Fantasia 2026.05: "Pimple", Our Effed Up World, CineMapsosa '26, Beasts Clutching at Straws '26, "Best Friends with the Devil", and Penny Lane Is Dead

Back to the "de Sève in the afternoon, Hall in the evening" grind (for one of the more pleasant definitions of "grind")!

We start off with composer Freya Berkhout, actress Jess McLeod, and writer/director/producer Alice Maio Mackey for Our Effed Up World (with host Justine Smith), which feels like an interesting turn for Mackey in that the trans and nonbinary characters are supporting roles and there was a lot of wanting to see folks like herself up front in her previous films. Maybe not that big a deal, but interesting in terms of whether she's going to have a more commercial career at some point; she mentioned "an IP thing" as part of what's next at the end of the Q&A.

She mentioned that they lucked out finding a video store that could be used as a set, including the genuinely sketchy basement which apparently smelled terrible, but you don't have time or money to clean it on an indie budget. The range of influences for this one was an odd mix, more Kevin Smith and Australian soap operas than the genre elements. I must admit that it's kind of odd to hear "gen-X" as more of an aesthetic description than "the people you grew up with", and folks from Australia talking about something as CW-inspired is kind of like seeing "Black Friday" sales abroad; it feels like it should be a specifically American term since they would be connecting it to something else within their culture, right?

(Also, did Mackey have a tremor last year? She had this thing where she was swinging the microphone back and forth in front of her mouth and it wasn't quite like we could only catch the syllables where it passed in front of lips, but it was oddly distracting!)

After that, I took a meal break because I have not see Pontypool since its original release and wasn't really up for a Bruce McDonald/Steven McHattie talk (though some friends back home would have loved it). After that, it was back to de Sève for the Korean shorts block, with filmmakers Lee Chang-bee ("I Love Your Alter Ego"), Lee Min-hyun ("Wish You Were Dead"), and Park Jung-yoon ("TROPIC") between the Fantasia hosts/translators. Very fun group of shorts!

Then, across the street for Beasts Clutching at Straws and Penny Lane Is Dead, with writer/director Mia'Kate Russell and actresses Alexandra Jensen & Sophia Wright, the latter of whom create very different impressions without the costumes and hairstyles from the movie, with Wright joking that half of being able to be Kat was wearing that outfit, and also joking about how the days when it was an all-woman set were different than when men were around, even if it was just as violent and gory.

Then to bed. Tuesday wound up being Big Break, Levitating, Hayop Ka!, a good burger because I was very late to the pass line for Someone's Daughter, and Los Vampires. And, man, I can't believe this has taken me so long to finish that today's the festival's last day, where you'll likely find me at The Peril at Pincer Point, City War, The Fox, Freaks Part II, and Jim Queen. Kind of half tempted to rearrange things to see Gozu, but also trusting that it playing here means some midnight shows back home and a spiffy new disc are on the way.


"Borbulha" ("Pimple")

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia Underground, DCP)

A pretty simple but entertaining gross-out short from Portugal with Tiago Rodrigues as a kid with a really noticeable pimple getting picked on by bullies until they decide to pop it and, man, they are not going to like what comes out.

I'm pretty sure that this isn't the first pus monster I've seen, but it's impressively gross and filmmaker Fernando Alle uses an impressive combination of gore effects, stop-motion, and puppetry to have it manifest and take out the little brats. The movie is just four minutes long, but Alle crams every beat needed from Rodrigues being sullen to the three victims having individual reactions and a funny denouement. Simple idea exceptionally well-executed!

Our Effed Up World

☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia Underground, DCP)

Alice Maio Mackay has been making micro-budget genre movies that festivals pick up even when they were very rough since she was a teenage girl, and even without the way she spoke in the Q&A after the screening, this is the first time that I find myself wondering what kind of filmmaker she's going to wind up being. She's clearly still learning and straddling the line between making a movie for a broader audience and making it for herself, but Our Effed Up World is fairly watchable.

It follows Sheri (Sara Thompson), who works in a supermarket with bestie Poppy (Annapurna Sriram), hanging out afterward with Finn (Jess McLeod) and Ash (Karis Oka) at the video store Finn's uncle left them. She's just resolved to dump boyfriend Harry (Jordan Dulieu), who doesn't take it particularly well, wandering about until he comes upon a strange and dangerous meteor - the sort of thing Sheri's astronomer father Hank (Scott Major) knows about because it's his job to watch out for such things.

A major part of the growing pains here are that, both by the amount of time spent and from what she said in the introduction, Mackay is mostly trying to make a hangout film with alien zombies to spice things up, and the latter almost feels like a crutch: The sci-fi/horror is not particularly memorable, and rather than resonating with the characters, mainly seems like an excuse to have them do something other hanging around and saying catty things. That's enjoyable enough in large part because Mackay has a more seasoned cast than usual - Sara Thompson has plenty of higher-profile credits, Scott Major is a bona fide veteran actor, and Annapurna Sriram is a natural goofy best friend - who are mostly able to slip comfortably into character rather than just recite lines on cue.

Those lines are sometimes more than a bit in need of a polish - the scene where Sheri dumps Harry especially makes her feel mean rather than frustrated or fed up - and It's kind of important to remember how young Mackay is because, although she's become a staple of festivals and other programs that want to showcase trans filmmakers, she's actually just now at the age where young filmmakers start working professionally, and only starting to actually be good. This movie still clanks, but not as often or as badly as the last one, which wasn't as rough as the one before that.

Which means I'm not sure whether I'd rather see her continuing to hone her skills or see how she does directing someone else's script, because you can really feel how this film lacks a lot of the connective tissue that ties one moment or aspect of a character to another, or does it awkwardly. Working with a more professional cast helps, but this is still very much someone learning the ropes and feels like it.


"SPEEDY!"

☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia: CineMapsosa 2026, DCP)

"Child learns the awful truth that adults lie" isn't necessarily a plot that scale to a feature-length film, but it's something that can certainly sing at the length of a short, and this one is charming as all get-out, getting a lot of great mileage from how ridiculous this speed-reading scam can seem when it's not held up by folks you should be able to trust, but, hey, Jung-min might have a bit of a crush on the teacher's prodigy son. The actress NAME turns in a really delightful performance as a bright girl who is shouldering a lot and but still feels like a kid.

The movie also hits its period marks nicely on top of being very earnest about what it can be like on a family that's striving for better but knows it might take some luck, or suddenly finding yourself complicit in something that's maybe not a crime but isn't right.

"Soulmate" '26

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia: CineMapsosa 2026, DCP)

There may be one too many alter-egos in this movie, between Ji-eun (Jeong Ji-eun), "hot girl Ji-eun" - the persona she adopts as a young actress - and Eun-ho (Kim Mi-ran), the result of dissociative personality disorder brought on by her stepfather's abuse. I spent an embarrassing chunk of this 20 minute movie thinking it was going to be a teenage actress trying to find a way to form a friendship/relationship with the boy next door who mostly knows her screen image.

That's not what this is, though there's a bit of it; instead, it's about Ji-eun being exiled to a mental landscape based upon the spot in the middle of nowhere where her abuse took place It's got all the pieces that go with that, from the taunting internal dialog to the enabling mother, to ultimately deciding to assert oneself, and for the most part done pretty well. Writer/director Lee Chan-bee does a very nice job finding the details that drive certain points home, particularly how there's this sexualization of teenage girls that's not entirely imposed by older men even as it often caters to them, and how Ji-eun's mental prison is abstracted but not cool in any way: It's empty and undeveloped and the sort of thing a city girl like a young actress would find boring.


"Ijen jugeosseumyeon jokenne" ("Wish You Were Dead")

☆ ☆ ☆ ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia: CineMapsosa 2026, DCP)

Lee Min-hyuk and co-writer Park Kyu-eun know how to make a good short film: They kick off with a neat premise that has some resonance, kick off in media res, and build a lot of beats around jumping straight to the result of a bad move rather than playing out the bits that are going to require a lot of tricky effects work. You could probably build a feature around a funeral for the controlling patriarch that has him coming back as a zombie and continuing to destroy the family after his death, but this really reduces it to its essentials.

It's got a lot of neat little bits in it, as well: The fact that the male heirs who can deliver offspring are privileged feels annoying and arbitrary as a zombie-movie rule (down to Seo-hyun's father being vulnerable in the way her brother isn't because Dad's had a vasectomy), but it's also annoying and arbitrary in everyday life; Seo-hyun taking a Go board and using it to try and plot an exit - visually, it's a sort of Go/Clue hybrid - is fun improvisation. And Park Seo-yoon is sneakily great as Seo-hyun in part because, while she's clearly the smartest member of the clan and the one with the best chance of figuring out an exit and probably running the family business afterward, there's something a bit unsympathetic about her, like she's not that upset that the family members who treated her as less important than her dimwit brother and cowardly father are being murdered as they try to execute her plans. This isn't a woman who needs to prove herself to her family so much as one whose potential doesn't have to be linked to their approval.

