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

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

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

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

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


"Atom & Void"

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


"Skulk"

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

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


El Llanto (The Wailing '24)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


"Floor"

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

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

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


Noijeu (Noise)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fantasia 2024.06: "Furet", Fly Me to the Saitama: From Biwa Lake with Love, and The Chapel

Pretty short day in part because of previous days not going as planned: Bookworm being sold out on opening night meant I opted for Swimming in a Sand Pool instead, and the science fiction shorts ran just long enough on the 21st that finishing the Nobuhiro Yamashita hat trick with Ghost Cat Anzu wasn't possible, meaning it was easy enough to turn back around and see Not Friends. Pair that with not wanting to risk cascading delays causing Vulcanizadora running late and making me miss Fly Me to the Saitama 2, and I had the whole afternoon free.

First order of business: Another Asian movie!. Well, technically, the first was going into Marshall's and getting some extra socks and underpants so that I could push laundry day to the exact midpoint of the trip, thus only hitting the laundromat once and hopefully not having clean and dirty clothes mingling in the suitcase on the way home. But that mall is right across the street from the old Forum and an easy stop before Customs Frontier.

Second order of business: Poutine!

Honestly, I wish my schedule had lined up so that I could hit Le Grand Poutine Fest for a few days in a row, trying out all the food trucks. This General Tao's Chicken Poutine was good stuff, though.

Then, finally, back to the Concordia campus and a couple of films without guests, which is why I'm throwing pictures of poutine in there. Not that I don't mind a little break after a week.

Not much of a break for the start of the third weekend (or "Week Three", if short weeks are allowed, where I'll be catching the first three episodes of Lantern Blade, Haze, and A Chinese Ghost Story II, seeing what the time/crowd situation is to choose between Jour de chasse and "CineMaposa 2024", and finishing with Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In.


"Furet" ("Ferret")

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024: Les Fantastiques Week-ends du Cinéma Québécois, laser DCP)

Fantastiques Week-ends is a celebration of local Québécois filmmaking, from features that recently played major festivals like SXSW ot things that are clearly a few friends screwing around with a camera and editing suite, mostly entertaining themselves as opposed to harboring much thought of doing this for a living. "Furet" is one of those, in a number of senses; if it gets broader notice, it will likely be as a novelty: Most of the supporting cast has Down syndrome, which can lead to the feeling of it taking place in some unusual parallel world. I don't think that's what the filmmakers are going for; they're just a bunch of people who have a thing in common getting together to make the sort of movie they enjoy and having a good time.

And it is a pretty good time - the title character (Rémi-Pierre Paquin), nicknamed "Furet" ("Ferret" in English) for his ability to weasel his way out of situations, gets pulled into a plot to rob a bar from the inside, only for a number of things to go wrong. It's goofier than a lot of comedies using that skeleton are, but also feels like a lot of fun: Why make a movie about gangsters if you're not going to put on costumes and make them 1940s gangsters? Use the ridiculous joke. If you can get a celebrity cameo, let him be silly in a way he probably doesn't get to be at work.

Make movies and have fun with it. You might turn out something better than expected.


Tonde Saitama: Biwako Yori Ai o Komete (Fly Me to the Saitama: From Lake Biwa with Love)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

I'll bet, watched back to back, there's precious little difference between the two Fly Me to the Saitama movies and either my tastes have changed or something in the experience was different (it's a movie just made to bring out the weebs going "haw haw, I know that bit!", and that can get me gritting my teeth more than laughing), but this one seemed to be trying a little too hard and leaning on that recognition in the way the first wasn't quite so much. Or maybe it just hit differently tonight. That happens.

The first - well, the first was something, a framing story about a family in a car whose daughter is ashamed to be from the Saitama prefecture listening to a radio drama about the Saitamese throwing off the yoke of their oppressors. The same family is in the car again five years later, daughter Manami Sugawara (Haruka Shimazaki) now grown and pregnant, worrying over the name of the child, when another drama comes on. It starts with princess Momomi Dannoura (Fumi Nikaido) looking to help unite the Saitama by building a railway line that connects its various districts as opposed to just going to Tokyo and back, but facing resistance; husband and Saitaman hero Rei Asami (Gackt) proposes building a beach. To do that, he and his comrades will travel to Shiga to import sand, but the hips are attacked, and they find themselves amid a similar revolution: Shiga is the equivalent of the Saitama in this part of Japan, with Osaka and its governor Akira Kashoji (Ainosuke Kataoka) ruling with an iron fist and revolutionary Kai Kikyo (Anne Watanabe), very much a female version of Rei, opposing him. He's got plans beyond just having Shiga under his thumb, though - a special chemical extracted from Koshinen Stadium can actually turn outsiders Osakan, effectively making all of Japan Osaka… or even the world!

The good news is that a movie so eager to throw jokes against the wall to see what sticks like this will do pretty well even if only ten percent are working for you, and the hit rate here is better than that. There's not a moment that isn't trying to make the audience laugh in two or three ways even if it's also looking to push some sort of story forward. Many of the jokes are very dumb, and many are completely inscrutable if you're not Japanese and haven't been diving into Japanese pop culture even more than the typical manga fan (I certainly wouldn't know someone had started talking with an Osakan accent or using Osakan slang without other characters commenting on it), but the thing is, they at least all look like jokes and are presented with gusto. Nobody is going to miss the gag because it's too dry, ever, and even if something is hard to parse, the comic timing is pretty impeccable, at least with a crowd. By the end, certainly, the filmmakers have locked into a delightfully absurd mode with big laughs.

Both new and returning cast are strong, and not just because the sight of Anne Watanabe and Gackt in near-matching costumes is fun - the same basic outfit that marks Rei as a someone feminine bishonen makes Kikyo a masculine "Lady Oscar" type - and they're both kind of excitable but complement each other in where they're clever and where they're dumb. Watanabe, especially, dives into how a lot of fans are going to be immediately eager to pair them off and has a ball. Ainosuke Kataoka similarly gets to chew a bunch of scenery as a megalomaniac villain who is quite obviously being cuckolded. And it's kind of a shame that Fumi Nikaido's Momomi is not so much relegated to the sidelines as doing her own thing back in the Saitama - she's a riot, and can sell a lot of gags on her own, but it's mostly against minor characters, as opposed to the other stars.

As with the first, the movie is a bunch of fun to just look at, with elaborate costumes that are as big a part of the characters as the performances but an overall aesthetic that can be kind of rickety, like a lot of secondary locations and visuals were built quick and on short notice so that the whole doesn't feel too fancy. When the action gets big and brash, though, the effects work is up to the task, because the filmmakers want the audience laughing at how wacky this is, not at how low the budget must be.

There's a lot that's fun here, but it doesn't always connect. Maybe the very end locks what wasn't quite working for me in - the first film is more self-deprecating while this sequel points more mockery outward, to the point of saying sorry, we don't really think this at the end. There was something kind of weirdly universal even when the first was at its most specific - every city that's not Tokyo or London or New York has that kind of chip on its shoulder (and even then, Queens has it for Manhattan, for example) - so you felt it even if the references weren't your own, but this is often more about the specific stereotypes than the feeling behind them. It may just be a small difference in attitude, but when you're blowing everything up to the scale that this movie is, it can make a notable difference.


