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

Shorts People!

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

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

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

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

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


"Lilly Visits the Hospital"

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

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


"Les Bêtes"

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


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

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


"Peeping"

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

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


"Pocket Princess"

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

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

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


"Pippy and the Typist"

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

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

"The House of Weird"

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

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


"Poppa"

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

Hmm.

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


"The Garden Sees Fire"

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

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


"Red Thumb"

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

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


"Demons in the Closet"

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

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


"A Walk in the Park"

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

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

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


"Howl if You Love Me"

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

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

Genuinely fun note to end the package on.


Mina ni sachi are (Best Wishes to All)

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

Where to stream it (when available)

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

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

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

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

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


Fucktoys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fantasia 2024 in Theaters This Weekend: Cuckoo, Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, and Oddity

"Cuckoo Walled-in Oddity" feels like it's kind of a horror premise of its own, right?

Anyway, as I'm sort of running behind on what started out as "Fantasia Daily" posts back in '05 (and have been since Day 4), I'm going to try to not let regular releases get too far ahead of me. I often don't really have to worry about it - I'll mostly try and avoid things that I'll have a chance to get to in regular theaters - but Cuckoo played against a streaming series that would have a second screening and felt appropriate to see at the festival because I was part of the crowd that got gobsmacked by Tilman Singer's student film six years ago; Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In was up against a set of shorts that I figured i could do without (and Hong Kong films, even those filled with stars, can be more hit-and-miss about getting a release in Boston); and Oddity... Well, Oddity came and went in Boston during the festival's first week, so this was actually the chance I had to see it on the big screen.

They are all pretty dang good; you can have a good time in Boston theaters (or theaters elsewhere, obviously) this weekend, and for all I know Oddity will be hitting SVOD around the same time.


Cuckoo

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

Tilman Singer just absolutely goes for it in his first post-student film, which feels like someone taking a case that Quatermas might have been involved in back in the day, going spook-a-blast on it, and dropping a thoroughly overwhelmed teenager in the middle. Just a big, loud, science-fictional take on something that seems like it belongs in the domain of slow-burn folk horror.

I kind of love it.

After establishing its weird bona fides, it introduces us to Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), pointedly riding with the movers in a van rather than her father Luis (Marton Csókás), stepmother Beth (Jessica Henwick), and half-sister Alma (Mila Lieu), who is mute though not deaf, as they take up residence in a unit provided by Herr König (Dan Stevens) on his Bavarian resort property as Luis oversees an expansion. Gretchen would really prefer to be home with her mother, friends, and band, but that's not possible, and while König offers her a job working at the hotel, he's also insistent she not try to bike home at night. She draws the attention of a couple of guests - Ed (Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey), who floats the idea of the two ladies running off to Paris together, and Henry (Jan Bluthardt), a cop who says there definitely is something screwy going on with König and Dr. Bonomo (Proschat Madani), who operates a nearby clinic, and looks for Gretchen's help.

Like Singer's remarkable student film Luz, Cuckoo takes place in an isolating but still contemporary location, where even the people under the sway of something apparently paranormal are still modern and thinking in such terms. For Singer and his young heroines, the dangers in the world outside one's normal field of view may have deep roots but the ways they are monstrous are familiar: König is a developer who thinks himself a philanthropist, and there's not necessarily anything else behind that particular sort of ego, which is perfectly capable of doing catastrophic damage on its own. When Gretchen and her new allies are attacked, it's more a sort of sensory overload/déjà vu that knocks them off balance enough that they sustain conventional injuries rather than mysterious scars, and if Henry fills the void of the mysterious monster hunter, he's also basically a cop with guns. There are secrets to be uncovered, of course, and they're not just normal creepy-men things, but weird in the way the natural world can be weird and dangerous.

What's maybe most impressive is that Singer often has this simmering while the difficult relationship the Gretchen has with her father and his new family is in the foreground, circling back around a week later, a lot of the most memorable scenes involve her forlorn calls to her mother's answering machine and how Alma clearly adores her big sister despite Gretchen's resentment. It's so much the movie that the extremely impressive job Singer does in the last act of making the weird thing going on clear is kind of amazing: He's got to get a lot of explanations out in the middle of a great deal of action. It's screwy as heck, but audiences who came in expecting a normal horror movie are going to come out knowing what its deal is rather than shrugging and saying "that was, uh, something".

It's also fun to watch Hunter Schafer and Dan Stevens run with it. Singer never calls for them to be subtle, so Schafer is wearing her character's heart on her sleeve the whole time while also being a moody teenager who slacks off at work and spending much of the movie having to pull off various injuries. Stevens, meanwhile, is smirkingly manic that the energy level jumps every time he enters a scene, giving off this charisma that doesn't lessen how he's all kinds of dangerous.. Others get in on the act later, and by the time the finale is going, everyone is sort of in overdrive but approaching the chaos from a clear direction.

By the time it's over, Singer has thrown a lot at the audience, from crazy camera angles and oddball music choices, people who are very much not combat-trained trying to extricate themselves from shootouts, and revelations that say they take the title "Cuckoo" seriously in every way they can. It's a blast of modern action-horror that's fun in large part because it's so contemporary.


Jiu Long cheng zhai · Wei cheng (Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

After a trilogy of Monkey King films admirable for their ambition but a mixed bag (to say the least) in their execution, "Soi" Cheung Pou-Soi made a hard shift, directing two contemporary crime films whose vision veered more to the dystopian than the mythic in Limbo and Mad Fate. He doesn't exactly split the difference here, so much as he finds a way to infuse a dark urban vision with big, wuxia-style action. The end result is something that feels like an entertainingly elevated classic triad movie.

It's adapted from a long-running comic book series, so it starts by getting the audience up to speed of how Cyclone (Louis Koo Tin-Lok) became the main godfather in the Kowloon Walled City early in the 1970s. By the time refugee Chan Lok-Kwan (Raymond Lam Fung) arrives some years later, his control is unquestioned, although Mr. Big (Sammo Hung Kam-Bo) runs other parts of Hong Kong. He's impressed by Lok's abilities in underground fights, but when he tries to fob a lousy fake HK ID off on Lok, the latter grabs a bag and runs, thinking it was money rather than drugs, leading to Mr. Big's #2 King (Philip Ng Wan-Lung) chasing him through Hong Kong all the way to the Walled City. King stops there, but Cyclone's lieutenant Shin (Lau Chun-Him) picks up where he left off, thinking Lok was trying to sell without giving Cyclone a slice. Eventually, things get sorted out, Cyclone takes Lok under his wing, and Lok becomes friends with Shin, underground doctor "AV" (German Cheung), and Twelfth Master (Tony Wu Tsz-Tung). Things are good for a while, but this isn't the sort of environment where that can last.

As might be expected from the last two movies, Cheung's vision of the Kowloon Walled City is something else, a mass of buildings that blur into a black monolith when seen from the outside, so tightly-packed and shabby that the distinctions between streets and alleys and hallways collapse. Cyclone's barber shop may be open air, or maybe not, because the Walled City is both a bunch of tiny rooms and one space. It almost leaves no room for wall-climbing action despite the three-dimensionality of the place, although these guys will find a way. There's nostalgia to it, an almost magical sort of stasis, but violence is never far off; it's soon clear that old grudges are never truly buried here, leading to a set of explosive confrontations.