There's a pretty good path to a longer feature if director Lee wants it, and I suspect a feature would look a bit different from the short, which is why this film is worth twenty minutes whether it leads to something bigger or not.


"TROPIC"

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia: CineMapsosa 2026, DCP)

Anything can be a metaphor if you work at it enough, such as an aloha shirt, which reminds Choi Sun (Bae Min-su) of both how her sister Seou (Kim Da-a) committed suicide and how she really wanted to get to a happier, more carefree place, even if neither she nor Sun could make it happen. It kind of suggests the Swamp Thing-looking monster and headspace that Sun finds herself in as writer/director Park Jung-yoon bounces her between the present and the past, her two young actresses playing two people with no-one closer even though being together isn't easy.

I really love how Park ends the movie, with Sun wearing a shirt that is clearly faded, either from far too much detergent or repeated washings. That's probably how you have to remember a loved one who has ended her life like that, and it's a nice visual for how Sun will keep as much of Seou with her as she can, even if she can only handle part of her.


Wara Nimo Sugaru Kemonotachi (Beasts Clutching at Straws)

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream the Korean version (Prime link for Korean version), or buy the disc for the Korean version at Amazon

I must admit to being curious about both previous iterations of this story: I recall the Korean film from 2020 being entertaining but also being kind of a miserable viewing experience (the festival streaming platform used in 2020 was terrible), and there are just enough differences between the two movies to make me wonder if this Japanese adaptation of a Japanese novel is closer. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be an official English translation - more mysteries and thrillers from that country are crossing the Pacific than ever before but there are so many! - but both adaptations being pretty good suggests good things about the source material.

It starts with Kanji (Ouji Suzuka), who doesn't seem like much of a "beast"; he's trying to make it as a Vtuber without really having a hook as he works in an internet cafe with private booths and looks after his grandmother with severe dementia in the apartment above her late husband's shuttered barbershop. Things potentially change when a guy who rushed out without paying his bill leaves behind a bag of money. Elsewhere in Tokyo, Ryosuke Ebato (Hiroki Narmiya), a corrupt cop deep in debt to the Goda syndicate, has a line on a college regent who has defrauded his employer. Is that the man who dropped the bag at the internet cafe, or the one who recently started visiting sex worker Mina, who has made a new friend in femme fatale Maria. Speaking of Maria, she seems to know the drill a bit too well when Mina needs to dispose of her abusive husband's body.

There's a twist or two to this, of course, which isn't completely surprising when you get to it, although to be fair I may have had the Korean version in mind when it happened. One thing director/co-wirter Hideo Jojo does fairly well is keep Kanji just busy enough, considering that most of the other threads are more obviously connected. They're not going to collide for a while, but his various frustrations at home are worth watching and entertaining for being darkly comic in a different way than the folks less innocently connected to various crimes. It means the tone doesn't really cause whiplash but the audience doesn't get completely mired in the pure cynicism of backstabbing and threats elsewhere, and there's just enough of that lurking around the edges that it doesn't feel completely separate.

It doesn't hurt that there's a nice supporting cast of characters around the main folks; Kanji's got a cute co-worker who might be a potential partner but doesn't have to be, and his grandmother is out of it in a way that plays as chaos comedy from a remove but which is also a pure nightmare from up close. Ebato's often paired with a driver who seems to haplessly wind up deeper than he intends because he (perhaps unwisely) considers Ebato a friend and a new partner investigating the very fraud he's trying to cover up, with the Goda chief having a hulking and horrifically eccentric good on hand. Mina's got an avid younger client, and Maria's lone-wolf status is fitting but things also lock in when her other connections are revealed. It's not a huge, messy ensemble, but it's one where the "hubs" are very solid indeed and none of the folks in their orbit are entirely one-note jokes.

There's also something very pleasant about how Jojo and company often seem to have come out on the other side of trying to chase the kind of cool that many were after with their intersecting crime narratives in the wake of Pulp Fiction - Kanji's streaming is small-time enough to be kind of pathetic, and everyone bit Maria is more dork than badass, with Maria explicitly pretty awful. The repetition of a zipper splitting a black screen as a scene transition renders it cute rather than too-clever, and there's fun knowing chaos to how the opening gag is used later.

It's always an odd experience to catch a remake of something after just long enough that the original isn't fresh in one's mind and not know whether good surprises are legit or differences and need bits are not quite pulled off versus vaguely remembered. I'm leaving towards this basically being well done, a chaotic but generally fun caper.


"Best Friends with the Devil"

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Hugo de Sousa comes up with a neat idea for a short here that's really well-positioned between innocent mayhem and something sinister, as Lola (Ellyn Jameson), worried about the disappearance of her friend Amy (Kailee McGee), files a missing person report and follows her trail to David (de Sousa), the last person to see her on a hike. Maybe not wise on the face of it, but when you're starting from the premise of "unfortunate accident" rather than "foul play", not indefensible!

I like how de Sousa plays this both as writer/director and actor, not really tilting the tone into obvious danger but also recognizing that the world can be especially dangerous for women on their own and letting the audience see various red flags without actually waving them in one's face. He gives out new information in ways that recognize that this is a short and maybe shouldn't be too vague for too long, forcing the viewer to really evaluate the situation without it being a slow-down/nod-sagely beat. The end's a mess, but it's a mess from how things started out.

I also always dig when a concussion is an actual big deal.


Penny Lane Is Dead

☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

You've got to hand it to writer-director Mia Kate Russell for the title "Penny Lane Is Dead", because when you stand back a bit and look at the movie, it's not necessarily terribly different from others like it, but centering the title character like that sure makes the movie feel like people don't fit into the roles they're supposed to. The movie delivers impressive blood, guts, and women in peril, but feels a lot more off-center than it might.

It starts by introducing us to Penny herself (Bailey Spalding), a pretty blonde with a nice family who just graduated after being accepted into a good school and who genuinely seems to acknowledge and enjoy her good fortune without trying to exploit it. She's heading out to her grandparent's cabin for a girls' weekend with her best friends: Toni (Tahlee Fereday), a tall and sporty girl whom the Lanes took in when her own parents couldn't handle her coming out as gay, and Amy (Alexandra Jensen), mousy and maybe autistic, which is probably not something you'd use to describe an Australian girl in 1986. Not invited is Kat (Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn), Penny's cousin and a constant source of drama, but she shows up anyway, with drugged cupcakes and her boyfriend Angus (Ben O'Toole) not far behind. Angus is a bad'un, the son of a crime boss, and has two goons in tow, with Merrick (Fletcher Humphrys) and old pro who would rather deliver the drugs they have with no fuss but Rodowsky (Steve Le Marquand), like Angus, more inclined to have a little fun with Kat's cousin and her friends, whether they want it or not.

Penny's the title character and Toni's the conventional protagonist, but the movie's center of gravity is Kat, who kind of fascinates in that she's clearly a monster from the word go, but Russell and actress Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn seem to have a pretty good handle on how girls like her get like that. There's not a moment when the movie stops and she explains her sad origin story, but every time Russell finds a way to remind the attackers (and the audience) that these sexy young girls are 17 or 18, you can't help but remember that this applies to Kat as well as Penny, and she's an outcast for what she did as a teenager. Wright dives into the role with abandon, fully committed to Kat's awfulness, but there's always a streak of desperate need to her bad behavior and skimpy outfits, and there are moments when Angus treats Kat terribly and it's very clear she knows this and one wonders if this might be the time she wobbles.

It's a great performance, but doesn't push the rest off the screen; the girls especially are a strong ensemble. Tahlee Fereday and Bailey Spalding are impressive as Toni & Penny; there are early scenes where they discuss the possibility of being more than friends and while they're maybe a bit nervous about letting Amy or Penny's parents in on this, they're both likably confident in who they are and trusting in each other, even if Toni's future isn't quite so certain as Penny's seems to be. Alexandra Jensen's Amy isn't the same - she's seventeen and carries an emotional support stuffie around - but I really like how Jensen doesn't play Amy as a collection of tics and nervousness; she seems to take a second to think before speaking even if she misjudges her words. On the boys' side, Ben O'Toole is entitlement unleashed as Angus, ninety percent repugnant but with the sort of self-assurance that one can see why he might be kind of appealing to someone like Kat or go unquestioned by someone like Fletcher Humphys's Rodowsky who doesn't allow any sympathy into how he helps himself to Angus's scraps. Steve Le Marquand does really well with one of my favorite archetypes, the unrepentant criminal who nevertheless wants to be friggin' professional both for what he tells himself and because leaving a bunch of corpses around is bad for business.

