Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

Fantasia 2026: The Last Footage

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Myanmar is better-known to Westerners for its political situation than for its cinema scene – much less its genre cinema scene – but low budget horror has developed a decent foothold in the country, with The Last Footage (2026) director Arkar Soe Oo already a well-known name domestically. The Last Footage is the country’s first ever found footage title; that’s interesting timing, given that the subgenre has been in decline in the West for some time. But the film is also an opportunity to see a side of life in Myanmar which would otherwise remain hidden, and the film obliges, starting with a few snippets of everyday life for a group of young, affluent Burmese – each first displayed with a user ID. We first see them variously playing music, out for a run, riding a motorbike – and ghost-hunting, apparently for an online audience (and doing some early blurring of the lines, as this actually has nothing directly to do with the film which follows). Then, we get the standard found footage introduction: it’s the template established for modern viewers by The Blair Witch Project, which tells the audience, ‘only this footage was ever recovered’.

However, time has moved on since BWP, which was made – at the time of writing – twenty-seven years ago, so probably before some of our cast members here were born. Nowadays, the template can be cleaned up to an extent by the presence of new technology, like smart glasses, which helpfully makes the inclusion of people using mobile phones feel much more plausible, because you can easily do both at once (and it rids us of the perennial question: ‘why are you filming?’). There’s a small but effective range of media in play here. We meet the group again: if the film is a little over-the-top in identifying people by their names and perceived social roles (the hot one, the geek, etc) then let’s put that down to a little bit of naivety about how much of this is strictly necessary. The group has come together for dinner, and one of their number – Thu Ya (Charlie Nyein) – is pleased to announce that he has recently inherited part of the Wingabar Forest, specifically a rubber plantation which had belonged to his late grandfather. He wants to take his friends to the area (which has accommodation), and everyone agrees to accompany him.

They get there by bus, and the sudden appearance of a local driver who loves Bob Marley so much that he dresses as him is our first solid clue that things may not be about to pan out entirely seriously here. That could either appeal to audiences, or put them off: it depends on the tone you want from films like these. Interestingly, from a cultural perspective, one of the girls, Wa Na (Thiha Tin Aung Soe), has to unexpectedly bring along her little brother, but no one reacts with the kind of horror which the sudden addition of a child would likely cause if an adults-only excursion had been planned anywhere in the West. More pertinently, the bus is stopped before it gets to its destination by Thu Ya’s estranged uncle, who wants to warn them off, but – ends up going with them. His is a harsh warning, apparently there to be ignored, but helpfully, we now have someone on board who understands the apparent dangers. They reach their destination, warnings about respecting the forest be damned, and they do what outsiders inevitably do: they awaken some kind of malign presence.

Here, for this reviewer at least, the film starts to burn through the goodwill which it may or may not have generated up to this point. Firstly, it rattles through an array of rather generic and grating plot points in short order, first by having the little boy mysteriously disappear, then by the sudden presence of a rather caricatured witch, who has been squatting in Thu Ya’s forest accommodation for an unspecified amount of time, filling the place with candles and ritual objects (one thing you notice about this film which is, remember, ostensibly taking place in the middle of nowhere: the amount of actual darkness is incredulously low). There’s more to come. Ritual, and the understanding of ritual, movies into place as a key consideration, but we see surprisingly little of it; it’s suggested that some of the party have previously held rituals or mishandled rituals, and then the witch has a few rituals up her sleeve, but we as an audience are held apart from the finer details of these. It’s enough to know that they’ve gone wrong, and that the witch is up to no good, using the ignorance of these outsiders to endanger them.

True found footage – if we can really accept the conceit – has to be a little loose, because we have to believe no unseen hand has come along and edited whatever it is we are watching into a neater, tidier shape. The Last Footage does, to do it credit, play out in what feels like real time. However, the film also underlines the careful balancing act required of this genre; much of the film devolves into back-and-forth talking and arguing, which again feels understandable if this is pure ‘found footage’, but it’s overwhelming for the viewer, and feels like it prevents the film from generating any suspense, or a sense of place. A little more eeriness would be lovely here, whatever the tone finally chosen.

By the end, there are some entertaining, if well-worn folk horror ideas here, and no doubt some of the issues around plot explication and pace are down to a certain amount of inexperience with handling all of this, but The Last Footage does suffer for its often jumbled, sometimes busy, occasionally baffling inclusions or omissions. Whilst it’s always intriguing when hitherto-unknown (to the West) filmmaking nations join the horror canon, that in itself isn’t enough to supersede a film’s issues. Keen found footage fans can probably find enough here to love, but for those of us who may have had our sympathies eroded by countless examples from the genre which haven’t hit the mark over the years, The Last Footage unfortunately can’t do enough to refresh or rejuvenate the framework.

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

Nightborn (2026)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Nightborn (2026) is a film hectic with female and feminine anxieties. In common with director Hanna Bergholm’s last feature film, Hatching (2022), it explores childrearing and infant care through a supernatural lens, and whilst the supernaturalism itself flows parallel to the very real human issues in the story, the supernatural elements themselves are beautifully handled and well put together throughout.

