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 2025.07: Stinker, "First Rites", Sweetness, Peau à Peau, "A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers", and Contact Lens

If you'd told me ahead of time which program on today's schedule would be one of my favorites of the festival I might not have believed you.

We kicked things off with Stinker and director Yerden Telemissov (center), who really came off as a charming, sweet guy making his first feature as a director after working as an actor for years. He's a big dude, so it's probably not entirely surprising that he's mostly been cast as gangsters and other heavies, but from the film he made and the way he talks, that's got to be some really impressive acting.

Next up, we have programmer Carolyn Mauricette with "First Rites" director Findlay Ironside, whose short I liked a bit more than the feature it was attached to.

After a dinner break, I headed across the street for Peau à Peau, which being a French-Canadian film had a whole mess of people in attendance, and me crossing my finger that the "subtitled in English" label on the program wasn't just a little joke at my expense, the way that it sometimes can be. Thankfully, it was not!

Still, kind of no idea what director Chloé Cinq-Mars and star Rose-Marie Perreault are talking about here.

And, finally, we head a bit closer to the mountain with Justine Smith introducing Birdy Hung Wei Ting, whose short "A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers" played before Contact Lens and was a real delight, as was the feature. This surprised me a bit, because they are riffs on specific art-house films that I might have missed - I only saw Jeanne Dielman because it won the Sight & Sound poll and IFFBoston and the Somerville Theatre booked it on 35mm - but there's a bit of a lesson here in that even films that get the reputation as being challenging or for sophisticates can be for everyone. These Hung and Contact Lens director Lu Ruiqi sort of pull the best bits out of the films they homage and twist them in a way that the fun is front-and-center, but the material itself is still great, and works beyond just recognition or a secret handshake between cineastes.

That said… Contact Lens can drag a bit like Jeanne Dielman in points, so I did at one point reach into my backpack for an energy drink I'd purchased for the next morning. It was disturbingly effective and now I'm making sure I'm carrying some little Pepsi Zeros for when I start to flag during marathon movie sessions like this.


So there's Tuesday! Wednesday would be A Grand Mockery, Every Heavy Thing, The House With Laughing Windows, the "Things That Go Bump in the East" shorts, and I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn. Today (the next Tuesday), I'll probably do The Undertone, the "Diasporing Dualities" shorts, LifeHack, and Dollhouse. Stuntman is good fun.


Sasyq (Stinker)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Stinker absolutely plays like a "kid hiding his new alien friend" movie, except that the kid is a homeless former classics professor in his sixties and the best jokes involve attempted suicide and a hand grenade. It's well enough made, but for who? Is last year's Steppenwolf all the more shocking because this is sort of the norm for mainstream entertainment in Kazakhstan?

It opens with that initially-nameless professor (Bakhytzhan Alpeis) attempting to end his life in various manners but not able to go through with it for one reason or another. When he's not doing that, he's hanging out in the general area of a roadside convenience store operated by crusty grandmother Nadya (Irka Abdulmanova) as she watches out for her granddaughter (Ailin Sultangazina). He's the only one that sees a UFO crash-land, disintegrating and leaving only one survivor (Chingiz Kapin). The Earth's sun would burn him severely, and it turns out that the only place nearby that approximates his home planet is the hole beneath the shop's outhouse. As the professor and the alien try to repair a communication device, the town's mayor is getting worked up over a motorcade that will pass the town in a few days, instructing a policeman to get word out to the residents to put their best foot forward, and clear away undesirables, like a homeless drunk going on about aliens.

As these movies go, it's mostly fairly pleasant and straightforward. The characters are familiar enough types played relatively well, especially once things thaw a bit and the granny and professor start warming to each other. The comedy tends toward the scatalogical - the title comes from two characters who kind of reek - but director Yerden Telemissov and coo-writer Sergey Litovchenko mostly keep their film on the side of the line where it's amusingly rude rather than truly disgusting. There doesn't seem to be much budget for special effects, but what there is looks reasonably nifty, well designed and within the limits of what they can do.

It still winds up feeling like they're executing a familiar template, and the pieces that could add some color don't do that much. The mayor, who seems to have a nice office from which to run a town that otherwise feels like a wide part of the highway, is introduced as a petty despot but never seems to have any villainous ambition or worthwhile secrets to hide. There's stuff that will maybe help the alien get home, but it doesn't amount to much other than making one wonder if police badges are literal tin in this town. There's a joke to be made about how folks in an advanced civilization don't know a whole lot about their tools in folks vaguely seeking some sort of metal, but this isn't that movie.

It means that the end is a real mess, with the mayor suddenly able to call on militarized police even though he's been leaning on one overmatched deputy (and as much as I'm kind of okay with a cop willing to prostrate himself for this mayor being the butt of some kind of mean physical comedy, the bits where he's deprived of his inhaler cross the line into cruelty), so that there can be a more bombastic climax. That's where the hand grenade comes in, and even that joke gets elongated just long enough to not be quite so much fun.

The film ambles along well enough, but it's hard to imagine anyone but kids being terribly amused, and I'm pretty sure I'd get into trouble with by brothers if I showed it to my nieces and nephews, so I'm really not sure who the audience is.


"First Rites"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)

Do genre festival programmers have a sort of insider term for "short that is build-up to and execution of some sort of supernatural rite, followed by an unexpected result?" I'm not complaining about them, mind you; just noticing that they seem to show up fairly often. "First Rites" is actually a pretty good example - it starts with an awkward conversation between Martha (Vanessa Gonzalez-Egan), who claims to a private chef, and Kirk (Matt Vince), who delivers her animal blood from the meat market, his interest being unwanted and maybe inappropriate; continues as Martha tries to revive the corpse of Jane Hudson; and then hits the viewer with a punchline.

