Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

Fantasia 2026: Unholy Night

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Zombies and Christmas: why haven’t we had more of this combination before? The overlaps kind of write themselves: gluttony, conspicuous consumption, a strong tradition of being trapped in the house. Unholy Night (2026) begins well, and clearly has a sense of how these two things could work well, but after a bold opening sequence which seems to suggest the kind of fun overkill you might expect from the schmaltziest time of the year (and the potentially bloodiest genre), it unfortunately loses that impetus. In trying to do too much it does too little, and there are some questionable decisions in here at the filmmaking level (this review is based on an early cut of the film, so there’s still a hope that the AI/CGI-generated exterior shots may yet get replaced).

We start with a picture-perfect Christmas gathering, but there’s a knock at the door: all hell breaks loose, as an undead man lurches into the home, killing everyone in his way (save for a little girl, who is helped to escape by her father). This is a hopeful taster of what’s to come, but we’re then taken elsewhere with a different family. It’s not as picture-perfect, but this Canadian-Italian extended family certainly has its standards, with even a mild break in tradition being met with sheer dismay (adult son Gino’s Hawaiian shirt has to go; you slice, never cube a melon). Finally, everyone is sat at the table to eat. Being a Catholic family, the dead are mentioned almost as much as the living, as if they’re still around; well, funnily enough, it seems they are.

There has been an arrival. Upon hearing a commotion in the kitchen, Gino (Marc Bendavid) and the rest of the clan peer around the doorframe to see Nonna (Jacqueline Robbins) standing at the hob. The issue here – as we might guess from hints in that opening scene – is that Nonna is, or was, deceased. She seems fairly tranquil at first, but after a little family bickering, we soon have a temporarily outraged, undead Italian matriarch, disturbed whilst cooking, and ready to commit ultraviolence (see image above)…

We’re still operating within the film’s quicker-paced early segment at this point, so it may seem that the family members are being offed so quickly that we’re going to run out of them, but this doesn’t continue for too long. It becomes more imperative to work out why, exactly, members of this particular family are finding their way back (we soon encounter other extended family members too, returning to their old homes). It turns out that the picture-perfect gathering we already saw going badly wrong actually happened to mama Lucia (Toni Ellwand) during her own childhood; it wasn’t a different family at all. Lucia cites ‘disrespect for one’s ancestors’ as a potential cause for all this. An alternative Italian tradition, perhaps? Even more importantly, the family needs to find a way to reverse it, and to send the dead back to wherever they came from, which is also currently unclear. But perhaps it isn’t just this one family? Keen to offer help to old flame Rene (Shailene Garnett), who is back in the area and getting swept up in the same unfolding panic, Gino makes it his business to get to the bottom of the situation.

There are some great ideas here, with a strong, engaging start and a film which seems to be confident in its tone and direction of travel. That initial threat ebbs and flows, however, and that undead rage is absent from some of the zombies, occasional in others and permanent in just one, which affects the film’s impetus. Of course, this isn’t a straightforward zombie film and much is made of the mystique of what’s happening and why, but it does mean a varying level of risk, with moments where it feels like the living are putting themselves in harm’s way simply so that we can add a zombie sequence where there are, at that point, none. The appearance of some of the zombies themselves vary, too, in line with how their demeanour shifts around. There’s a blend of CGI effects (not great) and some practical ones (better), but despite some fun – more than truly formidable – zombie scenes, the film endeavours to shift more towards the family dynamic, but in so doing, spreads itself rather thin.

There are different ways to adapt the zombie theme, but it seems to work better with consistency; either it’s all-out carnage (name any one of a number of titles), or else it treats the undead as a puzzle rather than an immediate threat (such as in Handling the Undead), but it feels necessary to pick an approach and stick with it. However, Unholy Night wants to ponder the situation, as well as having the undead operating as some kind of classic zombie threat.

But there’s one thing which unites the rest of the film, and that’s finding an answer to that question: why are the undead coming to Christmas dinner (or wandering around more generally)? One idea has a lot of potential here: something gets mooted early on which suggests that domestic and familial roles are so pressing, perhaps particularly in a traditional, conservative family set-up such as this, that they can potentially be enough to raise the dead. Are things not being done properly? Sauces not made? Shoes being worn indoors? Time to come back to sort it all out; Nonna’s first move, remember, is to start cooking. That has promise, because it could allow a whole lot of discussion around gender, class and all of those big social topics which often come up in zombie cinema – being a genre which often lends itself to such, whether a horror, a horror comedy or anything in-between. Sadly, this turns out to be a bit of a red herring, left behind in favour for a far more bland proposal, which itself dissipates.

It feels like we run out of justifications, but having gone down the track of offering a number of different justifications, the steady, if occasional array of zombies and deaths feel less interesting. Characterisation and relationship building can’t quite get off the ground against this shifting backdrop, either. Unholy Night has some charming and inventive aspects, though it drifts wide of the mark after its initially very promising opener, becoming a much more diffuse and variable proposition as it goes. It remains surprising that zombies turn up at Christmas so comparatively seldom, but despite some engaging content here, that door remains open.

Unholy Night (2026) received its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival 2026.

Fantasia 2026: Sour Minnows

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

“The whole point was you’re not supposed to space out.”

We find ourselves following two pleasant but aimless young men during the opening scenes of Sour Minnows (2026), as Ricky (David Brown) and Tepper (Chase Williamson) talk contentedly about this and that, though often circling obliquely back to their favourite topics: filmmaking and film. They’re stopped in their tracks when they come across a rather strange event: there’s a group of men, all laying down on the pavement, excitedly licking it. To be fair, it would stop you talking; it surprises Ricky and Tepper so much that they drop their groceries and flee.

At least, that’s what Tepper remembers happening. Ricky’s not so sure. The experience has had an immediate impact on his sense of time and place, affecting his perception. But he tries to carry on with things, which includes a date with fellow cineaste Aura (Suzanna Son) – it’s just a shame that their connection is also being affected by the erosion of any helpful baseline of ‘normal’.

