FANTASIA 27 - Week 1

Fantasia International Film Festival
27th Edition
Week 1

By “Doc” Hunter Bush, staff writer and podcast czar

My first exposure to The Fantasia International Film Festival was in 2020 where I saw a half dozen tremendous films that I would otherwise probably not have been exposed to (I’ve only encountered two of them on streaming services in the years since). This is the strength of all film festivals, but especially ones like Fantasia which gather movies, documentaries and shorts from around the world - essentially each year I excitedly open the festival preview emails whispering “Yes… expand my cinematic horizons, daddy.”

I try to take in as many films as I am given access to, not just for my own enjoyment, but yours reading this as well. While I won’t be going into deep detail on any of the films below, maybe one of them sounds like your kind of jam. Then the impetus is on you to seek it out, and I hope you like what you find.

Stay Online
Written by Anton Skrypets, Eva Strelnikova
Directed by Eva Strelnikova
Starring Elizaveta Zaitseva, Oleksandr Rudynskyy, Ekaterina Kisten

Stay Online wasn’t something that I was champing at the bit to see, but it pleasantly surprised me with its creativity and ability to keep its numerous simultaneous plot lines engaging. Stay Online is what’s being called a screenlife film - a film told entirely through a computer or smartphone screen via text windows, video messaging, and surfing the ‘net - set in the Ukraine during Russia’s invasion (which is still ongoing btw). Katya (Elizaveta Zaitseva) checks in with her brother Vitya (Oleksandr Rudynskyy) on the front line, her American friend Ryan (Anton Skrypets) a volunteer helping refugees get to safe zones, and keeps her & Vitya’s mother up to date on Vitya’s status, while also finding time to secure and ship a Spider-Man costume for a young boy whose parents may not have gotten safely out of a war zone. That’s in between sheltering in the bathroom when the air raid sirens go off.

Like I said: It’s a lot of threads, all mingling through Katya and her donated laptop, but Stay Online uses some very clever tricks to maintain the illusion that it’s all happening in real time. It keeps the tension dialed up, builds emotional connection to flawed, complicated characters, and attempts to communicate a fraction of the overwhelming dread that existing in a war zone feels like.

Lovely, Dark, and Deep
Written by Teresa Sutherland
Directed by Teresa Sutherland
Starring Georgina Campbell, Nick Blood, Wai Ching Ho

Lovely, Dark, and Deep focuses on one of my favorite spooky topics: the volume of unexplained disappearances that take place in our National Parks. The first feature from writer Teresa Sutherland (Midnight Mass, The Wind), Lovely, Dark, and Deep is loaded with strange happenings, eerie details, and the inherent alienness of nature experienced in solitude. Lennon (Georgina Campbell) is competent and dedicated to her job as a new park ranger, but has an ulterior motive: investigating the disappearance of her sister when they were children. She sets out for days at a time to chart the various areas of the park all alone, but there are dangerous things in the wilderness, and they know she’s looking for them.

This has some top tier scares in it and sets the spooky mood with surety and finesse. In a movie that tackles these kinds of themes, everything hinges on the payoff; is the explanation of events satisfying or does it feel like the filmmakers have skirted the responsibility of an answer? Lovely, Dark, and Deep, despite budgetary constraints, hits just the right forlorn, eerie, existentially chilling tone that I think audiences will respond to.

White Noise
Written by Christina Saliba, Tamara Scherbak
Directed by Tamara Scherbak
Starring Bahia Watson, Ryan Hollyman, Guifre Bantjes-Rafols

Short films have comparatively little time and resources with which to draw an audience in, but White Noise from director Tamara Scherbak does an admirable job. Taking a real life aural disorder - misophonia, an aversion to sounds - and a real life oddity - an anechoic chamber - and crafting a tidy little scenario that builds tension to an unsettling finale.

The performances are mostly brief, with the exception of leading lady Ava (Bahia Watson), and uniformly solid, but the real star of White Noise is the sound mixing and effects. Once Ava is left for her session in the sound-canceling room, the blanketing silence is slowly replaced by increasingly unsettling biological sounds: her heartbeat, the blood in her veins, her joints creaking, and on and on, becoming an oppressive cacophony. It’s deeply unnerving and, if you’ll pardon the pun, disquieting.

Mami Wata
Written by C.J. ‘Fiery’ Obasi
Directed by C.J. ‘Fiery’ Obasi
Starring Evelyne Ily Juhen, Uzoamaka Aniunoh, Emeka Amakeze

Shot in delectable black and white, Mami Wata tells a mythic story of heritage under attack from outside forces. Can the peaceful village of Iyi survive when its leadership, an intermediary between the village and a powerful water deity, falls under scrutiny through a perfect storm of mistrust, apathy, and jealousy?

Though the middle of this came across as a bit inert for me, I never lost interest due to the absolutely transfixing black and white cinematography (Lílis Soares) and direction (C.J. ‘Fiery’ Obasi).

Restore Point
Written by Tomislav Cecka, Zdenek Jecelin
Directed by Robert Hloz
Starring Andrea Mohylová, Matej Hádek, Milan Ondrík

Another film where the description left me expecting less, Restore Point has much more going on than just its ‘a future where a service exists allowing people to be brought back to life after an unnatural death’ setting. The world is nuanced and detailed, and the details matter: the fact that the RP must be backed up every 48 hours is a neat point that actually has significance.