Then it's time for revenge and retribution, and for all that the action in the first couple of acts has been elevated, the climax is at another level. Make no mistake, those action sequences that kick the movie off often feature Raymond Lam fending off a half-dozen guys while on the run, with everybody taking a lot of hits in a way that sells that they are all exceptional fighters. Action choreographer Kenji Tarigaki (often Donnie Yen's go-to guy) gets people up in the air and otherwise on wires so that each blow feels twice as powerful and being of this city becomes a distinct advantage. By the final stretch, what basically amounts to a four-on-one battle, it's like a set of mortals battling an enemy who has sold his soul for the power of the gods, wire fu that seems utterly detached from limits even as it still hits hard and looks like it hurts. It's eye-popping action that keeps escalating until it can seemingly go no further.

The melodrama of it all is maybe a bit wobblier; the movie is at its strongest when it's about the here and now, with Raymon Lam maybe not having a complicated character in Lok but getting across that, capability for violence aside, he's a simple man who wants to live by some sort of rules, the sort of orphan who slides into a found family easily. You see Louis Koo maybe seeing some of himself in the younger man (there's like a five year difference between the actors but it's exaggerated by Koo going gloriously silver in a more period-appropriate haircut) and a lot of charm to the group of friends. Sammo Hung seems to be having a good low-impact time as Mr. Big, chewing scenery more than punching holes in it, although that's nothing compared to what Philip Ng eventually gets up to as King.

Admittedly, one has to laugh a bit at the misty-eyed montage of what was lost when the Walled City was demolished and redeveloped in the 1990s; the aftermath of a gang war that involved smashing people through concrete walls face-first is maybe not the best time to go "but at least neighbors looked out for each other. It's unusually sentimental for the run that Cheung has been on, but maybe not for the guy who spent the previous few years making films about legendary heroes.


Oddity

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 4 August 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)
Available for digital pre-order on Prime; where to stream when available.

Not every filmmaker who tries it can manage what writer/director Damian Mc Carthy does with Oddity, which is essentially to say that they are going to start out in fairly weird territory and establish that as a sort of baseline which a viewer is going to have to accept to understand the logic of the rest of the movie. It's a tough stretch - the movie requires one to simultaneously accept and be surprised by the bizarre - that Mc Carthy manages, no matter how difficult that sounds.

It opens with Dani Timmins (Carolyn Bracken) working on renovating the peculiar old house she has purchased with husband Ted (Gwilum Lee), a doctor who works the night shift at a Cork mental hospital. It's an odd one, a square around a courtyard, currently without power or heat - but perhaps with ghosts; Dani has set up a tent to sleep in and a digital camera taking regular pictures so she can hopefully see what kind of spirit she's dealing with. That's when one of Ted's patients, Olin Boole (Tading Murphy) approaches the door, saying he saw someone else enter, but, well, Declan is in the hospital for killing his mother in a rage. A year later, on the anniversary of Dani's death, Ted complies with an unusual request by Dani's twin sister Darcy Odello (Bracken again), bringing Declan's glass eye to their mother's old shop, where every item is alleged to be cursed. She takes Ted's offer to maybe have dinner sometime and shows up at the house a week later, freaking out Ted's new girlfriend Yana (Carline Menton) even without the chest containing a bizarre mannequin that somehow seems to set itself up at the kitchen table when Yana isn't looking. Darcy is going to use her psychic powers to find out the whole truth of what happened to her sister, and Yana, who can't find her car keys, is stuck there with her.

If folks say the star of the movie is the mannequin, I won't argue - whether it be Mc Carthy, production designer Lauren Kelly, art director Conor King, someone working in their departments, or a true team effort, somebody came up with a spectacular design which looks big and hulkling, threatening even though it is obviously inanimate in part because of its gigantic open maw. You can get a good jump stare just out of it changing position while one isn't looking. It looks lifelike if completely immobile from a distance, but when Yana gets up close, one can see seams that suggest it can be posed, even if it seems unlikely to actually move about, and other details that make a certain, unnerving sort of sense.

That, of course, understates what Carolyn Bracken is doing, from initially presenting Dani as someone whose sincere belief in ghosts makes everything else not-ridiculous to how, at the end, Darcy can say she did something and the audience can fill in the absurd mechanism of it with placid acceptance. In between, she and Mc Carthy are taking a character who under normal circumstances is the eccentric occultist supporting character that adds spice to a movie that is really about Yana and Ted, even if it's later revealed that Darcy was some sort of canny manipulator, and making her the protagonist. Darcy's silver hair, spinster's outfits, barbed words, and passive-aggressive attitude, indicate someone who should be stealing scenes from the more relatable Yana and Ted (and, make no mistake, Caroline Menton's increasingly exasperated Yana is the reaction shot that makes a lot of scenes work); instead, the audience is with this oddball and her increasingly peculiar plan, and she's able to get the absolute most out of moments that focus on her sadness and regret. She does nothing conventionally, but the sadness of this woman who lost her sister is palpable.

Meanwhile, Mc Carthy is well aware that the audience is not there for some sort of quiet pondering on the subject of grief, and has a grand old time deploying jump scares and drawing out scenes where you're meant to just marinate in the sheer peculiarity of it. I'm not sure to what extent the film was built around the location as opposed to the opposite, but it's a terrific place for this sort of movie; you'll not only absolutely believe the house was haunted even before Dani died, but every corner of it invites the audience to study how the two floors interact, the halls with the ninety-degree turns, and even the bright yellow camping tent so that it's in their minds as a scene starts to play out there.

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I also kind of love the epilogue, even though it works a bit contrary to how I approach horror movies. The whole thing has, in a way, been a duel between Darcy, whose way of understanding the world is through the occult (the "unseen") and the impressions that strong emotions make on it, to the point of accepting that she will pay for Olin's murder, and Ted, who has made a study of the mind and cool consideration of everything marks him as a manipulative sociopath. It's not just that he has seemed to have won at the end - Darcy is dead and he has successfully placed the blame on Ivan because he is a more emotional psychopath with less self-control - but his way of thinking has won out: He is arguably able to burn the wooden man because he does not believe in it; his rationality has triumphed over Darcy's spirituality.

But, of course, Darcy was dying already, so that's no great victory, and, ultimately, she shows that she understands him far better than he understands her. She knows that he will not be able to help but ring the bell and summon the Bellhop, if only to prove it does nothing. As soon as he does, she's won so completely that the film can stop at just showing the Bellhop next to him savoring the empty victory that has cost him two women who loved him and saddled him with the house that the first wanted but he considered a millstone.

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That finale is a beautiful capper on a movie that has somehow taken a bucket of nothing but the strangest, most irregularly-shaped building blocks and built something that's not just scary, suspenseful, and surprisingly funny but also an impressively solid story.

Fantasia International Film Festival 2023.07: A Chinese Ghost Story, "How to Get Rid of Your Cheating Husband", Booger, Insomniacs After School, Things That Go Bump in the East, and Devils

Not seen until a couple days later, but those "Lost Cat" signs are some clever viral marketing for Booger and a colorful way to spruce up some shuttered storefronts, including one which I think was another regular Fantasian's favorite coffee shop.