Whilst it’s difficult for Ricky to make sense of what is happening to him, he’s not alone. Something is going on in this town. I mean, you could glean that from the pavement-lickers, but that wasn’t just a one off. That was an odd thing, but this is an Odd Thing, identified with a strange, seemingly sentient yellow hue which comes creeping through all the reveries, time slips and other kinds of sensual dissociation which are now occurring.

However, most of these – or at least in terms of what we, the audience, gets to experience – seem to affect Ricky in particular, even though Tepper and Aura have some rogue experiences of their own. We often stick with Ricky, and he is a sympathetic character, a guy with dreams of doing something more meaningful than the AI testing which he can barely describe out loud, other than bemoaning his ‘day job’ undertaken only to pay his bills. Lots of the experiences we see him going through are fairly nightmarish, too, wresting him ever further from the everyday without providing easy answers (though he does, eventually, find some means to address his questions).

Whilst Sour Minnows plays coy a lot of the time, it’s seemingly happiest when poking gentle fun at film fans, or considering the craft of filmmaking more broadly. With its meta-links to cinema, celebrity and even a spot of analysis of these, it disrupts the comfortable divide between film, filmmaker and viewer. There are, free-floating around here, bigger ideas about purpose, creative and finding meaning in chaos which perhaps resonates all the more these days, after the Odd Thing which was the pandemic and how that seemingly changed everything – not just filmmaking, of course, but certainly impacting upon filmmaking (and the kinds of films which have been possible, or seemed possible since that time). And perhaps Ricky begins to serve as a kind of Gen Z everyman after a while; he’s likeable, and you want him to prevail. You willingly stick with him, even when you’re lost alongside him.

But how to describe Sour Minnows overall? What’s my strapline? How about ‘hypno-mumblecore with a dash of Brecht and some trippy existentialism’? That could do it – perhaps. Truth be told, trying to impose a regular review structure on these kinds of experimental films is always a challenge, but then the viewing experience is a challenge, too. Sure, this is a film which could be classed as studiously inane on first pass – Brechtian mumblecore is a love/hate thing I suspect – but there’s a lot of work and technique, not to mention skill, behind this film. The issue, insofar as films need appreciative audiences, is that it’s always a little difficult to really envision who these films are for, beyond a suspicion that they’re more to analyse and unpack, than to enjoy. But director and writer Harrison Atkins knows this full well, having worked through similar with Lace Crater (2015) – the ‘strange-but-self-aware’ seems to be where his creative interests chiefly lie.

Sour Minnows (2026) received its World Premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival 2026 on July 24th, screening again on July 29th. For more details, click here.

Fantasia 2026: Home Bodies

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

We first see ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ (twins Emma and Ian Ho) as babies; these two children, now in their early teens or thereabouts, seem to have spent their entire lives in a spacious, but rather dark and dated-looking home, with only each other for company. However, this isn’t Megalomaniac (2022); the kids seem contented, they are clean, comfortably dressed, verbal (so someone has been teaching them), with access to food and drink. Minus the apparently-absent caregivers, things are – by most parameters – pretty normal.

When we look closer, though, things begin to look a little different. Firstly, these two get engrossed in games and activities which feel far too young for them. There is some kind of presence which watches over them – known to Red and Blue as ‘Papa’ – but it’s an unseen presence, offering only brief answers and messages in response to their as-yet very simple requests. But when the children accidentally break a window during one of their interminable games of catch, Red notices a beam of light and what we know as a keyhole, though she doesn’t know anything about keys. Still, it’s enough to prompt the girl to feel a little curious, for the first time, about the world outside – whatever that may be.

Perhaps as a distraction, or even as a punishment, the children soon find themselves waking up on what Papa refers to as their ‘forty-second’ Noel, a classic Christmas morning with tree and gifts. Here’s our first clue that time and space may not be running to the expected parameters here, or that perhaps Red and Blue are living to a curtailed clock, so that the excitement of Christmas comes around more than yearly. But there’s something else: an unexpected present. There’s a person under the tree, and at first Red and Blue, who are used to complete isolation, are barely able to recognise it as such. They’re petrified, but Papa assures them that all will be well. They have a new responsibility: to look after their new pal. No further details are given to them.

It’s a big ask; this young person, whom they decide to name ‘Pal’ (Ess Hödlmoser) is mute, passive and yet, surprisingly sinister with those traits, operating – whether they are aware of it, or mean to do it – as a disruptive force, especially for the more childlike and accepting Blue, whose scarred hand speaks to an unnamed past transgression and a real fear of change as a result. Red is more accommodating, desperate to fulfil Papa’s edict to look after their new friend, but via the wordless Pal, this soon means exposure to evidence of a far more disturbing world out there somewhere. The twins begin to grow apart, but Blue does find a way to reassert himself in his own way, soon enough – with all the repercussions this brings.

Whilst not a film which tasks itself with much in the way of on-screen violence, and even when nothing outwardly alarming is taking place, Home Bodies feels like a film with sinister bones. Its framework – real, but unreal – is communicated to audiences via its superb production and sound design, together with excellent performances from all of the lead actors (and we can’t overlook Ess Hödlmoser in this, as their presence on-screen is impressive, even though they remain silent). It all unfolds in a well-realised immersive environment, and it’s an interesting experience as a viewer, because we experience the film through concurrent shots and exposure to more of the setting than either child can experience in quite the same way in that moment, but we are trapped on their level, too, subject to the same, hovering, unsettling questions as them. This description of a closed environment with a seemingly indifferent overseer does have precedents, both on-screen and in literature. There’s a little of Vivarium (2019) in here: ostensible comfort; a home-like set-up; an observer or system which excludes the unwitting objects of focus from what the hell is going on (see also: Silo), something which feels even crueller when it involves two people as young and as vulnerable as Red and Blue. But perhaps most of all, director Casey Walker (In a Violent Nature, The Void) and his writing team (Adrian Murray and Marcus Sullivan) seem to have created a film which has significant overlap with the fantastic 1995 novel, I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, a supremely compelling story about a similar kind of prison – yes, we can call it that – operating under a similar array of large-scale questions.

