a five-feature day, especially when #4 didn't exactly leave one revved up and ready for more. It's the sort of movie that's got a lot going on but not as much happening, especially before it decides to actually get into a fight with evil.

Antonio Poyju (Germán De Silva) was, at one point, Argentina's greatest bruja - though he had a more grandiose term for it - and it runs in his blood, with his daughter Elena initially appearing as though she could be even more powerful than him. While the twentieth century had no shortage of demons to vanquish, the one that had the most impact on Poyju's life was the Kuorayara, a jungle spirit who killed Elena's indigeneous mother and stole a necklace from Elena that represented her faith. After that, she no longer fit in the jungle, and Antonio returned to the city, an embarrassment when his daughter was a teenager and now trapped in a mental institution because that's apparently where they send a person who claims to be a demon-slayer when things go south. Elena (Lorena Vega) isn't visiting him, but her nice lawyer husband Warren is doing the best to get him out. He had better hurry - the Kuorayara has returned, and still has the Poyju family in its sights.

There's good material in here, but writer/director Fabián Forte seems to spend the bulk of his time in the least interesting period and situation, when Antonio is an old man in the asylum, sort of plotting his escape but also spending a lot of time with the inmates' theater troupe, who have decided that Antonio's stories would make a better play than what they would normally do, even if that leads to a lot of infighting among unstable people about authenticity and ejecting of directors, while the subject of those stories often sits back and watches with some amusement. It is, perhaps, the natural inverse to what happened with Elena - where she lost her faith and burrowed into bourgeois "normality", these people whom others call mad gained the ability to believe in things beyond the normal - but Forte not only doesn't draw that line, but he spends so much time on the inmates arguing about minutia and so seemingly little on Elena's present (really, anything after the time between when Elena was little) that it's hard to integrate the latter into the story, while the former just feels trivial and obnoxious in its presentation.

It didn't have to be; Germán De Silva gives a dry, entertaining performance, his Antonio too aware of the hidden supernatural world to truly be concerned with the petty concerns of a bunch of madmen or sweat Elena's desires for a normal life too much. He's funny even when the intended comedy around him is not landing, and he handles the moments where the audience may be wondering if he's been reduced to something less than his true self to a force to be reckoned with quite nicely.

And when it comes time for Antonio and Elena to face their demon and slay it, Forte doesn't screw around, paying off all the shadowy, mysterious teases from earlier on with gory confrontations that prove plenty cathartic. The horror action in this movie is by and large practical and messy, possessed of a nasty sense of humor but still taking itself fairly seriously regardless. Forte may have jokes, but he's also going to give the audience reason to be invested in the finale.

The film has large chunks of screwing around with things that don't really matter, and as such never quite manages the scale implied by its multiple time periods and powerful monsters. It's like some subplots got out of control in the filmmaking process, and Forte couldn't entirely push them back.

IFFBoston 2021.02: The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Quiet and A Reckoning in Boston

Is it just me, or is anyone else watching Brian Tamm's intro to these movies, especially the ones labeled "Generic Somerville" or "Generic Brattle", and seeing if they map to where they think the films in question would play during an in-person festival? For instance, I could absolutely see The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Quiet playing the Brattle, while you head back to Somerville for A Reckoning in Boston. Maybe not scheduled for screen #1, but one of the odd-numbered side-screens, at least until a bunch of people with some connection to the production show up and are standing in the rush line, and it eventually moves up.

There'd also be a filmmaker Q&A that results in me having to use the "horrible photography" tag and gets into enough issues for long enough that I eventually have a hard time separating what was part of the film and what wasn't for the review, but not this year. Maybe in 2022.

Anyway, this is getting too late for these two to still be available via the festival site, but I'm A Reckoning in Boston will be on PBS later this year, and hopefully some streaming service or three will pick up The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Quiet. It's odd and slight enough to disappear outside its home territory of Argentina, but as I say in the review, I'm impressed with its attitude toward randomness and chance. We're not wired to handle that particularly well as a species, from imagining gods to personify forces of nature to looking for scapegoats, and I often find the phrase "everything happens for a reason" kind of horrifying when it's meant to give comfort, whether it makes people think there was something they could have done to not deserved misfortune or that some jerk deity is being cruel to toughen you up for later. It's not healthy to think that way, but human brains are pattern-recognition machines, so it's awful hard not to.