It's done well-enough, although at times I wonder about the odd part of the house where the ritual is performed (I imagine the owner of the house saying uh-uh, you shoot the whole thing in the entryway even if it looks weird and keep your fake blood away from the carpet and the dining room); writer/director Findlay Ironside and her team bring a sort of foreboding atmosphere to a suburban environment that seems like it would be extremely unremarkable just outside Martha's door, and her specific discomfort with Kirk's persistence lets one think that her motivations are one thing as opposed to something else, even though there's been a clue or two dropped. The punchline is pretty darn good.

So, yes, this is a familiar sort of short, but executed rather well.


Sweetness

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)

Let's start with the usual caveats that I have never been a teenage girl and that the nieces that I only see once every few months at family things seem pretty well-adjusted. They're maybe unnecessary, because I do more or less buy into the parts of Sweetness that are about Rylee being obsessed and going horrifically overboard in a way she figures is well-meaning, even if it's not particularly exciting to me. It's the rest that kind of falls flat and makes the film a grind to get through.

Said girl is Rylee Hill (Kate Hallett), whose widowed father (Justin Chatwin) is dating a woman she doesn't particularly like (Amanda Brugel) and who gets relentlessly teased at school, although she probably isn't helping herself by doing things like having her earbuds in when best friend Sidney (Aya Furukawa) wants to include a boy or two in their hangouts. Her current favorite musician is Floorplan frontman Payton Adler (Herman Tømmeraas), and both Rylee and Sid are excited for the weekend's concert. They get separated as Sidney wants to hang out with other friends, and Rylee is nearly run over by Payton before being offered a ride home. It's not quite a dream come true - her dreams involve much more! - and that's before the supposedly-sober Payton stops at a dealer's house and crashes the car. Rylee decides she's going to help him detox, and why not - her father's job means she's got access to handcuffs, said father and Marnie are away on a weekend retreat, and she's also house-sitting a place just down the street whose retired owners won't be back from their cruise for weeks.

Roughly halfway through Sweetness, I found myself thinking that this has escalated too far, too fast, and I didn't see how the filmmakers could work with their new baseline and stakes. Sadly, they can';- it's suddenly much harder to empathize with Rylee and the filmmakers don't seem to have a new plan to get the audience to understand her (and I wouldn't be shocked if they had trouble showing this petite girl lugging people around in a way that made it believable. There's really only one scene to come that delivers on the potential of the start.

It goes to show that sometimes even a relatively small independent film can be too big. The bit about Sweetness that intrigued is two characters in a room - the idol-worshipping teen girl who needs music to hold her together and the pop star whose own issues are causing him to crack - and once everyone is spending time on Things Getting Worse and Not Getting Caught, that all winds up in the background. The movie becomes a thriller of mechanics, but the folks involved don't seem to realize this, deferring what Rylee is doing to stay ahead of things which haven't been presented as a threat yet and acting like the character's well hasn't been poisoned.

Kate Hallett puts in the effort - even at the moments when Rylee seems to have an unchanging resting scowl, the audience can feel the mix of sadness and rage within her, and even when she's confident, it's a wavering, convincing-herself confidence. Hallett can be convincing in her heartbreak and teenage earnestness, enough to pull the audience in despite everything else. It's a nice complement to Herman Tømmeraas, who convincingly presents Payton's inner turmoil in moments when he's not just a jackass or rightly terrified and lashing out at the teenage psycho or yelling for help.

The mess of the second half causes the movie to end with a quiet thud that's all the worse because the epilogue suggests an intriguing alternate explanation for what's going through one secondary character's head. Interesting and unnerving as those last scenes are, this isn't that movie, or the one that it started as.


Peau à Peau (aka Nesting)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Les Fantastiques Week-Ends du Cinéma Québéçois, laser DCP)

Peau à Peau feels like a random, zig-zagging movie that raises things and then has the filmmakers get distracted, not returning until much later, and it maybe takes a while for a viewer to recognize that it's not distraction, but a different sort of seeming randomness. While the audience is looking for some sort of casual chain, this is about traumas being stacked, and the seeming lack of a pattern is part of the problem.

Motherhood is not coming easy to Pénélope (Rose-Marie Perreault) - not only did she have a difficult pregnancy, but her baby Lou's premature birth nearly killed her, and now that he's born, he's not gaining weight even as he seems to do nothing but feed, and won't sleep through the night, with boyfriend Gaspard (Simon Landry-Desy) somehow not awakened by the crying. She's taking Lou for a walk to the local depanneur during one of these incidents when it is held up, and she recognizes the robber as her sister Charlotte (Marie Bélanger). Coincidentally, a former lover she and Charlotte met at camp as teenagers, Swiss artist Edward (Saladin Dellers) has returned to Montreal for a gallery exhibition, and rekindling that relationship highlights how frustrated she is with Gaspard.

Also, during the robbery, "Charlotte" dropped her gun and Pénélope picked it up and has been keeping it close.

Viewers are often used to seeing thrillers as clockwork constructions, mysteries which can be solved and traced from start to finish then more or less safely put away, because that is in many way how minds work for everything. This isn't how things work for Pénélope; each new crisis reminds her of the last time she was this scared and vulnerable, but others have difficulty seeing beyond the issue at hand. So while they are trying to do what they can to handle that (or just as often seeing Pénélope as a disruptive source of problems), Pénélope is creating connections in her own mind trying to find a pattern, and it's leading her to stranger and more desperate places.

On the way, I often wasn't sure what to make of Rose-Marie Perreault as Pénélope as she wavered between grounded and the sort of exhausted that occasionally results in blurting out something shocking or unfiltered, with occasional detours into what can read as overacting until one realizes the extent to which she is in the process of cracking. There's a sort of consistency to her chaotic reactions, though, and Perreault manages to keep it unnerving or desperate enough that an outburst out of almost nowhere never seems out of character, but just this moment's last stray. She and filmmaker Chloé Cinq-Mars occasionally slip a glimpse of the woman she was before her pregnancy in, sometimes briefly enough that you don't know you've seen it.

