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 2026.02: 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.

Film Rolls Season 2, Round 07: Waterloo, The Girl from Rio, and The Last Battle

Okay, hopefully it gets a little less effort-intensive from now on!

Dale rolls an eleven, making her way to Waterloo, one of the first imports I ever got from Imprint in Australia.

Then, the next night, Centipede rolls a 20, making his way out of the Korean section and down to the next row to land on The Girl from Rio, one of many crowdfunded silence in this part of the board. The "rule", inasmuch as you can call them that considering how willing I am to make them up as I go along, is that a 20 gets one a bonus movie, usually something already seen, but I've decided that to keep things fair and random, those will involve stepping through a boxed set, in this case the fancy Luc Besson one put out by Sony last fall, and since the silent was short, I watched The Last Battle the same night.

Given that the difference at the end of the last round came down to Dale having one more movie than Centipede, this might even things up!

Waterloo

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Imprint Blu-ray)
Seen 13 February 2026 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Imprint Blu-ray)
Where to stream it, or buy the disc at Amazon

Many epics end on a historic military battle; of those, many are clearly reverse-engineered to have a story that climaxes in or during that battle. And then there are the likes of Waterloo, which don't so much construct a story that will build to that finale so much as their makers figure out where you have to start so that the battle of Waterloo is the final 45 minutes of a movie long enough to be considered epic-length.

That, then, would be a couple years earlier, when Napoleon (Rod Steiger) is initially exiled to Elba after the French army was pushed all the way back to the suburbs of Paris, the nations of Europe having united to contain him. As we all know, it is not long before he has escaped, and while Louis XVIII (Orson Welles) sends Bonaparte's longtime lieutenant Marshal Ney (Dan O'Herlihy) to capture him, Ney soon rejoins the former Emperor as have many of the soldiers. Bonaparte then looks to pick up where he left off, with Europe once again having the Duke of Wellington (Christopher Plummer) lead the forces to counter him, with the armies eventually converging on Waterloo for a fateful battle.

I suspect that there have been an order of magnitude more books and movies made about Napoleon Bonaparte than Arthur Wellesley - the latter is not singular enough that you hear people described as having a "Wellington complex" - but this is a film about a battle, and a battle requires two people facing off, so we spend a fair time with Wellington. Christopher Plummer is, of course, thoroughly capable in the role, but that's the thing; Wellington is capable and professional and not terribly dramatic compared to his opponent, so Plummer has less to do; his scenes are basically waiting to be sent into battle against this foe, so the movie busies itself a bit with the people around him, notably a nice enough soldier who met a girl at a party they were both attending, more or less marking him as the way one will recognize the human cost of this carnage when he dies. Waterloo is often very dry getting to its title battle, and at times the cast doesn't actually seem to be performing their characters so much as standing in costume while famous words are read in voice-over.

Steiger, by contrast, at least gets to dive into playing this antihero and growl in rage at anyone who stands in his way. It's not really a biography of Napoleon beyond the lead-up to Waterloo, so aside from a few comments about not being able to see his son, there's not much that's personal. Steiger does at least give Bonaparte a sort of forceful charisma, which doesn't particularly contradict how he seems to be doing this campaign to spite the world and show Europe that it had no business resisting him as opposed to trying to achieve some sort of tactical or political victory. Maybe it was, historically, about more than revenge, but that's what animates Steiger's Napoleon and gives the film what emotional stakes it has.

It's striking just how static and dull the shots of the movie stars posing and reciting are when intercut with the massive movements of the Red Army who have been called upon the give the film a cast of thousands, but the scale is nevertheless astounding: Whenever the camera pulls back and up to reveal the armies forming up, shooting at each other's formations, and falling apart, one's jaw drops, and I cannot imagine what it must be like on the big screen. There's so much going on at such a scale that it's hard to conceive of how director Sergei Bondarchuk managed to actually shoot all this without the post-production tools available decades later.

It's not a particularly great movie, and even in the finale when it excels, Waterloo often gives the impression of just a lot going on rather than a sense of what's happening in the battle. But, boy, if one of our local movie theaters gets their hands on a 70mm print, I'll put down money for a ticket. The film does one thing very well and everything else just well enough to justify the time and expense to get there.

The Girl from Rio '27)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, crowdfunded Blu-ray)
Seen 23 February 2026 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, crowdfunded Blu-ray)

Give a movie a hundred years to age, and the preservation and ability to restore the film will be all over the place: The opening of The Girl from Rio is in two-strip technicolor, and while it's seen some wear, it's enough to make one's eyes go wide at how the filmmakers have clearly done their best to make it so vibrant that the images will persist in one's memory through the film. Other scenes appear to come from a print so damaged and degraded as to be a pasty white mess covering half the frame, obliterating the facial expressions one might be trying to read. It's maybe an unfortunate reflection of the movie itself - you see what the filmmakers can do even though it's often not sharp.