La ermita (The Chapel)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

Because these daily reviews have a kind of format, I often wind up copying the previous one, keeping the skeleton, and filling in. Today, this kind of reminds me that The Chapel played in the same slot that had The Beast Within the night before, and some important elements are similar, in that both center on a pre-teen girl whose perspective is an important part of the story. I quite like this one where the other left me cold, and I think a big part of the reason why is that where Beast tried to be a timeless fairy tale, Chapel is contemporary and specific, and its details are interesting and make it easier to identify parallels than something trying to be universal.

The lore here dates back to 1631; with the Black Death raging, the plague doctors rounded up the sick and sealed them in one of the church's rooms, including Uxoa, a little girl who dropped her doll on the way inside and is said to haunt it. Nearly 400 years later, the site has been excavated and recreating the event has been a tourist attraction for decades, in part because medium Ivana Peralta claimed to make contact with Uxoa. This year, one of the locals most fascinated by the whole thing is 8-year-old Emma (Maia Zaitegi), a neighbor of Peralta's who hopes to become a medium herself and is encouraged by the old woman, but for a very specific reason: Her mother Maider (Loreto Mauleón) is dying of cancer. She finds the old woman dead one night during the five-day period when the chapel is ceremonially opened before being resealed, which brings Ivana's estranged, burnt daughter Carol (Belén Rueda) back to town to settle the estate. She's also a medium, but of the cold-reading variety, and resists Emma's entreaties to teach her. But Emma's a very determined girl who doesn't realize how dangerous the forces she'd have to access to talk to the dead are.

I love smart, practical little girls who nevertheless wear cat ears and light-up sneakers like Emma, and Maia Zaitegi is a real delight in the role, making Emma serious and perspective enough to realize what she's dealing with but also light and innocent enough that she doesn't plod through scenes morose. There's determination and curiosity to her that are genuine - a girl like this doesn't really put up a front - that make the moments when sadness overwhelms her or danger creates genuine fear more powerful. The kid is easy to love but is also making things happen in a way that makes sense.

Even with that, it can be hard to make them the actual center of the story and still keep them believable, but it also creates an interesting prism through which to view the adult characters as well. In this case, that's mostly Carol, who is Emma's complement in many ways that make her uncomfortable, and Belén Rueda gets across that Carol knows herself and how other people see her all too well. On her own, she's sarcastic but in a way that suggests she knows she's trying to push people away but doesn't actually want to hurt them. They're interesting to watch together in large part because they're intriguing separately and the pairing is not natural; Carol is well-aware of where the direction Emma is heading leads but also can't help but want to recapture that feeling that there's magic in the world and one's faith matters. Add in Josean Bengoetxea as a policeman that when to school with Carol and is one of the many neighbors looking out for Emma, and there's a trio that look like they should become a found family, but they don't quite fit.

Aside from all that, I like how it plays with faith and belief as well, with Emma motivated by need and possibly harming herself because she's literally playing with fire. The ghost story around the Chapel is terrific, leading to a neat horror-movie finale, but also a commodity, and the way the filmmakers will trick the audience into thinking they're seeing something from 400 years ago but reveal it to be modern recreations is clever: This is all malleable and convincing, and the balance between comforting and exploiting those who need the assurance these stories provide is never fair, whether coming from the official church or a fake psychic.

It's an idea that burrows in and takes hold in part because director Carlota Pereda and her co-writers don't try to abstract what Emma and Carol are dealing with but explore it, while still giving the audience creepy plague-doctor monsters and a phantom who lures an innocent into danger. It's smart and scary and makes all its pieces work together.

Fantasia 2024.05: "Meat Puppet", The Paragon, "Bladder Shy", Scared Shitless, Tatsumi, "AstroNots", Meanwhile on Earth, "Be Right Back", and The Beast Within

Ah, thought I'd be able to run this right around since I'd gotten everything on LetterBoxd, but this is a lot of shorts.

Anyway - guests!

Being a Canadian thing, Scared Shitless! brought some people: From the left, writer/director Brendan Cohen, director Vivieno Caldinelli, producer Lewis Spring, and cast members Daniel Doheny, Steven Ogg, and Chelsea Clark, who all seemed to have a great time making it to the point that when someone asked about sequel plans and one of the producers said something's in the works, Ogg barked a question about who was in it.

No guests for Meanwhile on Earth, but Mitch Davis brought up director Andrew Seaton and DP Matthew Samperi from the accompanying short "AstroNots".

There were actually a lot of guests for The Beast Within - I was sitting directly behind a couple that were whooping at every opportunity and sneaking pictures on their phone - but it was actually a pretty small group up on stage; aside from the host, we've got writer/director Alexander J. Farrell, co-writer Greer Ellison, and producer Alex Chang. It's kind of interesting that, while the movie is in large part being sold to the public with Kit Harrington, most of the questions about the cast and characters centered around co-star Ashleigh Cummings, who is pretty darn terrific here.

(Quick jump to IMDB, and, oh, she was Dot on Miss Fisher? Wow!)

If you're reading this on Wednesday the 31st (Day 14), it's probably my shortest day: It looks like I won't get to De Sève in time for Hell Hole (but it's okay; I haven't exactly love the Adams family's previous stuff), Rats! looks like the sort of thing I don't usually go for, Electrophilia looks interesting but is listed as subtitled in French rather than English, and I saw The Roundup: Punishment a few months back (do these movies just not play Montreal? I think this is the second time this has happened with this series). So maybe just Timestalker!


"Meat Puppet"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

Are high-school and university graduations the same throughout the English-speaking world? It's one of those things where some bits of pop culture tell me that there are differences but others make it look universal, though I hear that's kind of influenced by American pop culture. Anyway, this looks pretty American despite being set in the UK, from what I see, but that's kind of not the point; the point is that Cuba (Máiréad Tyers) and Oz (David Johnsson) are a couple but Oz is kind of immature, tending to sit around his room messing with toys and collectibles unless she drags him away, like she does with a phone call on the day of graduation, only to be tempted again when a delivery person shows up. He thinks it's a statuette he's ordered, but it's a weird puppet, and can't resist taking a look. It's a bad idea; not only does his consciousness enter the little guy, but the thing fuses to his arm, and it looks like his body is dead or dying!

Writer/director Eros V isn't particularly shy about saying what "Meat Puppet" is about - half of Cuba's lines are about Oz needing to grow up and become self-reliant, and there is, in the last bit that is built to get the audience to give a grossed-out howl, a pretty obvious illustration of taking control of your own life even if you're too busy laughing to notice - but that's kind of fine; these are emotional kids probably prone to blurting stuff out and it's the kind of short where everything's so screwy that the sudden "hey, I'm going to bring up this mundane thing!" switch is part of the screwiness, even if there's a puppet curse that you'd think would be more urgent.

And the gags are pretty good. The usual deal with someone in a puppet body - it's weird that this is a trope, right? - is having them be as mobile as a puppet character is, and instead having Oz having to deal with his body's dead weight is quality slapstick. The puppeteers do a decent job of playing things so that he's expressive without looking like Muppet-y flailing is his natural state. And, yes, they build the jokes to an impressive crescendo with quality bits after the climax and through the credits.


The Paragon

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

I really dig the vibe of The Paragon, which pulls off the trick of making one believe that a potentially multiverse-shaking narrative could play out in a small New Zealand town with a slacker protagonist without being so tongue in cheek that the comedy takes over. It's weird and offbeat but not poisoned with self-awareness. That makes it a sort of oddball movie and one where you've got to live with the reaction to your recommendation being "uh…okay". It's fun but in a small way.

