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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Niko

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


"Idyll"

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

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

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


"Soulmate" '26

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

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

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


"Algorithm"

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

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

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

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


"Szum fal" ("Noise of Waves")

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

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

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

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


"Horse Fly"

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

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

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


"HappyDeal"

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

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

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

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


You Are the Film

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


"175"

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

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

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


Paradise (Attack on Paradise)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Film Rolls Season 2, Round 08: Jagko and Beggars of Life

Heh, whoops!

No mistakes for Dale, who rolls a 14 and makes it almost to the end of the first row, landing on another from the Korean Film Archive, Jagko. You know what's kind of cool? You can search the Harvard Film Archives's website to see if they've played a movie over the past 25 years or so, and I'm kind of mildly surprised this hasn't. They play a fair amount of Korean cinema and this seems up their alley. I'm also kind of surprised that the program I figured it would have played in was 20 years ago. Time flies!

The "whoops" came a couple days later when Centipede rolled a 4 and landed on Beggars of Life, which really shouldn't have been on the shelf full of movies I haven't seen before because I saw it back in 2017, at the Archive, coincidentally enough. It didn't exactly feel familiar while watching it so much as like the sort of thing I've absorbed through osmosis, so I'm keeping it in. Kind of envying those who can be asked if they've seen a movie and just remember their every thought about it, though.

Solid as heck couple days here:

Jagko (aka Pursuit of Death)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Korean Film Archive Blu-ray)

Yeah, I'm very glad I bought a bunch of Korean Film Archive discs sight unseen when they were on sale a couple years back. Jagko is a terrific little drama with just enough thriller in it to keep it interesting and probably a whole ton of extra layers for people in 1980 Korea.

It starts by introducing the audience to Song Gi-yeol (Choi Yun-Seok), once a cop but now an alcoholic vagrant, being picked up and sent to a "rehab center" that doesn't offer much in the way of services or chance to leave - if its residents had family they hadn't alienated, they wouldn't be there - only to discover with shock that one of the other residents (Kim Hui-ra) appears to be Baek Gong-san aka "Jagko", the communist guerilla whose capture soon after the war was going to seal Song's reputation as a fast-rising star, but whose embarrassing escape left Song looking incompetent at best and complicit at worst. He's been chasing this white whale for decades, and does not intend to stop just because the guy at the other end of the bunkhouse says he's never even heard of this Jagko guy.

Writer Song Kil-han and director Im Kwon-taek don't leave the audience in suspense very long; it's hard to have parallel flashbacks if Jagko is not around, somewhere, to do the flashing back. Happily, Im and company do good work revealing what is the case to the audience while still making Song's certainty be more the result of his obsession than any evidence that "Kim" is actually the man he is looking for. It sets up a tight game of cat-and-mouse, as both parties try to recruit their fellow inmates to help them thwart the other, the stakes objectively small and petty but also all that both of them have got. Heck, at times they're all that the other people in this dormitory have; none of them really have any investment in Song's obsession or special fondness for Kim beyond the anti-communist background noise the ROK has been putting out their entire lives (that the institution keeping them off the streets is pretty socialist barely even registers as irony), but it's a little exciting and something to do, although most would prefer not to rock the boat. This isn't a case where the feud is going to spill out and metastasize into some larger cancer, but where it might be remembered as a weird thing that happened this one time.

The flashbacks fill it out, establishing why the stakes are so high for the pair of them. Im jumps back and forth and from one to the other, building a sense of tragedy as it's not always clear whether either could have stepped back and lived a normal life: For all that Song is clearly making self-destructive decisions which wind up dooming both himself and his quarry, the suggested magnitude of Jagko's crimes and the stigma associated with communism during these years may have been worse, such that Jagko could never fully open up to any of his lovers and Song maybe never could live down even the suspicion that he let the other man escape on purpose. There's still a litany of lives ended or ruined in their wake, and each episode feels substantial as it asks the question of whether things would turn out different if Song just stopped here without taking the audience away from the present for too long.

Choi Yun-seok and Kim Hui-ra both impress as Song and Jagko, respectively; though the audience never gets to see either at their peak, but we do get a sense of their decay, and how, even in this state, Song's got this vestigial arrogance and Jagko a certain charisma that probably made him a successful revolutionary back in the day, whether never going long without a girlfriend, even living off the grid, or convincing folks that Song might pose a threat to them as well. The film is populated by a number of entertaining minor characters, and the filmmakers have a knack for giving each marginal environment they find themselves in have a distinct feel and be a notable step down.

It wavers a bit toward the end, when the pair must explicitly confront that they are, ultimately, the only constants in each other's lives, and that the world has in many ways moved on from their conflict. I gather Im was a workhorse director cranking out genre films, and even if he was playing with grander ideas here, there's still an odd directness in the last act and curtness at the very end that's not really unlike what came before at all, but isn't quite what it could be. Jagko is sort of a grindhouse film with ambitions, ones it lives up to more along the way versus at the conclusion.

Beggars of Life)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Kino Lorber Blu-ray)
Where to stream it, or buy the DVD at Amazon (wait, is my BD really out of print?)

The bulk of Beggars of Life can't measure up to its opening scenes, which can shock a modern audience with just how frank and sophisticated a silent movie can be. When most of what one sees from the era is slapstick comedy or grand epics, the grim tableau an amiable train-hopper finds and the double-exposed flashback where he gets an explanation are a heck of an eye-opener.

That hobo is Jim (Richard Arlen) - "The Boy" - who pokes his head into a farmhouse and sees what initially seems to be an abandoned meal, although on closer examination, the farmer is at the table, dead. His stepdaughter Nancy (Louise Brooks) admits to killing him, but it's pretty clear that he had it coming after years of abuse. Though Jim is reluctant to get mixed up in this, he eventually lets her tag along, disguised as a boy, as he makes his way to Canada, where a relative supposedly has a job waiting for him. Eventually, though, the body will be discovered and a reward posted, word of which makes it to a hobo camp led by The Arkansaw Snake (Robert Perry), possibly leaving Nancy's fate in the hands of the eccentric Oklahoma Red (Wallace Beery).

The billing of the stars is interesting, almost a hundred years later - most today will think of this as a Louise Brooks film, and she's pretty great; Brooks establishes Nancy as someone just strong enough to be able to move forward but still kind of reeling from what she's had to do to get to this point; Nancy's a haunted heroine who never quite comes off as a damsel in distress but also clearly can use the support Jim offers. Richard Arlen (second-billed) is pleasant enough as Jim, who is maybe more of a match for Brook's Nancy that a complement, someone who has seen his own sort of hard times but still has a good core, and as the film goes on one gets the impression that what's awaiting him in Canada is not nearly as sure as he claims, but he's trying to will it into being for Nancy's sake. Arlen is one of a large number of matinee idols who run together now, handsome and capable enough to have had notable roles in a number of films for decades, but never quite had the combination that made him an icon remembered the way his co-stars were. Both are billed below Wallace Beery, who makes hobo "Oklahoma Red" memorable but an oddity to a later audience, like we're supposed to enjoy the familiarity of his shtick as much as its content. He'd become an icon of sorts, and he's pretty good here, enough that one can see why he's positioned as the central character despite not showing up until relatively late; he grabs the audience's attention and there's at least a genuine arc and question about whether he will ultimately defend or betray the young pair.