The girl in question is Lola Rojas (Carmel Myers), a dancer in one of Rio de Janeiro's most popular nightclubs. Her regular partner Raul (Edouard Raquello) is clearly enamored of her, but so is Antonio Santos (Richard Tucker), one of the most prominent men in the city with his fingers in every business, legitimate and otherwise, who takes her home every night. Recently arrived in Brazil is Paul Sinclair (Walter Pidgeon), a young Brit representing a coffee concern, who initially talks to Lola to prove she doesn't make a fool of all men; after all, he's got the lovely Helen (Mildred Harris) waiting for him at home. And while he inevitably falls for Lola, she is surprised to find herself intrigued by his resistance.

It's not a terribly substantial movie, running just a bit over an hour and having a plot generic enough that there are likely several similar movies with a different "exotic" city pasted into the title and without one necessarily cribbing from the other, and I wouldn't even be surprised if the two player films with the same name had the same plot but no direct inspiration (they don't, for what it's worth). It's a very basic template, with what stands out being how amusingly oblivious Paul is to how Helen is clearly moving on, and how Lola's landlady is a busybody who will obviously rat them out to Santos. It's a simple template and the movie doesn't stray from it.

Maybe the filmmakers intended to, at some point, because there seem to be vestiges of interesting details left: When Santos strong-arms Paul's supplier into not selling him coffee beans, he goes to "the independents", and it feels like there's some tension there (though, perhaps, it's less unique to this particular story than the sort of dealing that 1920s audiences more familiar with agricultural business would recognize easily). One initially might think that's what Santos means when he tells Lola that Paul has made enemies without his help, but it turns out he mostly means Raul, who is not only attracted to Lola but relies on her as a performance partner. It's a bit frustrating, because one can see the shape of a story here, but Paul especially doesn't really do anything; the filmmakers apparently don't want the audience to think ill of him for cheating on Helen getting involved in other conflicts and so are content for there to be attraction with Lola but for things to otherwise happen around them. For a short movie, it can feel dragged out.

Still, Carmel Myers and Walter Pidgeon are good-looking young leads with some actual chemistry. It being 1926, things aren't going to get too steamy and the film is built to not necessarily rely on sweet words, but the pair look drawn to each other and at ease, bristling meaningfully but not theatricality when folks say that they should maybe see less of each other and looking pained when they may separate for their own good. Richard Tucker (who, amusingly, would also appear in an unrelated film titled "The Girl from Rio" 13 years later) was in the midst of transitioning into silver-temple roles, and really nails the big shot who is handsome and charismatic enough to attract Lola in the first place but small and jealous enough to be a monster.

Drop the opening color sequence, and there's really not much to this bland but capable movie, although that does make it kind of a perfect example of this popular template.


Le dernier combat (The Last Battle)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon

Headcanon: Luc Besson's The Last Battle and E.L. Katz's Azrael take place in the same post-apocalyptic world, though obviously on different continents and at different times. Not that I think one necessarily inspired the other, because it's not exactly hard to to think "what if a genre movie had no words" independently, and if you're making your first feature on what is likely close to a shoestring budget (apparently expanding a short, "L'avant dernier", with much of the same cast and crew), I bet that not having to worry about dialogue frees up takes to use on action.

It opens on a man (co-writer Pierre Jolivet) constructing an ultralight airplane in an otherwise empty office building, which will allow him to fly above the marauders led by a sadistic "Captain" (Fritz Wepper) operating nearby - although, when it crashes, he's taken care of by an eccentric doctor (Jean Bouise) who has a young woman (Petra Müller) hidden on his property. The man assists the doctor, hoping to get close, but a man outside the gates (Jean Reno) decides that he's going to come for her more directly.

Besson was Besson right from the start, apparently: Jean Reno is in the cast, Eric Serra does the music, the script is a genre boiled down to its essence but with style and whimsy, and, boy, is he not doing well by the women in his cast. It's not like the men come off much better, since this is the sort of post-fall-of-civilization future where one grades the various loners on who is just a little bit less selfish than the others, but it's not exactly creative in the midst of a movie where the filmmaker is clearly trying to get notices for having some style so he'll get tapped to make bigger things. This is pretty much a demo reel with a basic story - some action, some jokes that don't stop it, a handle on the tone, and a finale of sorts.