It introduces the audience to Dutch (Benedict Wall), a tennis player who was good enough to be ranked but not good enough to be famous, at least until a hit-and-run left his leg broken in four places and his bitterness drove wife Emily (Jessica Grace Smith) to an affair with a co-worker. Crashing with his petty-criminal brother Oates (Shadon Meredith), he starts canvassing the town for the very common model of car that hit him, impulsively taking a slip from a poster promising psychic training. The woman who put it up claims he has great psionic potential in part because his heart stopped for six minutes during the accident, but Lyra (Florence Noble) is also frustrated at his insistence on taking easy ways and shortcuts, especially since she needs a disciplined ally to help her find a powerful crystal before it falls into the hands of her evil brother Haxan (Jonny Brugh).

Folks have made much more serious movies with that general description, and The Paragon has stakes, but it's also a comedy that recognizes that everybody in it should be funny in some manner, whether it's Dutch's bluster or the deadpan weirdness of Lyra and Haxan, raised to be psychic warriors by their messed-up father. Even Emily, who could be written and played to be a generic sort of ungrateful shrew or as understandably overwhelmed is written so that Jessica Grace Smith can make her funny in a very specific way. No matter how serious the moment is, there's a joke available, but the characters are also fleshed out enough that there's nowhere to go but the gag. Benedict Wall is very funny as Dutch, but can play it straight and demonstrate just enough self-reflection that his scenes with Michelle Ang don't go as one might expect. Florence Noble's Lyra is socially stunted but not to the point of stupidly following a menu of tics.

The film gets a lot of value out of sort of screwing around, with a lot of time spent on training and resisting it and side quests, and not feeling the need to tire everything together. There's a temptation to make everything interlock too much, or toss in a romance the film doesn't need, or hammer home an obvious theme. These guys don't do that, just telling their little fantasy story with a few jokes and not worrying about making it bigger than it need be.

The filmmakers are also fairly smart about how they deploy modest resources. They don't add visual effects to psychic powers that can work just as well if invisible, and don't tease that there's something bigger and flashier on the way. It helps keep the focus on Dutch, but also keeps the audience able to believe that maybe this has been here all along and there's been no way we could notice it. That may not be the actual primary intent, but it works, a case of pieces that fit together not making one look for the spots where they don't.

All told, The Paragon is fairly modest, but that modesty works for it in ways that ambition might not have. You often here talk of people squeezing a lot out of resources, but this doesn't look like there's that much strain.


"Bladder Shy"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)

"Bladder Shy" is one pretty obvious joke - a man who just dashed into a restroom has performance anxiety when someone else stands next to him and, no matter where he imagines himself being instead so that he can loosen up and just go, the other fellow shows up - but it's told well. There are variations full of gay panic or something otherwise uncharitable, but director Joel Goundry, writer/co-star Christopher Duthie, and co-star Mike Tan keep it from ever being mean-spirited or anything much more than folks being used to privacy when they pee.

I'm also kind of amused, after the fact, at how this five-minute short which feels like it all takes place in an ordinary restroom and could be done in an afternoon, probably actually took days or weeks because the small cast and crew was going around to various locations and shooting a few wordless seconds of people standing in or near water. Movie magic by Goundry and editor Dan Perrott right there, and I say that without jest.


Scared Shitless

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)

Scared Shitless is what it looks and sounds like and it's good at being that thing, or at least certain parts of that thing: The filmmakers push things a lot less than they could and than they probably should in most cases, to the extent that I wonder if there are harder-edged cuts of this movie in the editing suite, with what a lot of horror-comedy fans might consider the good stuff set aside because the filmmakers found the upbeat vibes working best.

Not that the story is upbeat to read the bullet points: It opens with a mad scientist (Mark McKinney) fleeing a burning lab after a confrontation about his extracurricular activities goes wrong in the usual way, and then movies elsewhere in Hamilton, Ontario, to introduce Don (Steven Ogg) and Sonny Donohue (Daniel Doherty), a father-and-son odd couple; father Don is a gruff plumber and Sonny, already suffering from chronic stomach issues, has also become a shut-in due to traumatically-induced germophobia. Don figures the way to help Sonny get past that is to have him start coming along on jobs, starting with a regular client who he suspects gets her toilet clogged because she wants attention. Of course, the guy from the opening has an apartment in this building, the thing he brought home has found its way into the pipes, and the nice young lady at the front desk who was a classmate when Sonny could still attend college, Patricia (Chelsea Clark), would kind of like anything weird the Donohues find kept quiet because between her med school tuition and her father's health issues, they really need to sell this building.

The movie is very much more comedy than horror, but more affectionate than mocking, from the old couple doing some BDSM play to how, even when Don and Sonny are introduced getting on each other's nerves, there's tons of affection between them. The filmmakers seem to actually like most of their characters and presume that they're going to try their best - Patricia even sounds apologetic as she delivers the "this deal has got to go through" lines - rather than building up conflict that's going to feel silly soon. Where it's aware of horror tropes, it's aware in the way that actual people tend to be rather than as a winking way to flatter the audience.

It's cheerfully gross, maybe not Steve Kostanski's most creative work as an effects artist, but he and his crew execute the basic tentacle/slug thing well, with all the attendant goop, blood and guts, and severed limbs. I suspect a lot of folks will appreciate that there's plenty of blood and guts but little actual toilet stuff, because that's two different ways of being disgusted. Kind of related, perhaps, is that the film has one of the tamest "naked camgirl gets attacked by a monster in the shower" scene it could, like they're going to kill a lot of people but don't want to be leering creeps while they do it.

Most of the fun, then, comes from the main cast. Steven Ogg casually sells a punch of goofy plumber jokes and has good father-son energy with Daniel Donehy, who also has a fun vibe with Chelsea Clark; they're a trio that seems pretty fun to hang out with and are the right kind of smart to treat this as a problem to be solved without seeming unreasonably capable for three sort of random folks. The building full of potential victims are entertaining right up until they sell being eaten as horrible but also twistedly funny, and the opening scene with Mark McKinney as a schlubby mad scientist (he kind of gives off "dumb Captain Kangaroo" vibes) and Julian richings as the guy looking to steal his work is more or less exactly what one would expect from those particular pros. Nobody seems to be trying too hard, especially once the film is set up and just rolls forward.

Like I said, there's probably a gorier, more exploitative version of this movie that could show up as an unrated director's cut on disc if those were still things, but it would probably have the wrong vibe somewhere and collapse. This is good bloody fun all the way through.


Tatsumi

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

Tatsumi is the sort of crime movie where one is surprised that the veteran criminals don't, at some point, let out an exhausted sigh that the behavior of some loose cannon is just not professional, because, really, that maniac is the real liability. Unfortunately for its characters, maniac loose cannons get stories started and keep them going; you kind of need one to get a crime story this good.

That is not Tatsumi (Yuya Endo), who tries to stay out of the violent part of crime and just stick to keeping things running at the yakuza-controlled docks where the fishing boats come in, calling his boss Takeshi (Ryo Matumoto) "Skipper" and unsentimental in how he treats his meth-addicted brother (Kisetsu Fujiwara). He can't entirely escape it, though - he's still Takeshi's go-to guy for when he needs a body disposed of, and ex-girlfriend Kyoko (Nanami Kameda) is asking for a favor: Her high-school dropout sister Aoi (Kokoro Morita), a mechanic at the garage Kyoko manages for Takeshi, has sticky fingers and a bad attitude, and if Tatsumi could help cool things down, that would be great. Unfortunately, another gangster (Ryuhei Watabe) has even stickier fingers, and when Takeshi sends his maniac brother Ryuji (Tomoyuki Kuramoto) to handle it at the garage, Kyoko and Aoi are witnesses, and Aoi is none too impressed when Tatsumi's plan seems to be "just accept what's coming".