I had, admittedly, expected a more genre-adjacent film (maybe not The Babadook, but in that neighborhood), but the filmmakers use that sort of thing sparingly: Mirrors don't seem to quite work right, at least for Pénélope, and the filmmakers often edit in a way meant to unsettle, jumping forward when the audience expects to stay in the same time and place, although the occasional narrated dates in the baby diary are a reminder that not much time has passed, and Pénélope is deteriorating fast.

I suspect this one will grow on me. So much about it is built to not just misdirect, but to trigger the instincts that say a film isn't working, even if it actually is, and a second viewing with that in mind could be interesting.


"A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2025 in Cinéma du Musée Even (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)
Where to stream A Brighter Summer Day (Prime link), or order the disc at Amazon

I think I need to see A Brighter Summer Day the next time it shows up in the Boston area, which probably won't be too long, because the various venues back home all tend to circle back around to Edward Yang eventually. I loved this short, but feel like a lot of what's in it has sort of been hanging around my consciousness for a while in clips and stills, and wonder how much Birdy Hung Wei-Ting and company are impressing me with impressive mimicry of something acknowledged to be great and how much is their distinctive spin.

It doesn't quite feel like that, though, especially when this film's Ming, after buying a bag of watermelon juice that seems like it could be on a collision course for her white school uniform, cheerfully buys a ticket to The Lady Avenger, a violent bit of pulp that she gobbles up, seeming to intimidate the boy smitten with her. You can see Hung flip the script even if you don't know what that script is, as Ming's fantasies take on a much more assertive bent and the boy starts to freak out. It's funny and unnerving on top of being genuinely beautiful.


He ma pi fu (Contact Lens)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2025 in Cinéma du Musée Even (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser DCP)
Where to stream Jeanne Dielman (Prime link), or order the disc at Amazon

A delightfully playful riff on a classic (Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles) that likely nobody would describe that weird to describe, Contract Lens can still sometimes have its inspiration's methodical nature, but pairs it with whimsy much more often as it is very much its own thing.

Bubble (Zhong Yunxi) lives on her own in a nice little apartment, tending to run late as she starts her day, screaming "I know!" when appliances inform her their work is done while she's still dressing or putting in her contacts. When not tutoring a little girl (Wu Shiqi) on her Chinese characters, she spends much of her time in the park, shooting various objects and people with her camcorder, and befriends one confident girl (Chen Fan) who seems tickled by the idea of being a muse. Bubble's "roommate" surprises her, though; she has "adopted a film", with the kitchen from Jeanne Dielman projected on a screen in Bubble's, and Jeanne (Dai Yanli) appears to be aware of the situation.

The most obvious fun comes from how writer/director Lu Ruiqi plays with the projection, having Jeanne initially bumping into the movie screen from the other side, or having Bubble occasionally seem to pass into and out of Jeanne's world, or having it interact with the balcony behind it. Lu tends to stage these moments more like magic tricks than visual effects, carefully matching Zhong Yunxi walking behind a sheet with her entering on the other set previously, or arranging things so that Dai Yanli's eyeline matches with the outside world. Lu will often start a scene blurry, bringing it into focus as Bubble puts her lenses in.

That's maybe not just a gag, but a reminder that Bubble is introverted and tends to interact with the world through a lens. She tells her outgoing new friend that many of the people she shoots are also shy and seem to prefer the camera as a mediator. She spends a lot of time on her laptop editing, and as the film goes on, she interacts more with Jeanne, though at a remove, than the friend who is right there. A fan who would "adopt" a film this way is often inherently possessive, and one wonders if Jeanne's apparent growing independence (real or imagined) springs from Bubble's fandom and obsession, and where it could lead Bubble.

The film, it must be said, is not non-stop surrealism and meta-commentary; though there are bits that are quite funny even outside of that (and I would love someone who speaks and reads Chinese to tell me just exactly how funny one of the penmanship lessons is), the film also parallels Jeanne Dielman in ways that can frustrate the folks who would avoid a three-and-a-half-hour arthouse drama, even at well under 90 minutes: We spend a lot of time watching Bubble do chores, or staring at ordinary, inactive things through the eyepiece of her camera, and repeating them. It's a contrast in some ways - Bubble has labor-saving devices that nevertheless seem to stress her out compared to the patient, methodical Jeanne - but it can occasionally give some viewers the fidgets in the way that the original film does.

I do kind of wonder how Contact Lens would have hit me without Jeanne Dielman being listed at the top of the Sight & Sound list and thus creating more of an impetus to see it when it had more bookings than usual a couple years ago. There's enough to it that doesn't necessarily require familiarity with that specific film, but it's a richer experience knowing it.

Fantasia 2025.05: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, The Battle Wizard, and Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark

Unusually short day, but a long post because it started with a shorts package. Well, didn't exactly start with it; I spent the first slot back in the apartment, finishing a post covering Friday, because the two things on offer were Japanese Avant Garde Pioneers, which would run again the next day, and Bullet in the Head, which I've watched a couple times in the last couple years and believe has already been announced as the group of Hong Kong classics from the Golden Princess collection that Shout! Factory will be touring soon. You're welcome!

Between being the last one in and sitting where I can escape in a hurry if need be, it wasn't a great spot for pictures, especially if you use the phone's panorama setting:

Let's split that up a bit.

So off at the very far left, we have the event's host, then "Filther" filmmaker Simen Nyland, from Norway; "Lola" director Grace Hanna & executive producer Derek Manansala, from the US; "Weird to be Human" director Jan Grabowski, art director Agnieszka Adamska, and production designer Juliusz Dabrowski, from Poland; and "Disappeared" director Jeong Eun-uk, from South Korea.

Jeong's interpreter was next, then finally representing "Fingerprints of the Gods" were writer/director Wei Zhenfeng, producer Zhong Yu, and one more member of the crew, with their interpreter hiding behind.

I believe my favorite bit of the Q&A was Grabowski being asked about creating the look for their synthezoid character and handing the mike to Adamska after saying a few words, where she said she had about $2,000 for the whole thing and then they had to use most of it on a skullcap because the actress wouldn't shave her head and so that made things harder than they needed to be.