The opening is the best part, though, direct and filled with genuine horror without much in the way of euphemism or equivocation on whether or not Nancy is in the right; director William A. Wellman jumps from Jim's stark discovery to Nancy's somewhat dazed telling without skipping a beat. It's a tough bar to clear, but if the film never has another sequence that good, it at least lets those scenes hang over the rest of the movie: What could have been a bit of ill-advised comedy becomes something more sinister, and every further threat of violence reflects what specific horrors might await Nancy. When the film attempts to impress in other ways - for instance, a runaway train that makes for a nifty climax without making this the sort of thrill picture one associates with Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton - it's generally done very well.

I'm tempted to give this another watch relatively soon, rather than wait another decade for it to reclassify itself in my head as primarily one of Louise Brooks's iconic roles, just to see how it hits when expecting all three stars to have the same sort of weight.


Well, that's a push.

Dale Evans: 37¼ stars
Centipede: 37½ stars

Centipede still ahead by the same nose as before.

The King's Warden

Looks like Boston got this in its second week in North America, and hopefully the snow doesn't screw its run up too badly - it's a good little movie that will probably get pushed out this weekend when Scream 7 swallows multiplexes in general and Pegasus 3 and the big furry(ish) track racing anime sucks up all the Asian cinema screens. But, right now the AMC app is simultaneously telling me that I have a ticket for Pegasus 3 in Imax tonight and that all of their theaters are closed indefinitely, so who knows?


Wanggwa Saneun Namja (The King's Warden aka The Man Who Lives with the King)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 February 2026 in AMC Causeway Street #3 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

The King's Warden has a hook that would make a terrific TV series - poor village campaigns to host exiled king for the economic benefits - except that history is not always going to accommodate the ensemble comedy set-up. Still, for all that Korean films can often give one tonal whiplash, this one handles the mood changes extremely well, though I imagine how well it plays for Korean viewers who know their country's history.

(Heck, how does it play now, in the aftermath of an attempted coup?)

The King in question is Li Hong-wi (Park Ji-hoon), who ascended as a teenager in 1452 but was overthrown by his uncle Sa-yong a year later and imprisoned in the palace, kept in line by minister Han Myeong-hoe (Yoo Ji-tae). Meanwhile, out in the sticks, village chief Eom Heung-doe (Yoo Hae-jin) is separated from his party during a hunting expedition and comes upon a village not unlike his own that is nevertheless eating extremely well. The secret, he's told, is that when the Minister of Justice was exiled from the palace, he settled there, and not only did the central government keep him well-supplied but the Minister wound up teaching the local children out of boredom. Heung-doe decides his village should ride this gravy train, and convinces Han to exile "Lord Nason" to them, not realizing it's the young king. Not only does this make the new situation highly volatile, but they are not far from where Hong-wi's uncle Crown Prince Geumseong (Lee Jun-hyuk) has been exiled, and the more ambitious Geumseong could use Hong-wi to give him some legitimacy if he challenges Sa-yong.

For as much as listing the major players makes the film sound full of palace intrigue, the front half at least plays more like an ensemble comedy, introducing Eom, his family, and neighbors on the one hand and Hong-wi and his concerned maid (Jeon Mi-do) on the other, and seeing how they bounce off each other. Mostly, it's a fine comedic vehicle for Yoo Hae-jin, playing the sort of puffed-up character whose clownish exasperation could get annoying if it weren't executed so well - it's the sort of Korean movie where the frustrated dialog is often a sort of loud, drawn-out wheeze - rounding into a more sympathetic shape as the film goes on. I don't know that I necessarily buy a deep bond between him and Park Ji-hoon's "Lord Nosan", though I like their parallel, connected journeys. Park does well starting from a more muted place than many filmmakers would have chosen.

It's a historical tale, so obviously it can't just be a situation comedy where the naive young king and the poor but practical village people learn from each other, but it evolves fairly smoothly, which is kind of impressive, considering that jarring tonal shifts can be one of the hallmarks of Korean cinema. The intrigue is introduced as a joke - the folks from the neighboring village being like "good luck with that, glad we dodged that arrow!" - and then sort of grows organically with the comedic material, as Hong-wi's sense of responsibility and connection to the people of this village grows, with Eom also reordering his personal and community responsibilities. The way Geumseong and Han Myeong-hoe emerge is interesting, with the former not a bad guy but maybe not thinking beyond the situations of the noble/ruling class, while the latter plays up his round baby face until it's time to be genuinely cruel and diabolical.

The whole thing is pretty nicely put together, too, making its modest scale work even when one might try to stretch to something more ornate. Even the CGI animals are mostly acceptable, in that they won't convince you that they're real but that they're definitely good enough if the other alternative is having a live tiger on set. In some ways, right-sizing is what makes this a nice surprise; there are a lot of opportunities to do too much or cut some corner, but every decision director Jang Hang-jun and company makes seems to make The King's Warden a more effective whole.

Film Rolls Season 2, Round 06: Harry Palmer and Shin Dong-hun

It's gonna be a long one today, because I spent the next month after round 5 getting through a couple of box sets!

Dale rolls a three, making the relatively short hop to Imprint's very slick-looking Harry Palmer box set! I don't necessarily need or even want fancy box sets much these days - horizontal inches of shelf are at a premium! - but this is a pretty nice package, which generally seems to be the case with Imprint, although I haven't gotten very many more of the fancy releases. Tariffs & shipping make it rough, currently.

To start December, Centipede rolled a 17, which jumps then a good way into the first Korean box, which is all material from the Korean Film Archive. I purchased a bunch of those when Kimchi DVD had a sale and I figured, what the heck, these things may never be cheaper (or even available again), and shipping costs less per disc when you order a bunch, and I've got the tendency of thinking of Korean cinema a starting roughly when Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance arrived stateside, so why not give myself the chance to learn more. The first one landed on was a pair of animated films from 1967 by Shin Dong-hun.

So, that's five movies (and a bunch of special features) that kept me busy for the better part of a month. How'd it go?

The Ipcress File

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

The Imprint disc includes the trailer, and it's kind of telling that, even more than highlighting how this is based on a very popular novel and some of the people who worked on the James Bond movies, it promotes Michael Caine as an exciting young face to watch. Obviously, they got that call right: I don't know that the pointedly non-Bond-like spy story is actually that great, but everything that would make Caine a star in the 1960s and 1970s is here from the start, just the right ingredient to make a movie that flirts with dryness kind of exciting.

Caine plays Harry Palmer (nameless in the original Len Deighton novels), a former soldier that got a little bit too entrepreneurial with the supplies and was given the choice of working for MI-5 or prison. He's bored out of his mind doing surveillance for Colonel H.L. Ross (Guy Doleman), who seconds the insubordinate agent to Major Dalby (Nigel Green), a stuffy middle-manager investigating the abduction of British scientists who, when ransomed, are seemingly unable to continue their work.