Reckoning takes the other side - that there are reasons for the challenges Kafi and Carl face, a system designed to help those already with an advantage (maybe they have what they do "for a reason"), but in a way, that makes it the yin to Dog's yang - some things are random and some are part of a pattern, and being able to distinguish the two and act appropriately is one of the most valuable skills one can have.

El perro que no calla (The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Quiet)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)

The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Quiet has maybe the strangest mid-film detour I can recall, surprising me as I watched it although I'll bet that two-weeks-ago me put this film on the schedule because the description hinted at it. Even before that, it's a movie that's as amiably eccentric as its title, well worth a look before it finds the most peculiar way it can to tell what could be a fairly conventional story.

The dog, Rita, doesn't seem particularly difficult as the audience meets her, but that's because her person, Sebastian (Daniel Katz) is home; apparently she whines non-stop when he's at work, to the point where the neighbors gather to complain. He tries taking her to work, and though Rita is well-behaved, it's apparently one of those offices afraid that anything out of the ordinary will be a slippery slope to chaos. So he's soon taking a job on a farm, with plenty of room for Rita to run. But that doesn't last, sending Sebas on other stops, until he sees a woman (Julieta Zylberberg) at his mother's wedding, also dancing by herself on the other side of the floor. They connect, and then…

Well, you've got to see what happens next to maybe believe it, but up until then, it's a well-above average guy-looking-for-his-place sort of movie. A big part of why it works so well is that star Daniel Katz plays Sebas remarkably straight-down-the-middle, even in the early scenes where he's sort of playing a straight man against the petty folks who have a problem with his dog. There's something a bit introverted and isolated about him, even when he's happy, but seldom with an abrasive sense of superiority. It's a performance built out of how he carries himself rather than what he does or says (and he doesn't really say a lot), and is especially complemented by Julieta Zylberberg and Valeria Lois, the former often a female reflection while Lois is the sort of confident, well-integrated-into-her-space mother that makes someone like Sebas seem a bit more uncertain.

As generally likable as Sebastian is, filmmaker Ana Katz recognizes that seeing him quietly be somewhat dissatisfied and move on could wear on an audience if drawn out too long, so not only does she keep the film itself short (a tight 73 minutes), but she makes sure that no individual segment ever wears out its welcome, telling a little vignette and then jumping on to the next stop, giving them just enough time to have meaning but to also let them be transitory. The crisp black-and-white photography proves flexible enough to reflect her main character's moods - almost always feeling a little gray and overcast, not at home among the office's harsh fluorescents, finding some quiet warmth in agriculture. There are a few animated segments which feel like how Sebas would process major shifts in addition to probably covering things this small picture doesn't have an effects budget for - though the production gets impressively creative when things take a weird twist in the last act.

Some may check out at the last act twist that literally comes out of nowhere, but I must admit to being impressed at just how thoroughly the filmmakers embrace that randomness as a theme. Sebastian might have been on the road to a predictable life had his neighbors not had a problem with his dog, but that sends him in a new direction, as does everything from what happens at the farm to meeting a girl to just helping give a stalled truck a push. But chance is not entirely something that happens to individuals; sometimes it's massive and completely unpredictable, a world-changing event that is absolutely an unfair thing for a screenwriter to drop into a script, but those things happen, arguably with increasing frequency, and they're not always timed to be what starts a story.

Those seeing this movie at a virtual film festival in 2021 don't need to be reminded of that, of course, although I'm curious about just when Ana Katz and her collaborators came up with this idea and shot it, just in terms of whether it's reflecting the world or the world is validating its thesis. Either way, there's insight to its oddity, and even the events before the big one are a fascinating way to treat chance as a real part of our lives beyond just chalking things up to fate or finding them cute and quirky.

Also at eFilmCritic

A Reckoning in Boston

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 May 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Independent Film Festival Boston Fall Focus, AgileTicketing via Roku)

The title of A Reckoning in Boston suggests a confrontation with a somewhat definitive finale, but I don't know that anything has particularly changed in the city. In some ways, filmmaker James Rutenbeck gets caught between scales here, but then, that's where a lot of stories end up, especially when they involve race or poverty - it's not hard to see the large forces at work, but most stories are going to be about surviving them rather than bringing them down.