After that, it was a decision between a restored Shaw Brothers film at 5:40 and something maybe sci-fi-ish at 6:30, and I chose the former even though I knew I'd probably be getting it on disc soon enough; the description of the other seemed a bit inside-baseball. It gave me a bit of time for the annual burger at Mr. Steer before heading across the street for Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark, which was one of the things I've had circled on the schedule since it was announced, having dug the original when it played the Brattle in its American release, kind of amazed there was a follow-up.

Then back to the apartment, with Cielo, Japanese Avant Garde Pioneers, Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards, and Dog of God on tap for Monday. It's Saturday now, and I'm planning on Hold the Fort, The Girl Who Stole Time, Influencers, and Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo, with Funky Forest highly recommended.


"Moon & Back"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

Writer/director Pony Nicole Herauf knows that the science-fictional aspects of her short film don't make a lot of sense, and bakes it into the beginning, when Branch (Bren Eastcott) and Mattie (Mattie Driscoll) phone a radio call-in show and are yelled at on-air for saying that the issue in their relationship is that their close friendship struggled when Branch was away at college, and now her new job is going to take her to the moon. It's going to be a big thing soon, they say.

Is it? Well, there's not exactly a lot else in the story to suggest it, but also only the most occasional slip to suggest that Branch is sick and may either be dying soon or undergoing experimental treatment far away, and this is a last weekend where that euphemism will be strictly enforced. It's not a thing one sees in the very funny performances from Eastcott & Driscoll at first - Branch & Mattie are the sort of delightfully ordinary folks who are funny in large part because of how they come off as mainly being funny to each other, even with Herauf giving them a lot of good lines - but they're good enough to give a lot of heft to scenes played against somewhat lo-fi visual effects toward the end.


"Lola"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

I'm inclined to believe that "Lola" depicts what's actually going on, with teenage prodigy Tessie (Jovie Leigh) making yet another attempt to cure or at least arrest her grandmother's fast-moving dementia. It's got the feeling of someone who has always been superlatively bright running hard into her limitations and kind of doesn't work unless Tessie can actually get in there and receive one last bit of good advice from the part of Lola's brain that hasn't been scrambled.

Of course, what's fun is that the apparent limitations of a student film lead to director Grace Hanna making a lot of choices that emphasize that this is from the point of view of a precocious child, from the animation to the props made of everyday objects to a mindscape that's got the same general form of one where filmmakers spend millions of dollars to create a mental library but is all the more poignant for its relative simplicity. The costume Leigh is given to wear as Tessie is also adorable whether it's the characters existing in a heightened world, her sort of playing dress-up, or somewhere in between.


"First Sight"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

"First Sight" looks like it's going to be a "don't fall in love with an AI construct" thing, but writer/director Andew McGee has some more interesting things to do, as widow Luna (Ellise Chappell) is matched for a first-date with handsome, likable Antony (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd). As a writer who reviews new consumer technology, she's got top-of-the-line Bluetooth contact lenses with a powerful AI in her phone offering useful advice on the heads-up display, but taking its recommendations doesn't make for an exciting date, and that's before the ransomware attacks.

I've been wondering when we were going to start to get more stories of artificial intelligence being kind of useless in situations where human expression is concerned, as features continue to come out with androids who are more human that human or AIs that can outwit even the most clever protagonist, and that's pretty far from the experience of anyone who has desperately tried to shut Copilot off. McGee is smart about this without it coming off as a lecture, and the ransomware bit is clever (although I'm almost more frightened of a hack where my reading glasses replace the fine print on a contract), although it kind of stretches the blind date out in a way that seems untenable.

Ellise Chappell is pretty darn good through that, at least, and all-around; she captures the bits of McGee's script that require her to be sad in a big way, even if it's not always on her face, and the sort of generally nervous that makes these sort of shortcuts so tempting. Jacob Fortune-Lloyd hits the right tone as well, disappointed enough that Luna is taking outside cues enough for it to show without seeming mean or sanctimonious enough to be unappealing.


"Disappeared"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

"Disappeared" kind of feels a little more like The Matrix with the serial numbers scraped off than one would maybe like, although with interesting ways to go should Eunuk Jeong get a chance to expand it. There are times when I wondered a bit if it were written and selected with the intent of showing off the studio in which it was shot in a sort of symbiotic way, a chance for both the business and the filmmaker to have a polished calling card, and that determined a lot of its emphasis.

I do kind of like the central performance by Tan Woo-seok, whose character seems to be the sort of screw-up where both he and those who know him get frustrated at how his limitations get in the way of his being generally likable - one sort of feels bad for noting how annoying it must be - and he's got a bit more range than that when need be.


"No Nation"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

Between this and 40 Acres, I'm liking the greater Native/First Nations representation showing up in some recent post-apocalyptic tales. Not necessarily a whole lot, but enough to make one consider how some things would shake out. "No Nation" carves out a nifty little niche where it feels grounded and gritty while hinging on silly genre nonsense, and director/co-writer Jeffrey Elmont seems to know it, having characters ask why they're doing the elaborate rugby ritual rather than something more sensible.

The reason, of course, is that the rugby ritual is cool, which is both why we watch these movies and how the guy in charge exerts control. The audience feels the excitement of it even if they don't necessarily have a rooting interest; Elmont and company reveal details as the combatants play rather than do an explanation ahead of time, throwing a monkey wrench into it just as the viewers understand. At that point, there's no satisfaction in anyone being hoisted by their own petard, and part of what makes the finale feel honest is that there's a lesson there but one maybe can't be sure people will take the right one to heart.