Gangster narratives use the word "family" a lot, and without necessarily tipping his hand that much, writer/director Hiroshi Shoji casts a critical eye on this: Sisters Kyoko and Aoi are polar opposites and get on each other's nerves but also clearly love each other more than anything else; it can also be easy to miss that Takeshi and Ryuji are actual brothers as opposed to just being in the same gang, or at least lose sight of that. Mostly, it's Tatsumi grappling not so much with his own sins but seeing a reflection of his own screwup brother in Aoi. Skipperrepeatedly speaks to how the yakuza is family, but eventually Tatsumi comes to realize that that's not a measure of loyalty, but something that has caused him to treat other relationships as similarly transactional, or at the very least conditional.

It's a good background and way to add some uncertainty to a nastily grinding story of characters who can't run but are almost certainly overmatched if they choose to fight back, let alone seek revenge. Despite not being constantly beset by new dangers, things move fast enough that Aoi can't change out of her bloody hoodie - the film's take on mob violence is that it relies on overwhelming force by people who know what they're doing, and someone like Aoi getting a blow in is pretty lucky - and there's just enough time to watch Tatsumi and Aoi show the wear of their situation. It helps show how, maybe, Tatsumi was worn down in a similar way.

Yuya Endo is impressive in how he gets that across, because Tatsumi doesn't particularly change aspect or the habits of a lifetime, instead just seeming to realign what he considers worth fighting for and maybe feeling a little better about who he is in the film's later moments compared to his feeling on the subject earlier, even if it comes with regret. His hard, overly practical manner clashes nicely with Kokoro Morita as Aoi, whose emotions are always right on the surface and whose immaturity is allowed to be frustrating rather than innocent. She plays off Nanami Kameda's Kyoko well, as does Endo - there's familiarity between these two but also little doubt about why it ultimately didn't work out, despite their both being smart, practical people. Of course, Tomoyuki Kuramoto steals nearly every scene he's in as Ryuji and isn't particularly subtle about it; he's a mad dog where one is never quite sure just how tightly Takeshi is holding his leash, speaking with a raised voice most of the time and with a tendency to push his head forward a bit, getting further into personal space to show there's nothing stopping him from getting further. It's the sort of vicious gangster performance that could wear itself out, but is present just long and often enough to keep the audience from getting the least bit sentimental about the enterprise.

It's the sort of energy that lets this feel like a road movie at times even though nobody ever gets very far on a map: It matters in which direction Tatsumi turns the wheel regardless of how far he's going.


"AstroNots"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

This is another short that has one really joke, but where "Bladder Shy" was looking to repeat, "AstroNots" is seeing how well it can be drawn out. It starts with the first manned mission to Mars about to launch, and as Mission Control runs down the checklists, pilot Abraham Adams (Aaron Glenane) confesses to Commander Thomas Collins (Adam Dunn) that he's spectacularly unqualified, somehow having BSed his way through various tests and gotten lucky on others. Collins knows he should abort the mission upon hearing this, but not only would that likely end the program, he's a descendant of Michael Collins, the man who stayed in the orbiter while Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon, and the idea of also being so close but forgotten is something he can't bear.

Dunn and Glenane are also credited as writers, and one can imagine the writing process as one of sitting around and riffing, trying different ways to crack each other up and challenging each other to figure out ways in which the whole thing doesn't work and which snappy answers are funny enough to become dialog and lead to something else. Somewhere in there, they figure out just what will keep things going for long enough to get to a near-perfect deadpan punchline, just really tight comic scripting.

It's good work all around, getting the right level of panic and recognizing that this gag calls for a reaction shot and this one should linger. Comedy direction and editing seems like it must be thankless and invisible whether done right or wrong, but it's pretty much always right here.


Pendant ce temps sur Terre (Meanwhile on Earth)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

There's likely a better example of the phenomenon than Meanwhile on Earth, but it feels like a bit of an inversion to a certain formula, where you promise weird aliens and horror with the idea of sneaking some sort of loftier ideas to the audience. This one, arguably, can be sold as a meditative drama, maybe one set in the future but where those elements are a metaphor, only to deliver something weird and chilling on top of that.

Elsa Martens (Megan Northam) was always close to her astronaut brother Franck (voice of Sébastien Pouderoux), and just as she was excited for him being selected for a deep-space mission, he couldn't wait to see how she grew as an artist, fully expecting her to be having shows in Paris when he returned even though she was crashing with parents Annick (Catherine Salée) and Daniel (Sam Louwyck). But he didn't return; winding up lost in space, and now Elsa is still living at home, occasionally defacing the statue erected to memorialize her brother and working at the palliative care center Annick manages - and even there, best friend Audrey (Soifa Lesaffre) is moving away to take a job somewhere on the coast - while Daniel scans radio bands hoping for a message and Franck's son Vincent (Roman Williams) is a frequent visitor. It's Elsa that receives a signal, though, via a strange biological receiver, from entities that say they have rescued Franck, and need Elsa's help to prepare for their arrival.

This is a pretty nifty situation for a movie even before the science fictional elements start appearing, although they are welcome when they do; if it is not going to be fantastic, why have the brother vanish while in deep space as opposed to at sea or in the country, after all? Writer/director Jérémy Clapin gives the viewer a good sense of who Elsa is and the way that this sort of grief and loss can feel tremendously isolating, as can a hostage situation, and like nobody can possibly understand because who has faced such trials before? She's confronted daily with the tragedies and indignities of the end of one's life and cannot find acceptance, much less solace in the idea that her family has avoided all of this. If this is all there was, it would be a great role for Megan Northam, who can hint at the vivacious young woman who should be there but who looks worn and spent instead.

After that, it's got a bit of a horror-movie story, although the story is carefully built to keep it on a certain path (fittingly enough) that it's not exactly suspenseful much of the time, but turns a screw or two nicely. The way that Elsa starts out initially seems like the way Clapin has set things up is designed to absolve her, but it leads to is more horrifying, that Elsa's good intentions have set her on a course she cannot escape, as it is made very clear to her that not making a certain choice is itself a decision with consequences, but where she also can't escape the guilt.

Though the live-action debut of someone known for animation, it's far less gaudy than many such films. There are animated pieces - it's kind of telling that the animated renditions of Elsa's comics about her and Franck having adventures from their childhood cast her as an alien, suggesting she didn't fit in and her brother was nearly her only friend - and there are a couple sequences and bits of weird biological design in the middle that definitely spring from the sort of mind that starts from this sort of visual, but the filmmakers take care to highlight the mundane nature of many situations, giving us a thoroughly lived-in world where most have moved past the thing that has devastated this family, even though it is extraordinary.

It's nifty work that can be sold as boutique-house science fiction even though, for all that it plays as something about human dilemmas and difficult moral choices, he also does not hesitate to use a chainsaw to point out how far Elsa might go if push came to shove. Just being smart doesn't make it any less a nifty genre thriller.


"Ahora vuelvo" ("Be Right Back")

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

I don't know that I've ever really considered how bizarrely incongruous raising a modern child in one of these old European apartments must be - most of the time when they show up in this sort of movie, the kid is dour because a parent has died or they've had to move in with a weird grandparent, but here we get Maria (Anastasia Russo), bouncing off the walls, watching cartoons at ear-splitting volume, shoveling microwave popcorn in her mouth. It's kind of no wonder that her mother (Belén Cuesta) is looking frazzled, and maybe doesn't feel that bad about stepping out to run a couple of errands.