Palmer was given a name for the movies, presumably because dialog that avoids mentioning it would have called attention to the filmmakers trying to avoid naming him more than it would have allowed him to be an anonymous functionary in the way that a novel told in the first person would (the special features tell what feel like oft-repeated stories about Caine and the producers trying to come up with the most unobtrusive name possible). Which is not to say Palmer is a cipher - he is a man of intelligence and taste, but with a scrappy, working-class edge to him, a guy you can easily imagine doing the crimes alluded to but also honest enough in his way, observant and willing to take the straightest line between points A and B even when it's not the done thing. He is in this way the template for every character Caine would play over at least the next twenty years, at least until he became a familiar and reassuring presence, and he's got it down to a science from the start. He's well-paired with everybody else in the film - Guy Doleman as the boss who knows you've got to embrace all of Palmer to get his best work, Nigel Green as the aristocratic officer who is increasingly irrelevant in post-war Britain, Sue Lloyd as the office girl who knows exactly what Palmer is up to, Gordon Jackson as a veteran who has just the class and experience to be amusedly aloof, etc. - and it never becomes a story about Palmer, or the sort of 1960s Brit he embodies, but who he is feels essential to the story and Michael Caine feels essential to that.

It's wrapped around a story about brainwashing, which is central to a few high-profile Cold War thrillers (The Manchurian Candidate being the most obvious), and looking at it from 60 years later, it's kind of odd that it was not a big part of more. It was, after all, presented as an existential ideological conflict, and the fear that one could have one's brain broken to embrace communism despite it being obviously inferior (and, indeed, necessitating some sort of traumatic attack) was embedded deep enough to still persist today, despite somewhat different targets. There's maybe a metaphor to that sort of collectivism smothering individual genius or making one a mindless pawn, even with the idea that Palmer's rebellious streak is what might serve as a bulwark against it.

Or not; the film is rather too matter-of-fact to lean into that sort of thing. It makes for an entertaining watch, though, as Palmer does something more like actual police work than one sees in crime or espionage films, finding the short cuts through his networks that would give him information the likes of Dalby wouldn't even consider important. It climaxes on a grueling attack on his mind as he tries to resist brainwashing, an impressively surreal moment that nevertheless emphasizes the crudity of the process, like Palmer isn't important enough for bespoke mind-control.

All in a day's work, of course, although Palmer and the film have no illusions about the nobility of such work.


Funeral In Berlin

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Imprint Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the American disc at Amazon

Following The Ipcress File about a year and a half later, Funeral in Berlin is probably the best of the Harry Palmer films, especially for those who come to them looking for a sort of anti-James Bond. It's the purest game of spy-versus-spy (versus spy?) of the bunch, with a story that demands attention and a reminder of just how present some elements we take for granted were at the time.

It has Palmer (Michael Caine) dispatched to Berlin, where he had been stationed at the time of his arrest, to facilitate the defection of Col Stok (Oscar Homolka), a KGB official about to be transferred from Berlin to somewhere far less prestigious and feeling disrespected, a huge get if for real, and one who demands his extraction be handled by Kreutzman (Günter Meisner), who has proven the most capable and audacious at smuggling people across the border. Palmer will be working with Johnny Vulkan (Paul Hubschmid), a co-conspirator in the larceny that got Harry blackmailed into the secret service (although Harry kept his mouth shut). He immediately finds he has the attention of model Samantha Steel (Eva Renzi), and while Harry isn't necessarily one to feel she's too beautiful for the likes of him, he's not a big believer in coincidence, either.

More so that the other films, Funeral is concerned with the mechanics of spycraft, how one goes about arranging something which must be audacious and almost undetectable, linking the skills of both street criminals and officials at anonymous desks doing boring file-pulling. The filmmakers put together a lean, streamlined tale with very few unnecessary parts, even though some may look like needless procedural detail. The main set-pieces of extractions are thrilling and full of a sort of whimsy amid the serious business, and as before, the ensemble around Caine is well-chosen: Everybody easily embodies what they appear to be, enough to keep everything moving forward in parallel with the audience not necessarily questioning more than they are meant to, and easily maintain that sense even their hidden agendas are revealed. The key to being a good spy, apparently, is presenting as much truth as one can so as not to slip up, and a good thriller reveals the parts of the lie that matter without making one feel a fool for missing it.

Which, inevitably, leads to something devastating for the seemingly aloof Palmer: On the one hand, he finds himself still quite capable of rage even beyond the manipulation by friends and foe that he has come to accept as par for the course. For as cynical as he is, he's not actually close to amoral, and while it's been fun to see him puzzle his way through things and adapt when he can't, there are points at the film where he's got to deal with anally not being who he had hoped and the fact that an enemy rather likes him despite it all. It's not a big breakdown scene, but one does get enough of a sense of Harry that it's not exactly surprising that he's done all he could to leave this life behind by the start of the next movie.


Billion Dollar Brain

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 November 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Imprint Blu-ray)
Where to stream it, or buy the all-region Australian box set at Amazon

It's easy to get kind of excited but also somewhat wary when getting ready to watch Billion Dollar Brain: This is the most overtly spy-fi premise of the three Harry Palmer stories, often treated as more grounded than the rest of the genre, but it's also got Ken Russell in the director's chair, and maybe a screwy story will allow for a preview of Russell's later, stranger work. Or maybe it will just be a mess.

As it starts, Palmer (Michael Caine) is working as a low-rent private eye, finishing another tawdry divorce case only to find prior employer Colonel Ross (Guy Doleman) waiting for him, looking to bring him back into the fold. Palmer refuses, but also takes a call from a recorded voice that wants to hire him to deliver a sealed package to Helsinki, where he's to meet American comrade Leo Newbigen (Karl Malden), though it's his paramour Anya (Françoise Dorléac) who is at the airport when he arrives. These two threads are, of course, the same case, with Palmer realizing he's smuggling eggs filled with a dangerous virus, and that Newbigen is working for - and plans to recruit Harry into - an anti-communist organization led by a former General Midwinter (Ed Begley Sr.) whose activities are plotted by a fancy computer. Harry is dispatched to Latvia to facilitate a revolution before arriving at Midwinter's Texas compound.

If it were a better movie, Billion Dollar Brain would be ripe for rediscovery. It's not just that it's ahead of time on seeing the dangers of artificial intelligence and "patriotic" American organizations whose symbols are too Nazi-adjacent for it to be a coincidence, but either Len Deighton's novel or John McGrath's screenplay has also zeroed in on the very specific point that these things are actually not that bright, easily manipulated and played by grifters who, sure, maybe agree with some of the goals but mostly want to drain the big rich moron terrified of paying taxes as much as possible. The film is at its most memorable when Begley is full of bluster in his weird compound or addressing his large but deeply silly militia. It's an insight that many are still just coming around to 60 years later, and for all that Russell and company have great fun with the insanity of it, they're still to be taken seriously as threats, if only for the chaos they create if not for their ability to achieve their goals.