And there will be corpses; it's a pretty gnarly movie where folks are likely to get maimed before being outright killed, and Russell is adept at using that to both make Angus & Kat seem more vicious and Toni's wins more satisfying. The gore team is on point throughout but Russell doesn't entirely lean on them to make the movie work: She doesn't exactly do a slow build but she tends to add momentum more than stopping for a breather, and she's crucially aware that Penny unconscious or dazed is going to create a lot more tension that the audience can grasp than various nasty injuries that much of the audience is going to read as "fun" special effects, and she's good at making sure there's really nothing sexy about it without making things more outwardly grotesque.

Indeed, I think what's kind of exciting about Penny Lane Is Dead and makes it feel noteworthy more than the setting or the quality of the gore is how the screenplay seems to reflect all the toxic forces at work in good balance: It is absolutely older guys preying on younger girls and even the surfer dudes at the local shop who are basically unproblematic don't serve as a "not all men" counterweight to that, but the engine that drives much of the violence is the jealousy and resentment among young women that is its own real thing even if Penny and her friends are great and casually supportive. Russell doesn't exactly bend things toward a definitive statement here, but she mixes these various impulses together in ways that give the movie a ring of truth even though it is, also, a revenge thriller with a ton of bloody action. It's good stuff, apt to satisfy the gorehounds but play like a real movie to those who want more.

Fantasia 2026.04: Niko, International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase '26, You Are the Film, "175", and Attack on Paradise

Another day, another short film package at the Museum seemingly scheduled with the intent of overlapping everything else in the schedule. But first, Niko.

Director Julien Birban Levy is French, apparently spent a fair amount of his youth in New York, lives and works in Tokyo, and decided that this particular film needed to be set in Seoul. I can't necessarily say that it captures that place specifically, although I kind of understand him saying Tokyo and Paris were too "cute" for it. I suspect that even the sections of those cities that were the appropriate sort of working-class-but-not-blue-collar might be too familiar or have some sort of quirky shorthand that makes them as today rather than a vague future. Interestingly, the neighborhood they found in Seoul was kind of emptied out, which really helped the vibe of the movie, though it's kind of odd: You make a movie that's partly about how capitalism is squeezing folks to death, and the best place to shoot it is a spot where capitalist redevelopment and gentrification is getting folks out of the way.

A couple hours later, I'm at the Museum for the sci-fi shorts, with "Echoes of Time" writer Charlie Clausen & director Gemma Lee; "Soulmate" writer/director/editor Jens-Julius Dall; "Noise of Waves" writer/director Tomasz Wróbel; "Idyll" producer/co-star Mina Sundwall & writer/director Austin Cauldwell; and "Horse Fly" writer/director Alex Park & D.P Adam LaPine . I've got to admit, the block made me feel kind of cranky after the claims that it was their best package ever, because, honestly can it really be that if not even one of the seven shorts was set in outer space? I kid, a bit, but it's kind of dreary to watch one short about someone getting addicted to a virtual reality app where every incremental upgrade comes with a pop-up saying it requires an additional fee or membership, and then have the second short be about someone addicted to a virtual reality app where every incremental upgrade comes with a pop-up saying it requires an extra fee or membership.

That wasn't the subject of all seven, but few of them felt like they were opening my eyes to something rather than rehashes of what I scroll past on social media daily. These are subjects worth exploring and on filmmakers' minds, but taken as a group, it just felt like such limited imagination, a lack of dreaming big, on top of all of them being European or English-language. Even the two that weren't about that sort of subject had filmmakers saying that they wanted to do a story about human relationships first and then worked in the fantastical elements to fit, but the upshot wound up being that it's less important to solve problems than to learn to accept them. Fair when the problem is "loved ones dying", sure, but combined with the rest…

All of these things are valid uses for the genre, and I've loved many stories along those lines. Some of the shorts were really good! But as a group, it's not just that this program was a bummer, but the implication that this is what folks working in the genre should aspire to seems wrong to me, like well-intentioned analysis about how great science fiction tells us about the here and now has diminished everything else about it.

Fortunately, I had time to sit around and grab some food before settling into Hall for the rest of the night. First up was You Are the Film, which matches the broad strokes of the subnormal but was oddly different in the details. Writer/director Makoto Ueda has done the screenplays for a number of fun recent time travel/loop films from Japan, so there was a big crowd.

Last up for the day, Mitch welcomed Bob Colaers, director of Attack on Paradise, and it's a shame star Said Boumazoughe wasn't here, because a lot was short of talking about what the film meant to him second-hand. Belgium has enough Moroccan and other MENA folks that he'd been frustrated not seeing anyone like him on-screen as a hero, so he came up with a sort, collaborated on the screenplay, trained like crazy, and then shot this movie in a building either very much like the place he grew up or the actual building, only doubled a handful of times during the action. It's kind of a crazy thing to will into existence, really.

Then to bed. Monday wound up being Our Effed Up World, Beasts Clutching at Straws, and Penny Lane Is Dead. You might bump into me Saturday as I more or less camp out in Hall for Bliss, Drag, AnyMart, and The Last Temptation of Becky.


Niko

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

It feels a little odd to note that Niko could maybe stand to lose ten minutes or so and also suggest that it's one of the more interesting depictions of a slowly-decaying dystopia I can recall seeing, but there's pacing and what you're using that pacing to show, right? Both the title character and the odd nuances of the world she lives in are often fascinating to dig into, but there comes a point where director Julien Levy isn't really finding new things to examine, and his story doesn't quite sing as much without the thrill of discovery.

He posits that in the fairly near future, Seoul will impose a digital curfew on top of a physical one, with the internet shut off after 9pm and only 30-second analog calls permitted. Clever young Niko (Tiffany Young) has figured out a way to monetize that with "Locked Out Company Service Niko", where she'll hang out and chat while someone waits for a locksmith, or perhaps anything else where someone might otherwise be fiddling about on their phones. That's how she meets Jiyoon (Kim Soy), and while she usually doesn't develop real friendships on the job, Jiyoon's an exception. Meanwhile, her boyfriend Jeremy (Sandor Funtek) is working at a highly-specialized travel agency - only serving a Seoul to Nairobi route - as a side gig to his "one week, one photo" project. He's surprised to actually meet a potential customer, whose husband is mad to see lions, though she's initially looking to go to Addis Ababa. Neither are really making enough money to pay rent, and there doesn't seem to be much point in planning for the future.

It's hard out there for a manic pixie dream girl at the end of the world, especially when the government is out there trying to make it difficult for people to connect, lest they organize. Perhaps accidentally, Niko makes the argument that it's not the screens that are crushing our mental health, but the constant squeeze of existential dread and nobody having enough money to do anything while everything stops working around them. How often does the average person have to call a locksmith, for instance, and how far do things have to fall that doors not working is a major problem? The characters are trying to carve out niches, in ways that are often foolish because they are young and only know the problems. It's not a fun world to live in, but it's one where Levy is able to find interesting new corners and ideas without having to spend much money on effects or making its characters difficult to relate to.

It can admittedly be kind of insufferable, like when Jeremy is giving his "one week, one photo" spiel, or any other time folks are coming off as twee and arch; it's not hard to sympathize with the unnamed young woman delivering an apocalyptic newspaper and raging at the triviality of the other characters' concerns. There's rather more of people bemoaning their lot in nothing but words than needed, an occasional excess of introspection and self-importance.

A one-two punch that refreshes a few elements of eccentricity as containing at least a germ of mental illness may have one reconsider one's feelings in that respect, and I like the way Levy gets a viewer thinking along those lines before introducing a pill bottle that solidifies the direction without specifying too much unneeded detail. He treats this respectfully, not going with wry observations about how this is a reasonable response to a dying world, and the overall tenor at the end is tragic, even if not literally or immediately so - Niko may have a plan, but it's probably not a solution, and there's little that these individuals can do to make life easier for those struggling.

It makes Tiffany Young's performance as Niko grow as the film goes on. She initially seems very mannered, a K-pop idol who may be out of her depth despite that background requiring the exact sort of charisma that Niko needs to have, but when she starts to crack midway through, a lot of the same tics start to seem more in-character. It gives Sandor Funtek a little more to respond to, and also highlights how Kim Soy really becomes the glue of the film as it goes on, managing because she's maybe got a slightly more solid foundation than the others, personally messy rather than existentially so.

Seoul is an interesting place for a French filmmaker based in Japan to make a mostly English-language movie; Levy finds areas that can feel kind of overstuffed but can also be starkly empty, like the life has been sucked out but what's left has been crammed too tight. It's a recipe for despair that, nevertheless, can still make you believe that maybe there's still something for you there.