She doesn't come back right away, of course, so it's not until the sun has set and Maria's stomach starts rumbling even though she's just finished the last kernel of popcorn that she realizes that this is actually a pretty scary place, and the person knocking at the door claiming to be her mother but having really weak excuses for not having a key might be faking. It almost seems to be about the shifting tone at times, how things that seem harmless can suddenly become spooky with the right shift, and a brash, kind of bratty kid can lose her nerve. It tips its hand fairly quickly, but also has some fun exploiting the idea that the sort of child who could be the resourceful heroine of this kind of story might also be a real frustrating handful for her parents.


The Beast Within

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

There's ambition to The Beast Within, and talent, but it's not exactly evenly distributed: The performances I love are all build around one that leaves me cold, and the ending isn't quite enough for me to circle back and consider how it all fits together. The pieces are seemingly all there for a fine psychological werewolf story, but they don't click together in solid fashion.

It takes place on a gated plot that doesn't seem to be very productive beyond a few backyard chickens and hogs despite the large, ancient stone farmhouse; with 10-year-old Willow (Caoilinn Springall) confined to it due to a respiratory disease that has her lugging an oxygen tank around. Or maybe it's just enough to be worked by father Noah (Kit Harington), mother Imogen (Ashleigh Cummings), and grandfather Waylon (James Cosmo), who despite the size of the house lives in a mobile home parked on the grounds. It's the sort of isolation where things faster, and maybe there's a reason why they live that way rather than in town - after all, every once in a while, Imogen takes Noah to another corner of the property for the night, along with a bit of their dwindling livestock, to be chained up until something passes.

So, do folks like Kit Harington on the show with all the dragon nonsense? I ask this because I can't recall ever seeing him in a film where he displays much in the way of star power or charisma, and it really kind of kills this. There's this terrific small cast around him, but much of the film almost seems to be hiding him rather than give the audience a chance to be charmed enough by his character to be shocked when his monstrous side comes out. He's admittedly got a particular challenge that some of the other members of the cast don't have, needing to play certain things as ambiguous enough to be reconsidered later, but the end effect is that this movie doesn't work if Noah's not interesting and he barely makes an impression. Bland, in some cases, is worse than bad.

I like much of what the filmmakers are doing otherwise; the rest of the cast in particular is strong, playing the metaphor pretty straight and building this really earnest core. Carolinn Springall gives the impression of someone who is used to her physical limits as Willow, which even more experienced actors often stumble at managing, while Ashleigh Cummings shines as the tough but often overloaded Imogen and James Cosmo gives off the very specific vibe of someone who never liked his daughter's husband but is there for support even when he doesn't say as much. They cover a set of family relationships that is likely very familiar to many even before the monstrous elements start to surface.

Once one gets a hang of the sort of timeless setting, it's a really nice thing to settle into, although I admit, I thought we were looking at multiple time periods at the start. The werewolf effects are mostly kept out of sight for much of the movie but do feel impressively tactile even as they're right on the border of where some in the audience would laugh at the man in a suit. It's fine for them to be kind of crazy and hard to believe, as it's a werewolf in a movie mostly told from a child's point of view, and works best when it's part of the shadows. The action-oriented finale is pretty well-staged, a good balance of things lurking just out of sight, sudden violence, and why you should not use antlers in all of your decorating.

There's not a lot there, though, with the film and audience biding a lot of time until that finale. I do feel, at least on a first watch, that the ending revelations are fortunate to have the emotional impact that they do one doesn't really care to examine just how hard the movie worked at pointing in another direction at times but just let it be. Folks will make excuses if they care about the characters enough, although it's likely better if they don't have to, and The Beast Within has an unfortunate tendency to straddle that line.

Fantasia 2024.04: The Avenging Eagle, International Science-Fiction Short Films, Not Friends, The Old Man and the Demon Sword, and Mash Ville

Falling a day behind here, because Sunday was a full day and Monday an early start, and the breathing room I'd hoped for didn't materialize. There's also no desk in this hotel room, so it's a little slow going.

Apologies for the terrible panorama from the Sci-Fi Shorts; some weird fisheye stuff going on. Anyway, my notes also stink, but from the left, there three folks from "Headache", with director Björn Schagerström in the center; two from "ZZZ", with director Philipe Vargas on the left; director Connor Kujawinski of "A Little Longer"; directors Daniel Shapiro & Alex Topaller of "Escape Attempt"; and Eddy Martin & Elena Rojas, two of the cast members of "ZZZ".

It was, as usual, an enjoyable Q&A, with the "Headache" folks talking about how it's kind of easy to find brutalist architecture that give you massive concrete slabs for exteriors, it's not so easy when you want that inside, and they wound up shooting in an art museum space that was between expositions, and seemed to be relatively welcoming of folks making a short film. They also talked about how using that space was tricky at times, since they didn't want visible light sources, in one case creating a weird spot where light was coming out of a shute that illuminated the head of a bed. They mentioned that it was a proof of concept for a feature, and that unlike a lot of shorts, they actually found themselves adding stuff into the initial cut, because the timing just wasn't right.

The "Escape Attempt" team had the opposite problem; their initial cut was almost an hour, too long for the shorts section of most festivals (the Oscars define one as 40 minutes or less and most festivals are similar). They initially cut it down to half that, but at times wondered if they should try to boost it to a feature. I'm not sure there's really enough in the story for that, and I imagine that at that length they'd be spending a lot on the FX budget. That said, they did mention that a lot more was practical than you might think, especially with the spaceship interiors; the production design team was eager to build rather than just send things along to the effects house.

I'd hoped to head across the street for Ghost Cat Anzu after that, but it would have been a tight fit and a shorts package with a lot of filmmakers to wrangle and have Q&A with always runs long, so I stayed in De Sève for Not Friends, which turned out fine schedule-wise, chipping away at Tuesday so I'd be able to see Customs Frontline outside the festival but part of it in spirit.

I stayed in De Sève for The Old Man and the Demon Sword, with the festival's Jusine Smith hosting writer/director Fábio Powers, producer Christiano Guerreiro, and visual effects artist Jules Spaniard. It's the sort of Q&A where, even if you didn't love the movie, makes one say "good for you!", as Powers talked about his love for B movies, having the idea for the movie in his head for a long time, and wanting to make something with António da Luz, a non-professional actor and the uncle of a cousin who had a distinctive vibe and energy, and how he started from the going-meta finale because he figured he'd need to explain a lot of slip-ups only to find the movie mostly went fine. He also brought in a couple of folks he remembered from television when he was a child, one of whom had surprisingly retired to his town, and contacting Spaniard on Facebook to get some pointers on how to do effects and winding up with a collaborator.

It's also apparently very specifically Portuguese in a lot of ways, including how the village where they filmed has a population of 14: Apparently a lot of those mountain towns are hollowed out in that way, which gives you a lot of freedom to make a movie but has its issues, like how there is obviously no coffee shop or grocery store in a place of that size.

So, very much an "Underground" entry, though not exactly full-on Outsider Art. I'm glad there's a place for that, beyond just "folks not interested in the wrestling horror movie on the bigger screen".