And, sure, it demonstrates that well enough. Besson and cinematographer Carlo Varini get some great shots, taking decent advantage of their black-and-white stock to keep their desert and urban settings interesting to look at but not too pretty or self-consciously dour; the team also stages action well, even at this early stage; there's characterization in the way folks fight. Jean Reno's "brute" attacks with a determined mania while Pierre Jolivet's protagonist is trying to figure things out in a way that reflects that we're introduced to him as a builder. I don't know that anybody watching this in 1983 would look at Reno and figure on him eventually becoming an international star, but it's not exactly surprising looking at it 40 years later.

Like a lot of low-budget early works Le dernier combat is more interesting than great, worth watching for seeing the seeds of what would emerge as Besson earned bigger budgets and moved onto the international stage. It doesn't have the playful, understated energy of his better works; he has to stretch thin material more than he can chase odd impulses. It's good that Sony throws this into the boxed set, but, no, it's probably not worth using 4K replication capacity so it matches the rest.


That pulls the number of films watched even; who's doing better?

Dale Evans: 33¾ stars
Centipede: 34 stars

Centipede pulls ahead by a nose!

Fantasia 2025.06: Cielo, Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers, Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards, "The Traveler & The Troll", and Dog of God

Man, I remember when weekdays at this festival were shorter than weekend days and you could get out touristing before the first movie!

First stop in de Sève for the day was Cielo with producer John Dunton-Dowser and director Alberto Sciamma, who mentioned seeing the first couple images in a dream but had no idea where they would fit in any sort of story. He mentioned this to Dunton-Dowser, whose wife is from Bolivia, and learning about it started to give the story shape. Because a movie takes time to come together, the three young actresses they were considering for the lead aged out, which led them to Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda, whom they describe as a truly remarkable young lady. She sent a video greeting that played before the movie in what sounded to my ears like pretty darn good French; she's been in a French-immersion school for the past year and Sciamma boasts that she's caught up with most of the kids who have been learning since kindergarten. Part of their goal for the movie is to help fund her education, the filmmakers describe it as a place where the drop-off between the private and public schools is very steep.

Sciamma really seems to have fallen in love with the place, praising the local crew and how they made it a Bolivian film rather than one by a Spanish filmmaker. He also took care to mention that the altitude in Bolivia can really throw you for a loop: La Paz is the most altitudinous capital city in the world, 2km above sea level, so the air is thin and the deserts get far chillier than you would think just from looking at them. A beautiful country, by all accounts, but not for the weak of spirit.

Next up, Ruppert Bottenberg hosting Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers director Amélie Ravalec, who discovered this strain of post-WWII Japanese art relatively recently and did a deep dive into it. Having made this sort of broad-overview documentary before, one thing she noted was that while Western artists in previous projects would often agree to participate quickly but maybe not be incredibly helpful, the Japanese artists often took quite a bit of convincing but were very giving of their time once they assented. There was more she would have liked, but given the timeframe, several people she wanted to interview had passed, and including even seconds of archival footage from television interviews (for example) would have ballooned the feature's budget.

The film would be back in town with French subtitles at the end of the week (now, if you're in Montreal), and has also been reworked into an artbook that was promoted in the closing credits, and it should be a good companion, considering just how much material is in the movie.

There might have technically been time to fit the Korean shorts package in at de Sève before crossing the street, but with everything running a few minutes late, but not the consistent same few minutes, I decided not to chance it, got some food, and then saw Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards in Hall (can't quite make the shift to Alumni Auditorium). Good fun.

I'm not going to lie, I was worn down by the time we got to Dog of God, but you've got to respect the bling the Abele brothers wore to their screening. I think I dozed through a lot of their movie, which seems hard to believe, but is true. On the other hand…

Here's Adam Murray, with Ruppert to the left and Daniel in the background, and his short "The Traveler & The Troll" was worth the price of admission (or time on the schedule). I'm not sure I've seen anything that recalls Weird Jim Henson so well since his passing!

And that's last Monday in the books. Tuesday would be Stinker, Sweetness, Peau à Peau, and Contact Lens. Today (the next Monday), I'll be at Transcending Dimensions, The Woman, Looking for an Angel, Hi-Five, and Kazakh Scary Tales, if all goes well.


Cielo

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

The filmmakers admitted to being concerned with aesthetic over story in the introduction, and there were times I felt it, down to having to more or less invent a theme that doesn't quite work to make elements palatable (see below). Still, Cielo ultimately worked in ways that this sort of contemporary South American fantasy film often doesn't work for me, finding a way for its flights of fantasy to bring me in rather than take me out.