Unfortunately, there wind up being a few too many threads going on here for the whole thing to form a good pattern. The deadly bioweapon, the astroturfed Latvian rebels, and Newbigen's scheming all wind up at cross-purposes to each other, there's not really a great spot for Anya inside all of this, and as much fun as it is to see Oscar Homolka's Colonel Stok again, he feels more like fanservice than a clever insert. There's something that seems like it has real potential at the core - is Harry more disgusted with the way everyone in the spy business uses each other to join up with Newbigen to leach off Midwinter or horrified at how these cavalier monsters could get a lot of well-intentioned Latvians killed? - and the idea that trying to fight something as incoherent but well-funded as this organization is actually really difficult could fold in there, but it never all comes together, rather than just being a bunch of things happening.

Indeed, it's mostly good at the extremes, whether that be Michael Caine continuing to charm and seduce as the smart, pragmatic Palmer or the broadest American nonsense. There's some fun in between, but the film doesn't fully figure out how to have capable agents tussle with screwy villains.

Hong Kil-dong (The Story of Hong Gil-dong)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Korean Film Archive Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the American disc at Amazon

I was a tad surprised to see Shin Dong-heon's 1967 animated features seemingly owing more to Disney and other American animation houses than those of Japan, but why not? Despite the two countries being physically close, Japanese occupation was well within living memory and there were plenty of American army bases in the country on top of Hollywood's global reach. It does, nevertheless, make is somewhat ironic that the preservation and restoration of this film hinged on a Japanese print.

The film itself starts with Minister Hong (voice of Lee Chun-sa) being told by a fortune-teller that he must kill his concubine's son Gil-dong (voice of Kim Suil) in order to avoid a doom of his own. He doesn't have the heart to do it (which is good, because it's a ruse by his envious wife) and instead exiles Gil-dong. Gil-dong accepts this stoically, and soon meets Chadol Bawi (voice of Kim Sun-won), a diminutive but spunky wanderer, and the pair make enemies of despotic governor Um Ga-jin (voice of Yeom Seok-ju). In order to fight him, Gil-dong studies swordsmanship with Master Baekun (Lee Wu-yeing), during which time Um's power grows and begins to threaten the elder Hong.

The film is based upon a Joseon-era epic that was itself likely inspired by a Korean Robin Hood figure (although the research connecting them would not be published until a couple years after this film), or at least a portion of one version of it, and it being such a large work that a 67-minute film can only cover so much is a bit of a problem: Writer Shin Dong-woo seems to pick the important highlights that form into a story the best, but it's kind of inert. Not boring, really, but maybe too steady - Gil-dong doesn't really evolve much over the film, mostly becoming more skilled with a sword, and his ties to Chadol Bawi, farm girl God-dan and her father, or even the various villains, don't exactly intensify. One expects that all happens over the course of a long novel, but director Shin Dong-heon and screenwriter Shin Dong-woo have beats they need to hit and every extra cel is time and money, so it's streamlined.

It looks great, though, the animation is smooth and the designs are appealing, showing plenty of Disney and Fleischer influence. I'm not sure how far off it is from other Korean animated films of the period - a quick glimpse at the booklet suggests it was a major hit and spawned imitators quickly, along with an immediate follow-up/spin-off for Cadol Bawi. It's a nifty little movie, and while I've kind of harped on its faults because it was a disjointed thing to watch at night - I kept thinking I'd nodded off and missed something only to see that it just leapt forward a bit - it looks pretty great for its origin and period.


Hopi and Chadol Bawi

* * * (out of four)
Seen 9 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Korean Film Archive Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (when available)

Work must have started on Hopi and Chaol Bawi just about as soon as The Story of Hong Gil-dong hit South Korean screens, because it came out the same year, and it certainly seems to benefit both from the previous film's success and from perhaps being less tied to famous source material: It's a bigger, more fantastic adventure that lets the crew from the first stretch in new directions rather than be penned in by respecting the original novel.

With Hong Gil-dong busy with official duties, sidekick Chadol Bawi (voice of Kim Sun-won) goes out looking for master swordsman Hopi, hoping to learn his lightning sword technique. Hopi saves him from attacking wolves, but disappears into the night, while thief Gomsoe is happy to take credit. Hopi, it turns out, is not the defender of the oppressed that Chadol Bawi imagined, Nevertheless, the three wind up having their paths cross with corrupt officials who intend to cede the northern part of the kingdom to the Jurchen tribe, led by a shapeshifting wizard.

Hong Gil-dong wasn't a bad movie at all, but its central character being unfailingly righteous and heroic could make it feel very predictable; here, the filmmakers let Chadol Bawi's earnest youthfulness take center stage and let Hopi's bitterness and Gomsoe's willingness to go along serve as counterpoints. It puts friction into the picture, and suspense, and the revelation of the tragedy in Hopi's past makes everything more operatic rather than just being spelled out like in the previous movie. It's not really a complicated story, but it lets kids watching identify with Chadol Bawi and feel a little nervous about where Hopi might wind up, which is a genuine emotional hook.

On top of that, the trio gets to occasionally face monsters instead of just bandits and soldiers, which allows director Shin and his compatriots to really let loose, using the tools of animation to have impossible things happen, design exaggerated creatures, and make alpha villain Somasul especially a worthy adversary. Even the less supernatural action scenes such as the attacking wolves toward the beginning are striking. It's a dizzying land of adventure and legend at times, and the animation is pretty darn good, occasionally showing some of the looping that you'd see in the Fleischer cartoons that clearly serve as an inspiration but also some Disney grandiosity.

It can kind of be a lot at times, especially at the end, when you're enjoying the big action sequences but also maybe mentally thinking back and wondering if all these folks being bad guys makes sense; were they ever working against each other before being revealed as allies? It's also got a last-minute revelation that's kind of inevitable even if it's not really set up or hinted at, as much because you kind of need to give Hopi something after all this. That's not a bad thing - it feels right - but it kind of feels like it came out of nowhere.

Perhaps surprisingly, after doing these two features, Shin Dong-heon would not direct another, instead working in television (including a stint at Nelvana in Canada) and writing about music. Perhaps Korean productions got crowded out between American and Japanese animation, or perhaps the overwhelming nature of theatrical animation was overwhelming. Either way, he leaves behind a couple of striking films that deserve to be more than a footnote in the history of global animation.


Well, that's a lot - how's it affect the score?

Dale Evans: 31½ stars
Centipede: 28¾ stars

Dale benefits from the slightly bigger box set, but that can get flipped later!

Asian Imports: My Daughter Is a Zombie and The Lychee Road

Back from Montreal, back on this nonsense:

Both are apparently leaving Boston after Thursday (and those are early/late shows), though The Lychee Road had a pretty good three-week run; I was kind of worried I might have to find a window while in Montreal, where it was playing at the Forum. They're being displaced by another big Chinese movie (Dead to Rights) and some others from elsewhere in Asia - the Shin Godzilla rerelease and War 2 & Coolie from India.