"Idyll"

☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, DCP)

I went off a bit up top about how movies like "Idyll" feel kind of redundant as science fiction if you're following tech in any way, and I kind of don't know who is watching short sci-fi films that isn't, but it still hits its spots pretty well: The premise makes sense, the gags about how tech companies will create an addictive experience and then squeeze people for every upgraded hit possible are both funny in their timing and anger-inducing in how they ring true, and the whole thing clings together pretty well: It's not really a movie about how these curated channels create unrealistic expectations or how something sold as social actually separates one from their other friends in favor of bots and simulacra, but it fits in. That "Our Girl" (Mina Sundwall) is cute and name-checked as such works rather than seeming like something that would work against the movie, saying no-one is immune rather than trying to convince us she's a sad sack.

Being a short rather than a feature makes the end seem more than a bit rushed, though; writer/director Austin Cauldwell seems to be skipping to the most noteworthy events in chaotic fashion rather than using related ideas to reinforce each other like in the beginning. The end's a decent sting, but maybe not quite the one that follows from the rest of the movie.


"Soulmate" '26

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, DCP)

This one also gets dinged a bit for playing right after "Idyll"; it's a lot of the same jokes and themes in less clearly polished form, and which you prefer might entirely be a matter of whether you like a movie that finishes with a rug-pull or a display of growth. I do kind of dig it for how relatively low-fi it is, not out of some knee-jerk preference for analog or DIY-style filmmaking, but for how most the the VR scenes being machinima using software that's not quite state of the art emphasizes that there's no way Jalte is fooling himself into believing the VR environment is real but that these bots and online-only experiences are giving him something he wants.

That extends to how Hampus Egelund spends almost the entire movie with VR goggles over his face that aren't exactly sleek and modern-looking, and you get a lot from his body language. He does really well walking around like this is something he's got plenty of practice doing even if it's not quite a person's natural state in this particular future. I kind of like that filmmaker Jens-Julius Dall kind of avoids showing other people's faces as well, at least for a bit, to disguise whether Jalte is a truly sad case or if we're looking at the future more generally.


"Algorithm"

☆ ☆ ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, DCP)

…and the internet is still awful and making it difficult to connect! Who knew?

There's kind of an interesting idea here, as filmmaker Emily Charlotte Poulter plays with how many of these social media sites/publishing platforms will tempt users with potential monetization, and there's a lot of potential in Evie (Leonie Federie) and Cora (Virginia Hartmann) finding that being split up has been bad for them financially even if they recognize that they really aren't good together. It feels like a really rich vein to mine between how this sort of thing is addictive and leads to one creating a sort of curated version of oneself, but the film doesn't get into much of that.

It might just be a matter of resources being thin and this being a pilot for a feature; there are one or two sets and the apartment set is especially barebones - it looks like Evie lives in a Big Green Room without any personality, bland and generically futuristic without many of the details that would make what seems like a pretty good premise sing.


"Szum fal" ("Noise of Waves")

☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, DCP)

Oh, so we're off the internet being evil and on to contacting people you love from the past?

In this case, the fun is in the details - everything about the Ghost Phone is hand-crafted analog/retro, from the machine itself to the online video which looks like it was shot on VHS decades ago and maybe not uploaded recently, to how its effects are generated in-camera using a CRT and affecting the magnetic fields as you touch it. The back and forth between 13-year-old Antek (Marceli Sikora) and his father Pawel (Andrzej Konopka) is quite charming and has the right amount of melancholy while letting them feel alive. Sebastian Pawlak is fun as the inventor who mostly wants to get rid of this cursed thing while still having a glimmer in his eye.

Once it gets into the bit about how both Antek and Pawel potentially get lost trying to contact Antek's late mother, the movie dries out a bit; despite the novel mechanism, filmmaker Tomasz Wróbel feels more bound by what has to happen than going anywhere unexpected.


"Horse Fly"

☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, DCP)

"Horse Fly" doesn't feel like a pilot for a feature so much as a short that excised a major chunk of what might make it interesting, to wit: Who are the targets of the drone missions that Cameron (Angela Wong Carbone) and Matteo (Brian Sutherland) are monitoring? Thematically, it would certainly hit harder if it were China, but I don't believe this is ever specifically stated, and the way the last scene talks about their base moving around suggests a United States at war with itself, and the checkpoints are also weird. During the Q&A, the filmmakers talked about preserving ambiguity, but I feel like ambiguity really works against this movie: Cameron seems torn up because she has been ignoring her Chinese heritage before meeting a family who immigrated from the same reason, and their shared ties work because they are specific, but the film's lack of detail makes it a sort of free-floating guilt.

Weird, because Carbone is good, as is Janet Hsieh as the shopkeeper surprised and delighted that the mixed-ethnicity customer who has been coming in for months speaks Mandarin, and the hand-made drone bunker is a really nifty little set. The folks involved all know their stuff, and having everything front and center feels like it would solidify the whole thing.


"HappyDeal"

☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, DCP)

And we end back where we began, with modern internet-enabled capitalism making everybody miserable with the really nasty bit being that most of the darkly satirical elements here are barely exaggerated. Here, Emma (Marie Kauffmann) is working at not-Amazon-wink fulfilment center that has been thoroughly gamified with the reward being an apartment and being taken on as a salaried employee. She's looking good until she twists her ankle, but that leads to another opportunity.

If you've read anything about what working an Amazon warehouse or delivery route is like, there's a lot in this movie that will have you nod, thinking "yeah, that's probably the next step", and the film more or less runs on each of them seeming like they should be beyond the pale even as you can see unaccountable billionaires and corporations doing them as soon as possible. It works a lot more often than not; Kauffmann's Emma is easy to root for, and she does very well at communicating that she knows this is insane and soul-destroying but rationalizing it because she and her daughter need to eat and sleep, without a lot of laying it out plainly. Filmmakers Alexis & Jeremie Lopez do very well handling the frustrating details, as well, such as how online polls are less about gathering reactions than getting a chance to signify loyalty, or how something meant to be awful will be presented as helping veterans.

The story is kind of built to fizzle, because ending it on a riot or Emma winning the competition or losing it because someone else was more committed or anything, really, is going to be either unsatisfying or undermine the point. It probably couldn't end any other way but how it does, but it's abrupt but not quite ironic enough to be an absolute gut-punch.


You Are the Film

☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

You Are the Film is slight and anything-goes to the point of eventually becoming nonsense, but then, those are arguably also this movie's virtues. It's 67 minutes long and has a pair of absolutely insane final-act twists that will get some folks laughing out of sheer incredulity, but it's been meta from the start, so there's no arguing that this isn't what you signed up for.

It opens by introducing the audience to two young people in similar situations: Madoka (Marika Ito) manages and writes for a small theater troupe that mostly performs in a small pub but is on the verge of playing a large venue; Kazuma (Kai Inowaki) is the glue holding a rock band that plays in a nearby bar together. The proprietors of the establishments give them flyers for movies playing in the theater next door, but when they arrive, rather than meeting each other in person, they see their opposite numbers on the screen, and get kind of annoyed that the film appears to be interactive, before reading the synopses to each other reveals that two of Madoka's cast are about to quit and some hamsters are threatening the other members of Kazuma's band over money their guitarist stole.

From there, things mostly proceed in real time with Madoka and Kazuma rushing in and out of the theater to deal with their respective issues, occasionally returning to the theater to consult or talking over their shoulder. These challenges, by and large, aren't exactly intractable on their own, which means the crossing over is more fun chaos than the movie becoming an interconnected moebius strip of a plot. It's fairly shaggy, maybe unavoidably so given the meta nature of the story, where cinematic logic is going to be invoked rather than drawing charts.

It can go pretty far on how amiable its two leads are, though, and their performances parallel each other nicely enough for the premise to work while also feeling distinct enough that they're not repeating themselves. Marika Ito and Kai Inowaki manage the neat trick of having chemistry while spending most of the movie only seeing each other on a film screen, impressing with their commitment to their art even as they acknowledge what a mixed blessing it is to do so with their friends. Ito probably has the stronger general ensemble around her, but Inowaki plays off, the guitarist, nicely.

(This all takes place in what looks like a delightfully cozy theater surrounded by a fish & chips café, vintage shop, and rock bar; I'm envious!)

It eventually becomes chaos, and I'm kind of torn between wishing Ueda has a big budget to work with for the last act and appreciating the shoestring absurdity he goes with. There's fun in both approaches, but the one Ueda chooses shows how his reach exceeds his grasp, and for as high-energy as the last act is, you can kind of feel him flailing and maybe wish that this was a more cohesive film, more the ouroboros his previous works managed to be while still feeling like anything could happen.

This isn't quite the magic trick that Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes and River were, but it's cute, goofy, and finishes quickly rather than wearing out its welcome.


"175"

☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

This is an impressively nasty little short without a whole lot of overt violence, in large part because its edge is baked into its politics, with its characters' humanist goals in direct opposition to the violent, inhumane actions they will use to achieve them. The screw-turning is nice - cops in the café where those trying to prevent a vote on exclusionary immigration policy are holding a representative's son, the captors being a bunch of amateurs who aren't all sold on the plan - but what's really effective is how the filmmakers know this clearly cannot work: Good people will choke doing bad things, from taunting the cops because they've become too assured to being lax with the weapons they don't want to use. Evil will more directly beget evil.