Anyway, there's Booger writer/director Mary Dauterman (on the write) with the festival's Justine Smith, talking about how, yes, this film takes place in a very specific part of Brooklyn because that's where they live, and that the Booger we see on-screen is her cat half the time and a couple of "professional" cats at others, although I gather the pros were only marginally easier to work with.

Here is some of the line-up of folks who made "Things That Go Bump in The East", a pretty good turn-out considering how much we're talking about short films made on the other side of the planet, here. From left to right - and apologies for where my notes are bad - we have "English Tutor" producer Jung Jongmin, cinematographer Paik Won-jo, and writer/director Koo Jaho; "You Will See" co-star Chng Min-Si and cinematographer Perrin Tan; "Foreigners Only" cinematographer Ali Ejaz Mehedi and director Nuhash Humayun; "Tang" filmmaker Kim Min-jeong, and host Steven Lee. Nuhash Humayun also had a feature in the festival, and was one of the most voluble folks in the Q&A, joking about how this was all based on a real thing in Bangladesh and how he's not necessarily immune to the pressures involved, as the "fake" North American accent he was using wasn't exactly how he spoke at home.

Finally, we wound up the day back across the street in Hall with director Kim Jae-Hoon there for Devils, which had a lot of people talking about it being gorier/more violent than usual, enough to make me wonder if maybe Korean movies have been smoothing themselves out for a more mainstream/international audience? I mean, I haven't really joked about a movie having a Korean level of violence lately, sure, but Project Wolf Hunting wasn't that long ago.

Next up: A quick detour into Fantasia stuff coming out over the next week, and then Hippo, Baby Assassins 2, and Where the Devil Roams as part of the next "regular update". As I post this, the festival is over, but I've got plenty of Letterboxd entries to expand and shorts to write up.


Sien lui yau wan (A Chinese Ghost Story)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Retro, 35mm)

This movie really is just a classic of pulling one crazy thing on top of another that looks like just another briskly zany Hong Kong horror-fantasy-comedy, although if that these things were a dime a dozen I've admittedly got to rack my brains a little as I consider how many of the similar movies I'm thinking about came afterward and tried to imitate what this team did exceptionally well. If this movie's not best-in-class, it's right up there.

After an opening where a scribe meets his end at the hands of a ghostly dancing woman, the film introduces Ling Choi San (Leslie Cheung Kwok-Wing), a shabby traveler who just barely passes a number of dangers and indignities as he makes his way to a town where he's expected to collect a number of debts, as well as swordsmen Yin Chek Ha (Wu Ma) and Hsia Hou (Lam Wai), who have a long rivalry and have chosen the haunted grounds of the Lan Po temple on which to duel. When the broke Choi-San is directed to the temple as a place to sleep without paying, they expect he won't return, but he serendipitously evades some ghosts and throws another, Lip Siu-Sin (Joey Wong Cho-Yin), off with his general decency, to the point where she finds herself unwilling to murder him. Of course, she is by far the most sweet-natured supernatural entity on the premises.

Of all the things that work just a little bit better than could be expected, the not-so-secret weapon is Leslie Cheung, who takes the stock character of the nice but inept twit stumbling through the crazy situation and makes him a genuine heart of the movie hero even though Yuen Kai-Chi's script never actually makes him better at fighting or doing the sort of magic that dispatches supernatural villains. That is a lot more rare than you'd think for the number of these movies that have this naif at their center, but Cheung has the sort of natural sweetness the part needs and an ability to handle tragedy when it becomes clear that Siu-Sin's best ending might be reincarnation rather than resurrection. He and Joey Wong play off each other very nicely at that, she's believably a reluctant monster. Wu Ma, meanwhile, is a counterpart to them falling for each other with bombastic delivery and pragmatism about how she's a ghost and part of something that could cause disaster and he's just a goober who will likely be no help at all.

It's also got some really nifty monster effects in its dessicated mummies, who maybe don't always look great when seen in full, but the filmmakers really maximize their effect when they are introduced, making a scene organized more around comic beats than actual scares still feel sinister and dangerous. The delight taken in the film's special effects work is probably a big part of why the film is often associated as much with producer Tsui Hark as director Tony Ching Siu-Tung, although his work is nothing to sneeze at; he The film is full of fun bits of supernatural madness, including demon weddings and the confidence to do almost zero effects when characters open a portal to another world because there doesn't really need to be something cool there and it would just distract from the thing that's going on and what's up next.

And, yes, there's flying martial arts; Tony Ching started his career as a director with Duel to the Death and is one of the action directors here, and the action always plays as pretty substantial: Even as Wu Man, Lam Wai, Lau Siu-Ming and others are leaping at each other and trading blows with swords as they go by, it seldom feels like there isn't effort behind these impossible showdowns, as opposed to people flying and posing at each other for energy blasts.

All in all, It's a confident, entertaining movie that really nails what makes the genre work at its best.


"How to Get Rid of Your Cheating Husband"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival Underground, digital)

There's an "oblivious-influencer" dynamic to this movie that I don't quite get - insert humblebrag about not watching the kind of short internet videos in question here - but which is kind of amusing regardless, like these two are so far up their own tails that the fact that one friend's husband was another's boyfriend even registers as weird and uncomfortable. Like, it's not so much that they should hate each other rather than him, but that they don't even seem capable enough of extending their awareness that far from their individual selves.

It's kind of the most memorable thing about the short, really; that vibe (combined with German actors who I suspect are exaggerating odd accents when speaking English) is far more memorable than any twist or line that arises out of it.


Booger

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival Underground, DCP)

On the one hand, I always feel embarrassed during this festival about taking days or weeks to get reviews posted. On the other, circling back a week later and comparing what stuck with me to what is in my notes and quick entry on Letterboxd is often clarifying and an odd contrast: For example, a week and a half away from Booger, I had almost completely forgotten that there was a fantasy/horror component to the movie, which speaks to how well the rest of it is done, considering the festival where I watched it.

"Booger" is the name Izzy (Sofia Dobrushin) gives to a stray cat that showed up in the apartment she shared with longtime best friend Anna (Grace Glowicki) a couple years back and decided to stay over Anna's initial objections. But now Izzy has died, and while Anna is trying real hard to hold it together, she can't afford the rent on her own, Izzy's mother Joyce (Marcia DeBonis) is in and out to pack up her daughter's things, and Anna's boyfriend Max (Garrick Bernard) is kind of pissing her off by acting even more broken up about Izzy even though they were never really friends without Anna as an intermediate. On top of that, when Anna tries to get Booger to stop gnawing on a plant, the cat bites her and bolts out an open window, and if it wasn't bad enough that Anna lost Izzy's cat, it's starting to look like that bite is making Anna take on some feline characteristics.

So, if I don't remember much of the whole "turning into a cat person" thing, what did stick in my mind. Well, Grace Glowicki as Anna, mainly; she's in nearly every scene of the movie and gives a performance that stacks all of Anna's emotions rather than switching between them: Weird cat stuff on top of her clearly using her lost cat to keep from collapsing from the loss of her friend on top of the sort of grief that leads to other forms of denial to how she was maybe not entirely sure of herself before all this. She's sort of on her own for much of the movie, although one noteworthy element is just how well she pairs with Marcia DeBonis in navigating the empty space that's supposed to link them; DeBonis's Joyce is obviously devastated while also giving the impression that, at her age, she's encountered death a little more and understands the emotions around it better. It's also impressive just how strong an impression Sofia Dobrushin makes as Izzy in quick bits of random vertical video from the girls' phones, enough to get the impression Anna kind of orbited around her and make other remembrances ring true.