All of these potential inspirations or precedents, whether incidental or acknowledged, suggest bigger-picture ideas about ethics and self determination, and Home Bodies makes compelling use of these throughout. It’s visually rich and smart enough to work well as a metaphor, of two children being tasked with the formidable, barely-understood responsibility of growing up, gaining independence. But it works on its own terms too as a subtle and enthralling piece of science fiction, brave enough to hint, not tell. Home Bodies is an unsettling, but mesmerising piece of world-building.

Home Bodies (2026) received its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival. For more details, please click here.

Fantasia 2026: The Fated Hour

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Austria, the early 19th Century: in an evocative opening scene, a young woman kisses her hand to the gravestone of ‘Seraphine’, her late sister. The young woman, Florentine (Alina Schaller) is about to be married to Bruno (Daniel Holzberg), a minister who has just come into his living. Their lives should be happy, but Florentine is melancholy in ways which seem to surpass grief for her sister – and father, whom she has also recently lost. When Bruno pleads with her to be candid with him about her mystifying sadness, she promises she will explain everything at dinner that night.

As promised, Florentine explains that, some months previously, she read a ‘dreadful letter’ which had been vouchsafed to her by her father, only to be opened under a certain circumstance: her impending wedding. This prompts her to talk about Seraphine (Fanny Altenburger), her much-missed sister and a sensitive, brilliant soul that we’d now consider ‘a psychic’; it was understood somewhat differently in this time period, and often intertwined with ideas about religious faith, as it is with Seraphine – who tells Florentine that ‘an angel’ whispers to her things she could not otherwise know. But Seraphine begins to change: she seems able to bilocate (an idea which was gaining prominence through emergent Spiritualism in this era,, but had also long been treated by Catholicism as something miraculous). She loses track of time, becomes reclusive and unwell (though we could probably guess that last part) and, finally, tells her sister of an encounter with a frightening apparition, which whispers to her the ‘fates’ of all of her beloved family members, as well as herself.

The Fated Hour is based on an 1810 story titled The Relationship with the Spirit World (Die Verwandschaft mit der Geisterwelt) by Friedrich Laun, and it’s such a great candidate for an adaptation (it has also been translated into English on several occasions since its first publication, once by the fantastic short story author Marjorie Bowen in the 20th Century, and the film shares its title with hers). It’s such a rich story; there’s so much in here, and none of it needs (nor does it get) oversimplified or overdone in the script, though the changes made by writer and director Peter Hengl do, to an extent, streamline the story, centring it more on the family history aspect, given Bruno’s impending family connection. Family, legacy and fate are incredibly important here, as are newer ideas about ‘disordered’ minds, which in the early 19th Century existed at an intersection between gender roles, religion, modernisation and incipient belief systems, like changing ideas about the spirit world.

Other self-evident truths cast their shadows over The Fated Hour, too: the great precariousness of life and death – in a period in history where disease and premature death were still all-too common – is an accepted part of the tale, but then so is a certainty of some kind of afterlife, even when contact with it could be terrifying. The tale-within-a-tale used here (with an accompanying voiceover) is a popular motif in supernatural fiction – offering a double-remove from events, both to obscure the incredible and also to emphasise it – and it’s brought to life here subtly and effectively, with a simple but effective soundtrack, visuals, camerawork and edits.

Period literary adaptations like this always bring to mind – well, if you’re British, maybe – A Ghost Story for Christmas, and there’s certainly a shared lineage and some shared visual elements, but The Fated Hour is still very much its own beast. In terms of some of its aesthetics, it perhaps resembles The Vourdalak – another literary adaptation. The Fated Hour is wonderfully uncluttered, with lots of soft light and painterly visuals. And yet for all that beauty, for all those lovely costumes and locations, it’s still a quietly creepy and profound piece of horror. This is after all a story of inescapable destiny, which is bound to be as affecting and weighty now as then, explored here in an atmospheric and economical thirty-minute film.

The Fated Hour (2026) received its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival. For more information, please click here.

Fantasia 2026: No Rest for the Wicked

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

1862: the Faroe Islands, and a small, devout but insular community eking out a living in this remote place. We meet Ásla (Sofia Nolsøe) and her adult son, Baldur (Egor Venned, channelling a very young Rupert Everett). Baldur is a fisherman, who one day finds himself blanketed by an unanticipated sea-fret which disorientates him and drives him perilously close to the rocks near the shoreline. However, he sets this risk aside when he hears someone crying out for help. He tries to row towards the distressed person, but falls from his boat and hits his head. Thankfully, the stranger is by this point close enough to see it happen, and he dives into the water to save him.

The men then walk the shore back to Baldur’s home – though bereft of the fishing boat, which puts the family at risk of going hungry (the islanders practice subsistence fishing, rather than anything more organised and commercial). Despite this, Ásla is glad and grateful to meet Helge (Game of Thrones actor Pilou Asbæk), who explains that he usually works on whaling vessels, though he’s recently been living on the other side of the island while he waits for a new berth. As a way of showing his appreciation, Helge offers to help Baldur find and repair his lost boat, which they duly go and do.

A grudging fascination on Baldur’s part soon begins to give way to a mutual attraction. The other Faroese at first enjoy Helge’s company, too – he’s confident and rambunctious – so he fits into the small community well for a brief spell, and he’s invited to stay with the widowed mother and son, even if he sometimes acts as a faintly uneasy reminder of the bigger world out there (including through his sexual proclivities and his blossoming, covert relationship with Baldur, which cannot go hidden or remain secret for long in such a place).

There’s not so much a sense of an impending catastrophe in No Rest for the Wicked (2026) as there is a broader question about which direction the catastrophe will arrive from. There’s the dread of exposure, the burden of emotional turmoil and a whole range of other pressures around this extreme, closeted environment which seem certain to find their way to the surface. And in truth, a blend of all these elements eventually come to wreak havoc, both on the village and on a newly-departing whaling vessel, which threatens to take if not one of the men away, then both of them. This it does, literally and figuratively. Baldur’s grief for what ensues leads him to wish for the impossible – and to receive it.