It always amuses me that, when I get back from Fantasia, there are a couple of films that would have been right at home there which I kind of have to scramble to see, but it's mostly because those movies have a higher churn rate than a lot of multiplex material all year round.


My Daughter Is a Zombie

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 August 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #8 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

As far as I can tell, My Daughter Is a Zombie has no connection to My Neighbor Zombie, one of my favorite movies in the genre that also happens to come from South Korea, but I like it for one of the same reasons I liked the other: The filmmakers steadfastly refuse to approve of solving a health-care crisis with guns, which even the most well-intentioned folks in other zombie movies find hard to resist.

The film opens with Lee Jeong-hwan (Jo Jung-suk), a former zookeeper and large animal trainer, returning to his family home in the quaint village of Eunbag-Ri to greet his daughter Su-ah (Choi Yu-ri) - who, we are soon shown and informed, is likely South Korea's last zombie. Like most 15-year-old girls, she found her father kind of cringey and annoying, even if she did share his love of dance, but got bitten while they fled Seoul during the zombie outbreak. She had turned by the time they got to Eunbag-Ri, but neither her father, grandmother Kim Bam-soon (Lee Jung-eun), nor Jeong-hwan's old friend Cho Dong-bae (Yoon Kyung-ho) had it in them to put her down. What they soon discovered was that apparently infectees like Su-ah respond to reminders of their old lives, so they do all they can to help Su-ah resist her new feral instincts. Not eager to help, on the other hand, is Shin Yeon-hwa (Cho Yeo-jeong), Jeong-hwan's first love, the local schoolteacher, and, after having to put down her own finacé, the region's top zombie-hunter.

I don't know how many Webtoon-derived movies I've seen, but this feels like the most Webtoon-derived a movie can be. There's an episodic structure that seems built to never really end but also never leave you completely hanging if it were to stop, a cat that is just expressive enough to need to be CGI. That isn't a dig, necessarily, but it kind of feels 90% premise, 10% plot, committed to the idea of this but kind of content to meander and not worrying about filling in some gaps. It's all right by that, though; the filmmakers capture how comics designed for infinite scroll have a sort of soothing rhythm even when the events are tense, and translate transitions and style to live action well. I'm reasonably sure the caricaturist at an amusement park is the original artist, which would be cute.

It's got a pleasant enough cast playing characters you're seldom sorry to see on screen, too: The adults are affable and funny while still tending to carry a little bit of the tension that naturally comes with hiding Su-ah, with Cho Jung-seok tending to look more committed as the movie goes on and more backstory is revealed, while Lee Jung-eun gives depth to the alcoholic granny that would typically be a comic character and Cho Yeo-jeong sees how a potential threat can be funny. I like Choi Yu-ri's Su-ah enough to wish we saw most of her as just a regular kid, although I kind of suspect that the pantomime she does as a zombie is kind of difficult to pull off well. The script says the word "zombie" throughout but doesn't treat Romero rules as necessarily definitive (indeed, the entire idea is arguably that they're made to force people to act cruelly rather than question cruelty). The filmmakers are pretty good at balancing cute absurdity and danger.

Maybe not enough; there's a lot that seems really ill-advised beyond what we might be willing to forgive, and less soul searching afterward than seems warranted. The story maps just well enough onto caring for, say, a child with cognitive issues that the places where it doesn't feel a bit uncomfortable (I wonder how it would hit if the girl's father was "teaching" instead of "training" her). And, boy, it wants to have all the endings, both introducing a new threat and including a gigantic "oh, by the way" bit.R />
Is it a bit odd for a zombie movie to ultimately be described as "pleasant"? Maybe, and there are certainly times when it doesn't seem to be the best of ideas, but it's not a bad idea to take this approach every once in a while.


Chang'an De Li Zhi (The Lychee Road)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 August 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #9 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

The trick of a movie like The Lychee Road, I think, is figuring out how to maintain the odd spirit of the start, where you've got room to be kind of goofy setting things up and making jokes that are either anachronistic or about how certain things haven't changed to make the Tang Dynasty relatable to a moder audience, into the finale, when the stakes are immediate, the story is maybe catching up to recorded history, and there's a lesson you want to teach. Da Peng is better at the modern and chaotic than period adventure and dreams, so this movie slides out of his wheelhouse as that goes on.

He plays Li Shande, who came to the capital at 24 with the desire to be a dedicated public servant, and twenty-odd years later "Old Li" is well-liked by his co-workers in the Department of Imperial Granaries but still a broke ninth-level administrator (he's much better at math than politics), taking out an expensive loan to buy a home on the very outskirts for his sharp-tempered wife A-tong (Zhuang Dafei) and young daughter (Yang Huanyu). But it gets worse: The Emperor has decreed that fresh lychees from Lingnan will be served at his wife's birthday celebration on June 1st, 117 days away, but lychees spoil in three or four days, far faster than any route between the cities. Scheming Eunuch Du Shaoling (Zhang Ruoyun) advises the head of the Granaries, Liu Shuling (Wang Xun), to find a sap to appoint as Lychee envoy and take the fall, along with the expected death sentence for failing the Emperor. That'd be Old Li. It takes him 30 days to reach Lingnan and would likely take just as long to return. Ambitious merchant Su Liang (Bai "White-K" Ke), a second son looking to escape his brother's shadow, offers to buy the pass that will let Li bypass tolls and customs to live out the next three months in comfort, but after meeting Su and Zheng Yuting (Yang Mi), the young owner of the local orchards, he begins to think there may be a way to pull it off.

Longtime fans of co-writer/director/star Dong "Da Peng" Chengpeng, whose movies have fairly reliably opened in North America on top of being big hits in China, should feel at home in the first section; Li is more nerd than hustler, but he's both pretty funny and a guy audiences can relate to amid the slapstick chaos and broad comedy, a lot of it along the lines of "folks in Tang Dynasty Chang'an had to pay mortgages and deal with monstrous bosses too!", and even in this sort of period piece, it's the sort of comedy Da Peng is good at, both as a filmmaker and an actor. There's delights in the middle, too, as Li sets out to handle a mission where he's been set up to fail by using the scientific method and experimenting with logistics, along with making friends with the people he'll need to help rather than ring to trick them. It's a neat balance of problem-solving and not getting too far into the weeds, and sort of feels like a bridge between the light satire of the first act and a finale which needs to be believable in Tang Dynasty terms. There's lots of chuckling about pigeons being Imperial email and wondering if stickers were really a thing in that time.

Even before the finale throws a bunch of epilogues one's way, though, the shift to something more melodramatic feels a bit off, especially if one thinks Li Shinde would be more conscious of where his new plan was heading. The scheming suddenly seems too immediate compared to the rest of the movie, and too abstract. Sure, the truth of the matter is that Li's fate is largely in the hands of nobles and bureaucrats who barely regard him as human while he's in the room with them, and not even that once he leaves, but even with the occasional cuts back to Chang'an, it's hard to get invested in the scheming over who will lose face if Li succeeds (and is willing to kill over it) versus those who think they can derive advantage when the sort of logistics problems Li has to solve on the fly are what has been driving interest so far. There's also a speech which seems a little too intent on reflecting good socialist values, maybe to counter how Su Liang and Zheng Yuting aren't portrayed in a bad light for being businesspeople seeking advantages, but we've all got folks who need to hear it, whether we're in China or the United States.