But the overall story is what really shines here: a noir-adjacent thriller with cyberpunk undertones where a cop (Andrea Mohylová) must team up with a recently deceased scientist (Matej Hádek) to track a terrorist group trying to bring down the entire RP system on the eve of its privatization. The characters are flawed, desperate, and almost always just a step behind where they need to be, and that makes for a riveting watch.

Vincent Must Dies
Written by Mathieu Naert
Directed by Stéphan Castang
Starring Karim Leklou, Vimala Pons, François Chattot

Y’know how some things are said to be “shaped like a friend”? Well for some reason, many, many people one day seem to find that mild mannered office worker Vincent (Karim Leklou) is shaped like an enemy. Neither Vincent nor the movie seem that concerned with figuring out why, being more interested in Vincent’s just trying to figure out a way to be.

I saw a brief interview with the director (Stéphan Castang) where he said that he was interested in crossing genre lines with this film, including horror, comedy, and romance, and while I think it does blur those boundaries, it does them a little modestly for my taste. I did enjoy the film overall, but would have liked a little something extra from it.

Shin Kamen Rider
Written by Hideaki Anno, Shotaro Ishinomori
Directed by Hideaki Anno
Starring Sôsuke Ikematsu, Minami Hamabe, Tasuku Emoto

I’m only familiar with the Kamen Rider mythos through cultural osmosis, so I’m not sure how much of this tale about a motorcyclist resurrected through cybernetic and genetic augmentation to fight other augmented cyborgs (all themed around insects) is accurate. BUT what’s important is: I don’t care. It’s impossible to stop and question the logic of Shin Kamen Rider when the story is barreling ahead like a grasshopper-themed cyborg on a specially-made motorcycle; his red scarf flapping heroically in the breeze.

This film crams what feels like an entire trilogy’s worth of story into one 2 hour block and it’s only the slightest bit overwhelming. But the pure vibrant, gory, action-packed fun makes it worth the small amount of emotional exhaustion. The tremendous villain performance from Mirai Moriyama as Ichiro doesn’t hurt either.

Transylvanie
Written by Rodrigue Huart, David A. Cassan, Axel Wursten
Directed by Rodrigue Huart
Starring Katell Vervat, Lucien Le Ho, Emma Guatier

Part Let the Right One In, part George Romero’s Martin, this French short is a complete blast. Watching 10 year old Ewa (Katell Vervat) plan to make handsome, slightly-older neighbor boy Hugo (Lucien Le Ho) in her legion of undead followers, despite his relationship to local mean girl Gwen (Emma Gautier) completely hooked me right from the jump.

Is the subject material familiar? Sure, but it’s handled with a freshness that lends each of its slim assemblage of scenes an energy that makes them hard to ignore. The worldbuilding done at the fringes of this short is subtle, but deeply effective. I felt more affection and camaraderie for Ewa within 20 minutes than I did for characters I’d spend several times that amount in other offerings. There’s not much market for short films, nor is there one simple place to seek them out, but I’m looking forward to anything director/co-writer Rodrigue Huart does in the future.

The First Slam Dunk
Written by Takehiko Inoue
Directed by Takehiko Inoue
Starring Shugo Nakamura, Subaru Kimora, Maaya Sakamoto

I’m familiar with the Slam Dunk series in reputation only but I was genuinely excited to check this out. I’m not sure what I expected of an animated feature film based on a basketball manga from the early ‘90s, but I’ll say this: I wasn’t disappointed. Set entirely during one important game, the psychology of the teams was fascinating, clearly explained, and doled out in reasonable amounts, and the characters were fleshed out through a series of flashbacks that were genuinely touching.

The film’s focal character is small fry Ryota Miyagi (Shugo Nakamura) who has struggled his whole life to escape from the shadow of his deceased basketball star older brother, but the standout character for me was red-haired troublemaker Hanamichi Sakuragi (Subaru Kimora) who - fun fact - it turns out is actually kind of the protagonist of the series as a whole! It’s worth noting that the animation is stunning and makes every gameplay minute riveting.

The Fantastic Golem Affairs
Written by Juan González, Nando Martínez
Directed by Juan González, Nando Martínez
Starring Brays Efe, Bruna Cusí, Javier Botet

Easily the most unique film I’ve seen thus far at Fantasia, The Fantastic Golem Affairs (El fantástico caso del Golem) exists in a world entirely its own. When Juan (Brays Efe)’s best friend David (David Menéndez) slips and falls from the apartment building’s roof during a game of movie title charades, instead of becoming a big messy pile of meat and bone, he shatters. Turns out David was a golem, artificial humanoids designed to be friends and lovers for socially deficient humans, whether the humans know it or not.

That’s only scratching the surface of the bizarre and creative, silly and horny, and through and through colorful world that Juan González and Nando Martínez have created, and I won’t spoil more than I’ve already mentioned but needless to say: it’s a lot of fun. The ending isn’t quite as bombastic or scintillating as the set-up and world as a whole, but it’s far from a let-down, and still entirely worth your time.

Fantasia International Film Festival runs until August 9th in Montreal, Quebec. Tickets are available HERE.