This film offers a subtle and very welcome update to an established, and in the wrong hands, sometimes rather hackneyed horror mythology (which I’m not naming outright, though you don’t have to look too far to find). Here, it’s beautiful, careful and evocative. Metaphors abound, but as a means of combining theme and aesthetics, the motif of fog in the film works very well, shifting us – and the characters – between clarity and secrecy, visibility and isolation. There are some similarities to another Nordic horror, The Damned (2024) – another film with a remote setting, stricken community and ambiguous supernatural elements. But if we’re talking about thematic overlap, it’s hard not to think of Wuthering Heights. It works. There’s the same remote, wild location, the same thwarted love, the same familial pressures, the same sense of lovers whose emotions surpass everything available to them, from language to lifespan.

Throughout, there’s superb cinematography from Jacob Møller, with a range of shooting styles encompassing the film’s stark landscapes, close-ups and candlelit, or naturally-lit interiors. None of it is ever overcomplicated – but it’s confident. The languid pace, too, allows the film’s solemnity to form and to persist. All of the performances are strong, though Venned is hypnotic as Baldur, his character unfolding and transforming as the film progresses. It’s also great that Ásla gets some character development of her own, and isn’t simply held within the confines of the familial role, although the restrictions of home, hearth and faith encircle everyone here.

Whilst the potentially slightly jovial note of the British English idiom used for the title doesn’t quite align itself with the tone of the film – although, word by word, its literal meaning does sum up the film rather well – this is a fantastic film for those who value mood and atmospherics over flashier effects and sequences. Its story carries an emotional weight, too. Brooding and well-realised, No Rest for the Wicked aligns lust, love, loss and grief as only the subtlest use of the supernatural can.

No Rest for the Wicked (2026) received its world premiere at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival. For more information, please click here.

Fantasia 2026: Purge

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

The short film Purge (2026) poses an interesting question, if at first a broad one: what makes us who we are? It then sees the question through in a sharply focused, often brutal manner, invoking aspects of body horror and, arguably, some modern Gothic elements. Honestly, it feels very much like a filmmaker-specific fever dream, but although Purge happens to use a creative arts setting, it speaks to a broader set of ideas too.

Gee (Zara Jestadt) is a screenwriter. The first thing we learn about her is that she is struggling with rejection after rejection; we also see a rejection email from a writers’ lab on screen. Given her subsequent panic attack and her professed feeling that she can’t keep going with all of these setbacks, she finally decides to participate in a medical trial for a new antidepressant, enrolling herself in a scheme being run by the Internus Clinic, to test a drug called BriteNol. “Why now?” the clinician asks at their first meeting. Gee’s response shows that her personal issues run deep (as made clear in a fantastic, and often very physical performance from Jestadt). Well, the tablets certainly do something, and they seem to work quickly, too. When she gets unexpectedly invited to take up a place in a screenwriting programme, it genuinely feels like Gee has finally turned that corner. But has she? And at what cost?

‘Be careful what you wish for’ is an old adage, one frequently and often meaningfully explored in horror; just recently Obsession, one of the biggest horror hits of the past decade or more, has played with the idea. But where the feature-length film explores the sickly intertwining of love, sex, friendship and power, Purge perhaps runs closer to the bone in some respects, giving voice to that sneaking suspicion that “the veil” – as programme director Vaughn (Andrew Moodie) refers to depression – needs to be there, and should not, or maybe cannot simply be torn away. Devoid of her feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt, Gee can’t write. But she can’t behave well, either, laying into her partner, Finch (Isabella Shibuta) and soon, self-sabotaging, losing what she thought she wanted more than anything. It’s as if her depression works like an anchor, providing weight and time for deliberation. The creative arts are brutal, but you need your whole self to navigate them.

Does Gee get that old self back? And would she want to? Circumstances may force her to come to terms with a new version of self-understanding, but this very horror-literate, carefully-focused short film makes a number of points in a surprisingly layered and thoughtful story. It’s always amazing to me that so much can be done with a short film, but again and again, the format proves its worth.

Purge (2026) will feature as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival, screening alongside Ancestral Beasts and appearing on Wednesday 22nd and Tuesday 28th July. For more details, click here.

Fantasia 2026: Permanent Damage

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Prison inmate Tommy (Calem MacDonald) escapes prison via a bedbug-infested drop-off of mattresses and bedding at the local dump. Not only does this show commitment to the bit but, given the reaction of the worker who spots him, it isn’t even the first time this has happened. Tommy makes it into town, where he heads into a dollar store looking for a disguise and runs into an elderly lady, who accidentally saves him from the store detective by mistaking him for her son, Donnie. Donnie? Sure. Mrs Whynot (Clare Coulter) has dementia; she wasn’t bluffing to help him. In a fix, and needing to take advantage of this situation, Tommy/Donnie accompanies her home.

The place is in disarray. Mrs Whynot isn’t in a fit state to live alone, but she’s clearly fallen through the net somehow, and she spends her days alone, watching old home videos of her son when he was small. Touched by this, Tommy sticks around, trying to help her as best he can. As this becomes his new normal – at least for a while – he runs into some of the neighbours, including Joe (Olivia Scriven) – liberal with the drugs, heart in the right place – but more pertinently, he meets Mrs Whynot’s slum landlord, LL (an inspired performance from Stephen Dorff), who is also Joe’s uncle. Tommy finds out that Mrs Whynot was given notice for non-payment of rent three months ago, and she is being evicted. To avoid this happening to her, Tommy agrees to work off the books for LL as a handyman, helping him with his portfolio of dilapidated properties, which mainly entails cutting corners and hiding evidence from the regulators. Joe works for her uncle, too, and as they spend more time together, a romance begins to blossom.