"Weird to Be Human"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

Sometimes, watching science fiction, I'll groan at "back in the bad old days of the Twentieth Century, we did this, and though we say we've outgrown it…" dialogue, even if delivered with intense earnestness by William Shatner or Patrick Stewart, but I feel like I'd kind of welcome it in "Weird to Be Human". Part of that is that we're in "AI is more human than human" territory, a bit strained as AI makes things in everyday life dumber, and part is because many folks in the present who could do with a fable about how the government chooses who is eligible for citizenship and makes them jump through tortuous hoops to obtain it are isolated from the process and could maybe use the linkages.

All that is in "Weird to Be Human", but you may have to know it's there to see it. Happily, it's got a nicely unsettling "one dystopian room to decorate in budget Cronenberg fashion" aesthetic, the sort of performances where a viewer can settle in and change their impression of who is supposed to be the audience surrogate and who is supposed to be the monster over the film's running time, and just enough memory of being behind the Iron Curtain and having resurgent right-wing movements for everyone involved to know of what they speak. The small cast handles their parts quite nicely, willing to sound alien and odd but let their inner humanity come through, for better or worse.


"Fingerprints of the Gods"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

I wonder, a bit, to what extent a character named "Monkey" was intended to make one think of some sort of trickster deity at first, even though we're probably more in "at a typewriter" territory in this short, as a reporter is given a story that makes him question the foundations of the universe.

"Fingerprints" is nice-looking - I particularly liked the precise layout of Monkey's apartment inside a run-down building - but it kind of falls prey to what hobbles a lot of simulation-theory stories, where there's not exactly much the folks discovering that they live inside a simulation that may be shut down can do about it, and for all that director Wei Zhenfeng talks about being inspired by the Mandelbrot Set, he never quite finds a way to blow audience minds with some sort of fractal revelation of simulations within simulations. It's a nicely-mounted short, but probably the one where specifics have faded most over the time it takes to write things up.


"Filther"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

Appearing at this moment, with its faceless protagonist, steampunk imagery and compositing where the elements don't quite seem to match, this probably draws "is this made with generative AI?" more than the "nice ambition, but maybe you're stretching a little thin" it would have gotten a couple years ago. Unfair, perhaps - nothing in the credits indicates that's the case - but it's got the feel: Some nifty ideas, a focus on aesthetics, and a story that's relatively thin, trying to be capital-E Emotional while connecting the big visuals.

I found it kind of pretty but distancing, and there's something really odd about the love story seeming to favor the match-making service over the nice girl at the shop nearby who at least seems to like him. Nothing' is really happening other than the protagonist fixing things, and for as much as the clockwork construction is kind of a soothing respite from folks being mean to him and the general tumult among the normies, the movie isn't doing much more than showing pretty pictures to earn a happy ending.


Tian long ba bu (The Battle Wizard)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Retro, laser DCP)
Where to stream it(Prime link), or order the 2009 DVD at Amazon

The Battle Wizard may not be one of those Shaw Brothers flicks with a surprising seed of greatness in it, but it's awesome beyond its campiness, diving into one weird thing after another, barely considering the possibility of slowing down.

Twenty years ago, Qin Hongmian (Gam Lau) informed her lover Tuan Chengchun (Si Wai) that she was two months pregnant and telling her husband that it was his wasn't really an option, since he'd been away for six months, That husband (Shih Chung-Tien) chose an inopportune moment to return and attack Chengchun, only to discover that the latter's kung fu is so powerful he can shoot energy blasts from his fingers. Oh, and Chengchun is a prince who already has a fiancée (Hung Ling-Ling) who dismisses Hongmian in the bitchiest fashion possible. So it's no wonder that Hongmian spends her daughter's entire childhood teaching her kung fu so that Mu Wangqing ("Tanny" Tien Ni) can seek revenge on her father, his wife, and any offspring they may have produced. The trouble is, Chengchun's sun Tuan Yu (Danny Lee Sau-Yin) is a pacifistic scholar who has no desire to learn martial arts, which means he'd be in big trouble after stepping out to prove to his father that one just needs words if he didn't meet pretty snake handler Cheng Ling'er (Lin Chen-Chi), as Hongmian's husband has been hiding out, biding his time and training a disciple to assassinate Yu as well.

It's a lot happening and it's about an inch deep, sure, but like the best Shaw Brothers martial arts films, there is just enough earnestness in that inch to occasionally surprise, whether it's the look of shock as Hongmian realizes she's been abandoned or how enough friendship develops between Wangqing and Yu that the filmmakers aren't just teasing incest (amusingly and coincidentally, this special-effects-heavy film was made in part as a response to Star Wars, anticipating this twist by five and a half years). No matter how frantic and silly things get, the cast gets to make their roles more than ciphers notable for their fighting styles.

They're fighting a lot, of course, but there's a good balance to the violence that alternates between splatstick and good wire fu. The filmmakers go to town with all the visual effects and fantasy that mid-1970s Shaw Brothers can muster, complete with finger guns, rubber monsters, and a guy in a thoroughly unconvincing gorilla suit. The action choreographed by Tong Kai mixes up swordplay, punching and kicking, and what is effectively gunfighting fairly well, so that combatants aren't just posing at each other, and things get enjoyably gross as limbs get blasted off (leading to characters running around on iron chicken legs) or Lee Sau-Yin seems to have a good time playing Tuan Yu as surprised by the martial-arts moves he gets by drinking magic snake's blood.

It's got a nice pace to it, too, introducing a new absurdity just often enough to get audiences saying sure, why not, rather than feeling overloaded. It's maybe a bit too much by the end - there are points when I was thinking it's been too long since we checked in on the cute snake girl, and I suspect a subplot about where her family fits into all this was cut until the film needed more bodies for the ending battles - but it goes down smooth and never stops amusing for its whole 77 minutes.

And, honestly, what else do you want? The Battle Wizard is determined to entertain from start to finish, and it's a gas all the way through.


Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser DCP)
Where to stream Tamala 2010 (Prime link), or pre-order the disc at Amazon

Sometime asked if seeing the first movie made this 23-year-later sequel better and I had to say, maybe, although it's been 20 years and I really should have bought and watched the new disc as soon as this was announced a part of the festival, the way I often do when sequels drop after this sort of wait. This could go up or down, depending on how that plays for me when I see it again.