In some ways, the ending seems a bit too abrupt and not what the rest of the film was leading to, but in others, it couldn't be otherwise: All the strong performances and nail-biting cutaways to television coverage of the vote is always going to lead to a mess, and likely one that plays as unfair and random.


Paradise (Attack on Paradise)

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

There's got to be a great book in looking at the "fight your way in/out/up/down" genre, which seemingly hit its apogee in The Raid, likely the first movie people can remember to being all-in on the idea, though it likely has antecedents back to the silent era in film and a whole host of video game brawlers. The Raid hit at just the right point to be hard to top in terms of sheer action, so something like Attack on Paradise has to lean a bit more on personality, which it has in bunches even if it's often sort of messy.

It opens with Suleyman "Solo" Akhari (Saïd Boumazoughe) being pulled over on a garbage traffic violation only to have the racist cops who try to beat him discover he's got martial arts skill they don't, with one left dead or incapacitated enough that Suleyman spends seven years in prison. When he gets out and attempts to return home to Paradise Apartments, he finds a great deal has changed for the worse: Not only has his diabetic mother (Fatima Khanfour) lost her husband and other son while Suleyman was locked up, but she has been moved to a smaller unit on a lower floor because the upper two are now occupied by "Prince Hanza Haddad" (Achmed Akkabi), a gang kingpin who has decided to make the building his fortress. It's also his lousy luck that the cops have decided this is the day they're going to take the Prince, and not only are they none too concerned about the residents of the building, mostly poor immigrants, but they've severely underestimated the firepower Prince has. It's not too long before Suleyman winds up thrown together with Yasmine (Clara Cleymans), a single mother on her first mission as a member of SWAT, where the only way out appears to be fighting their way up to take the Prince down.

Attack on Paradise is a labor of love for star Saïd Boumazoughe, and while "extremely violent brawler" might be an odd dream project for someone not particularly known for action work, it clicks into place a bit when you learn that he grew up in an Antwerp high-rise much like the Paradise (if not that actual building) and seldom saw other Moroccan immigrants in this sort of role. He's certainly done the prep, getting into great shape and training to at least sell the moves he makes on-screen even when he's paired up with a much larger MMA-fighter type. Of course, part of that is that he's willing to take a beating on-screen in the way that some action specialists aren't; he's got no problem selling that he's running on fumes at points, looking sort of knowingly ambivalent when thugs praise him as a cop-killer (he's obviously not proud but not going to contradict these guys), or engaging in different sorts of amusing banter with his mom or the old friend who runs the convenience store at ground level.

He's given a fine counterpart in Clara Cleymans, who plays Yasmine as equal parts "only woman on the team who has to act extra-tough to deal with the meatheads around her" and just being like that; Yasmine and Suleyman are both Not Screwing Around in different ways but there's something very fun about how she's got the tough-guy energy and he's the put-upon partner, even if that's not their roles. It would be nice if they had adversaries who were on their level beyond selling fights; Achmed Akkabi makes the Prince ruthless but not quite intimidating, while Jamal Ben Saddik and Soroush Helali don't have much personality as his toughest enforcers. Imanuelle Grives is entertaining as the lieutenant (and Suleyman's former lover) who is there in part to serve as Yasmine's final boss, and there are some colorful opponents, but no-one who plays as much more than an obstacle to the heroes.

Which is fine; the point is to make Suleyman and Yasmine run a gauntlet, with director Bob Colaers and the action team going as hard as they can for as long as they can. Boumazoughe does a lot of his own stuntwork and I suspect that a lot of his opponents were cast for their ability to move as much as look threatening, so fights look pretty darn good for a relatively modest Belgian flick, with a few sequences feeling at least a bit inventive and unusual. Colliers and company don't stint on the blood and guts even when it might raise some eyebrows - does Belgian SWAT go straight for headshots before announcing their presence generally, or is that something reserved for immigrants, or artistic license because the filmmakers know what their audience came to see? - just blasting the hell out of everything as they throw their heroes against increasingly larger-than-life bad guys.

It's a fun stretch of no-messing-around action, and I certainty wouldn't mind seeing Boumazoughe and/or Cleymans back for round two, especially if they get some more charismatic villains.

Fantasia 2026.03: Anime no Bento '26, Break Free, and Unidentified Murder

Pardon if today seems a little more scattered than usual; I left the apartment without my little five-inch square notebook and so wasn't making notes through most of the day, and that's not great when the first couple films of the day are Japanese shorts and new releases; Japanese studios just do not update English-friendly movie databases and there's a lag on the crowd-sourcing as well. I eventually wound up hitting Pharmaprix to grab pen and paper for the last show, but wasn't quick-thinking enough to record or photograph the English credits of Break Free.

Anyway, late start because the early afternoon was filled with panels and such more than screenings, so we kick off at the Museum with the Anime no Bento package:

Five filmmakers for seven films from Japan is a pretty decent turnout, although the scheduling meant there wouldn't be time for a Q&A - these packages are soon after the "My First Fantasia" shows, and genre festival staff in a museum cinema might not exactly specialize in getting families with kids in and out - so there was little time to do more than introduce director Taka Yuki from "Don't Dodge Life", "20001 An Earth Odyssey" creator Taiki Sakurai, "Echo" filmmaker Asuka Dokai, "Foxing" director Takeru Shinokuza, and Eit Mitsufuchi, who did basically everything on "Dust of the Simulacrum".

It didn't quite run late enough to bump into Break Free, with producer Yusuke Suzuki (CHECK), star Akito Fujii, and writer/ director Yu Nakamoto on hand. It was a fun Q&A, even if it was one where you get the sense of how bizarre it must be to fly halfway around the world to show your movie to a huge room of people who speak two different languages from what you understand, standing in front of them while they chatter and a translator occasionally decides a question is for you. Fujii, in particular, often seems to be listening intently for something he could respond to and then giving a very amusing answer when he got the chance.

It was interesting, though, as I gather the film kind of grew from Fujii starting a TikTok where he did dances in character as a yakuza (his character's cover story in the movie), with the studio boys eventually calling Nakamoto in saying they wanted him to write and direct a movie about a dancing gangster, which sounds pretty old Hollywood for a movie built around social media! Fujii, though he's got the look of a gangster, has been dancing since he was young, and said it was a bit of a challenge to dance crappy in earlier scenes. Nakamoto, meanwhile, answered a question about directing action versus dance by noting that sometimes the work of choreography is similar, but with action you are often doing pieces at a time, often with doubles, and camera work very much plotted alongside motion, while dance is often longer shots, no doubles, and the camera reacting to something more spontaneous.

After that there was an hour and a half or so until Unidentified Murder back at the Museum, time to do a little shopping and grab a slice of pizza. I think it might be the only new Hong Kong film at the festival - Blades of the Guardians probably belongs more to the mainland and there are three archive prints/restorations - which seems kind of crazy.

Next up, another couple big gaps on Sunday with Niko, the International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, You Are the Film, and Attack on Paradise. Tuesday looks to be Big Break, Levitating, Hayop Ka!, Someone's Daughter, and either Los Vampires or Solo, depending what the release plans for the former look like.

(And here's a look at how the sausage gets made if you're without a notebook or a pen but know you're not going to remember who is who the next day!)

"Echo"

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

One from the "cute fantastical representation" school of animated shorts, "Echo" has a pair of twin children traversing a strange landscape, having crashed there in unusual escape pods of sorts, eager to meet their mother, with one more daring and apparently boasting greater stamina than the other. The twist is that they are as yet unborn, and in the outside world, their mother is not doing well, having lost her husband not long after discovering she was pregnant.

It's a lovely movie to look at, with cute designs that walk up to the border of perhaps overly whimsical without quite crossing it. I'm kind of torn on how directly I'd like weekdays happening with the twins to represent what's going on with the mother - they feel very disconnected here, but link them closer and suddenly there are implications best not examined!


"Future Kid Takara Episode 1: The Child From the Future"

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

This is very clearly built for children, which is no bad thing, but it can be kind of hard to parse as an adult as a result. It's bright and earnest and full of entertaining designs and transformations, but is it too simplistic? Tough to judge, as an adult, especially without seeing more of the series. Little kids do need introductions to the idea of climate change, though, and they might as well be plain-spoken.

This one looks pretty cute, like it will combine fun adventure with good information, and I kind of love that the girl Takara meets in the past/our present looks like she might be an over-enthusiastic chaos source. The opening has a really nice vibe that feels a bit like it's trying be a bit of a spoof of the sort of thing parents thought was fun as a kid while also trying to be that thing for a new generation.