The cat-person story is what sells the movie, though, and even if it falls away when considering what makes this a noteworthy film, in the present one may find oneself wondering if maybe writer/director Mary Dauterman over-committed to the bit, just a little? For as much as I loved the central performance and the sharp way that it looks at grief, there comes a point where I'm a little more tempted to groan and wonder just how many things along these lines that they intended to do, especially when the expressions of it get a little more grotesque than just Anna's habit of licking at the hair that dangles to her mouth. It's not just kind of nasty, but a viewer can kind of feel early on that this isn't really going to be a film where the end is a complete physical transformation or Anna otherwise losing her humanity.

The execution of those things is often pretty strong, though, almost all done with body language and just unwavering dedication to doing this thing, no matter how weird or gross it may be. Still, I think the line which stands out the most is "she was going to leave me?", which changes the grief in a way the audience immediately understands and makes both Anna and Izzy more imperfectly human without ever having to tear either down, even if there's another, more consequential moment that upends the story more.

It's a really impressive little movie in a lot of ways, even if I do worry that the next person I recommend it to won't realize what they're in for.


Kimi wa Hokago Insomnia (Insomniacs After School)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival Underground, DCP)

Is there something about the manga magazine to movie pipeline that enables Japan to send two or three pretty darn good coming of age stories to this festival (which mainly features genre cinema) every year when it seems like this is a genre we barely do in America? Do these movies play theatrically and do well? I'm so curious, because even something as specific in its details as Insomniacs After School is going to be universal to some extent.

It opens with high-school student Ganta Nakami (Daiken Okudaira), who wanders around at night unable to sleep, only to find himself crashing during school hours, thinking he's the only one like this until, sent up to the school's disused observatory on an errand, he discovers Isaki Magari (Nana Mori), a bubbly, popular girl, napping there in a storage locker. They quickly bond over their shared affliction, though school nurse Kurashiki (Yuki Sakurai) informs them that 1 in 4 Japanese have some sort of sleeping disorder, and suggests they re-start an astronomy club to legitimize the use of the room, putting them in contact with graduate Yui Shiromaru (Minori Hagiwara), who led the club the last time it existed and won an award for her astrophotography, though Isaki doesn't take to the technique nearly as well as Ganta.

One thing that I particularly like is that, despite what that last sentence may imply, it's not long after the moment when one recognizes that the movie is kind of built around the boy's perspective and interest that it finds a way to give the girl something that could, eventually, be more hers than his. In some ways, that's the bare minimum, but it's important: A lot of movies don't manage that, and it's very welcome, especially when a person has seen a lot of them and can sort of spot the point where one character may wind up the means for the others to learn a valuable lesson, which is fairly adroitly handled here.

The very appealing leads are a big part of why this is another strong entry in the genre: Daiken Okudaira, for instance, is likable and earnest enough as Ganta but does capture that even a genuinely decent-hearted person can tend to make things about himself, both in terms of being a bit selfish and overreacting when things go wrong, while Nana Mori brings the stubbornness and perhaps desperation behind Isaki's cheerfulness. There are also a bunch of supporting characters who carve out individual places and personalities in pretty limited time, particularly Minori Hagiwara as the nurse one suspects has some sort of similar issues of her own and Haruka Kudo as Isaki's sister Saya, who feels more like a genuine sibling with whom one has a complicated relationship than is often the case in Japanese films (often, there seems to be an age gap or implication that brothers and sisters inhabit different worlds that isn't present here). That includes parents who, even when they're not around much, at least feel like a daily, concerned part of their kids' lives.

Co-writer/director Chihiro Ikeda, for the most part, avoids much in the way of filigree; the film is cleanly shot and generally opts for characters telling each other things rather than flashbacks, because in most cases the fact of someone opening up about what happened is actually more important than its details. They're good at making the quiet emptiness of these towns at night beautiful but also just a bit off; it's nice for Ganta and Isaki to have special space, but less so that they need it. The locations, from the high school with the unlikely observatory to the old ruin Ganta uses as background for a photograph (one of the few times the film gets fancy or clever with its shooting), are enjoyably specific.

It is, as per usual, a very direct film aimed at teenagers like its characters, but it does that very well indeed.


"Sarangi"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, digital)

A young man wanders through an empty school building, inescapable music in the air, but when he finds the person playing it, it only makes things scarier.

Filmmaker Tarun Thind jumps on some pretty common nightmare elements and executes them well, from the unnerving setting with endless hallways that never seem to lead outside to how discovering a musician rather than just something on the PA only makes it worse to the final overload. I suspect that it might have worked even better for me if I had recognized "God Save the Queen" as the tune being played on Indian instruments; knowing that, it works even better as an idea that this definitionally British thing is pervasive even now, having wormed its way into South Asian culture even where it's incompatible and done damage whether one tries to resist or not.


"Two Side"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, digital)

What initially simply looks like a case of school bullying reveals itself as something more sinister, the student at the center starts cracking up.

This is a really nifty short that, perhaps, hints at a sort of cycle of predation on top of the main character just losing his mind, as its animation piles symbol upon ambiguous symbol, with mirrors and masks, the latter literally having two faces. The crime at the center definitely happened, of course, but the implication is that the victim had done the same thing at some point, and so on up and down the line; it just turned out worse. Visually, the film is a treat - all that imagery is great to look at and director Luo Mingyang is terrific about jumping from one perspective to another in both smooth and abrupt fashions.


"English Tutor"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, digital)

Looking to earn some extra money, a college student (Lee Do-Eun) takes a job tutoring So-yeong (Oh Chae-A), but both the student herself and the obsession of her mother (Seo Hye-In) to hear "just one word in English" soon becomes exceptionally unnerving.

Overall, an impressive horror story that doesn't really mess around with subtlety - both So-yeong and her mother are creepy from the start, both made miserable in their own ways from the pressure put upon them, and Lee Do-Eun has a quick descent from someone approaching a job casually to realizing that when you are brought into someone's home, there's a good chance that you'll encounter all the associated issues within. Writer/director Koo Jaho escalates quickly, so that it's quickly chasing the Tutor outside and offering up a bloody result.


"Foreigners Only"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, digital)

A man looking for an apartment (Mostafa Monwar) in Bangladesh finds himself thwarted by numerous openings that are apparently available only to foreigners, building to an obvious solution.

Well, maybe not the obvious solution, as the ads for "Fairosol" skin lightener in the background are apparently only slightly exaggerated from the real projects on offer in South Asia, but the obvious horror movie one. Writer/director Nuhash Humayun is not particularly subtle here, but given how pervasive some of this is, subtlety is not really called for: Between the pervasive advertising and a landlord (Iresh Zaker) making sure that he explains his rationale in clear English (as opposed to Bangala), presenting it as an aspirational issue that nevertheless reveals the sort of combination of snobbery and self-disdain that leads people to diminish themselves. The ultimate solution is gruesome and should logically be fooling nobody, but that's the sick humor of it - people will respond to a surface trait no matter how nasty what's underneath is.