The day ended across the street in Hall with the World Premiere of Mash Ville, with host/programmer Steven Lee, director Hwang Wook, the translator whose name I missed, producer Lim Dong-min, and actors Kim Hee-sang & Chun Sin-hwan. They talked about wanting to do genres you don't see very often in Korean movies, specifically name-checking westerns and John Ford, and it's kind of funny, because if this is a Western, it feels more Sam Peckinpah than Ford to me. I don't really know that it's actually a Western; it feels more like the Coen Brothers doing small-town crime with a heart of pitch-black darkness.

Anyway, I was kind of wiped out at that point, maybe not properly appreciating it and retaining it well. I'll probably give it a look if it pops up somewhere else.

Long day! And a couple more since; if you're reading this on Saturday the 27th (Day 10), the plan is trying for Killer Constable, crossing the street for Capsules 2024 if I'm not far enough up the pass-holder line, HEAVENS: The Boy and His Robot, Kizumonogatari, and Infinite Summer.


Leng xue shi san ying (The Avenging Eagle)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Fantasia Retro, laser DCP)

I haven't seen nearly enough Shaw Brothers material to know where this stands in the pantheon - they made so much and I've mostly watched it hit-and-miss as it plays various repo programs! I'm guessing this is close to top-tier, with a hook that makes it stick out enough to be worthy of the spiffy new restoration and forthcoming release on disc.

It opens with a man who calls himself "Vagrant" (Ti Lung) falling from his horse as he desperately rides across the desert; a passing rider who calls himself "Homeless" (Alexander Fu Sheng) stops to assist him, only to have Vagrant run off with his horse. Homeless eventually catches up to Vagrant, who reveals that he is a former member of the Boat Clan, a group of vicious marauders commanded by Yoh Xi-hung (Ku Feng), and Vagrant was one of the notorious Eagle Warriors. He has attempted to turn over a new leaf, for reasons he chooses not to share, but Yoh has sent his comrades to bring him in dead or alive, and ultimately it appears that the only chance at survival is to go on the offensive. Homeless chooses to help his new friend, although he remains cagey about his own past.

The restoration/scan of The Avenging Eagle that played Fantasia's Retro series is good enough that you can see the glue holding the wigs on, one of those things that makes you wonder if maybe movies were made with the expectation that a little projector motion and the like was expected to smooth such things out. Honestly, it can be shocking how good movies you associate with beat-up grindhouse prints and bargain-bin VHS look given a chance. And this one looks fantastic, full of bright colors and garish costumes and a world created on soundstages that feels both mythic and squalid, terrifically and clearly shot.

It's just generally a very fun movie, as well. A lot of Shaw Brothers martial-arts flicks have tended to feel like arcane and arbitrary reasons to fight, and this has a stretch like that, but eventually it has things click into place and push forward for the rest of the movie. Ti Lung and Fu Sheng nail the sort of reluctant brotherhood that is in many ways the mainstay of Hong Kong action cinema, with Fu especially giving a performance that initially feels fake but is revealed as fake with a purpose, eventually becoming something unexpected, while Ti Lung makes his Black Eagle someone with a heavy emotional burden who is nevertheless a man of action even when confronting it. Ku Feng, meanwhile, is the sort of larger-than-life monster who convinces audiences that the other two will have to fight together even before they throw the first punches.

The fighting itself is terrific in a way that's not necessarily a given, sometimes a little heavy on slow motion that becomes freeze frames but giving the feel of something spontaneous rather than overly choreographed. Director Sun Chung, writer Ni Kuang, and fight choreographers Tong Kai & Huang Pei-Chih have an excuse to throw waves of enemies at Ti Lung and Fu Sheng, all with distinctive weapons and styles which have the heroes having to adapt their own tools. It's never just "more", and the filmmakers make the mind games that are part of the finale just effective enough to make things nicely wobbly.

Also, I chose to believe that several scenes with sleeve knives were meant to look like the guy was flipping his enemies the bird. It's that kind of movie, straightforward in its serious, deadly intentions but well aware that the object is to have fun<.BR />

"ZZZ"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, laser DCP)

A woman (Julieta Ortiz) comes to what appears to be a closed-down mattress store, but the inside is revealed as a place where one can enter and choose their dreams. She chooses to see her husband Sebastian (Eddy Martin), a truck driver who died in an accident twenty years ago, but even a dream of being your younger self (Elena Rojas) and reuniting with the love of one's life will be tinged with the memories of the real world.

Writer/director Felipe Vargas leans hard on some familiar tropes here, but combines them in interesting ways. The flophouse explicitly recalls images of opium dens but the actual injection is laced with Sandman imagery that carries through to a desert landscape that helps make it clear that Marcella is less injecting herself into a memory as building a desired environment; it's also kind of amusing that this is all located in a storefront that used to be a mattress shop, things that were briefly and unsustainably ubiquitous in recent years. It's occasionally somewhat short of brilliant; the finale with a police raid and "will she choose to extricate herself" feels kind of old-hat, and the film could maybe use one or two more explicit reminders that, ultimately, Marcella is talking to herself.

Vargas and Eddy Martin do seem to get that, though; even if they don't say it out loud, Martin has Sebas vacillate being Marcella's idealized memory and also her own guilt and need to be forgiven. Julieta Ortiz and Elena Rojas do very nice work of making Marcella and "Ella" the same person, even if they aren't entirely cast for being dead ringers for one another; they capture a lot of the same body language and way of speaking, and Vargas often shows that the older Marcella is not a solid block of guilt, but someone who still has a lot of what made Ella vivacious.


"Headache"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, laser DCP)

"Headache" opens with the appearance of taking place in a prison, but that's maybe not quite it - at least, there's no mention of there being an outside world that put the people in there with their flatly colored jumpsuits and rigid hierarchy. Frank (Torkel Petersson) starts out wearing blue and in Production, moving pills from one bin to another, but he is told that he has been one of the least efficient workers there and is moved to Consumption, where he is given a gray uniform and tasked with popping the pills Production is creating. To make sure, they are regularly given regular bonks on the head. It finally strikes him as so absurd that he tries to escape.

Director Björn Schagerström and co-writer Agnes Jeppsson have a number of satirical targets, with a bit of Stanford Prison Experiment thrown in as well. The sharpest barbs seem to be aimed at late capitalism, where businesses are completely focused on growth at the expense of what people actually want and need; the broadest ones which maybe get the biggest laughs target bureaucracy and a sort of algorithmic obedience that cannot handle unexpected actions. They are all, by and large, good jokes, but kind of at right angles to each other, so that what's going on at the end had kind of drifted from what was really working at the start.

I do like how Torkel Petersson sells it all. He's got the job of being the audience surrogate who sees this society as nuts but also being of it, and he really nails that deadpan alarm. There's a nice cast around him; I believe Jenny Elisabeth Gustavsson plays the member of management who is either cheerfully evil herself or an effective enough mouthpiece that she might as well be, and really nails that quietly predatory vibe to stand out. Even folks who show up late for a gag or two really fit into this odd situation without issue.


"The Move"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, laser DCP)

I really like the structure Eric Kissack does with this short film: Establish things in relatable, entertaining fashion, throw some fantastic wrench into it, and then double down in a way that hits a nerve and pushes to a dramatic climax without sacrificing what's been making the whole thing work. Eliminate "fantastic", and that's probably the way most comedies are supposed to work, especially at this length, but a lot of people forget that or get the proportions off.