"20001 An Earth Odyssey"

☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

I am here for the joke about "it must have been used for religious rituals" in any form, which is good, because it basically does three of them as a family of alien archeologists examine a playground on an earth where humans have died out. It's a very fine example of how, if a joke is solid enough and you can tweak the execution just enough, there's a lot to work with.

The style of it is admittedly a bit after my time; in American terms it looks like NickToons from the 1990s or so. I suspect that it hits a sweet spot for kids and adults younger than me, even if the main 2001 reference is kind of corny.


"Don't Dodge Life"

☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

This one's a visually interesting bit of animation, although it probably makes a bit more effort reaching for profundity than it can really manage. Making the abstract concept of life a character can't help but oversimplify something that the other protagonist and potentially the viewer is really struggling with, and filmmaker Taka Yuki seems to struggle with what to do with the idea to make this a story.


"Ambivalent Garden"

Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

Two days later, I don't recall anything about this one at all, despite the description and images on the site's pages being striking! Did I nap?


"Foxing: Kitsuné-tsuki"

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

Write-what-you-know shorts can be dangerous, because they often reveal just how much young artists are pouring into their art to the exclusion of everything else. That's a bit of a weight on "Foxing" for a while, as filmmaker Takeru Shinozuka's avatar Shinano mopes about her work as an animator and how she feels unworthy in a way that's both familiar and also kind of tough to swallow for animation-lovers. We've seen young artists work themselves into and out of funks before, especially with some well-placed encouragement.

Still, the execution is really nice, especially once we meet her kitsune doodle come to life, Koyami. The expected metaphor reveal doesn't have quite so much pressure on it because Shinano has already commented on how much she's like a kitsune in some ways, but I really like the way Koyami is both pure ego and merciless criticism; She's obviously going to be an aspect of Shinano when the mask comes off, but I really like how Shinozuka doesn't separate these traits out into dueling avatars, because not only are both necessary for creating art, but they are more intertwined than usually presented.


"Dust of the Simulacrum"

☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

Filmmaker Eit Mitsufuchi pitched "Dust of the Simulacrum" as, among other things, an argument for working in the 3D CGI medium when the animation industry in Japan is still very much focused on a traditional style, but kind of seems a little too meta about it at times? It's not ReBoot or anything, but it's a lost video game character trying to dodge "bugs" that are overrunning a blank landscape, and I don't know if it ever gets beyond being too on-the-nose.

Oddly enough, it's a case where the human characters look nice enough but the bugs look like they could use a little refinement (although, potentially, to look jankier rather than more realistic), and it's another one where what's going on doesn't quite carry the ambition the filmmakers are trying to project.


Odore! Yakuza (Break Free)

☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Break Free opens with text about how Japan's crackdown on organized crime has more or less crippled the yakuza as a force in Japanese life, and if it goes further, one wonders what the effect will be on pop culture. There will be movies like this, chronicling the fall in ways both serious and comic, but will there eventually be nostalgia for it? As much as filmmaker Yu Nakamoto has a great deal of sympathy for his characters, that doesn't extend to bolstering the institution, which is probably a part of what makes it work.

In it, Kunio (Akito Fujii) is 38 and has been a yakuza for twenty years, but the business of organized crime is not great - he's working as a food delivery driver and longtime comrades are struggling as mascots and trying to catfish - beyond how everybody is filming everything these days and it's very easy to get caught doing violence in public. Insulted by a lack of respect by a civilian, he improvises a sort of dance thing where he doesn't quite hit the guy, and it racks up millions of views. The gang decides to monetize this - an odd scheme where Kunio will present himself online as an influencer who is just cosplaying as a gangster, though the intimidation going on in the background is real - but he'll need some better moves, which means taking classes with former background dancer Marie. She, of course, is very cute, and Kunio starts to wonder if he wants more than a life of crime, even as a less organized but more vicious gang makes a play for their territory.

There's a song and dance man inside every tough guy actor - they weren't doing film noir and kung fu in high school drama class - but I don't know that anyone since James Cagney has really had the chance to be both, no matter how much Hugh Jackman wants to. It's treated as a bit of a joke when they do, and both Break Free and the TikTok channel of star Akito Fujii which inspired the film are playing on the incongruity of a guy who looks like Fujii dancing, but the joke hits so well at its best. Fujii's muscles are not quite bulky but he's not exactly wiry, and even when Kunio cleans up, he kind of looks and sounds like a schlub, so it's genuinely entertaining to see him suddenly move with seeming abandon (though I'm not sure he ever becomes quite so competitive in the dance battles as the plot requires him to be), or have the film suddenly double back and remind you of the gangster life he's trying to hide.

Not that I'd dream of spoiling those moments, especially when the best are a couple layers of absurdity deep, but they bring forth an explosion of laughter, enough to get past how a lot of the movie around them isn't quite so brilliant, coasting a lot on how good the high concept is rather than how any of the details fit together. At their best, though, the filmmakers are great at sending up how goofy something is and then doing a quick pivot to this other very silly thing, catching someone who is just making fun of the one element off guard as the thing they like better isn't spared.

And, underneath it all, this all works because it feels true that the violence of the yakuza is a dead end, even without the steps that the government is taking so that gangsters can't participate in legitimate society. The organization is dying and success requires one to either be completely monstrous (true or not, the yakuza often tried to present themselves as a useful part of society) or otherwise make oneself miserable. Being the kind of gangster Kunio and his friends see themselves as is not manly in the way it once was. Dance isn't either, but there's joy in it if not money or glory, and that's got more value than posturing like a gangster.

The movie fizzles a bit at times, Nakamoto may show violence as ultimately ineffective and obsolete, but he can't quite create the triumphant dance moment that the film needs at or near its climax. It's great fun to watch Fujii play against apparent type, though, enough for the best moments to carry the rest.


Unidentified Murder

☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

There's a fun bit at the end of Unidentified Murder where a newscaster is trying to recap what has come before and seems to feel that relating this idiocy is below her dignity, and she's kind of right, but the trick of the film is that, for all we the audience knows what was going on is screwy, it's not quite something that can be dismissed until the movie has finished walking right up to the line.

25 years ago, three kids went out to play and only two came back, saying their friend had been abducted by a UFO. 25 years ago Mark (Ling Man-Lung) and Kit (Ronald Lam) are going on some internet UFO programs to talk about how their friend Ho vanished, laughing dismissively at a host (Kenny Wong) bringing up how it was rumored they killed him. Mark's girlfriend Lau Man (Renci Yeung), who does YouTube pranks on Mark regularly, decides to hire an actor, Kim Chi-Fei, (Peter Chan) to pretend to be Ho and meet them at the site of the disappearance on the 25th anniversary, but, uh, why did Mark and Kit bring shovels - were they going to dig something up?

Suffice it to say, the film has a few more chances to bounce back in time to show what was really going on, adding more layers to its deceptions as it goes. The key, though, is that while Kim is in the middle of all this an explicitly hired to fake something, he is absolutely the most open and earnest character in the group, trying to come up with motivations for his character with three lines as he invested himself completely into something that Man has apparently put about seven seconds of thought into. He's a simple character but never really dumb; Peter Chan does an exceptional job of giving this oddball the right human frustrations.

The whole cast is like that, and it's impressive how, even as the film gleefully reveals how the audience doesn't have the whole story and things aren't as they seem, nobody in the cast has to completely switch things up and say that you were lied to. These folks are, by and large, pretty simple young folks and content creators who haven't grown into something more substantial, but even Renci Yeung's shallow YouTuber makes sense as a person and garners affection beyond not deserving to be murdered.

By the time it's finished, the screenplay has piled a lot of "here's something I didn't tell you before but which changes everything!" on, with some chips investigating the scene besides, but it remains clear and surprisingly linear, dishing out the new information at just the right time to not have to do a lot of sleight-of-hand to keep things out of the audience's sight. The chases and reveals go quick enough to keep things moving without there ever being much risk of missing anything, whether joke or information.

Filmmakers Kwok Ka-Hei and Jack Lee Chun-Kit have a good handle on how to thrive at this scale; the film sort of feels knowingly small, with roughly three or four locations, and doesn't try to trick the audience into it feeling bigger. The movie seems to speak the language of both classic farce and modern media-savvy internet video well, and gets good laughs from each of its about faces.

Fantasia 2026.02: Trauma or, Monsters All; "Yucky Guy"; Dance Freak; "Cardigan"; Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant; and Blaise

I started the day by misreading the time for Trauma or, Monsters All as 1:45pm rather than 1:15pm, which means when I got there at 1:30pm, the film was just starting because it had a nice long intro. I occasionally complain about that sort of thing causing films to bump into each other, but in this case it worked out for me, so I'll try not to whine later!