"Tang"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, digital)

Well-enough made to feel closer to "a real movie" than machinima (I've seen Unreal Engine credited in enough actual features to recognize how blurred that line can become), although its basic survival-horror material, short runtime, and lack of dialogue tend to leave it open to interpretation while not giving one a whole lot to interpret. I think it's mostly a nightmare of a woman who feels she is somehow inauthentic after losing a lot of weight or otherwise re-shaping her body being chased down by grotesque, fatty monsters and shed skins, though this doesn't seem to be as prevalent a theme in Korean cinema as it had been in previous years. It's fine, and I suspect younger audiences who can engage more emotionally when they see something that looks like a videogame will probably enjoy it more than I.


"You Will See"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, digital)

In this one, Gwyn (Chng Min Si) comes into possession of a camera that seems to have a mind of its own as she pushes herself further to capture something meaningful.

The thing that resonates me here is the way that carrying a camera around can mess with your mind in a way that having one as part of your phone doesn't; you're constantly looking for a shot rather than capturing one opportunistically, but also often feeling that you don't necessarily have the right to it, that the striking image you've chosen to capture and save and maybe sell or present often comes from someone else. That's the thing that writer/director Kathleen Bu and actress Chng Min Si capture very well here, from Gwyn's nervousness and urgency to things like the camera straps digging into her shoulders, like it's enslaving or capturing her rather than just functioning as a tool.


"Night of the Bride"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, digital)

"Night of the Bride" is a premise that could turn into black comedy with relatively little effort - a young woman (Gurleen Arora) has been kidnapped with the intent to marry her to a desperate mother's son - but writer/director Virat Pal mostly chooses to be relentlessly straightforward in the film's grimness, even if it starts with the odd image of a woman being made up while tied up, like all the questioning and trying to talk one's way out of it happened before that point and now there's just desperate pleading.

Still, that doesn't make Arora's portrayal any less compelling or Harrdeep Kaur any less insane as the mother, and Pal does a nice job of keeping the noose tight, with most of the short taking place within one or two rooms, a wall of resignation among the rest of the cast that seems harder to fight than active cruelty, and a revelation or two that doesn't necessarily surprise but certainly highlights just how difficult these forces can be to resist, even when folks know they are wrong.


"Wang Shen Zhi Ye" ("A Night with Moosina")

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, digital)

A busy animated film in which a kid ventures into the forest after seeing a friend emerge changed, but there's a twisting path to getting out of both the forest and a trans stage with one's life.

Director Tsai Shiu-Cheng offers a sumptuous feast of animation, with screens full of bright colors, often crowded with objects meant to keep humans safe from all the spirits in the forest, even as the colors mute as heroine Chun Mei pushes deeper into darkness. It's an adventurous, often riotous spookshow, but Tsai has the knack for letting all that happen at a pace where the next thing is always a few seconds later than it might otherwise be, just enough to make the audience dread what comes next a little bit more.


Devils

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

As much as yelling "plot hole!" is bad film criticism most of the time, there is some real "we put a lot of effort into showing that something is hard before having it be easy in the home stretch" nonsense going on here that is going to draw that complaint a lot. It maybe shouldn't really matter, because it's mostly in the service of gratuitous last-minute twists which are already kind of a lot, but it does get a "hey!" or at least should.

Two years ago, homicide detective Jae-hwan (Oh Dae-hwan) and partner Gi-nam (Kim Won-hae) thought they had tracked down a ring of serial killers, but things turned sour at the last moment. Now, Jae-hwan has a new partner in Min-seong (Jang Jae-ho), and is determined not to let history repeat when they corner the killers again after a tip from inside the group. During the chase, Jae-hwan and quarry Jin-hyeok (Jang Dong-yoon) vanish when they fall over a ridge, but Jae-hwan's car is soon found with the pair unconscious inside. When he awakes inside the hospital, though, Jae-hwan discovers that he is inside Jin-hyeok's body and vice versa, with the killer threatening to kill his family unless he tracks down Jin-hyeok's partners, so that he can extract revenge for their betrayal.

It doesn't really matter that the end is especially stupid because the film mostly runs on taking a nutty premise and then having something even crazier behind it, and that's executed in such a way to make one kind of admire the sheer audacious nature of it. The cast comes to play, with Jang Dong-yoon making meals of both Jin-hyeok's mad sadism and Jae-hwan's panic while Oh Dae-hwan makes a great leap from "cop on the edge" to sadistic manipulator; if they're not hitting the crazy heights of Travolta and Cage in Face/Off, they're in the same ballpark.

And yet, beyond the high concept, the filmmakers often seem to just go harder instead of enjoying the bold choices they make from the very start. For example, if your serial killers are already painting their victims in weird paint that glows in UV light, why also dismember them? That's taking something that could be uniquely twisted - taunting messages to the forensics guys, for instance - and replacing it with plain gore. There are a half dozen cops in the squad, but none are really memorable, and, heck, even new partner Min-seong is more or less the same guy as Gi-nam, right down to potential family connection. It's bloody, but maybe not that creative in such things aside from the one big idea that carries it for a while, when the plot gives writer/director Kim Jae-Hoon all sorts of opportunity to play with how the line between the cop and killer mindsets can be twisted. Kim's got a story that needs to be very cynical about its cops but doesn't quite manage it.

Kim does have an impressive mean streak, though which manifests itself in impressively staged action as much as so much maniacal laughter. Fights give the characters some room to move and whale on each other, and everything gets bigger and harder without hesitation when it's called for. Big storytelling swings must be accompanied by big action, and he never shrinks from that.

The movie goes from clever to dumb in a big hurry at points, obviously enough to be visible in real time rather than just on further reflection. It's manic enough to keep things going - and at 106 minutes, lean by Korean standards - but sometimes going for broke means falling short even if it's an impressive effort.

The Amazing Maurice

What's "doing well" in theaters for a movie like The Amazing Maurice these days? I saw it on its fourth weekend at Fresh Pond, in a 34-person auditorium that was maybe half-full, and I'd be surprised if it was ever in any larger rooms.over that time. It probably hung around a little longer because most schools in Massachusetts were on vacation this past week and an extra kid-friendly title for matinees couldn't hurt. Still, given how crazy the turnover often is at Fresh Pond - it's a 10-screen theater that is only the closest place for a fairly small area - it's impressive staying power. Most films like this will have two shows a day for a week and be gone.

But this stuck around, and I've kind of got no idea why. Does the Boston area have an unusual number of anglophiles who will say "hey, that's a Terry Pratchett adaptation, I'm in!" without ever seeing a trailer - and is the fact that Apple is a local chain going to make them more sensitive to that, even if they weren't already the place where this sort of thing opened? Did the trailer play before enough other things there to get that audience's attention, like the trailer for The Magic Flute that played before this one? Was it advertised in some way that I, having no kids and not seeing a lot of ads for anything these days, just missed? Would it have played other theaters if the wasn't down 30-odd screens compared to before the pandemic?

I honestly don't know. And does pulling $3M in qualify as a big windfall for Viva Pictures, whose stuff generally seems to go straight to video? Especially as this could sort of be a multiplier for that business, because people might vaguely remember it being in theaters and treat it more like a real movie. Does it count as an overperformance and maybe get director Toby Genkel a look from the bigger studios?