(You're already talking to the distributor, right, Ned?)

As it opens, one-year-old kitten Tamala is just hanging around the run-down, graffiti-covered Cat Tokyo, popping in to visit her boyfriend Michaelangelo, a private detective and handyman who has just been hired to find someone who vanished a couple weeks ago, on 7 July, and while it seems like Tamala wouldn't be much help, she knows people, and they soon find video footage of him vanishing into thin air - and not only that, the same thing happened to six other cats that same night, forming a pattern across Cat Japan that matches a constellation. Meanwhile, a one-eyed mercenary named Blur is tracking occult occurrences around Cat Earth, many of which seem to lead back to Tamala herself.

I don't know that vaguely remembered details of Tamala 2010 really helped - they basically had me expecting this to be kind of unnervingly sexy, which didn't seem to be much of a factor after the start - and I kind of think loose continuity is kind of explicit here. Tamala is described as a 1-year-old kitten despite this movie taking place 20 years later than the first. It is, perhaps, a sort of meta-commentary on the state of media, with corporate entities behind the scenes managing cycles of destruction and rebirth, with the Real End lurking. The punk, anti-capitalist characters of the first film reappear somewhat jarringly toward the end, though their message is somewhat muted.

There's a lot of movie to get through before that material really takes center stage, though, and the long middle is seldom nearly as fun as the apocalyptic finale or watching literal sex kitten Tamala (seemingly what you'd get if you gene-spliced Betty Boop and Hello Kitty) tags along on Michaelangelo's missing person case. Tamala herself is in short supply for a while, and none of the other characters who get more involved with the plot are as memorable or fun, with the story itself more atmosphere than developments that pull an audience closer.

Like the last one, though, it looks and sounds amazing, a run-down retro future with great character designs, touching camera, and nifty music and sound the baseline . The mostly B&W look hits the direct spot where manga, film noir, and the Fleischer Brothers overlap. Tamala's cheerful dancing and bouncy walk (accompanied by squeaky boings to make one wonder if she's wearing leather all the time) give way to unsettling violence, and while I suspect that much of the film was realized digitally, writer/director/composers "T.O.L." really lean into that in the final act with a robotic cat god whose obvious CGI nature makes her incursion into Cat Earth almost Lovecraftian.

So, yes, going to see this again, and looking forward to it. It's crazy stuff, probably about 40% nonsense even if you've recently caught up on all previous Tamala material, but fun and energetic nonsense.

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

Check it out - North American guests!

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

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

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

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

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

Also, a lot of talk about prosthetics!

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


"Sounds of Glass"

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

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

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


The Bearded Girl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


Find Your Friends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boston Underground Film Festival 2025.05: "Ragdoll Dance", Best Wishes to All, Fucktoys, and Escape from the 21st Century

Shorts People!

Honestly, there could have been two groups like this, but even when I don't do the Saturday midnight, I usually look at that Sunday noon slot and wonder if I'm going to be up for rolling out of the bed without an alarm, doing some crosswords, having a big ol' bagel or donut, and making it to the Brattle by the start. I don't pre-order in case there are folks who really want to see this particular "existential" shorts package, and I don't think I've made the first shorts package on time since the festival started having this scheduling template. Certainly not since the pandemic.

I did not take good notes for this, and IMDB lists a lot of producers for Fucktoys (hey, I think this is the first blog post with cussing in the title that might wind up in my teenage nieces' social media feeds!), so I apologize for saying this is a guy I don't know, writer/director/star Annapurna Sriram, someone else I don't know, co-star Sadie Scott, and festival programmer Chris Hallock.

It was a fun conversation, because this was obviously a very low-budget movie and there was therefore a lot of talk about just how much of it was thrifted in and around New Orleans, or shot without permits and the like. The film hit various pandemic and hurricane-related delays, but, one has to admit, there are times when you can't imagine it taking place anywhere else.

Sriram also spent a lot of time talking about how the heart of the film is how, when you're young, especially a young woman, you can sort of know danger but kind of blithely go ahead anyway, and this was about when a person's luck runs out, and how you recognize that and react.

And with that, BUFF is finally wrapped up, and I've blown right past IFFBoston. Here's hoping that is finished before it's Fantasia time!


"Lilly Visits the Hospital"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

"The Bum Family" shorts are kind of BUFF tradition by now - I feel like we've seen them at every festival going back to before the pandemic - and, honestly, they've never been my favorite things in the package, very much "I'm glad you guys had fun making this but I'd never seek this out on my own". As usual, it's got some fun gags and some that feel inside. I kind of feel like this one has the characters feeling a little more self-aware of their weirdness than previous shorts have - not entirely planning to be an agent of chaos instead of just being one while trying to be normal, but with more of that than usual.


"Les Bêtes"

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)


I loved the heck out of this at Fantasia last summer, and seeing it a second time months later maybe shaves a little of the novelty off but sharpens the satire a bit - one goes from laughing at the darkly comic awful ways that the aristocrats treat the macabre but lively little animated performers that are brought into the castle to feeling the callousness, especially in the performative cruelty of the little impressario who thinks it will bring him closer to his human masters. No, guy, you're one of the creatures to them.

It makes for a delightful little short, though, as filmmaker Michael Granberry and his crew make a bunch of Weird Little Guys and have them perform, do nifty character animation on the aristocrats, and use the petty bourgeois envy of the folks in between as a catalyst to something more destructive that constantly moves between horrifically destructive and satisfying bits of small-scale revenge. There is something especially powerful about a stop-motion film that ends in flames; for all that one knows that there were probably multiple copies of each little figure made, there's a special horror to the destruction and sense of the miraculous in what survives.


"Peeping"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

Four minutes of odd that kind of looks like either the hardware or software used for rendering could use an upgrade in a way that may be deliberate, to give it a bigger underground/raising a fist to the man feeling. The premise is pretty straightforward and not going to be misread - folks just trying to have fun and do picking themselves apart to please a censorious authority - but some of the designs are neat and it's not trying to do too much.