Meanwhile, LL is full of big plans: he has what he refers to as a ‘golden goose’, which he hopes will lead to new opportunities, something different and far more lucrative than his slum empire. Although he’s wealthy compared to his tenants, he still bridles under the sense that he’s just at the top of a very small trash heap. The golden goose is his way out. But, hey, with that sort of potential, it sounds like it might just offer the same kinds of prospects to anyone who was to get hold of it…

If I was to say that Permanent Damage goes from the sublime to the ridiculous, and mean it entirely as a compliment, then that could be the whole review. Job done. This is such a rich film, and any synopsis feels like it’s stripping the life out if it somehow. It’s full of ideas and smart, if oblique ways of exploring its central themes. It’s set in a tough world, and the bones of the film feel recognisable. From the opening moments we have plenty of markers of poverty, from the casual chit-chat about bedbug infestations to the close shots of scratchcards, the boarded windows and the junk store clothing which seems to be worn by everyone, LL included. Then there’s the importance of the never-never: dream destinations like the Carolinas; game-changing possibilities, like the golden goose. In all of this, there’s a kind of fight between stasis and change, hopelessness and hope.

Yet for all that, and despite the skilled way in which all of this is established, this isn’t what you could call a realist portrayal and it never tries to be one, or else to remain one. As the film progresses, things get ever more colourful and eccentric. Tommy’s early quandary, his ‘should I stay or should I go?’ dilemma is subtle and touching, but his character wakes up to his new reality, and starts to live in the world again; MacDonald’s transformation here is impressive. The film takes its time before even hinting what his life was like before and why he found himself in the situation he did, but in this (and in the characterisation of LL as a larger-than-life villain) we get two opposing characters and perspectives. We also wind up with an array of larger-than-life supporting characters and improbable developments, which take the film through to its impressive, and oddly life-affirming final act.

This all means the increasing use of humour to offset some of the film’s tension. There are some wonderfully bizarre scenes, but somehow they all fit flawlessly with the far more hard-hitting content, even when absurdity kicks up a gear and holds sway. Maybe that’s what Permanent Damage is: a perfect marriage of touching and absurd, surrealism in the service of something deeply humane. It’s a bold piece of indie filmmaking which leaves a real impression.

Permanent Damage (2026) received its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival. For more details, please click here.

Evil Dead Burn (2026)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

As the poor, plot-irrelevant saps we meet briefly during Evil Dead Burn‘s pre-credits sequence die their genuinely horrible deaths, I almost had to laugh. Not because years of viewing increasingly horrific gore has burned away my nerve endings, though perhaps that is partly true; no, it’s the fact that the original Evil Dead (1981) was outright banned in the UK during the ‘Video Nasty’ furore for scenes which, sure, are unpleasant – but so far removed from Evil Dead Burn in terms of sentiment, severity and tone that it feels almost unreal now. The very notion of getting something like Evil Dead Burn made in the 80s – SFX capabilities notwithstanding – much less getting it BBFC-certificated is utterly implausible. Never mind that ankle; Evil Dead Burn quite happily mauls and massacres every inch of the human form, starting immediately and never relenting. If it overdoes it with the callbacks and ‘just one more thing’ at the very end of the film, then this doesn’t seriously detract from an overall deeply disturbing, unflinching study of family-centred ultraviolence. Mind you, the Deadites (never referred to as such here, but still the go-to term) used to be a lot more jovial. There are a few moments of almost-levity, but unlike some of Raimi’s projects, this isn’t a film setting out to make you laugh.

Why so serious? The film wisely decides not to bother with a convoluted plot, instead using the existing framework with one key add-on in order to get things off the ground. We’re told that researcher Benjamin Price was part of an organisation called the Circle of Wise Men, making it his life’s work to track down knowledge about the Necronomicon, what it can do – and, key here, a means to send the entities it summons back to hell. Seems said entities don’t much like that. In a series of recordings, Price warns that should the Deadites detect the presence of a certain artefact, it will ‘summon’ them and they will stop at nothing to procure the object for themselves. This is all unbeknownst to Price’s grandson Joseph who, despite inheriting all of Benjamin’s research, chooses to use it merely to get ideas for his abortive writing career. But rooting around in his grandfather’s archive seems to do just what Benjamin warned: to call up the unstoppable force which wants to get rid of the Price family once and for all, and they want that dagger. This is why two blameless fishermen come in for a battering from an arisen Deadite, for no other reason than they’re in the way: we have met this young lady before, and it seems she hasn’t mellowed.

Honestly, it wouldn’t make for much of a film, but the Deadites could probably have just waited it out. The Price family is an unhappy, dysfunctional unit which is probably only a few degrees away from implosion even without the onslaught to come. Joseph (Hunter Doohan) has inherited the family lakehouse, but neglected it; it’s doing a House of Usher long before anything worse happens there. He wants to be a writer, but without the writing part, a strange but common affliction in writers. At his birthday party in his brother Will’s bar (Will is described as a restaurant owner; presumably the restaurant is somewhere else), Will (George Pullar) tries to prompt him to make a start by buying him a very expensive pen. So Will has it made, right? He has money, and a wife, Alice (Souheila Yacoub) but he’s a brittle, paranoid control freak, and he’s offered up to the audience – despite this never being, or setting out to be a nuanced character study – as a man who’s very easy to loathe, as soon as we see his controlling and coercive behaviour towards Alice. After an argument at the birthday gathering, Will decides he’s going to take their car and drive home, despite Joe and girlfriend Thya’s best attempts to stop him. Cue road safety advert par excellence as he slams into the arisen Jessica, there simply to pass on the curse to him and his family: some do it with physical contact, and some with words; Jessica chooses the latter, but mainly because she is cut to pieces in the car windshield. Will then dies horribly in a fireball; what could be better than a tragic roadside death to drag his brooding, resentful and traumatised clan back together?