It did mean there wasn't a whole lot of time for the post-film Q&A with DP Sharif El Neklawy, producers Tilson Allen-Merry & Gaby Leyner, actress Aitana Doyle, and writer/director/editor/producer/co-star Larry Fessenden. One thing that sort of made my eyebrows go up but wasn't followed up on was that he called it "a late film and maybe a last film", which is a bit surprising - though a lot of folks are thinking about retiring at his age, artists generally have another decade or two in them - but as a producer, I suspect he knows the reality of his viability as a director. Horror's often a young person's game, and one of the things he did was thank Doyle and the other younger cast members for pointing out when he was behind the times, which she laughed at in a "yeah, we had to do that" way (as opposed to "Larry's just being silly and self-deprecating").

It was also apparently an unusually tricky shoot, even though he lives in the town where he shot it - not only did he have to find two houses right next to each other that had the right properties, but co-star Alex Breaux was doing Stranger Things on Broadway, which means he was only available to shoot on Mondays. It also meant getting the cast of Depraved and Blackout together, and while I suspect it's not as hard as it might be if you're based in New York and have a lot of friends like Fessenden, but with that schedule it's probably some work. That's also where he mentioned that James Le Gros doesn't really like horror, but they go back.

Next up: Justine Smith with Dance Freak director/DP Alan Resnick and director/writer/actor Robby Rackleff, and I must admit, though I like Justine a lot, when she's hosting a screening, it's probably the Underground section she programs, and that's kind of an empty-slot choice for me most of the time. I've enjoyed some, but that's getting lucky.

Anyway, I didn't really like their movie, and I sort of enjoyed their Q&A mostly as a comedy act where Resnick was the pro trying to make his friend look good. Sometimes you just aren't quite sure whether folks making a movie like this and taking it to festivals did it as a lark and are enjoying the ride even if they're kind of out of their depth, sort of contemptuous in an "I can't believe you paid money for this thing we crapped out" way, or doing a bit. It's usually the first, but, man, can this sort of thing not be my sort of thing.

Next up, crossing the street and having writer/actor Hans Obma of "CARDIGAN!" ask how many of us have ever heard Welsh, and, you know, I don't know if I've ever seen a short or a feature in Welsh before. His was fun!

It played before Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant, with "THUNDERLIPS" - Jordan Windsor (holding the alien baby) & Sean Wallace, because I guess music video guys have to also be named like a band - talking about how, yeah, it is kind of odd that a couple of dudes were making a movie about pregnancy and childbirth. Windsor pointed out that, once you have a kid (even as a father), you find out that every woman has some sort of horrific pregnancy story, and they made sure that they got a lot of outside input while making their film, and they requested to get more questions from folks who weren't dudes when the first few were guys. Aside from that, they mentioned that it took a circuitous path to production - they wrote a feature script, got told that it would sell easier with a short, so they pulled ten pages out, made a short, brought that to a Melbourne film market, and then got to make the feature. Hannah Lynch stars in both, and they said they cast her in large part because her personality is fairly close to Mary.

After that, I had some time to kill before heading up to the Museum for Blaise, amused to overhear in line that Nicolas Winding Refn had been at the Ultraman documentary because he's a major fan.

Next up, an oddly late start on Saturday with some gaps as it's mostly events before the "Anime no Bento" package, then Break Free and Unidentified Murder; Sunday looks like Niko, the International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, You Are the Film, and Attack on Paradise, with Blades of the Guardians, Pontypool, and Redline all recommended. Just a coupleof those weird days where you've got to stay in one screen to maximize movies but I'm apparently building in meal breaks.


Trauma or, Monsters All

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Cinema J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
One gets the feeling that Larry Fessenden had the idea for doing a crossover when he realized that Blackout would mean he'd directed vampire, Frankenstein, and werewolf pictures, but didn't necessarily have a great story when he started doing the work of a producer to bring people back, and one didn't come together when the schedules lined up. That probably makes the whole thing a little more meta than intended, with everyone sort of aware that they're in a monster mashup even if they're not quite winking at the camera.

He returns us to Talbot Falls, where historian Cassandra (Laëtitia Hollard) has moved looking for some quiet as she begins a book on George Washington Carver, taking a job in the library and making friends with Agnes (Aitana Doyle). Having read about the werewolf incident that took place a couple years ago, she begins to suspect that her next-door neighbor who locks himself in the basement during the full moon is actually Charley (Alex Hurt), whom everyone presumes is dead. Reading up a little more suggests that his housemate Adam (Alex Breaux) is the Frankenstein's monster that was said to beset a neighboring town a couple years earlier (in Depraved). Wanting to write about something in the present rather than from a hundred years ago, she pitches an editorial to the local paper about how the trauma of those events is like monsters in their midst, though Charley's girlfriend Sharon (Addison Timlin) is looking to get into contact with him. Not only does that raise the hackles of a lot of people who don't like an outsider coming in and trying to analyze them, but things like that get online these days, which attracts the attention of a biotech investor (Joshua Leonard) who has been looking for Adam, but also Sam (Larry Fessenden), who became a vampire 30 years earlier and is intrigued at the idea of other monsters relatively nearby.

If Sam's presence sounds kind of odd, it is; when Fessenden mentioned that this might be his next project after Blackout played the festival three years ago, it sounded like he intended to have Meredith Snaider from Habit return as Anna, but he apparently could not track her down or interest her in participating. I'm not sure she would have been a better fit, although the tone might have been different, since the exposition and "let me expound upon some themes" moments carry a different weight coming from the very recognizable writer/director of the film playing an earthier character than Snaider's Anna. Even taking that into account, there are an awful lot of people status-dumping more than conversing or acting, after doing things that the film needs even if they don't arise naturally, jawing about where things stand in the aftermath of Blackout, with Cassandra also spending a lot of time worrying about the book she's writing in a way that doesn't always feel like it connects to the rest of the story (and boy howdy, do people comment on how she's telling uncomfortable truths while being named "Cassandra" a few times). It's a scenario in search of a plot. Fessenden is kind of onto something in terms of poking around the idea of trauma and recovery, likening the end of a horror movie to a mass shooting/casualty event that scars a place and attracts outsiders trying to use it for their often good-natured but insensitive ends, but mostly winds up restating it rather than developing it.

He's put together a nice cast, though, especially in terms of the newcomers - young leads Laëtitia Hollard and Aitana Doyle are really charming, and although it can sometimes feel a little frustrating, there's something very real and earnest about the way Hollard's Cassandra naively stumbles and repeatedly uses "I'm just connecting what's already out there" as a shield. A hangout movie with Hollard and Doyle as these characters would be quite enjoyable, and that really helps when wheels are mostly turning in the background. The returning folks do a fair job of sketching out who they are in a little time, possibly enough that the exposition and flashbacks could have been cut back a bit. Alex Breaux is a standout as Adam, playing kind of simple and brain-damaged without doing Karloff or struggling to get words out to hammer that home.

There's a fair amount to keep track of happening kind of randomly, even if there's not a whole lot of actual horror movie action and gore for most of the film, with what there is feeling a bit obligatory even if it's well-executed. Even the climax seems like something a movie has to do rather than entirely where threads were heading, although Fessenden earns the emotions his finale is aiming to stir when they finally hit.

Would a little more time ruminating on the script have made Trauma a more fitting climax to 30 years of Fessenden putting his spin on classic monsters, or was the idea always more enticing than what could be pulled together from the previous three movies?


"Yucky Guy"
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Cinema J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)

What can I say, this is a sort of absurdity that doesn't really connect with me at all; I keep waiting for it go somewhere but it's really "'people sleeping through chaos in their grand but featureless mansion', 'dogs wearing diapers', and "tresspasser pees to mark territory' are funny" and not a whole lot else. I mean, sure, they are funny, but once the concept has presented itself, I just want a bit more than this movie does.

It's also 13 minutes long, and it kind of makes me think about how a lot of people don't necessarily need something to be funny to laugh, but it's sort of their default way of breaking tension, and a lot of this sort of comedy seems to confuse effect with cause.


Dance Freak

* * (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Cinema J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)

A thing about a lot of "Underground" movies is that they're not just acquired tastes that may not match one's sense of humor or kink, but they are often actively unpleasant to watch under a lot of circumstances, such as sitting close to the front of the auditorium for Dance Freak. It's a grainy black-and-white film with frequent strobing made by viral-video specialists and probably meant to be viewed on a tablet or maybe a television, a contained rectangle rather than the entirety of what one can see. It's harsh to look at and the filmmakers don't really give an audience a lot of reasons to do that.

It introduces us to Obie (Robby Rackleff), a sort of sad sack whose girlfriend Dorty (Megan Koester) is running for office and starting to explicitly leave him behind rather than just by implication, and who is apparently mainly employed because everyone else at the office has forgotten how to access systems. He's trying to take up birdhouse building as a hobby, but it's not going that well. That's about the time when the Dance Freak starts showing up, somehow hypnotizing folks and deflating them while they are in their trance. A scientist at the lab where it was created, Dr. Dilly Gorgul (Sheila Mears) tells Obie it "looks just like you but is a separate entity" and then runs for the wasteland, mostly leaving Obie and Dorty to handle the situation.