It is, at least, an extremely watchable cast that Da Peng surrounds himself with: Zhuang Dafei gets introduced as something of a harpy who mostly slaps people, but by the end one can see a marriage that works. White-K and Yang Mi lubricate the center of the movie in different ways and always feel like they've got a life outside this particular story. When you need to raise the stakes in the end, you can do a lot worse than bringing in Andy Lau Tak-wah as an imperial advisor who seems malevolent even when being helpful.

I'm not sure it necessarily adds up to a crowd pleaser, though it's done fairly well in its native land and stuck around here longer than usual. There are bits throughout the movie to enjoy, at least, even if it as a whole never gets the heights of the filmmaker's best, zaniest work.

Fantasia 2025.08: "Methuselah", A Grand Mockery, Every Heavy Thing, The House with Laughing Windows, "Things That Go Bump in the East", and I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn

This day started early:

3:30am, to be precise, with the alarm right in the room, rather than just the hallway. I don't know what it was about - I just headed out and tried not to bother the firefighters who showed up impressively quickly - but I'm glad it wasn't serious. This is a twelve-story building with 10 rooms on my floor, and there were not 100 people milling about afterward. Maybe it's just usually filled with college students and mostly-empty for the summer (there are about a dozen keyboxes for AirBNB rentals and brokers showing it to prospective tenants locked to the front steps, and that doesn't even include me), but I have a hard time imagining the folks who sleep through that din or say, man, that's a lot of stairs, maybe I'll evacuate when I smell smoke or firefighters pull me out.

So, it was almost 4am by the time I got to bed, which is just shy of the line where I usually say it's not worth going back to sleep. My body was going to wake me up at 8am or so anyway, though, and I wound up dragging something fierce for most of the day. It didn't help that most of the afternoon programming was from the Underground section and I'm not really a giallo guy, so I wound up dozing off or zoning out until the shorts package in the evening.

I mean, after "Methuselah" by Nathan Sellers; his short was 4 minutes long and pretty darn strong. Obviously, Justine was not really looking at my giant lens-covering finger in disdain (why Samsung designed this phone so that ones finger naturally rests there whne using the buttons to snap a picture is beyond me).

On the other hand, Adam C. Briggs and Sam Dixon made a movie that was often dark and grainy and very easy to zone out to, so I missed some the film, their Q&A gave the impression that Brisbane is not exactly an Australian hive of creative expression, but it was a scene where everybody sort of knows each other, and they wound up working together, if in unfamiliar roles at times.

Mickey Reese and Josh Fadem were really "on" in their intro and Q&A for Every Heavy Thing. I dig the energy which I didn't have, and that Reese wrote it for Fadem, who had played over a hundred supporting roles but never had a lead, so this was made with him in mind, and pretty much the entire cast. I suppose, as with Brisbane, when you're making movies in Oklahoma City, you know who you're working with.

After that, it was The House with Laughing Windows, and, as I say below, I am just not a giallo guy.

At some point after that, though, the caffeine kicked in or something, or maybe the "Things That Go Bump in the East" selections were just more my speed. Here we've got our moderator (Xige Li?), "Mom, Stay Dead" director Lee Na-hee, programmer/translator Steven Lee, "Dhet!" composer Dameer Khan, and "Red Spider Lilies: The Ascension" co-star/producer Eriko Nakamura & director Koji Shiraishi. As you can see, it was a pretty fun session, with Lee talking about how her short was inspired by how her mother actually blossomed once she finally moved out of the house, gaining a bunch of new hobbies and creating art, which got her thinking about how there are a lot of movies about how children grow at times like this but not necessarily parents.

Khan, meanwhile, is local to Montreal, representing "Dhet!" since director Ummid Ashraf had visa issues. There seemed to be more trouble with visas this year then I remember being a case before, although that could just be random variation. It does demonstrate how even relatively small-scale shorts like this have international collaborators, and Khan talked about how the giant highways the protagonist is traveling make Dhaka a very loud city, so the music had to be layered and a bit discordant, enough so that when it is suddenly quiet, the eeriness of it really hits.

If you look at IMDB, "Red Spider Lilies" is listed as "Pilot Version", and Eriko Nakamura said that, yes, they were very much looking do something more with it. I hope they do; it's a fun premise! She also mentioned that she was in another film at Fantasia this year, Dollhouse, but also not to go see it on her account because it wasn't really one of her great acting roles.

Finally, I made it across the street to Hall, where this is sort of the best picture I got of the surprisingly big contingent for I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn: Writer/director Kenichi Ugana plus actors Lissa Cranadang-Sweeney, Rocko Zevenbergen, Madeline Barbush, Estevan Muñoz, Ui Mihara, and Katsunari Nakagawa. One thing Mihara mentioned is that she felt a lot like her character going into the movie: If you look at her IMDB page, she seems to be have done an episode of TV every week or so for the past couple years, and felt pretty darn burnt out before doing this one. Though she maybe could have done without the amount of gross things she had to put in her mouth to spit out.


That's the start of Week Two on Wednesday the 23rd; Thursday would be Redux Redux, The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, Anna Kiri, and my first go at Transcending Dimensions. Today (Saturday the 2nd), my plans are Foreigner, Circo Animato, Mononoke II, and Queens of the Dead. The School Duel and The Virgin of the Quarry Lake are pretty good.


"Methuselah"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP):
:
A poem of a short film, using striking words and imagery to how trees are both dynamic and static features of nature - always growing but persisting for centuries in some cases - and how too many have been used by humans as sites for hangings and lynchings, tainting them forever. The narration by Jordan Mullins walks a line between reverence and rage, and the images from filmmaker Nathan Sellers manage to emphasize the evil men do with these marvelous things.


A Grand Mockery

* * ½-ish (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)

A Grand Mockery is engrossing for as long as it feels like an 8mm pseudo-documentary, but as soon as it tries to consciously be transgressive or experimental, it starts to get a bit tiresome. The filmmakers have vision, but it's not necessarily clear.

It follows "Josie" (Sam Dixon), initially seen walking through a Brisbane cemetery, seemingly one of the few green spots in the city and a sort of postal network where folks leave messages and meet up. There's not much going in the city - things are cool with his girlfriend, the father he tends to is mostly non-responsive, and his job at a cinema involves either cleaning up the disgusting messes customers leave behind or trying to handle their obstinacy. It wears on him, both physically and in the increasingly unhinged notes from possibly-imaginary correspondents.

The wear doesn't really kick in for audiences until the film's final scenes; up until then, even the moments when it approaches the grotesque and despairing feel immediate and earnest, the portrait of a man in a place where his artistic instincts seemingly can't take him anywhere, the cemetery seemingly the only source of tranquility. There are drugs and drink accelerating it, but one mostly sees a situation where folks get ground down because there's no seeming mobility. Josie doesn't necessarily seem inclined to make a living out of his drawings and the like, but they go unshared and he seems to have no other avenue to express himself to others.