It opens serenely, with seven-year-old Santa (Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda) sitting by a beautiful lake, before she catches and swallows a large goldfish. She walks back to the stone house her father is building, but what happens next is shocking, and soon she is on the road, pulling a cart with a large barrel on it, bound for the sea. She makes a trade for a truck with a priest (Luis Bredow), who probably didn't think she was going to drive away in it. That she only gets so far is more on the truck than her, but she'll soon be met by others, including a luchadora going by "La Reina" (Mariela Salaverry) and policeman Gustavo (Fernando Arze Echalar), thoroughly puzzled by the trail Santa has left behind.

The film is, if nothing else, gorgeous from start to finish. Director Alberto Sciamma and cinematographer Alex Metcalfe are certainly aided by finding great things to point a camera at, drawing upon the landscape without seeming to push into the fantastical. The film has one of the most beautiful opening shots you'll see, and whether Santa winds up in small towns, the desert, or the city, there are surprising compositions and delightful combinations of colors. These are also environments where people seem at home, with faces and costumes that seldom seem exaggerated.

Young lead Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda is also fantastic on her own, 8 years old and with the ability to play a magical, precocious child who seldom sounds like a teenager or like she's saying the words of an adult screenwriter trying to sound like a child. She's a confident kid who sells having a little girl's perspective on her unique experience, and it's why one believes she can accomplish miracles in this world; she never seems not part of it. There is authority covering warmth in the performances of the people she meets - men like Luis Bredow's priest and Fernando Arze Echalar's cop who maybe need someone as remarkable as Santa to unearth the decency between their world-weariness and women Mariela Salaverry's empathetic entertainer.

The story, though... Well, it very clearly follows the imagery of the idea for a scene, and I suspect that it's useful that the violent opening will mea some folks are just going to be out less than ten minutes in. Santa may be a wondrous enough girl that a found family coalesce around her, but to the extent it does, it is all on the performances. The story has the right shape and the cast sells it, but it's a framework, not something that one can dig into.

That's enough, for the most part. It's a great movie to look at with some great pieces, just all aesthetic and emotion as opposed to the sources of that emotion.

(The structure I found myself trying to impose on the film is that I think you've got to posit that this whole plan comes from a desperate mother who places too much weight on an 8-year-old, even one who can perform miracles, but it's not something the movie really examines. Maybe Gustavo recognizes that what Santa does is not truly her fault, but there are things a policeman has to do once the scene is discovered that are elided over.)


Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Documentaries from the Edge, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers is firmly in the category of documentaries that I treat like an introductory university course, right down to taking three times as many notes as I normally would for a feature of its length. Obviously it's not even that, but it's a solid chunk of good information to get someone started on the topic.

As these things go, it is pretty darn solid. The filmmakers break things down into logical sections that touch upon the context of these artists' work without ever straying to the point of the film really being about something else, and get what seem to be fairly open, unguarded interviews with the surviving subjects. Even in the earlier sections of the film, where its roughly-chronological nature has them discussing the horrors of World War II and its aftermath, they tend to focus on it shaping them as opposed to releasing a lot of raw emotion, but they are the survivors who found outlets long ago.

Mostly, though, director Amélie Ravalec includes a ton of art - plenty enough to be a good sampler, with the narration relevant but not like someone standing behind your shoulder in a museum, explaining everything in detail rather than letting you experience it and make your own connections. Clearly, she feels, the best way to start to understand a work is to look at it, and while contextualization is useful, one's appreciation of a work must ultimately come from the work itself. It's overwhelming at times, though, with seemingly a new work to examine every minute (the citations part of the credits is long); the companion book is probably going to be great.

There's also a very nice soundtrack, not exactly recognizable needle drops to me, but reinforcing the energy of the period and movement(s) and providing a rhythm that keeps the film from feeling like either a fire hose of information or like it's waiting for you to catch up. It's a really nice presentation.

(Fair warning: There is a lot of bondage, enough to make you wonder if this is what caught the filmmaker's eye originally, with a section attempting to explain why there's so much after so much has gone by without much comment. By the end, it's more like a bit of an odd emphasis.)


Akabane Honeko no Bodyguard (Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Purchase the manga at Amazon

My friend Tony, who owns the local comic shop, often talks about how his son is into manga and anime but tends not to overlap them for the same property: If he reads the manga, he'll probably skip the anime, and vice versa. I don't know how the live-action adaptations tend to figure in for him, but I do find myself feeling the same way about them lately: As much as I dig movies like Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards and see where they've been compressed, I'm not sure I need to go back to the source material. This is fun but you can burn a lot of time getting the same story twice.