Perhaps, perhaps not. There's so much reporting on the juggernauts that this far more modest thing doesn't get a lot of talk, and likewise, it's hard to say what counts as "success", especially in the current environment. I suspect that this will wind up doing pretty okay by the standards of non-studio animation - it got seven-digit box office, it will probably sell a few more discs^* than usual because Pratchett has fans, and… well, who knows how things go on streaming, although I've got to figure this gives it a little bump.

But I don't know, certainly not well enough to guess as to whether making decent movies at this scale which get this sort of release is sustainable.

^{* A stereographer is mentioned in the credits, so, yeah, I'd like a 3D release, although I suspect that might only happen in the UK and/or Germany.}

The Amazing Maurice

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 February 2023 in Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond/Cambridge #8 (first-run, DCP)

Bold move, small studio, releasing your animated film with a taking orange cat while Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is still in theaters! For all that many may look at this and see an off- brand knockoff, though, it's very much its own thing and does carve out its own space, feeling like it captures just enough of Terry Pratchett's voice to have a distinct appeal. The Amazing Maurice may be a notch below the big boys in some areas, but it's decent all-ages entertainment.

Maurice (voice of Hugh Laurie), as you may have gathered, is a talking cat, which even in the magical realms of Discworld is fairly unusual. He's got a good racket going, showing up in a town along with a rat infestation, drumming up donations for a piper to lead them away. The piper, Keith (voice of Himesh Patel), is in on it, of course, as are the rats, who can also speak. One, Dangerous Beans (voice of David Tenant), tries to convince them to give up swindling, but Maurice prevails, and they're off to a new town. Something is fishy, though - food in the town disappears immediately, as if treats were stealing it, but there are no ordinary, dumb rodents to be found. They, on the other hand, are discovered by the mayor's daughter Malicia (voice of Emilia Clarke), who was already itching to solve the mystery.

Malicia, to this point, had been the film's narrator, the sort that winks hard at the audience because she knows all the tropes, although she's studied harder than the average hero who has learned everything about life from storybooks (she will teach her audience what a "framing device" is and why it's useful). She's rather a lot, to be honest, right on the edge of being the character who ruins the movie both by being the loudest and potentially making it about spoofing other things rather than telling its own story. Fortunately, the filmmakers are mindful of how they mix and match and otherwise divide attention among their ensemble, so that nobody truly takes over or gets crowded out. It also uses its meta winking to drop something kind of important on an audience of unsuspecting kids.

Mainly, it's funny, with a bunch of fun characters from humans to cats to rats that use their broadness to bounce off each other in fun ways, often set up so that one person can be deadpan about how the other is crazy and vice versa without taking sides. It's a smartly twisted take on how talking animal stories would "really" work, what with the non-talking variety tending to eat each other, that nevertheless isn't truly mean, and it's got a good balance of visual and verbal jokes. It's also one of those British cartoons that draws on a ridiculously deep voice cast: Hugh Laurie is smooth but capable of some barbs as Maurice, Emilia Clarke puts enough glee into Malicia's manic know-it-all nature to make her tolerable, David Tenant captures how Beans is a spiritual leader still trying to understand the world, and Gemma Arterton is the good-hearted but no-nonsense Peaches, just to start.

The animation is actually pretty decent cartooning on a budget probably well below what Disney and DreamWorks spend, and smoother than these second-or-third-tier studios often manage (there's a credit or two for stereography, but it didn't play in 3D locally; there's a sequence or two that would probably look good that way but the film doesn't have the too-obvious parallax one often sees when 3D is a high priority). It's got the sort of character design that doesn't exactly feel identifiable as one thing but also isn't quite its own in a lot of places - lots of Disney faces with Aardman noses and spindly Laika legs. The exception is Maurice himself, where the filmmakers have seemingly worked hard to not make him look too much like any other orange cartoon cat from Garfield to Puss in Boots, and seem not to quite know what to do with his toothy mouth before it's time to remember that cats are predators as well as snobs. There are moments when I wonder if it's a bit of a riff on medieval paintings where you wonder if the artist has only heard cats described, which is an interesting idea, but they're fleeting and wouldn't match up with the conventional design elsewhere.

The story is shaggy at times and screenwriter Terry Rossio maybe finds himself a bit tripped up by the end, and maybe not quite sure just how self-referential this should be, but as a whole, it's pretty good all around. The kids in the audience and their Discworld-fan parents both seemed into it, and I must admit, I wouldn't mind seeing this group tackle Pratchett again, maybe poking at something that has been exhausted a little less than fairy tales.

This Week in Tickets: 30 January 2023 - 5 February 2023 (Winter Weather Edition)

January ends with some Oscar catch-up, a reminder that climate change hasn't completely defanged New England winter, and more good stuff.

Things kicked off with a rare-ish Monday night at the movies to see Glass Onion a second time, since I don't have Netflix and we probably won't get a disc until Netflix/Lionsgate/Criterion do some "Knives Out Trilogy" thing in a few years. I liked it more the second time around, and was reminded while writing up last week's Next Week that I made some comment about Johnson maybe being my favorite contemporary filmmaker. Couldn't get to any of the other shows, but I'm thinking I might do a run of the Johnson stuff on my shelves between Film Rolls "seasons".

Speaking of which, Mookie got to Once a Thief a couple nights later, although it didn't really belong on the "unseen" shelves. It was just tough to get a bunch of John Woo stuff and set it aside.

The next couple nights were long ones - All Quiet on the Western Front at the Coolidge on Wednesday, seeing it on the big screen while I can, since it apparently isn't part of the AMC Oscar fest and who knows if we'll have a Regal by the time they're doing theirs? Thursday night was Pathaan, a big ol' Indian spy movie that is apparently the fourth, rather than the first, part of the "YRF Spy Universe". The rest are available on Prime, (one even in 4K!), so I might also do a run of those in the next couple weeks.

It got really cold that night - it was actually stupidly cold as I walked to Magoun to catch the train to Pathaan, but warmed up by the time I got to the Brattle for Jethica on Saturday. How cold? Well, the pipes froze, despite everyone's best efforts, but that's happened before and it was no big deal, eventually, but this time pipes in the wall behind my shower broke in two places. I discovered this just before heading to bed after Bruce landed on Romancing in Thin Air, a Johnnie To film that keys on a character freezing to death.

So, I spent a lot of Sunday watching the landlord try and get it fixed, but still had time to head out to the first "Silents, Please!" of 2022, Within Our Gates (with bonus feature The Other Woman's Story). I might have headed for another movie afterwards, but, not going to lie, was feeling kind of scuzzy from not being able to take a shower, so I headed back home.

Which gets us to the present, down to not being able to have a shower until tomorrow morning. Stil watching movies, though, so follow me on Letterboxd for first drafts of everything but the Film Rolls stuff.

Glass Onion

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 January 2023 in Landmark Kendall Square #1 (Filmmaker Focus: Rian Johnson, DCP)

There's an argument that the real test of a mystery story is the second viewing, when the audience is looking out for every hidden clue or bit of performance that might be misdirecting but genuine. I don't necessarily hold to that - it's nice when a mystery works that way, but I don't think it's more important than the "ya got me!" the first time through - but I do think that this is where Glass Onion really shines: It's a pretty terrific "second time through" mystery, while Knives Out was the better rug-pull.