Here, we meet Kate (Amanda Crew) and Todd (Dustin Milligan), a young couple whose relationship had recently hit a few bumps but are now moving into a new apartment, getting ready before the movers show up. Initially, Todd is complaining that the previous tenants left an armoire behind, but they soon find it's not the weirdest feature: There's an itty-bitty invisible wormhole that zips things over to the other side of the living room, and it probably says something about their relationship that Todd is terrified and panicky while Kate sees it as the coolest thing that she's ever seen.

It's really fun to watch Dustin Milligan and Amanda Crew work here. They give Todd and Kate great opposites-attract energy, trading rapid-fire barbs in a way that's genuinely funny but also shows the strain relationships built around such different temperaments can have, and kick it up a notch when the portal makes things weird. They are both genuinely funny and go big in a way that complements each other: Milligan's whiny neuroticism might be a lot except that Crew's rapid acceptance and excitement creates a middle they can orbit around without ever getting too far apart. And when things get weirder, the energy level is such that it's not even really a pivot to making a choice that may be entirely against one's nature for the one one loves.

Pretty darn good in under ten minutes.


"Escape Attempt"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, laser DCP)

During the Q&A, the filmmakers mentioned problems with the runtime, in that the initial cut was almost feature-length but they probably couldn't stretch it further without killing the pacing, so they cut it down to something which qualified as a short. The pacing is good now but the storytelling has some big gaps. It's listed on IMDB as a TV series, but I kind of can't see it working better in that configuration. It kind of feels like the crew made something they couldn't complete but the material was too good to waste, so they put it together as best they could - which isn't bad.

It opens introducing us to Saul (Andrzej Chyra), who describes himself as a professor with particular knowledge of Twentieth Century conflicts, and who is looking to leave the Earth and get away from humanity. Most jaunts are to Pandora, but that planet is nearly as crowded. Emma (Anna Burnett), the pilot of a private spacecraft also on her way to that planet, offers to drop him off at one of many uninhabited worlds, a detour her linguist husband Vadim (Ieuan Coombs) is less excited for. They warn somewhat over the trip, but when they make landing on this supposedly empty world, they find that people are already there, villains Saul recognizes all too well working a slave labor population to death.

There's backstory or lore here, more than a half-hour short winds up having time to explore and which might have been slated for future episodes if this did indeed start life as a TV series. You can probably do without to a certain extent - you don't really need to explain Nazis - but there are some very odd jumps in its story, especially as Emma and Vadim never seem to be more than wealthy vacationers before encountering this huge and horrifying mystery, and while they seem a little too well-equipped to handle it. It is really stopped down to just Saul reckoning with a long-ago decision to run.

Looks really nice, though, if very much in the Apple Store vibe with white jumpsuits seemingly the only fashion in the future. There's a stark contrast between the 2020s Star Trek look and what they find on the planet, and even though the effects are likely mostly CGI, there's a satisfyingly model-like feel to how the ships move.


"Sincopat"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, laser DCP)

Another short with a devilishly simple idea played out well, "Sincopat" introduces Ona (Núria Florensa), an executive and designer who has taken her company's newest device out for a spin: The "Narval", a fashionable smartwatch which synchronizes with injectable nanotechnology that takes up residence in the audio processing center of one's brain, beaming music directly into your head. It will make the company a fortune, and Ona loves it. At least until a malfunction has the nanos stop receiving and just repeating what's in the buffer, meaning the same two seconds of music are playing in her brain on a loop, and there's no way to stop it.

I've kind of got my doubts about the whole "no way to stop it" thing - it initially seems like a problem that can be solved with a hammer if you don't want to wait for the transmitter's battery to die - but the basic idea is good enough to let it slide for ten minutes of jokes about how having this in your head on a loop will drive you absolutely mad and how, obviously, a big tech company is going to consider this a one-time fluke or an acceptable risk with the launch so close. Co-writer/director Pol Diggler gives the short a "stages of grief" structure, which proves a good fit and allows the film to jump forward to the next gag rather than feel trapped by the implications of any one idea. The punchlines for the short as a whole are a bit obvious, but they work.

Núria Florensa sells the whole thing well, too - there's a likable sort of fecklessness to Ona at the start, capturing the intersection of "this is so cool" and "this is going to make us so rich" tech executives, while later projecting the horror that comes with each stage of this torment. This could have just been a fable about a tech person hoisted on her own petard, but it plays more darkly comic when you realize the company will treat this all as collateral damage.


"Katele (Mudskipper)"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, laser DCP)

I must admit, I was more often interested in "Katele" as an idea than drawn into its particular story. "Modern fantasy rooted in Australian aboriginal culture" is something I hadn't seen, and it feels like you could do a lot more with that than what we see here. Which isn't much of an outline: Martha (Elmi Kris), an indigenous woman working the late shift in a laundrette, sees one of the machines go haywire and pulls a man (Waangenga Blanco) out. She hides him, argues with the white guy making deliveries to various institutional clients (Tony Nixon), and when the man vanishes, ruminates on what her life should be like.

It may just be that this short is a bit miscast as part of a science-fiction block, especially for someone like myself who tends to gravitate toward the nuts-and-bolts end of the genre; in that context, one may tend to fill in a fantastical narrative that's not exactly there. I, for example, read the ending as Martha following Katele back through the portal to a world where Australia had never been colonized, but there's not exactly anything in the text that says so. Indeed, not a lot really happens.

Still, Elmi Kris has a face, and she projects the frustration and sadness of her current situation well, and even for those not in her particular circumstances, the feeling that one's life shouldn't be like this and maybe there is someplace where it isn't is powerful. She's terrific at communicating this mood.


Phuean (mai) sanit (Not Friends)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

My first reaction to seeing the description for Not Friends was "Dear Evan Hansen, but Thai", which is probably unfair, in that I haven't seen that film or the play that spawned it and they could be completely different in their details (though Not Friends at least has a cast full of folks believable as teenagers). It's not a bad take on the basic theme, but doesn't quite have the confidence to remain darkly comic or the agility to pivot to something heartwarming.

The film centers on Pae (Anthony Buisseret), who has transferred to a new school for his senior year after an incident at his previous one, where he was often treated as an outcast because the smell of the family flour-mill business seemed to stick to him, and which his father (Pramote Sangsorn) expects him to join because he's on his own for university. He's assigned to sit next to the gregarious Joe (Pisitpol Ekaphongpisit), who says Pae is his 150th friend and a person only has that many in his life. That will be true for Joe, who is hit by a truck and killed crossing the street. It's an opportunity for Pae, though, as a fine-arts school is having a short-film contest which can deliver a full-ride scholarship without having to worry about entrance exams, looking for tearjerkers, so Pae opts to make a film about his best friend Joe, using the story that won Joe a writing contest. The snag is Bokeh (Thitiya Jirapornsilp), who was Joe's actual best friend in junior high, but winds up reluctantly offering her services as cinematographer despite her initial plan being to expose Pae as a fraud.

It feels like this was the most fun version of the story for about five or ten minutes, right around the school assembly, when Pae shifts into full huckster mode, the other students falling for it and Bokeh joining up to make sure he doesn't screw it up. The cynicism of the premise is on full display, but writer/director Atta Hemwadee can't really sustain it; the movie shifts into "let's put on a show!" mode and a later twist just never sits right. It also doesn't help that Joe's award-winning story, while being useful in offering a lot of ways for Pae, Bokeh, and the AV club to shoot wacky things, feels mawkish and simplistic, something that may win an elementary school contest but not one for high-school seniors and not something that will make adults cry. People in the film keep saying it's great but it doesn't hold up when the audience hears it.