Husband and wife Saga (Seidi Haarla) and Jon (Rupert Grint) have decided to set up home in the Finnish forest where Saga spent her childhood summers. The house, which previously belonged to Saga’s grandmother, is a fixer-upper for sure; the forest itself seems to have staked a claim on the place. But Jon and Saga seem blissfully happy and determined to make a go of it. They have also decided that they want children; Saga, with all the confidence of a non-parent, declares that she would like three babies in the next five years. Jon, with all the naivety of a non-parent, nods the idea through.

That shimmering, verdant Finnish (actually: Lithuanian) forest doesn’t stay beautiful and idyllic for long, however. As the couple explores the woods near the house, the place falls oddly silent; it’s a haven for pareidolia, too, and funnily enough, Londoner Jon notices it first – though that doesn’t stop him getting it on with his wife and then, the next thing we know, Saga is giving birth, bloodily and traumatically. Jon, bless him, goes and gets her a bunch of long-stemmed roses to mark the occasion, thus neatly signifying to the audience that he is well-meaning, but a little daft. Nothing could be less use in the circumstances; he may as well have brought in a traffic cone.

More pressingly, the baby himself is gearing up to be a challenge, even by newborn standards. He hates being touched, he hates sunlight and he was born covered in hair. Saga, still running on the fumes of societal expectations and oxytocin, wants to believe that everything will be fine, even though she is exhausted, has significant birth injuries to heal from and is already suffering from acute anxiety.

Yes, Nightborn is a dark fairy story, and there’s a reasonable school of thought which could interpret the whole film as an allegory for the feelings of panic and destabilisation which first babies can bring; it’s mentioned in the film a few times that children can feel like little aliens, impossible to understand or deal with. But at the heart of this film is a woman in (mostly) realistic circumstances, becoming lonelier and lonelier. Saga is trying so hard to inhabit a role she’s been prepared for all her life; as she struggles and becomes submerged in doubt, people around her deal with it by babying her or ignoring her concerns by turns. Of course, the deep dark woods played a role in this child’s conception – Kuuru (a name with various nature-based meanings in Finnish) responds to his environment differently to most babies, but Saga’s plight as a new mother is what really carries the film.

However, underpinning this are elements of Finnish faery lore; the forests, which cover most of the country, were thought to harbour potentially malign elemental spirits, akin to the faery folklore found in different variants throughout Europe. It’s clear to see some links with the folklore about changelings in the film (and equally clear to see how changeling lore itself derived from exhausted, alienated parents who blended their doubts and anxieties about childrearing with supernatural ideas as a means to externalise and to explore them). Kuuru (who is nearly always carefully hidden, remaining in shadow or being filmed from the back) bites, maims and grunts his way through his first few months, to the soporific smiles of everyone – except Saga. It’s maddening, for us and for her, and some of the film’s more extreme sequences approach awkward comedy on several occasions.

Fair play to any film which refuses to flinch away from the grisly realities of childbirth and nursing like this, even if it’s employed for some degree of shock factor. Horror cinema has generally proven itself least likely to flinch, but even so, a small run of films over the past twenty years or so have dared to show us details which would have been impossible previously. The birth scene here, which follows directly on from the sex scene in the film in a startlingly quick edit, with a shot of the baby’s head tearing its way into the world (and I am not exaggerating here) does exactly what it sets out to do: make us look. That popping perineum is not the only source of blood in the film. There is lots of it. Lots and lots, running from nipples, filling sanitary pads and even sometimes drenching the floors.

Then there’s the crying. Kuuru cries constantly, and that squalling baby sound is hardwired to get under one’s skin: it does so very successfully here, running through the biggest share of the film’s dialogue. Pertinent to all this is the lack of connections between women in Saga’s life; no one listened to grandma’s (useful) tales; Saga’s mother, bless her, has hard and fast boundaries and no desire to play granny; Saga’s sister tries, but has a long list of ‘recollections which vary’ when it comes to their childhoods. It all leaves Saga – who isn’t perfect by any means – wide open to the events which overtake her.

The more isolated Saga becomes, the more the fantastical elements of the story come into play, offering a visually accomplished and often artistic breakdown of reality. There’s no neat exposition checklist, and the film even hangs onto some ambiguity as it rolls to a close, despite the tragic and unsettling events at its core. Don’t let the gore fool you: there’s more at play here, despite – if we’re being picky – a couple of oddball physical scenes which don’t quite fit with the tone used elsewhere.

Nightborn (2026) comes to Shudder from July 31st.

Fantasia 2026: Corpus

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Corpus (2026) is a brooding and subtle horror film which reveals its key ideas very slowly and carefully; arguably, it never allows us to understand everything, preferring to focus on its sensual, uneasy world-building and those who finds themselves there.