Honeko Adabane (Natsuki Deguchi) is an ambitious high school student - she's got dreams of being both a dancer and a lawyer like her parents - and not the sort who has a hundred-million dollar bounty placed upon her head. That's because her birth father is Masahito Jingu (Ken'ichi Endo), head of the Japanese equivalent of the CIA; he grabs roughneck Ibuki Arakuni (Raul Murakami), a childhood friend of Honeko's, off the street and asks him to be her bodyguard, although part of the job is making sure she is not aware of the forces attacking her. Ibuki agrees, but stumbles on his first attempt. Fortunately, Honeko's best friend and dance teammate Nei Toyega (Hikaru Takahashi) is also working for Jingu - as is all of class 3-4, led by dorky-looking Sumiko Somejima (Daiken Okudaira), and trained in various specialties since pre-school. But with the price on Honeko's head so high, will Somejima's "23 tarot cards" be enough?

Honeko Akabane's bodyguards definitely falls into the trap where folks adapting a manga have trouble fitting the whole story into a two hour movie - there's a spot where original manga-ka Masamitsu Nigatsu probably milked two or three cliffhangers in weekly serialization out of what's an annoying 5-minute delay here - even when you don't have 25 title characters. You could streamline the heck out of this, except that doing so would probably not just lose one of the most entertaining subplots, but the sheer excess of it is part of what makes it so much fun as the filmmakers frantically pile more on well past the point where they actually need to, a hilarious surprise if you're going in fairly blind and probably still entertaining for the sheer audacity of it if not.

It's pretty goofy all around, with some very winning performances in the center, particularly the very fun chemistry between Raul Murakami and Natsuki Deguchi who actually feel like opposites attracting; Murakami is great at suddenly dropping Ibuki's tough-guy pretenses to present a very affable doofus with a massive crush on Honeko, while Deguchi is good at catching how Honeko is smart, assertive, and kind of dorky (when it comes to the law) underneath the sort of pleasantness that can often read as bland. Ken'ichi Endo makes Jingu a funny character whom one can nevertheless believe is a wily spy master, and Tao Tsuchiya is a real delight swinging Masachika from genuinely dangerous villain to socially maladjusted weirdo and using the same backstory for each.

The filmmakers also find a good balance between using the premise for groan-worthy gags and good character based comedy, and there's style to spare. I presume the look is comic-accurate, and both the white-and-black school uniforms (with the assassins in all black a helpful inverse) and the slick outfits Masachika's crew sports. It's fun and poppy while still giving its weirdos room to be likable teenagers even amid the spy movie hijinks.

There's some fairly entertaining action, too: The filmmakers do a nice job blending slapstick with some actual danger, dedicated to keeping it hand to hand and selling that these spy kids might hold off a few professional assassins.

Not sold: Folks thinking Tao Tsuchiya's character is a guy. But, then, that's also a manga trope dialed up to the max, and that's what makes this movie work.


"The Traveler & The Troll"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

I don't know that writer/director Adam Murray is directly influenced by the late Jim Henson here - he could be young enough to have been born after Henson's passing - but his short hits a particular Henson vibe that maybe isn't represented as much among his successors as kid-friendly Muppets: A world where the macabre creatures are possessed of dry wit, moving about in such a way that a viewer can see that they are puppets but where the uncanniness makes them a little creepier. The effect is ultimately still comic, but with the lingering feeling that it could have been scary.

Instead, it's kind of charming, with the troll (voiced by Dave Child) demanding an answer to three riddles when the traveler (Erika Ishii) who has passed through his territory has no money, only to find that she really likes riddles and he's seldom had to actually pose three. It's a goofy little thing, but that sort of flipping the script from unnerving to amusing is a big part of this sort of piece's appeal.


Dieva suns (Dog of God)

N/A (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser DCP)

Dog of God has a hell of an opener, as its blindfolded werewolf protagonist squares off against a giant and rips its testicles off. It's metal as hell and brothers Lauris & Raitis Abele know how everything works together here, with grandiose physical acting enhanced by rotoscoped animation and a no-messing-around soundtrack, going for "hell yeah!" right away.

It falls off, though, and I found myself unable to hang with it much after that, whether because I was worn out from it being the last film of the day or because the story was pretty darn dull. There are audiences for nasty medieval fantasy where everyone is some degree of cruel or cynical, but it doesn't create a rooting interest in me, and later bits of violence struggled to match the operatic intensity of the opener.

Still, I'm not sure how I slept through so much of a movie this loud.

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

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

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

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

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


"Atom & Void"

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


"Skulk"

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

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


El Llanto (The Wailing '24)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


"Floor"

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

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

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


Noijeu (Noise)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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