On the first go-round, it takes far too long for the first body to drop, but the broadness of the comic bits works pretty well the second time around: When you recognize which ones aren't actually hiding anything, you can just enjoy the goofing around, rather than strain for significance that a moment just may not have, while the moments that do matter pop.

And once there's a murder to solve in the second half, things start clicking into place and moving full throttle, both the first and second times. Unlike the first Knives Out, very little of the killer cast winds up feeling like pure red herrings to keep the suspect count high, and the tight time frame keeps lulls from happening. The commentary winds up sharper and probably benefits some from the space since its original release: It was exceptionally well-timed to dunk on Elon Musk, but with him moving from the foreground to a consistently-too-loud bit of background noise, that means all the other jabs at folks like him can skewer their targets. Even the last act's broadest jokes are plenty sharp, even if I'm not sure that the big finale really works: <SPOILERS!> As great as Janelle Moná, Edward Norton, Daniel Craig, and the rest of the cast are here, I think Johnson plays things a little too much like broad comic spectacle as opposed to the expression of pure rage, and how someone will do something really transgressive to avenge whom they've lost. <!SRELIOPS%gt;

Ultimately, it's a little more shaggy than it maybe should be, but even better than I initially thought. Benoit Blanc's second outing is a worthy successor to the first, and I'm excited for more.

Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front '22)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 February 2023 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #2 (special engagement, DCP)

I'm sure there are other genres where the same thing can be said, but if it's possible for a movie to be too well-made, the war film is maybe where it can be the most obvious. This one, for instance, has so many moments when the striking cinematography, makeup, and other pieces of technical excellence or clever storytelling register as accomplishments more than enhancing the emotion of the moment. Filmmaker Edward Berger will build a striking image of German soldier Paul Bäumer worn down, dragged through a mire, and I'll notice the meticulousness of it: That is some incredible caking of mud on the soldier's face; it will look fantastic as a still or presented in 4K with HDR.

It's not really as overwhelming as all that for long stretches, though, and the film is impressive in how conscious it is of how war destroys its soldiers as human beings. This comes out most during the fighting, when filmmakers might be tempted to use doubles or worry about staging more than performance. That's when we see that Paul has become good at this, though, a berserker with just enough self-awareness to recognize that he's a monster even in the moment. Felix Kammerer really nails that aspect of the character, letting a demon loose and afraid of it as much as he's afraid of dying the rest of the time, and these moments are spread out just enough to highlight how the soldiers are young men occasionally making memories that could be nostalgic later. It's more than a bit diluted by cuts to the brass, although maybe that's needed to drive home that this damage isn't something that just happened to these young men, but something done, especially in the final, futile chapter.

Is it too consciously impressive? Maybe, but even some of the showier parts are able to overcome how nifty them being unusual decisions is. I love Volker Bertelmann's score, for instance, a bass rumble that hovers between anachronistic atonality and an orchestra stripped down to its bass. And, nothing wrong with showing off a bit, because that sort of thing is at least interesting to look at and consider. Besides, it's a Netflix movie, so maybe you need that to get people locked in rather than giving it half their attention while folding laundry, even if it's a bit much in a theater.

Fantasia 2022.09: The Harbinger, Stellar: A Magical Ride, "Lass Mörder Sein", and Megalomaniac

In a month and a half or so, when I'm joking about how all the people at Fantastic Fest saying they're really feeling it after four or five days are soft, I won't mention that day nine of Fantasia was like this, with me missing the first show because I was doing day job stuff (which engages a different part of the brain), taking a slot in the afternoon off because I'm still not into the Cavalcade of Perversions, and then effectively punting the last film because I was drifting off.

It's taken me this long to figure out that I should probably sit a bit further back for late shows in De Seve than I typically do. There's a stage and stadium seating, and widescreen films are a bit further up, so when I'm hanging out in the third row my natural eyeline might actually be underneath the screen. If you're starting to feel the length of the day, dropping it just a little means you're no longer looking at the actual film and then it's just a bit easier to drop out.

Not that this was a particular issue with Harbinger, a darn good covid-set horror flick that had a nice turnout even for the second show: Writer/director Andy Mitton, producer Richard W. King, co-stars Myles Walker, Gabby Beans, and Emily Davis, plus producer/guy-playing-three-rolls-but-only-one-where-you-see-his-face Jay Dunn. I noted with some amusement that Walker at least was masked right until he sat on the lip of the stage and most of them had masks at the ready. The folks who made a movie set in New York during the early days of Covid were still taking it seriously.

Of course, the pandemic is part of the reason that they were in this movie, too - the cast was almost entirely New York stage actors who took on the job while Broadway and even most of the city's smaller stages were shut down, and had probably spent a fair amount of time in the circumstances that inspired the movie.

See also Stellar director Kwon Soo-kyung, whose movie isn't quite the creative (but probably impossible to actually stage) car chase movie suggested by its taglines, but a shaggier sort of caper with hints at something a bit mystical but doesn't actually rely on it. Not disappointing at all, but also maybe not what one expects from a Korean film in this particular place.

He noted that "casting" the car took a bit of effort - they managed to source two Hyundai Stellars from the proper year and they were apparently every bit as much of a pain in the ass as portrayed in the film, one of them basically unsalvageable by the time they were done shooting and the other, well, not exactly something he'd want to keep as a souvenir. There's a little meta moment in the movie where the lead has the chance to sell it to someone who needs them because they're making a period film, and it speaks a bit to how that can be tricky; there's not a lot of people keeping non-classics like this model in good condition.

Also, in response to a question, he had never heard of Herbie: The Love Bug (which kind of feels like it might be due for a Disney+ revival especially since it's been a while since "New Beetles" were a thing). Just not really a thing in South Korea.

Last up, we've got Megalomaniac writer/director Karim Ouelhaj and producer Florence Saâdi, with (I think) the festival's Celia Pouzet on the left. As I mentioned before, I hit the wall during this one, so I really didn't have much context for their Q&A. The movie itself is stylish but punishing, so I wasn't exactly tempted to try and catch the second screening a couple days later. Must be a different experience at 11am Sunday morning capred to 10pm Friday.

Next up for Saturday the 23rd: Anime no Bento, Demigod: The Legend Begins, My Grandfather's Demons, Deadstream, and Kappei.

The Harbinger

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

I found myself excited by the opening of this movie just seeing that it was going to acknowledge the pandemic. It will, after all, be very strange when, in a decade or two, people start talking about the movies that best represent the 2020s and the thing that defines the early part of the decade is just never present. Even better, though, is that this is a genuinely creepy movie that has all the fears and concerns of these days right at its heart.

As it starts, Mavis (Emily Davis) is not doing well at all, sleepwalking around her Queens apartment, disturbing the neighbors, and having to take increasingly extreme means to snap out of it. The building manager (Jay Dunn) asks if there is some family or friends in the city that she can call, but there really isn't. There is Monique (Gabby Beans), though, a college friend who is trying to ride out the pandemic in a bubble with brother Lyle (Myles Walker) and father Ronald (Raymond Anthony Thomas) at the family home, and Mavis was there for Monique when she needed it. So back to the city she goes, where she finds Mavis is in a really bad state - sometimes sleeping for days, having to dig deep into her skin with her nails to wake herself up from bad dreams which feature the figure of a plague doctor. Soon, Monique is having those dreams too, and when Reddit points them to a demonologist who does Zoom consultations (Laura Heisler), they are told to delete any mention of the problem from the internet, because this thing is a powerful meme (in the classic sense of the word) that can spread just through people knowing about it.