The finale, though, is just endless. The filmmakers are good at sneaking up on the audience for a while, Josie's increasingly scraggly hair hiding how some health issue is distorting his face until he winds up in a strange bar that may only bear a passing connection with reality. At that point the movie starts banging on past any point it could be making, drawing out its grotesquerie until Josie is a drunken, distorted mess. Fair enough, I guess - that's arguably where lives of quiet desperation wind up - but after a while the filmmakers have eroded a lot of the goodwill the film had earned.

It goes on a bit as he gets outside the city, and the green of the woods and swamp seems like a bookend to the cemetery at the start (8mm green seems like a very specific color), and for a bit I wondered if it was intentional, starting in a city graveyard and ending outside the city in a place dense with life, but, apparently, the decay is too strong at this point, and the film trundles on until it ends in a whimper.


Every Heavy Thing

* * ¼-ish (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

I'm mostly giving this a pass, because even though I didn't doze off much, I feel like I missed a lot of pieces that were important to the story.

It starts out conventionally enough, with a Scream-style pre-credits murder before introducing the audience to Joe (Josh Fadem), who sells ads for the local alt-weekly, one of the last in the country, reluctantly accompanying a friend to a show - he and wife Lux (Tipper Newton) seem to have separate social lives - only to enjoy it more than expected, and see the singer get murdered. Killer William Shaffer (James Urbaniak) says he's going to let Joe live because it amuses him, but it will amuse him much less if Joe does anything stupid. Like helping the paper's new writer (Kaylene Snarsky) when she has leads on the disappearance William is responsible for.

The problem in a nutshell is that the story really doesn't have any place to go after William reveals himself, about ten ten minutes into the movie; Joe winds up in this holding pattern but it plays more like awkward social situations rather than walls closing in or real danger. Writer/director Mickey Reese puts in other threads - Shaffer as the vanguard of various tech companies moving their operations to the city, an old friend (Vera Drew) returning to town after her transition, various family concerns - but none of them seem ironically more urgent than the man who is murdering women and apparently disposing of the bodies very well, which isn't presented as a big deal itself versus how it puts a man in an uncomfortable situation.

Plus, the jokes are only about half as funny as the writers seem to think. It gets by on volume for a while, and Tipper Newton is maybe the film's most valuable asset as Lux, seeming to put a weird and amusing spin on just about everything. After a while, though, things just aren't that funny, and the film made in part to give Josh Fadem a lead role after a lot of character work winds up showing why he hasn't been cast in one before: He's affable and has pleasant chemistry with almost everyone else, but it highlights him as a glue guy in a cast the way Joe is in his community, but maybe not with the sort of charisma that puts him at the center of a story.

One admires the attempt that this sort of outside-of-Hollywood indie is making. Unfortunately, it seems too committed to a twist that seems inspired at first but goes nowhere.


La casa dalle finestre che ridono (The House with Laughing Windows)

* * ½-ish (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Retro, laser DCP)
Order the old DVD at Amazon

I've probably posted some variation of this before, but I think I'm just not a giallo person. No matter the extent to which the director is regarded as a master, or how sexy the cast is, or how shocking or lurid the twists are, I just don't get drawn in, and The House with the Laughing Walls was not an exception to this rule. Like so many things in the genre, it falls in that gap between intriguing mysteries and unnerving horror for me.

(In fairness, all the films this afternoon suffered from my sleep being interrupted the night before, so I wasn't absorbing as much as I'd like.)

It feels like it should be a little more intriguing than it is, with an art expert (Lino Capolicchio) arriving to restore a church's peculiar painting, mysterious disappearances, and secretive villagers, but the film is too arch for much of its running time. Stefano doesn't really feel like anything, drifting through the story as strange things happen around him, not particularly defining himself as an academic or artist, and there seems to be an opportunity missed in using the restoration as a thing to hand the story and investigation on, where immersing himself in this artist's life and techniques draws him closer to the man's demons. Even with a new restoration, everything feels pre-faded, like there's never been any life to the story to start with. The mystery feels too distant.

It gets crazy toward the end, even audaciously so, but maybe it's a problem of genre-awareness, where knowing something is a giallo means that one is awaiting rather than dreading the inevitable, and the finale is surprising just because it's random rather than lying in wait to blindside a viewer. Sure, okay, the sisters are messed up, but not in a way that has anything to do with what Stefano has experienced, so it's not resonating.


"Magai-Gami"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

"Magai-Gami" has a pretty darn basic premise - folks in a scary place investigating an urban legend come face to face with monsters that will kill them if they look away - but it executes exceptionally well: Leads Ion Obata and Nagisa Toriumi are a fun pairing even as most of their banter is done over the phone, and the audience picks upon their dynamic very quickly even as the movie starts with them already on the ground. Mostly, the monsters are kind of great, feeling like a mix of visual effects and practical work that capture the freaky images of old illustrations while not looking more out of place next to a girl in a puffer jacket talking on a cell phone than a more modern design would.

Filmmaker Norihiro Niwatsukino doesn't have a particularly long résumé, but he seems very assured here, keeping the film moving even when it involves standing still, displaying a good handle on using what his effects team gives him, and setting up a supernatural-containment mythology in the closing minute or two that doesn't feel too much like it's trying to impress with how clever it is. The program guide describe the short as a proof-of-concept, and, yes, I'd like to see more.


"Ba Dong Yao" ("Hungry")

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

Taiwanese puppet fantasy adventure is one of the best bits of any Fantasia Festival that contains it - I've rearranged schedules to make it work - and it was a really delightful surprise to see it show up in the middle of what initially looked like an animated short. It's a good animated short - it's got a strong style and a story about an ailing kid and his busy father in the middle of a festival that spans the traditional and the modern - but the live-action puppets means this film zigs where one expects it to zag, making his fever dreams feel a bit more real in the moment than his actual world even as they're clearly mythic.

Oh, and bonkers, as these goddesses fight to become his mother and the puppet combat is a kick to watch, fully embracing the capabilities and limitations of what these things can do, especially with a little FX work to eliminate rods and strings. It's great fun that leads into neat music and a satisfying finale.


"Mati Adat" ("Kill Tradition")

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

Compared to the others, "Kill Tradition" is a nifty slow-burner of a short, keeping just what the stakes are on the horizon as it builds the relationship between Idah (Nik Waheeda), the sort of precocious kid that gets into trouble, and her recently-widowed mother Iman (Ezzar Nurzhaffira) as they prepare a meal for an upcoming ritual. Waheeda is charming, and Nurzhaffira really nails this vibe of how having this girl is wonderful yet tiring. They're highly watchable, especially Nurzhaffira, once the inevitable reveals itself.

That's when the audience sees where the title is going, in a couple of ways, and while Nurzhaffira plays up how this is more than she can take and the devastation of it, writer/director Juliana Reza and the rest of the team emphasize what sort of inertia tradition and ritual have. It's evil tradition - even with what appear to be actual supernatural entities, there's no strong justification that this is effective or necessary - and Reza highlights the callousness of it as much as the grace of those consumed by it.