"Pocket Princess"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

This one's a neat stop-motion tale that feels like it's adapting a lesser-known fairy tale, one which makes it pretty clear that the cruel priest uncle isn't just an unsympathetic taskmaster but almost certainly molesting his niece, which makes its Grimm-ish finale something between a horrible nightmare and an escape. I suppose that's what makes a lot of those original-recipe stories work sometimes - looking at the world's horrors and admitting that sometimes the only escape you can construct is mental.

It's also kind of nifty-looking, really knowing how to make its various characters have the right balance of innocence and malice, and also making the fantasy world that Anna retreats into both fraught and tight, even when it might seem relatively bigger.


"Pippy and the Typist"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

Look, it's got a moment where the main character dropkicks the person controlling the world's actions from the magic typewriter, and that's quality physical comedy. I'm not sure its meta hijinks ever get quite that funny again, but it puts in the effort, very much dedicated to chaos and the idea that just because you're a cartoon character, you may not actually know the best way to deal with cartoon characters, especially if you're already vindictive about your prior bad situation.

"The House of Weird"

* * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

It's not a hard-and-fast rule, but generally speaking, what you get when folks self-describe themselves as "weird" ever since the original Weird Tales ceased publication isn't great (yes, there's nuance to be had here, but this is a review of a 4-minute short), even if you can see folks having fun and want to applaud that. That's more or less what "The House of Weird" is - filmmaker Mark Reyes and friends screwing around with various tools to create series of funky looking rooms in a house that doesn't exactly open geometric law, and maybe trying to say something about how today's world is incomprehensible and like an escape room you can't exit, but mostly coming off as lightweight oddity for the same of oddity. But, hey, it's a first film, and maybe a learning experience.


"Poppa"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

Hmm.

Yep, weird, but it builds up to the one joke you can fit into its two-minute runtime, and there's something really pleasant about its 1990s TV animation style that makes the gross bits work a little better.


"The Garden Sees Fire"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

Another bunch of weird little guys, but drawn out trying to create a sense of importance. Mostly well done, I suppose, but 15 minutes is a lot of abstract weirdness.


"Red Thumb"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

An impressive dark fantasy that does nice work combining story, allegory, and world-building into a tight space.


"Demons in the Closet"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

One-minute stop-motion horror story, riffing a bit on Army of Darkness, perhaps. Might have taken months to do, but works out pretty darn nice.


"A Walk in the Park"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

I can't seem to find the particular Jay Marks who made this one on IMDB but I hope folks in Hollywood are noticing this short because he certainly seems like a guy where you try and recruit him for something bigger, whether in animation or live-action. He's got a really good knack for building eerie atmosphere into blockbuster action, makes a twist into a deeper horror work, and inserts comedic bits in that don't undermine the sort of story he's telling.

It turns out to be the sort of big, slick banger that tends to be the grand finale for one of these blocks, except…


"Howl if You Love Me"

* * * ½ (out of four) Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

This is also a great one, a zippy little cartoon where a couple manages to work around the lady's lycanthropy until the werewolf hunters come and make everything worse. It's upbeat and adventurous with a fine score and plenty of comic relief from their little dog, and despite the lack of dialogue and the cartoon character designs, there's a moment or two that really captures the best bit of werewolf stories, where someone is absolutely terrified of what their conditions will do to their loved ones. It's also built up in such a way that we can really enjoy the final rampage.

Genuinely fun note to end the package on.


Mina ni sachi are (Best Wishes to All)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)

Where to stream it (when available)

Best Wishes to All is quality Japanese "the world is somewhat askew from what you think" stuff, although very much the sort where I kind of want an argument to be raised with its premise at some point, even if it ultimately fails. This lady wants to push back on nihilism, but doesn't really get a chance to try.

The young woman in question (Kotone Furukawa) is visiting her grandparents for the first time in years while on break from college, with her parents and brother expected to join them soon. Something seems off, though, compared to when she visited as a child; there are strange noises, and a mysterious locked door at the end of the upstairs hallway. Eventually, what she finds shocks her, and the reaction of everyone around her but one childhood friend shocks her even more.

What she discovers doesn't really make sense, but that's exactly the point of this sort of Twilight Zone-ish story: Director Yuta Shimotsu and co-writer have a broad idea here, that the price of one person's happiness is another's suffering, and will generally always err on the side of the mechanism being vague and the feeling being authentic than trying to construct a perfect, detailed set of parallels. The discovery is a quality slow burn, though; the filmmakers have a nice way of raising flags right away so that the audience gets a feel for what they're in for but not the how, so the audience is kind of poking around the corners trying to see what's coming. When things get definitively weird, it gets more ominous.

It's also got quite the nice lead performance from Kotone Furukawa; she quickly sells the audience as a likable, down-to-earth student and recoils in horror well, but she's good at the middle part, too, where the heroine is between the horrible discovery about her world and anything she can possibly do about it, processing without looking blank. There are plenty of complementary folks to make it work, too: The too-friendly grandparents, the friend who knows what she doesn't and suffers more for it, the recluse who had the same reaction she did and had it drive her mad. The performances as a group sell the idea of a world that is (probably) different from ours in one very important way but can seem like it isn't twisted into unrecognizability, at least on the surface level.

It does kind of get scattered toward the end, sort of tossing in every sort of symbolic idea for how this works semi-randomly rather than building something that feels like it could actually be the case or has interlocking bits of meaning, which would be nice. It's effective for most of its hour and a half, though, and doesn't stretch out past that enough to undo it.


Fucktoys

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

Fucktoys is probably the most cheery example of this sort of proudly disreputable movie - the type where you can imagine the folks involved taking each gasping patron who flees the theater out of shocked propriety as a sort of victory - that I can recall seeing. It's all sex workers on the margins of a place that is pointedly already marginal, but is never really looking to make the audience feel like they're slumming it, even when it eventually gets to the point when the candy coating starts to wear off.