Filmmaker James Rutenbeck has been in the business for around 30 years, settling in the Boston area, and has taken to teaching "Clemente Courses" in the neighborhood of Dorchester. That's a program designed to give inner-city adults exposure to the humanities that they might not have received before. Two Black students in particular catch his attention - or at least agree to be filmed - in 2015: Kafi Dixon, a bus driver for the MBTA with a growing interest in urban farming, and Carl Chandler, caring for grandson Yadiel while his daughters concentrate on their education.

Kafi's story is the one most clearly entwined with the larger issues Rutenbeck points out early on - she's a state employee facing eviction and also working so that other women in the city can be more self-sufficient, but empty real estate is increasingly previous in Boston, and developers certainly have their eye on the parcel where Kafi has started her first farm. Rutenbeck points out that of the thousands of mortgage loans made as working-class neighborhoods gentrify and the Seaport is just developed out of whole cloth, only a trivial number are going to Black families. She doesn't feel that she's being taken seriously as she talks to people in city offices trying to make her farm official. Rutenbeck's empathy is clear, and though he makes a certain amount of effort to be invisible, he recognizes that this is impossible; having a white man with a camera in the room, even potentially, changes the environment, and he's not shy about expressing anger at how much this is the case.

Carl, meanwhile, is seldom in the middle of confrontations as dramatic as Kafi, which means they spend a little more time focused on his time in class, and the viewer quickly gets an idea of just how sharp he is, at one point spotting a hierarchy in ancient Egyptian art while his classmates are still seeing more surface-level properties. As with Kafi, one quickly gets a sense of much the filmmakers like and respect him, but it also highlights the extent to which one can find brains almost anywhere, but folks like Carl and Kafi don't get the same sort of encouragement when young and don't have the opportunities to climb out of a hole the way white people with just a little more money do.

There are moments when a viewer might suspect that Rutenbeck might have started out making a movie about the Clemente Courses program itself, and how studying philosophy and art can be just as valuable as the job-training programs that often seem more directly practical, if only because it gives one a better understanding of the big picture, as the reading is often used for transitions, and there's talk of economics and the city's racist history around busing. There are plenty of related stories that might be more dramatic, but Rutenbeck makes the choice to center Carl and Kafi whenever possible, making sure that when he includes himself or something more abstract, it's in a way that speaks about them, rather than positioning the teachers as saviors.

Has Boston particularly changed in the six years since production started? It doesn't seem that way; what reckonings have occurred have been more or less at the individual level. Not everybody is necessarily going to have the sort of determination Kafi and Carl show, although it certainly suggests that the right mindset and set of tools can make a big difference.

Also at eFilmCritic

Noir City 2020.01: The Black Vampire & Panic

Hey, this technically makes it a Boston-area festival, right?

Okay, that's a reach, as is "this probably would have been the lineup for Noir City Boston at the Brattle", but so what? If there's any series festival shrugging off borders is worthwhile, it's this one.

I've got to admit, watching the first couple night's worth has been fun, but I'm kind of glad that Eventive is letting one rewatch within 48 hours after pressing Play, because I started Panic way too late and dozed off a lot during it, and watching it a second time in the morning just wasn't the same. I suspect that the best thing to do if you go in and out during a movie is write it off and come back later, but with a limited rental like this, I had to do it right away but wasn't really in the mood to either give that second all my attention or half-watch it.

Still, they're both nifty little movies, and if you read this while the series is still going on (link through the 29th), you can see them with the introductions from Eddie Muller and some interesting post-film material, from talk about the Argentine film industry of the 1950s to discussion on the history of subtitling

El Vampiro Negro (The Black Vampire)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 November 2020 in Jay's Living Room (AFI Silver/Noir City International, Eventive via Roku)

There are some who will say that El Vampiro Negro is the best version of its tale, and while that's a stretch - Fritz Lang's M is a legit classic - this Argentine take on the story from 1953 nevertheless makes a much stronger case for its own existence than many remakes do. It's a smart update of the story which doesn't lose its way for having a lot to say.