It's a sneaky good metaphor that Mitton has found here, not an allegory for the disease itself but the heightened sense of anxiety and alienation that were a by-product of trying to deal with it. Lots of people lost sleep, found themselves out of contact with friends, or saw people just disappear from their lives without a proper goodbye. The movie does a nifty job of heightening all of that, establishing its own mythology on top of it, careful not to make something real into the work of an outside force. There's a sharp sense of the trade-offs made while people were hunkered down, with the genuine relief Monique and Mavis feel at considering each other safe enough to unmask and approach compared to how Monique's family is warm appreciative of each other but also kind of on edge as the fortress mentality takes hold.

Another part of what makes the whole thing work is not getting too fancy with its nightmares - as surreal as dreams and dream imagery can be, they often feel ordinary in the moment, so Mitton and his crew don't change the lighting or color grading or focus on anything immediately strange until it would also alert Monique. The slow realization that one is in a dream, without it even being weirdly ironic, and the difficulty getting out, pushes the particular horrors of its setting even further. The twist, when it comes, is almost self-aware, what a dream should be, fed when that's an expectation that can be subverted.

There's also a pretty great cast, New York stage actors available because their shows were canceled, fresh faces who are nevertheless not affected, comfortable with a story that they are often telling to each other rather than recreating. Gabby Beans and Emily Davis have such good chemistry together that it's easy to miss just how solidly this film is built around Monique's perspective, with Davis finding ways to carry both Mavi's accelerating breakdown from scene to scene even as Monique's presence is ameliorating it. Beans makes Monique empathetic and thoughtful in a strange situation while still seeming unusually heroic, and her scenes with Myles Walker and Raymond Anthony Thomas feel like a family that gets along but has some sharp differences in priority about how to deal with something like the pandemic. I hope some of them wind up doing more film.

The movie does stretch on a bit toward the end, when it sort of gets into potential mechanics of defeating the Plague Doctor on the one hand and struggles a bit with what sort of horror movie it is on the other - is it ultimately going to be about facing and defeating one's fears or about creating unease and despair to the last frame? There's not exactly a right or wrong answer as opposed to preferred ones, and it's also something of a relief to see these particular fears handled at all.

Stellar (aka Stellar: A Magical Ride)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

The high concept used to sell Stellar - a repo man chases down a stolen Lamborghini Huracan with his father's beat-up Hyundai Stellar - probably would have been impossible to pull off as anything but the most carefully constructed car-chase movie imaginable, far more likely to fall critically short than succeed. Instead, the filmmakers go for something a little more offbeat, and the result is fine - not brilliant, not a disaster, but eminently watchable on a lazy evening.

It starts with Young-bae (Son Ho-jun) and his partner Cheol-gu (Ko Kyu-pil) getting their hands on said red Italian supercar and stashing it it the garage owned by Young-bae's friend Dong-sik (Lee Kyu-hyung) until it's time to deliver to their boss Seo (Heo Sung-tae) so that he can put it on a ship for a foreign buyer. Dong-sik drives off with it, though, and Seo interrupts Young-bae and sister Young-mi (Kim Seul-gi) at their father's funeral to exact punishment. Young-bae escapes, but can't take his own car; instead, he's forced to use the Stellar that his father bought to use as a taxi some thirty years ago and has probably spent the last decade under a tarp. It's no match for a Lamborghini - it topped out at about 50 km/h (about 30 mph) and has seen better days besides - but Young-bae has to find Dong-sik before chasing him anyway.

There are a lot of things in Bae Se-young's screenplay that don't really make a whole lot of sense - would this car not have some sort of tracker, for one, and just how exactly does Seo think that beating on Young-bae and taking his non-shitbox car is going to do anything to advance his goal of getting the Lambo back (it always strikes me that the really successful gangsters are the ones who are able to frighten but not do actual damage, keeping underlings useful and debtors repaying, and Seo doesn't seem very good at that in this instance)? Meanwhile, Dong-sik is just kind of hanging around, not quite waiting to be found but not doing a lot to make Young-bae work for it.

Then again, that's not exactly what this movie is really about - the Stellar is not just a cruddy old car, but a connection to Young-bae's late father (Jeon No-min), whom Young-bae hadn't seen much since he left his wife and children in a "they're better off without me" thing and still resents. Of course, girlfriend Sung-hee (Park Se-young) has just had a positive pregnancy test, so Young-bae has a lot of issues to work through, and the script has him just aware enough of this that when he finds himself talking to the car, he'll finish it by rhetorically asking who he's talking to. And while Seo is in no way any kind of father figure, every misadventure Young-bae gets into that doesn't specifically involve him plays on parents and children in some way, and that's before you get to how, while the car may not have Herbie levels of personality, it can be arbitrary in ways that are all too human. Hmm…

It puts the car in enjoyably abrasive company, as Young-bae can be a selfish dirtbag, but Son Ho-jun isn't asked to cross the line to mean and it's pretty clear that he's basically responding to a world that has treated him poorly in kind. Lee Kyu-hyung and Ko Kyu-pil similarly play unreliable but not mean-spirited partners, and Heo Sung-tae navigates his role as the main villain well, able to look the fool while still being threatening. And while this never becomes a movie built around the chase, the moments where it does start leaning into action, vehicular or otherwise, are not bad at all, particularly one chase with a whole slew of unlikely participants that eventually winds up in reverse.

Even knowing that it's not going to be all chase, the film winds up more than a bit sillier and sappier than it initially sounds, but it mostly navigates that fairly well. It just means there's still room for someone to figure out what happens when you put the Transporter or Special Delivery drivers behind the wheel of a Stellar and ask them to catch the Lamborghini…

"Lass Mörder Sein"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Max Gleschinski has made impressive little lo-fi short here - a sometimes painfully slow burn that opens with a slow pan across what will be revealed as a crime scene, a murder committed with no particular motive for gain, before flashing back to show how it went, and how it could have gone. It issues its foregone conclusion early, and then somehow still manages to build tension through its dynamic of reluctance, bullying, and something just hanging there unsaid - a woman caught between not really being interested in some guys' company not sure whether to push them away or not, even if the situation isn't consciously registering as unsafe.

The film consciously avoids much in the way of obvious polish, opting to look like something its characters might make using regular consumer equipment. There's no glee in the violence, and Gleschinski keeps rolling long enough after for it not to feel like a climax, managing to make the dragging it out seem purposeful.

Megalomaniac

(Sort of) Seen 22 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

As I say up top, I hit the wall during this one and really didn't absorb much of anything during it. It's a particularly rough sort of movie to do that with, because from what I saw it seemed to be trying to illustrate something cyclical, and was also maybe told out of strictly chronological order, so it's easy to get lost. I got very lost indeed.

A ton of style, though - it's a great looking movie that does an excellent job of establishing that the twisted and horrific can often exist behind boring, bucolic fronts in any neighborhood. The soundtrack is also terrific, and necessarily loud.