AP (Annapurna Sriram) is one of them, a sort of flighty young woman who has been able to earn all she needs to get by selling sex she kind of wasn't opposed to having anyway when she feels like it. The thing about trusting fate in that way is that a girl can wind up in a panic about what fortune tellers say, specifically that her recent run of bad luck is due to a curse, and that she needs to earn some money quickly in order to hire someone to get it off her. So, with the help of friend and lover Danni (Sadie Scott), who just got out of jail, she hops on her scooter and starts looking around Trashtown for ways to earn some quick bucks, though her scatterbrained nature means she often finds herself at the same place she started, if not further behind.

That the movie generally seems to be going somewhere is a neat trick, because it's a story that requires a lot of episodic bouncing and things sort of sinking to a slightly lower low that would kind of die if it stopped being fun despite the trajectory. Writer/director/star Annapurna Sriram does impressive work in all three areas keeping the energy up, playing AP as the right sort of dim but scrappy-sweet girl who can keep forward momentum for 100 minutes without slowing down for the audience to question anything and keeping things upbeat despite the absurdity. Sadie Sweet is a good foil for her, harder-edged but on the same wavelength, and there are a few other one-off types who match the vibe, notably Danian Young as a politician too genuinely nice for his own good and François Arnaud as a high-roller who might be able to solve AP's money problems himself.

The film is often stripped-down to an extent that approaches surreal, never more so than when hanging out in AP's "bedroom" in the middle of a field - is this literal, the way AP perceives homelessness that includes freedom, or something else again? The film is full of stripped-down locations and characters that could fit some version of them. Sriram lets them move blithely along, suggesting that the inconveniences of living hand to mouth more than make up for being smothered under patriarchal, moralistic expectations. Even a square like me can understand where AP is coming from.

The film is, however, ready for the conclusion it winds up reaching, which delivers the right emotion for every moment after the twist that sets out on a new course. Sriram shows a really steady hand here to make a point without the topical moralizing, and the poetic license taken at that point feels earned even as it lets her not go into what could have been a lot of details about how things would play out that the audience neither need nor wants. The big twist is jaw-dropping for all that it's maybe been in plain sight despite how the vibe is very much anti-twist, and she shows as much skill turning a screw as she had deliberately not doing so.

Some folks are still probably going to opt out pretty quickly; Sriram is certainly not making any effort to include a big, mainstream audience here. It's good work, though, whether she intends to ever make movies for the more easily-upset or not.


Cong 21 Shi Ji an Quan Che Li (Escape from the 21st Century)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available) (Prime pre-order link)

Even folks who like and watch a lot of imported movies often tend to forget about the foreign film filter - that they often look better or classier because, with only so much demand for them outside their native territory, only the best or most mainstream cross borders in any meaningful way. China produces a ton of movies, though, both for theaters and its big streaming services, to entertain its population of 1.4 billion, but it's a rare thing for something as decidedly odd as Escape from the 21st Century to push its way into North America in even the tiny way it's managing.

It opens in the summer of 1999 on "Planet K" (which is basically Earth but pointedly not so, which I imagine gets you a little more leeway with the censors), introducing the audience to fat kid Paopao (Kang Qixuan), his dumb friend Wang Zha (Chen Yichen) with a "Hong Kong" wig for hair, and their buddy Wang Chengyong (Li Zhuozhao), who is super-popular, dating the gorgeous and equally popular Yang Yi (Ma Fanding), and will fight anybody who tries to get between them. That's how they wind up exposed to a weird chemical that allows them to take the places of with their future selves while their teenage bodies are unconscious - but in 2019, Paopao is now not only a hunk (Leon Lee Chenhao), but he's the one dating Yang Yi (Zhu Yanmanzi); Chengyong (Song Yang) is gangster working for a mysterious Boss (Wen Zhengrong); and Wang Zha (Zhang Ruoyun) is a photographer partnered with reporter Liu Lianzhi (Elane Zong Chuxi). Worse, they find out that this dystopian world where they're at odds with each other may be their fault, and they may even be putting their past lives at stake!

Story-wise, this movie is wobbly as heck; there's a good sort of time-travel farce set up in the idea that Paopao and Wang Zha are determine to keep the extremely jealous Chengyong from finding out Paopao and Yang Yi wound up together in both the present and future, but it doesn't really work, both because Yang Yi never really becomes enough of a distinct character of her own to make the answer interesting (as is wont to happen to girlfriends in movies about three or more male buddies) and because that piece is mostly a way to get these kids to stumble around and get into bigger trouble, which could have dire consequences for planet K, although it's the sort of "paradoxes just sort of make things blow up for reasons" sort of time travel trouble as much as anything really clever.

Still, that all leads up to an absolutely crazy, apocalyptic climax, with Bonnie Tyler singing "Holding Out for a Hero", missiles flying, characters sneezing themselves between 1999 and 2019 to try and keep a henchman from becoming too good at Street Fighter, and even more ridiculous things. Writer/director Li Yang throws the whole kitchen sink at the audience at hyperspeed with visual effects that do their level best to pull off every gonzo thing in his head, and he mostly does it without the audience getting lost. That doesn't mean one necessarily knows what's happening, but you can keep track of what the various characters are doing and what their individual stakes are, with nobody getting left behind.

Of course, the whole movie is cranked up to eleven even before this The present and the past have different aspect ratios, the film will become animated when live action is simply not sufficiently trippy for what's going on, and why settle for larger-than-life when one can be absurdly larger-than-life? It's exhausting at times and often both over-complicated and without room for nuance, but it's seldom boring, and it really helps that the teenage and adult actors do an excellent job of staying in sync rather than letting the two time periods get away from each other.

It's weird, maximalist filmmaking that was probably lucky to hit the festival circuit and gather up people to tell their friends they won't believe how nutty it is rather than try to cram that into a high-pressure worldwide release.