It can't escape the inevitable comparisons to its predecessor, of course, in part because star Nathán Pinzón - described in the post-film discussion as an avid cinephile - is seemingly determined to not just play the same part that Peter Lorre played, but to be Peter Lorre in M. It's not quite mimicry, but there's nevertheless a sense that he is pointedly making the same choices and using that performance as a guide wherever he can, and why not? Not a lot of people in Argentina can easily see a 20-year-old German film, and this is his chance to bring something he loves to them. It's not Lorre - it evokes him well enough but doesn't quite have the same "born-for-this" feel that Lorre brigns to it, especially if you've seen the original.

But it doesn't quite matter, because the serial killer in this movie is almost secondary; the film's true villain, arguably, is Prosecutor Bernard (Roberto Escalada), he may not be corrupt but he is always ready to bring the full force of his office to bear if it will help him resolve his case, and that's doubly so if he sees someone as his societal inferior. As such, he sets his sights on Amalia (Olga Zubarry) early on; a single mother who works as a nightclub singer in a club owned by a former drug trafficker (Pascual Pellicota), and who as such has no reason to believe that her precarious position will be helped by doing the right thing. And while director Román Viñoly Barreto and co-writer Alberto Etchebehere were likely pushed to make some changes by mid-century censorship requirements, they're able to be subversive and clever in how they do it: The mob as in organized crime isn't going to be the ones that do the work the police can't in this movie, but the overlooked people - folks with disreputable jobs, the homeless, the disabled - will.

That occasionally makes for a movie that gets a little wobbly when it gets to the child murders that supposedly drive the plot; there's a good argument for the filmmakers not engaging in lurid exploitation, especially since the theme of pitting the privileged against the displaced means that Ulber will be lashing out in a lot of the same ways the underdogs are. It doesn't reduce the horror of the serial killing to a plot device, but it does kind of show that there's enough going on that some things get pushed back a bit.

Panique (Panic)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 13-14 November 2020 in Jay's Living Room (AFI Silver/Noir City International, Eventive via Roku)

Notably based on a George Simenon novel from outside his Inspector Maigret series, and it's one of those odd postwar French movies where there's this broad amorality and paranoia that sometimes seems peculiar from 75 years later, oddly dry even for noir.

Part of the thing that makes it so is that while all three leads are good in their parts, only Viviane Romance's Alice seems well-rounded throughout; she's aloof at some points but even as she's working a cynical seduction, she's got genuine affection for the boyfriend who was part of the gang that had her spending a year in jail and a believable as she starts to develop a soft spot for their patsy. Michel Simon is a guy whose charisma comes through as Monsieur Hire - it's not hard to see how he was a big star despite being kind of an odd nebbish in this film. He plays the sort of protagonist who is midway between hero and antihero, right below abrasive but just not-friendly enough that one can see why he's still an outcast. Paul Benard, meanwhile, is a guy you buy as Alice's no-account (and then some) boyfriend Freddy, but he's still someone you're told is charming rather than one where you believe it.

Director Julien Duvivier and co-writer Charles Spaak can't help but see the war over their shoulders as they make the film, and it's maybe a little bit more believably frustrating now than it has been at many times since. Freddy's blunt, seemingly transparent riling up of the townspeople who are already on edge seems kind of ham-fisted, as is the way it rapidly becomes a game of telephone, but it's not like what's going on in the real world is that much more sophisticated. What is a real delight is the town itself, apparently close enough to Paris or some other city to be on the Metro but still isolated; it may be filled with easily duped people but hits a real sweet spot between feeling like something created for the film and real, cozy enough to seem like a set but big enough for a finale. It's a nifty environment to lose yourself in even when you know what's under the surface, and the big finale is one where you can see a lot of the tricks but it's still stitched together into something that's more than a bit impressive in its scale.

Fantasia On-Demand Preview 2020.03: La Dosis (and Fly Me to the Saitama)

Another short "day", as only three movies were set to have their embargo lifted Saturday and one of them was a "Fantasia Classic" that I saw (and greatly enjoyed) at last year's event. The third, Hail to the Deadites, I may catch up with during the festival proper if I've got time, but I may not; I'm not huge on documentaries about fandom and figure I'll see it in its natural environment, as a special feature on the next release of Army of Darkness as I purchase my fifth copy of one of those movies, with the question being who actually owns it now and whether whatever catalog specialists they license to sees fit to give it a 4K release.