It’s a dark sense of humour that plumps for a cremation after all of this, but hold tight: the film has great fun treating Will’s memorial with all the contempt the man deserves. The comedic touches here are in many ways as mean and callous as the violence itself, even if considerably lower in the mix – or at least, less of a priority – every time we get a new Evil Dead instalment. But things are about to get a lot worse, given that Will’s body was infiltrated right before he died, and he now wants to pass on his gift to other members of the family…

If you are someone who enjoys the feeling of being challenged by the gore and violence you see on screen, then it’s hard to think of a horror film in the past decade which does it better. Where the likes of Obsession and Longlegs might have one or two signature scenes where it really goes all in, Evil Dead Burn decides – for the largest share of its runtime – to do it continually, and if director Sébastien Vanicek and his team of writers did a bit of storyboarding which they then made fit, then this is the type of film and script where it works just fine. Actually, the script and the pace here are near spot-on, with only a little looseness around the final act and a stubborn determination to keep the kills coming until long past the end credits, when we’d clearly, really had enough by then. Evil Dead Burn throws in some aspects of home invasion alongside its supernatural content, but really what it does it to literally and physically tear a family to shreds, even while they try to work through their grief, their broken relationships and – when it comes to Alice – their misguided antipathy towards her. Mother Susan (Tandi Wright) is a toxic boy mom whose favourite, crispest son can do no wrong; her husband Edgar, who reads like a disgruntled step-parent but isn’t, is angry at everyone, but hates Alice with a special passion. Grandma Polly (Maude Davey), Benjamin’s widow, has dementia, and veers in and out of coherence. Where some reviewers have been critical of the broken family dynamic at the heart of this film, largely, it seems, because this is a commonly recurring trope in modern horror, here it gives the Deadites something substantial to work with. As family members try and (spoiler:) fail to withstand the malign influence they can soon feel creeping into their bones, there’s a nicely-crumbling façade already there, ready to be kicked to pieces.

The only real misstep for me comes right at the end of the film, with a certain Deadite looking (and feeling) a tad insubstantial and just too CGI-y for this reviewer’s liking; the rest of the film clearly makes use of CGI too, but it has a grittiness to it which doesn’t call undue attention to itself and looks rather good. So that could have been better, and the needless attempts to do more dot-joining before the film was really over was unnecessary, but given that the next film – a prequel – will be on the way in a couple of years, I’d say things are looking fairly positive for fans of this particular, devastatingly nasty and ugly brand of horror. Now, as to why we’re craving this boundary-testing kind of overkill in this day and age? That’s not a debate for now, but I guess *gestures at everything*

Evil Dead Burn (2026) is available in cinemas now.

Fantasia is turning 30, and we are here for it…

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

The busiest and best time of the year for Warped Perspective is just around the corner again, as the Fantasia International Film Festival gets ready to celebrate its 30th anniversary. Covering Fantasia has become a regular fixture for the site and it’s always genuinely very exciting: it’s often an opportunity to see world premieres of titles which will then go on to make huge waves throughout the rest of the year, such as with last year’s Undertone (then still titled The Undertone), the heart-wrenching supernatural horror of Good Boy and a film which went on to make a significant impact at Celluloid Screams later in 2025, as well as being one of Darren’s favourites, It Ends.

But what about this year?

The festival has been revealing its selected titles over the course of the past few weeks, so for absolutely all of the information that’s now out there, you’d do best to head over to the official site. However, from this site’s point of view, here are just a few of the titles which are most interesting – at least a few of which WP hopes to be covering in a few short weeks. Welcome to genre film Christmas: here are ten Fantasia titles to watch out for.

Her Private Hell

Opening the festival with this Canadian Premiere, its director Nicolas Winding Refn will also be receiving the Cheval Noir Career Achievement Award: his return to filmmaking, Her Private Hell, is a surrealist story of intersecting journeys through a futuristic, mist-obscured city. Influenced by the director’s own experiences with loss and mortality, Her Private Hell (starring Sophie Thatcher) promises a neon-hued, giallo-coded cinematic experience, best served by the big screen.

Village of Eight Gravestones

Another Cheval Noir recipient this year, Takashi Shimizu (Ju-On) will be premiering his two newest films at the festival. One of them, Village of Eight Gravestones, speaks to the director’s love of Japanese pop and pulp culture, as well as his tenacity in bringing strange, often unsettling mystery to the screen. In the film, a young man named Tatsuya is travelling back to his rural village home following the death of his mother, from whom he was long estranged. On his way, he encounters a private detective, Kindaichi (a popular fiction character in Japan featuring in no less than 77 novels). Kindaichi has been looking for Tatsuya, both to intercept him and to inform him of a long-fomenting hatred for him and his family in the village, after his grandfather committed a violent historical atrocity; as such, the people waiting for him at his destination are going to be none too pleased by his arrival. Part mystery and part massacre, Village of Eight Gravestones is a folk horror of sorts, full of lively characters and bizarre ideas.

Permanent Damage

There’s another kind of journey at the heart of Permanent Damage, but this time, an escaped convict, Tommy Gods, has a met his match in a cruel landlord – marking another quirky exploration of modern social issues by director Seth A. Smith, as the film takes on America’s wealth and housing crisis. Boasting a knockout cast – including Stephen Dorff – and the expected, often darkly comic treatment of its topics, the film receives its World Premiere at the festival.

Junction Row

Now here’s a title which has ‘Warped Perspective’ written all over it: Ginger Snaps actor and horror genre darling Katharine Isabelle plays Juno, a recovering addict who makes the difficult decision to leave everything behind in pursuit of a fresh start. But when Ruby (Natalie Brown) goes missing, Juno is forced to head back to Junction Row, their old housing compound, to determine what has happened to her, facing down all of the bizarre changes which have taken place there in her absence. Fantasia has always gone a bundle on creature FX and cosmic horror, and Junction Row could well stand as one of this year’s notable examples spanning each of those genres.