"Mom, Stay Dead"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

Filmmaker Lee Na-hee kicks off her short with a fun image - grieving daughter Sora (Oh Sohyeon) working her way through a book with "101 Ways to Summon the Dead", with #44 being the Ghost Summoning Dance - before coming up with a neat twist: The ghost she summons (Cho Ahra) seems to be roughly her age, having moved on from Earthly concerns, including the daughter she left behind, into her idealized form. There's maybe a fun sitcom premise in here, something about how family members would really relate if you removed the societal obligations and expectations from them.

It's maybe not far from the likes of Back to the Future or Chinese hit Hi, Mom - though I can't think of any that pull someone into the future rather than having their kids in the past - but aside from what Lee discussed in her Q&A about discovering what her mother could become once she was no longer worried about taking care of her daughter on a day-to-day basis, there's something intriguingly weighty here about spirituality. Sora has been using religion and magic as a way to fulfil her desires rather than really contemplating what all this implies, even as the mother recognizes innately that this girl needs something from her.

A very nifty twist on the idea of moving on that feels all the more honest because of how absurd and thought-provoking it can be simultaneously.


"Dhet!"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

There's a really strong theme across short films and anthologies this year of how gig work like rideshares and delivery is a sort of hell designed to be inescapable until it finally crushes a person, and I kind of worry that it will wind up staying in shorts and their equivalents in other media, because if you've got the money to make a feature, the business model behind this is kind of an abstract thing and you mostly see the convenience. It's a longer distance between classes than it used to be.

"Khet!", from Bangladesh, is a pretty decent example. The story itself is pretty basic - motorcycle-taxi guy (Ahsabul Yamin Riad) ignores a homeless man (Fozie Rabby) telling him not to take a certain turn and winds up unable to leave one of Dhaka's highways - and is perhaps ultimately more about the maddening geography of the city than the rider's circumstances. It's not a bad idea, since cities built around such highways are a topic of conversation in themselves, but it leaves writer/director Ummid Ashraf without a metaphorical offramp on top of the literal lack of one; the story kind of runs in circles without much chance of an ending that truly satisfies.


"Red Spider Lilies: The Ascension"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

"Red Spider Lilies" isn't quite made just for me, but it does take a genre I tend to really like - the haunted family calling the sort of professional exorcist who carries themselves more like an exterminator than a religious fanatic - and eventually twists it into one I like even more (which would be telling). Here, that's the Aoi sisters, living in an old family house, where one night something possesses Kotoko (Tomomi Kono), leaving Nana (Tomona Hirota) to call the famed Teshigawara (Hirotaro Honda), whom younger sister Ami (Eriko Nakamura) has seen a lot on television. Once there, though, Teshigawara finds this to be much more serious than his usual situation.

It's not a new observation that exorcism stories arguably work better in East Asian environs than elsewhere is that there is a sort of formal place for ghosts and demons in local mythologies with the opposing forces less formalized (in the West, there's the rigid hierarchy of the Catholic Church and the likes of snake-handlers but not a lot in between). So there's room for Teshigawara to be a professional and a celebrity and a lot of entertainment as the Aois interact with him like that, but also to be able to go in another direction when a twist comes without a whole lot of effort. Honda sells it well and injects dry humor into the film that doesn't undercut what else is going on, but the three sisters are great fun as well: Eriko Nakamura gets attention as the very funny Ami, but Tomona Hirota and Tomomi Kono solidify their older siblings as the short goes on.

Like "Magai-Gami", this is pretty explicitly a pilot/proof of concept, and I would quite like to see more.


I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festiva, laser DCP)

Watching this film, I chuckled at a low-budget horror-film producer being named "Rusty Festerson", and the actor playing him. Are they going to get that this Larry Fessenden cameo is a joke in Japan, or is this a film made for an extremely specific audience? If it is, that niche definitely includes me, and I'm glad to see it.

It opens by introducing two folks from different worlds. Shina (Ui Mihara) grew up in Japan with things coming relatively easy: Naturally pretty and doing okay in school and sports despite not really having to work very hard at them, show business was the first time she really had to apply herself, and really take pride in succeeding. Jack grew up in Eugene, Oregon, without anything ever coming easy, diving into horror movies and heavy metal, and eventually moving to New York City to work for Festerson's company and getting frustrated when it's just a job. Shina is frustrated too, showing disdain for her work, and taking a trip to New York with boyfriend Ren (Katsunari Nakagawa) to escape the limelight. Once there, though, English-speaking Ren finds himself frustrated by her nonsense and she feels disrespected, and an argument winds up with Shina, with no money or ID, outside a bar where Jack and his friends are commiserating over the star of their movie dropping out at the last minute. When Shina has nowhere to go at closing time, Jack lets her sleep on his couch, and manages to communicate that he'll pay for a flight back home if she acts in his movie, not knowing she's a big star rather than just a pretty face.

All in all, it's a fun little movie, charming as all get-out with the filmmakers keenly aware that a romantic comedy must be that, with everything else a secondary concern. And it works; even if I don't entirely buy that this pair falls in love with each other, I do believe that they fall in love with making movies with each other, and that's nearly as good for the movie's purposes. If that's something writer/director Kenichi Ugana planned for, that's smart, giving him a fallback position in case the romance doesn't quite get over, as the "making movies with friends" energy is solid enough to believe in Shina's half of the story.

That's sort of the film's biggest issue - Shina is a lot funnier and sympathetic, with a stronger arc than Jack, and I don't think it's necessarily a matter of assuming a foreign-language preform meets a certain standard even when you'll notice the flaws in one's native tongue. Ui Mihara is given a lot of assignments and mostly pulls them off, from the celebrity who is shallow enough that one can laugh at her arrogance to the professional kind of appalled by the mess she's found herself in to smitten to hurt; all kind of tying back to her opening mission statement. Estevan Muñoz isn't quite just given one note as Jack, but he's always playing it at full volume, and I don't know that it's a matter of Ugana being more comfortable in his native language and culture. The English-speaking supporting characters are by and large fun, but Jack is not a complementary half of the movie.

Fortunately, the rest of the movie is a good time, full of deadpan humor, missed translation jokes, and the ability to walk the line between getting laughs from what a sketchy production this is for what will almost certainly be a terrible movie and earnest respect for them making it. Ugana seem genuinely fond enough of its scrappers and has the knack for getting the audience to smile at them, which not all movies rooting for underdogs manage. He and the cast make the tricky transition from Jack and company clearly exploiting Shina in an uncomfortable way to her being part of the gang, and if you can feel an ending being jammed into place, it is at least jammed solidly into place.

I do kind of wonder how well this plays at places other than Fantasia, which is in large part about this sort of love affair between Eastern and Western pop culture, as well as mixing the global mainstream and the lowbrow. Still, even it's obviously going to play like gangbusters in that specific room, I suspect it's going to really amuse the folks who would enjoy being in that room if they could.