Anyway, I'm sure that will be a lot of fun for the folks who do order it, and I'm willing to bet it would have been a real kick if it played in an auditorium with guests. I don't know whether it would be a Hall or de Seve movie, though.

La Dosis, I suspect, would be one that winds up in de Seve, a slow-and-low burner that holds things back to good effect but isn't really made to get the crowd of 600 or whatever to whoop. I dig it, though. And I strongly suspect I'd still enjoy the heck out of Fly Me to the Saitama, and I don't even feel bad about padding my 2020 reviews with it, because I probably wrote the final review of that one closer to the 2020 festival than the 2019 one anyway!

La Dosis (The Dose)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)

One keeps expecting La Dosis ("The Dose") to move up to another gear at some point, but it never quite does so, at least to the extent that one might expect. That's not a criticism; it's an acknowledgment that there are ways that society can provide cover to darkness, and one cannot necessarily wait for the big moment to make things better.

It begins with a comatose patient in an Argentine intensive care unit entering cardiac arrest; the doctors give in after three attempts to restart her heart fail, but nurse Marcos Roldán (Carlos Portaluppi) seems to sense she is not gone yet, and applies the paddles himself. She is revived, but still unconscious, and the hospital is loath to spend more resources on this old woman who is apparently without family, prompting Marcos to steal something from the supply closet and inject her with it. Meanwhile, some changes are happening in the department - the area supervisor is ailing, and co-worker Noelia (Lorena Vega) hints that it's already been decided that the job is Marcos's. There's also a new nurse in the ICU's rotation, Gabriel Santos (Ignacio Rogers), handsome and cheerful and happy to give the oft-invisible Marcos a ride home. He may, however, be a little too sympathetic with regards to the mercy Marcos showed that old lady.

One doesn't have to know much about the health-care system in Argentina to guess that Clinica Nagal is maybe not the area's best hospital, but the filmmakers don't vilify it. They show how cramped this ICU is, and it looks kind of dark and dingy compared to the other hospital that Marcos has occasion to visit, with its clean white walls and private rooms, but if this is a lesser hospital for the city's lower classes, it doesn't seem to have disdain for its patients; the doctors and nurses and the rest are mostly professional, dedicated caregivers. Still, you can see how it's a place where things may fall through the cracks, with resources stretched thin. It's not really about how the lower-class patients or staff are taken advantage of in the way that some movies might be, but it's not a factor that can be entirely discounted.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Tonde Saitama (Fly Me to the Saitama)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

This may not be the most shojo movie possible, assuming I'm not being my manga categories mixed up, but even if I am, it's right up there in terms of just being absurdly, specifically Japanese, and regionally so at that. It shouldn't travel at all, even to a festival audience of people who love Japanese pop culture, and yet it got the biggest laughs of any film there, because for all that the jokes are specific, the spirit is not, and the way they're told is something anyone can laugh at.

The Saitama is a Tokyo suburb, described as the bits that were left over when Tokyo and Yokohama separated, and apparently not well-regarded by its neighbors. Teenage Manami Sugawara (Haruka Shimazaki) is embarrassed to be from there, something of great consternation to father Yoshiumi (Brother Tom) and mother Maki (Kumiko Aso) as they take a road trip. Frustrated, Yoshiumi turns on a radio drama, set in a heightened Tokyo where Class President Momomi Hakuhodo (Fumi Nikaido), a stiletto-heeled monster from the very best family, rules her high school with an iron fist with the Saitamese basically servants living in hovels, though she is as immediately smitten with new transfer student Rei Asami (Gackt) as anyone - "you can still smell the America on him!" What she doesn't know is that before he went abroad, he lived in the Saitama, and has been sent to infiltrate high society and destroy it from within.

Though I can't recall ever seeing any of the manga Mineo Maya specifically, original series Tonde Saitama was published in a girls' manga magazine and director Hideki Takeuchi is clearly channeling the general style, with its elaborate hair and fashion, lean and androgynously handsome men, and generally exaggerated visuals represented and amplified on-screen. It's a somewhat garish style that often works better on the page than screen, but this is a story that lets the filmmakers lean into it; between the contrast with the modern simplicity of the car and the satirical intent, it's no leap for the style to be self-parodying. After a while, becoming more ridiculous is a big part of how Takeuchi and screenwriter Yuichi Tokunaga keep it light rather than mean.

Full review at eFilmCritic