The Last Footage

The country of Myanmar may be mostly known for its recent, complex and often traumatic political issues, but so far as genre cinema goes, it has until now been a completely closed book. Step forward, writer/director Arkar Soe Oo, with Myanmar’s first found footage horror film, The Last Footage: it will be receiving its World Premiere at Fantasia this year. With its first-person perspective, and in eschewing some of the more puzzling aspects of ‘found footage’ (who is editing this and where is that music coming from?) the film promises to be a return to the basic tenets of the genre, unfolding in the darkening Wingabar Forest…

Buddy

Has it ever crossed your mind what would happen if the cutesy, life-affirming mascots of children’s TV and film ever just went off-script and started stalking the children they are meant to love, educate and protect? With a recent slew of now copyright-free cartoon characters making it a priority to head off on murderous rampages (from Winnie the Pooh to Popeye), it seems like the world – or, okay, a very select group of film fans, actually – is perhaps oddly ready to be chased and murdered by characters from their childhood memories; perhaps Buddy is an adjunct of that, with its own fictional world-building and the titular Buddy deciding to axe-murder his way through the world built within the cutesy confines of a kids’ TV show (in response to writer/director Caspar Kelly’s own remembered envy at the kids who got to appear on TV).

Bowels of Hell

It’s certainly not the first time Fantasia has found itself concerned with the smallest room, but where Flush kept its eye trained fairly squarely on the human tragedy unfolding in its toilet stall setting, Bowels of Hell promises – or maybe threatens – more scatological detail entirely. Set in a São Paolo apartment block (and directed by Brazilian experimentalists Gurcius Gewdner and Gustavo Vinagre), it boasts a range of gross-out kills (watch out when you need to answer the call of nature in this cinematic universe) and a bit of social satire, for good measure.

Los Vampires

More-than-passing fans of the vampire cinema genre may well be familiar with the Spanish Dracula of 1931 – itself a compelling, and for some viewers, superior version of the Universal film of the same year. In a similar way to how Shadow of the Vampire imagines the backstory of the Nosferatu shoot – albeit adding its own layers of compelling supernatural content – Los Vampires focuses on the very human relationships and interactions between the two titular stars of each Dracula film, sharing sets and scripts in the pursuit of two completed projects (although anonymising the key players here, as a mark of respect to them both). As much a tribute to an old way of filmmaking and a lost generation of film stars as a hitherto-unexplored character study, Los Vampires promises an immersive and thought-provoking take on its subject matter.

The Glorious Dead

They’re back! The Adams Family have been making films – which have been featuring on this site – for some years now, and their latest offering promises another, hefty dose of the meaningful strange as a sheriff and deputy (Toby Poser, Zelda Adams) awaken one day to an unrecognisable world – one where old rules and old familiarity have all just – disappeared. People are missing. Pets are missing. Then, the dead start rising. Creating an allegory of a discomfiting, alienating modern existence which may hit close to home for those bearing witness to the confected divisions erupting all around us, The Glorious Dead will doubtlessly balance dark humour against stark horror in ways which have by now become an Adams Family staple. The film receives its World Premiere at the festival.

Motherwitch

Part Gothic fairy tale and part bleak colonial history, Motherwitch follows the fortunes of bereaved parent Eleni, who – after the senseless loss of all three of her children – forges an alliance with a sentient, feminine force, hoping to get them back. Filmed on location in an abandoned settlement in Cyprus (a country which has been contested and divided for generations), the film blends human loss with the darker threads of mythology and tale-telling, offering something magical – but riven with unease.

And there is so much more: Parisian vampires; New Zealand tentacle horror; Gillian Anderson in an imagined slasher franchise; Finnish parenthood horror; reimagined feminist Ozsploitation; Japanese werewolf horror; Yeon Sang-ho doing cannibalistic survival cinema, and a dancing virus which threatens to take over the world…

The festival starts on July 16th, running until August 2nd. Festival screeners will start to appear just after the festival begins, so expect Warped Perspective coverage to begin very soon after that. Seen something listed you’d love to read more about? Get in touch on social media – it might well be possible!

Raindance 2026: Tokyo Nightfall

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

A young man called Amenashi (Iori Abe) is grieving the loss of his sister, Anna (Utano Aoi), who took her own life after witnessing a suicide – the experience of which seemed to draw her in, making her doubt in any sense of a future. In a broader sense, Amenashi is grieving the kind of optimism he and his sister felt before all of this happened; there are also hints at family troubles, though tellingly, we never see any of the mentioned family members in the entire film, and almost no one over the age of 25, either. Amenashi’s close friends Hattori and Nozu (Taiga Hironaka and Kosuke Tanaka) are all for distraction and entertainment to deal with their own sense of loss, but Amenashi has other ideas. He has signed up to attend a special event for people who, like him, are suicide-curious, but don’t want to go it alone.

If that sounds a teeny bit like Sion Sono’s ferociously weird Suicide Circle (2001), then be forewarned: it isn’t, although later in its runtime Tokyo Nightfall (2025) does pull together some visually striking, shocking scenes which might recall the earlier, cult classic, and on seemingly no money whatsoever. However, the film as a whole takes a drastically different approach; even though there’s a hint that suicide itself can be, for want of a better word, ‘catching’ (think Heathers, think Bridgend), Tokyo Nightfall is a small, quiet, character-focused examination of suicidal ideation, though frustratingly, a lot of this is rather thinly communicated. The film has its strange paradoxes, too. Amenashi heads off to the suicide event, which is being hosted in a cellar bar with surprisingly upbeat, banging club music. Everyone there has come to the social event determined, it seems, not to be social, and it’s top-secret, but the bouncer/organiser lets Hattori and Nozu in when they tell him they’re looking for their friend. Problem: they’re there to dissuade their suicidal friend from ending his life, but not being suicidal themselves, they start quite enjoying themselves – at least at first.