The heck of it is, the film clearly has the right folks in the leads. Anthony Buisseret is genuinely funny when playing Pae as a dumbass with an instinct for scheming and faking it until he makes it, giving the impression of someone less a monster than desperate enough to grab onto anything and figure out how to make it work later. Thitiya Jirapornsilp is a good foil for him as Bokeh, making her smart enough to realize her own faults as well as Pae's and both relishing the chance to sabotage him and to make a movie about her friend. Pisitpol Ekaphongpisit pops in and out of flashbacks as Joe, and does a good job of riding the line between being the pest Pae often saw him as an the earnest good friend of Bokeh.

Gags about amateur filmmaking dominate the middle section, and there's a fun sense of absurdity on the one hand and fondness for the scrappy improvisation. There's a certain stabbing at us older folks when Bokeh suggests doing an homage to the most famous scene in the first Mission: Impossible film and her classmate points out that the movie is old, from before they were born, but I guess it's fair (and I wouldn't exactly mind if Tenet becomes the zoomer equivalent). There's a stab at the characters of similar quality when it's revealed that they didn't know everything about Joe, but Hemwadee kind of gets into a mire playing it out.

Eventually, he's seemingly working hard to make everything retroactively a lot nicer, and while maybe that's the emotions he wanted to evoke, it's less entertaining to be assured that folks weren't that bad than to see them work to overcome their worst impulses. As a result, Not Friends has its moments, but can't quite lean into how it's often at its best when the characters are at their worst.


"Space Dumbs: The Fly"

* * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)

Man, we're going on 60 years of people making the same jokes about Star Trek and 40 making the same jokes about The Next Generation, aren't we? It's kind of amazing that some folks are still howling when they get the reference.

But, hey, more power to the fact that people are still having fun with Star Trek decades later in Kazakhstan. We've seen these jokes before, but everybody's got to start making movies somewhere, and writer/director/co-star Alan Talkenov is a disconcertingly good match for Brent Spiner as Data.


O Velho e a Espada (The Old Man and the Demon Sword)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)

There's kind of a weird tension to watching something like The Old Man and the Demon Sword because half its charm and reason for existence are the way it is a DIY labor of love, while in the other, some of the material is good enough that one might want to see it a bit more refined. If this were a professional production, you'd call it a bad movie, but if it had to make money, it would not exist, and the world might be a bit poorer for that.

It opens with a warrior monk wandering central Portugal with a sword in which a loquacious demon is trapped, discovering a town shielded by a force field that is overrun with demons, which apparently only the town drunk António (António da Luz) can see. The sword, of course, will end up in the hands of "Tohno", and there's a seemingly never-ending supply of monsters which only he can see that need to be dispatched before the sword is recharged enough to cut their way to the outside.

A lot of this is actually kind of cool if you like the stuff filmmaker Fabio Powers is drawing from. The monsters are often rendered with effects straight out of the video games of some prior decade, but some of the designs aren't bad at all; I particularly like the guys who are like a vantablack hole in the image but still give off an impression of unkempt furriness. The design of the sword is straight out of a baller anime, and there's some fun in how the filmmakers have clearly figured out how to get the eyeball in it to turn and blink and are going to do this in every damn shot, and voice actor Paulo Espirito Santo is great even if you don't speak a word of Portuguese. They love and own the cheese.

On what you may consider to be the other hand, though, António da Luz was not an actor, but a guy the director liked and wanted to put in a movie, more or less telling him to be himself and maybe improvise a little. This sometimes works, especially at the start - he's got this sensation of sadness and whimsy filtered through what seems to be a genuine bone tiredness that professionals don't always capture - he often feels undirected and like he's got the same few ideas to spew, and Powers never manages to turn conversations between his alcoholic screwup and the demon sword into something one can really build a film around.

Perhaps anticipating this, the film also ends on something that is weirdly meta and maybe too clever by half, winking so hard at the audience as to sprain something but doing it in such a way that it's not particularly satisfying no matter how you look at it. It can be seen as throwing away some of the fun fantasy, or raising the question about whether this sort of DIY film can be exploitative but not actually engaging with it. It doesn't quite play as cynical, but it also feels like walking away, not actually doing anything with what got the audience's interest.

It's a handmade underground thing, so it's going to be kind of rough. I'm glad I've seen it, and I'm glad Powers has this odd artifact that he made with a friend. It's a pure curiosity, but there's room for that.


Mash Ville

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

The listings for Mash Ville describe it as a Korean Western, but I don't really know if it scans as part of that genre, aside from there being a sense of rural isolation; it's too frantic and the themes don't exactly line up. It feels more like some of the meaner Coen Brothers movies, full of small-town nastiness and weird nihilistic violence, but only sporadically managing that sort of compulsive watchability.

It starts with two people in traditional dress murdering some farmers in what one would initially assume to be some sort of gangland assassination; the only survivor in the town, it seems, is Kong Hyun-man, and him quite by accident. In a nearby city, movie propmaster Jeong Yo-ji is drinking her breakfast, arguing with a producer about delivering a corpse dummy, unaware that another drunk woman, Moon Seo-in, has selected her trunk for a nice comfy place to lie down. Yo-ji rebuffs a waiter's attempts to sell her on a local moonshine, which liquor executive Park Won-jeon is seeking out to explain why his company's sales are so low in this specific area. He happens upon Joo Seo-jeong (Jeon Sin-hwan), not realizing that he's the distiller in question, working with his perpetually out-of-it half, impressively bearded-brothers (Park Jong-hwan & Park Sung-il). The bad news from them is that someone just died after drinking the latest batch, so they start heading to the next town over before the local law enforcement finds out. Because the brother accidentally buried his car keys with the body, they wind up carjacking Yo-ji, and those cult killers from the start are heading in the same direction.

This seems like it should be a lot of violent fun, and it often is: There's an art to the punctuation headfirst that filmmaker Hwang Wook seems to have mastered, the film by and large looks great, and there's a fun soundtrack. Each of the three main threads is a good candidate to be part of a movie like this, off-kilter enough to feel new but also not quite big enough to be the sole support for a feature on its own.

The trick is how you play the threads out and, more crucially, crash them together, and that's often just not very good. For every inspired idea like the screw-up brothers winding up in the middle of a weird death cult, there's two cases of really not having any idea of what to do with Seo-in after her unique introduction, or even Yo-ji. There should be some sort of surprising alchemy in play, but too often, these elements pass our bounce off each other. Even within a thread, there's seldom the sense that a couple characters bouncing of each other is particularly interesting or something you'd like to see more of. The best moment is probably Won-jeon waxing rhapsodic about his knowledge of spirits to Seo-jeong, who claims he just likes a bourbon with a cigar. It's good "we're in a movie and here to entertain you while increasing tension" talk that the film otherwise lacks.

Much of the cast is underused like that, but they handle their assignments well. Jeon Sin-hwan is the closest the ensemble has to a lead, giving the sense of someone with potential beyond small-time moonshining but never quite able to push himself in that direction. Park Jong-hwan anf Park Sung-il make a fun comic team. The folks playing Yo-ji, Won-jeon, and Hyun-man squeeze what they can from their scenes, and the killers feel both deeply weird and dangerous.

(If anybody wants to hook me up with a press kit or update some websites so I can credit people peppery, it would be appreciated!)

On top of never feeling like a Western, Mash Ville too often feels like a lesser version of the genres it's closer to: There's a good Coen-inspired movie or Pulp Fiction knockoff to be made with this material, but this all too often isn't it.