Filmmakers Robby Rackleff & Alan Resnick give Obie the sort of surreal micro-budget film world where things are sort of empty and eccentric where we can see it though there are hints that it gets truly bizarre just out of sight, and that's good for a few good gags at worst and a fairly constant stream of chuckles if your mileage varies in that direction. The trick is often finding something that sounds not quite right in a particular way, such as names like "Obie" and "Dorty" and "Gorgul", and saying them with a straight face. It's easy to milk jokes like that too far; a street gang called "the Salad Boys" earns a chuckle when the name is tossed out but fizzles quickly when they try to play the gag much longer. A lot of the movie is deadpan where the silence after a joke without a punchline is held too long or they keep going, sure there's a bit that will convince someone that this is funny.

If the jokes in this sort of movie don't land, it can still work if there's something interesting to grab onto, but that's seldom the case here. Obie and Dorty are not particularly personable either individually or as a pair, and the idea of the Dance Freak doesn't quite coalesce, either as an awkward expression of Obie trying to feel joy or him draining/feeling drained by the world. It's like a whole movie based on the snidest reading of Peter Parker dancing like a dork in Spider-Man 3, and by the end, the storytelling is muddled - it's Obie's story, but he's out of action, and the chemistry between Obie and Dorty isn't enough to let her work as the lead later on.

There are a couple of bright spots - Sheila Mears actually gets to make Gorgul a character, giving a bit of a "knows what danger looks like" edge to her ivory-tower dorkiness - but I seldom found it funny enough to be worth looking at.


"Cardigan"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

I don't want to belabor how much I enjoyed "Cardigan"; it's a five-minute short that doesn't quite have one joke but leans on its main gag enough that parsing it in a review can deflate it. But, as such things go, it's executed very well: Writer Hans Obma and Lois Meleri Jones hit the right notes as a couple that the audience can identify with when faced with something unfair but also just privileged enough that we feel like they may have something coming; Iwan John and Bethany Williams-Potter are an enjoyable odd couple as the police officers the run afoul of. The main joke of just how much this town identifies with its namesake clothing is goofily absurd and pivots to something that delivers a wry grin at the end.

It's a five-minute comedy sketch, but it's a good one.


Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Where the short that preceded Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant is adroit with its gag, the feature uses a sledgehammer, but it's got a target that can use a good sledging and seemingly never forgets something that a lot of absurd comedies forget, including one I saw earlier in the day: Make everything as weird as you want, because people and situations are weird, but do it by pushing something very familiar to an extreme that one can still recognize.

So we meet Mary (Hannah Lynch), nearly 30 and still living with her mother Cynthia (Yvette Parsons), who simultaneously harangues her for being a layabout but also doesn't give her any space whatsoever. Mary's got an odd kink in that she really enjoys tentacle hentai, which brings us to the neighbors, whom we meet as Ann (Jackie van Beek) tries to get her son Boo (Arlo Green) to do something other than masturbate in his room, seeing as that causes the power to flicker. When Mary and Boo bump into each other in the laundry room, she discovers that Boo was conceived when his mother was abducted by aliens, and he has the glorious tentacled genitalia of her dreams. They only agree to masterbate, but, well, his jizz is powerful, spraying across the room and dissolving her pants - and, apparently, alien fetuses grow faster than Mary can convince people she wants no part of being a mother.

Writer Jordan Mark Windsor and his co-director Sean Wallace don't mess around, letting the audience see what Boo's got between his legs in the first ten or fifteen minutes rather than playing coy, and it's kind of a brave decision, because it's going to be a while before they can really escalate from that sort of prosthetic weirdness. They don't retreat from it - among all the other fluids, Mary's morning sickness is a colorful, gooey mess - but it's not quite the movie where they're going to try to top the last crazy thing you saw every ten minutes, although when the climax comes, it's great, just as weirdly practical and weirdly organic as one might hope after setting the bar high at the beginning.

Part of the point may be to get a big early laugh that hooks the audience - this movie is weird and gross enough that its theatrical run might be limited, so you've got to give the folks streaming it something to whet their appetites at the start - but I suspect that part of it is how frankness is the engine driving the movie, and spending the next hour and a half letting the audience see all the ways pregnancy can wreak havoc on a woman's turned up to 11 isn't really compatible with getting cute about just what put Mary in this position. Windsor & Wallace are careful never to be scolding; Mary wears her kink on her sweatshirt even if she doesn't want her mother, Boo, or anything else all up in her business, and folks being matter-of-fact about things is seldom played as foolish. There's not really a villain here - all these people are trying to do their best by Mary and Boo even as they're confused and trying to act normal in the face of it, despite the situation being pretty darn abnormal.

The cast sells that great, especially Hannah Lynch, whose Mary is annoyed and sarcastic and winds up snapping at a lot of people but seldom comes off as mean; she's probably funny if weird under better circumstances. She bounces off Yvette Parsons's Cynthia well, the latter always seeming to take up extra space with a working class accent that you can see as a constant embarrassment to Mary. Cynthia herself is a contrast to Ann, all reserve and fear that puts a quiver in her voice when she tries to protect authority. Arlo Green gives a really nifty performance, exaggeratedly reserved and tentative at the start, but in a way audiences will quickly buy into, but doing a nice job of coming out of his shell as having an actual friend and a sense of responsibility displace shame.

The secret sauce might be the small army of folks playing doctors, nurses, pharmacists and the like who all deliver the right blend of disbelief, surprise, curiosity, and ultimately professionalism in the face of this bizarre pregnancy. As much fun as the gnarly practical effects are, a lot of what makes the movie work minute to minute is the mix of how health care can be an impossible bureaucracy to navigate despite being filled with individuals who mostly want to make things better on the one hand and how this crisis clarifies who these four people are, especially to themselves.

And it's impressively gross.


Blaise

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia Animation Plus, DCP)
Buy the original book en français at Amazon

Blaise is kind of a weird-looking movie, not quite the CGI equivalent of animating mouth movement onto photographs, but residing in a very particular spot in the uncanny valley where a still looks like it might be live action but looks more and more unreal and off-putting as you stare or watch it in motion, and that's the movie in a nutshell: Seemingly-relatable cringe comedy that gets very weird, very quickly, but still has the chops to get some big laughs.

Blaise Sauvage (voice of Timéo) is 16 and friendless at high school because he's more than a bit weird, but comes by it honestly - father Jacques (voice of Jacques Gamblin) is a ball of neurosis and mother Carole (voice of Léa Drucker) has a real knack for saying the wrong thing and being absolutely unable to explain her error and recover. They try to get him to reconnect with the daughter of Carole's friend Marisa, which leads to him getting dragged along to a party and protest where he meets Joséphine (voice of Nina Blanc-Francard), who crushes on him immediately but both make things needlessly complicated by pretending to be something they're not.

The film is co-written and co-directed by Dimitri Planchon, who created the original bandes dessinée, and it feels very much like a certain style of comics: It's made of a lot of little vignettes, as likely to end with a sort of unnerving ambiguity as a punchline, which helps the movie bounce around a bit, rather than get mired in the boringly serious moments that connect one funny bit to the next, very helpful for this sort of dry, French comedy where what's functional could dilute what's deadpan or transgressive without the viewer quite realizing why it's not as funny throughout as it could be.

That deadpan style puts a fair amount of responsibility on the voice cast, since the animation isn't going to help out with wild takes very often, so there's got to be a fair amount of nuance. Jacques Gamblin is maybe the standout, giving Jacques a sort of soft-spoken nervousness that adds to the slightly shaggy image on the screen, while Léa Drucker makes sure Carole seems (over) confident at home and then brings a hint of panic to her voice that doesn't quite contradict the professional mien at work. Timéo's performance as Blaise is kind of flatter, an introverted teenage drone, while Nina Blanc-Francard does a good poor little rich girl, sympathetic even as she's often kind of awful.

That all makes the film sound kind of small, offering a chuckle or two at most, but Planchon, co-writer Clémence Lebatteux, and co-director Jean-Paul Guigue both make sure that the film has outstanding timing and a satirical punch, often positioning the Sauvage's petty concerns against angry protesters in a way that makes the family look petty and thus more absurd even as a lot of the radicals are plenty ridiculous in their own way. There's not a misconception that they can't escalate into a disaster, with the path out of it both clear to see and impossible to take, and when all else fails, there's Chekhov's hand grenade threatening to take what is an irritation and make it literally explode.

It's a very, very funny movie, bouncing expertly between the squirms of recognition and belly-laughs of disbelief, and only enhanced by how it so often looks almost normal.