The film doesn’t just stay with events unfolding in the club; instead, it chops up its timeline into sections, with a large amount of time dedicated to old footage the friends made of each other back when Anna was alive. In terms of providing context, this makes sense, and this is a film which can only really look backward, given its distaste (or its main character’s distaste) for looking forward. This technique also provides some, perhaps limited means of deciphering Anna’s motivations and issues, though – and this is something the film does a lot – much of this is to be deduced from characters looking wistfully into the distance. Amenashi does it too, and spends more screen time doing this than engaging in dialogue or action. In amongst all of this, the film frequently overlaps footage we have already seen, either presenting it from a slightly different angle, or extending it, so that the conversation we have already heard continues for a few more moments. It shows structural awareness, sure; it’s also – by its nature – repetitive, and adds to a suspicion that there isn’t really enough here for a feature-length presentation. As it stands, the film racks up around an hour and fifteen minutes, but a lot of that is the overlapping footage mentioned. As a viewer, it can feel onerous.

There are some surprises, not least the film’s moments of unexpected whimsy – Nozu is, for the most part, a stock comedic character, and before he quits his job Amenashi is a food delivery guy, which allows the film a few moments of breezy, observational humour – even if this is then followed by a shift back to ingrained ennui. On a similar note, the portrayal of the rather jovial suicide party will, and the next clause will be doing some very heavy lifting, not be agreeable to everyone. Whilst Japan does have a very high youth suicide rate compared to other developed nations, it’s probably more the treatment that these fatalities receive in the media and in culture that feels most striking and different for Western perspectives. It’s painting in broad strokes I know, but the thought of such an open treatment of suicide, even a non-graphic one, from a 21-year-old director just appearing in the US or UK, for example, seems highly unlikely, given the norm now seems to be to avoid the term ‘suicide’ altogether: we now see the term ‘unalive’ used instead.

But despite Tokyo Nightfall‘s attempts to grapple with a difficult and timely issue from the perspectives of young, rootless people, it can’t really get as far as anything which feels truly revealing or meaningful. It hints at elements of Tokyo life which are straining at the seams, alluding briefly to CSE, poverty and debt, but in its frequent repetitions and shifts, it stutters. It’s not without its ideas, but its issues overwhelm them. Still, in the film we get glimpses of a Tokyo which usually hides away – grimy, cramped, ignored places, which are easy to imagine providing a meaningless and remote kind of living for some of its residents. Perhaps the fact that it has been made, rather than how it has been made, is really the most significant aspect of Tokyo Nightfall.

Tokyo Nightfall (2025) will receive its World Premiere at this year’s Raindance Film Festival: for more details on screenings, please click here.

Raindance 2026: The Devil Whispered my Name

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Camping: not even once. That’s perhaps surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, the clearest message in The Devil Whispered my Name (Un susurro invocó mi nombre), a film which – in trying to do a lot – ends up not doing much. This is a shame, as there are some brilliant visual flourishes and good sound design here, just in dear want of a focused, connecting narrative.

Back to the camping: a group of (initially) happy young people have decided to get together out in the woods to mark their last evening of all being together, as some of the party are about to head off, in pursuit of new horizons. In Argentina, this means more than a few beers, however: the kids have lined up a third eye-prying Ayahuasca trip, cutting out the shamanic middleman to go it alone – though perhaps a bit of guidance wouldn’t have gone amiss, as this dalliance with a mind-altering substance goes about as well as you might expect. Soon, Carla (Bianca Mitnik) is waking up alone, though initially believes she hears her own name being called, and wanders off in pursuit of it. When she properly awakens, her mouth is full of blood, her arms are scratched – and her best friend Maria, who had only just introduced the fact of her pregnancy, outlasted these happy tidings by a couple of hours, tops.

Ten years pass by. Now a dancer in Bueno Aires, Carla (now Clara Kovacic) is ostensibly doing well with a move to Paris lined up, but she still suffers from visions. Why people decide to take these incredibly destabilising mental disorders to foreign countries is always a puzzler, but Carla is determined to put her career first, and to make a fresh start. There’s a snag: before she can go anywhere, she hears from her old friend Daniel (Antonio Kassab) that their mutual friend from the infamous camping trip, Germán, is dead – and they need to go to his funeral. It’s only right, argues Daniel. Carla agrees, though her hallucinations insist on going with her and, at the wake, she spies a strange symbol on Germán’s hand. It triggers a memory of Maria’s death; Carla recalls that same symbol on Maria’s body, too. She tries to put this from her mind, playing catch-up with people she has not seen for a very long time – including Maria’s mother, Ruth – but, in a heartbeat, the small town reveals that there’s more going on here than just Carla’s personal, private visions. The night reveals some monstrous goings-on: ritual and madness which seems somehow to be centred on her.

The Devil Whispered my Name suffers from pacing issues, and this sudden lurch from torpor into a sudden, busy assemblage of conspiracy, possession, a demonic force…it happens fast, but then it recedes just as fast. It’s not clear why the curse has only broken out a decade later after offing Maria but going no further, but regardless of that, the issue really is that the film can’t, or won’t make good on its hints at a uniting storyline with those gory elements to boot. It instead breaks up these scenes with long, fact-finding sequences: the film prioritises, whether through budget or disposition, lots of quietly walking around, chatting, and sleeping. It is frustrating. Who keeps catching forty winks in this situation?

That’s not to say that the film lacks atmosphere: the cinematography can and does do some good work. Clara Kovacic also does well with her role, appearing on screen for the vast majority of the runtime, but carrying that responsibility well. It’s just that the film only really offers dashes of bigger ideas: the occult, demonology, religion, even New Age-type beliefs like auras and self-discovery are all in there, but nothing feels clearly prioritised. It’s possible that 2023’s breakout hit When Evil Lurks – with its own rural Argentinian possession horror – has set some kind of a bar, even subconsciously, for filmmakers and audiences both, even though The Devil Whispered my Name reverts back to notions of trauma and destiny by its close, holding back some more effective visuals for its finale. It looks as though directors John Mathis (Where’s Rose?) and wife Emilia Cotella have further joint ventures lined up: their aesthetic sensibilities already work well, but it would be great to see some more consistency in narrative and pacing, to really draw together those other skills.

The Devil Whispered my Name (2025) featured at this year’s Raindance Film Festival.