We start in 1997: there’s an as-yet unseen photographer doing a shoot with a young model described as ‘green’ – in other words new, inexperienced. The girl, Wren (Nuha Jes Izman), is excited to be working with Billie (Lily Cowles), whose work has received a lot of recent acclaim. Billie uses this to immediately inflict trauma on the girl, by calling in another model – a nude male, wearing a strange, fetish-looking get-up that we don’t get to see too closely, but we see what it does to Wren, who is panic-stricken and reduced to tears by his arrival. Billie justifies it by saying this kind of work is necessary in an industry where having ‘the edge’ is everything. This fraught and uncomfortable rush-through sets us up to consider the power play inherent whenever someone is being observed, seen, recorded – and photography is a component of this, even if it only forms part of what is later offered to audiences.

Moving forward in time by a year, we meet New York City photographer and petty coke dealer Sayo (Jeff Wahlberg), just as he’s about to arrive at a trendy nightclub to fulfil both roles. He’s a local, he knows everyone and he seems to be in his element here. However, his evening is destabilised somewhat by the arrival of local boy made good, actor and Celluloid cover star Vincent (Brodie Townsend) who has been off building his career (and not staying in touch). There’s some history here, to say the least, and it’s enough for a slightly ambiguous and super-charged reunion between these two, first at the club and later, back at Sayo’s place. But we learn one thing: the photographer responsible for Victor’s recent magazine cover is the same photographer we met previously, and she is throwing a special party at her house out in the country. Vinnie has been invited, and he wants Sam to come along: he says it’ll be great for networking.

Eventually Sayo, who is trying very hard not to just succumb to his barely-repressed feelings for Vinnie, as he still feels very angry with him, agrees. Accompanied by mutual friend, party animal and designated driver Ross (Michael Vlamis), the three men head out into the boonies early the following day, ostensibly for the party of a lifetime. However, when they arrive, it’s not quite what they were expecting.

At the sprawling country house, they are greeted by three women: Billie, Wren – who seems to be over her initial photoshoot – and Cata (Ching Valdes-Aran) who seem to be in a kind of open relationship with one another, none of which they are particularly shy about sharing with their guests. The reason for the occasion is an unusual one, too: it’s St John’s Day, one of those rarest of saints’ days where the birth of a saint, rather than their inevitably horrible death, is celebrated. Regardless, given that the three men are still recovering from the night before, the candlelight meal and the feeding-by-hand which begins to go on feels like a lot; they’re relieved when more of a conventional party finally follows on from dinner, with coke, booze and sexual tension back on the cards. Despite this, the strangeness of the set-up and the by-turns voracious, and then guarded behaviour of the three women makes it difficult to relax. Intoxication brings the problems between Vinnie and Sayo back to the surface, but it’s hazily clear that, brewing in the background, is something far stranger. The film takes on an increasingly uneasy atmosphere, but there’s a subcurrent: you know instinctively it hasn’t quite got where it’s going yet.

Corpus is a meticulously designed and realised piece of cinema with heady, absorbing aesthetics: it’s quite the experience. Its use of colour and light – especially at night, which is when this film comes alive – is consistently beautiful, but at a deeper level than this, the film’s tactile qualities really stand out. It’s a very intimate film. Skin – often seen up-close – looks dewy, or sweaty, or even sickly here. The film often centres around cinema and celluloid, photography and the clicks, whirrs and processes which analogue photography necessitated, back when this was the only means of capturing likenesses and images. There is lots of handheld camerawork, giving the film a malleable, immediate feel, especially in how it tracks faces and responses. Sayo is at the heart of this; the majority of his performance goes unspoken, and he is often doubly distanced from events around him – we see him listening or observing from afar, and you feel for him, and for the sense of isolation this engenders. He’s a sympathetic character, and you share his increasingly fraught mindset as he begins to glean that something, at least, is not what it seems. The sensual focus on male bodies from the perspective of women – or, subtly differently, from a woman’s perspective, is also an unusual addition here as the triangle of Billie, Wren and Cata never come out and explain anything about their lives, how they live or what they want – other than their determination to celebrate a saint’s day in their own inimitable, quaintly hedonistic way, with their own motivations.

Of course all of this is a gamble, this reticent approach which may challenge audiences expecting certain kinds of explication, but in common with a few other prolific horror/sci-fi titles which have also kept their secrets, it’s the more engaging for those denials. We learn enough, and having bonded with the characters we’ve accompanied from New York City, we can still see Corpus on its own terms: as a languid, unsettling piece of high weirdness, a sensual nightmare simmering with unspoken subtext. Give it the time and space that it deserves.

Corpus (2026) received its world premiere at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival. For more information, please click here.

Mockbuster (2025)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

When do you first remember seeing an Asylum studio title? Established in the late 90s, they may have been knocking around for a while before they ended up on your radar. So at a guess, your first Asylum title might have been Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus (2009) or if you’re a little younger, perhaps Sharknado (2013), or else you may have forgotten exact titles, but definitely remember witnessing a fight between 80s pop sensations Debbie Gibson and Tiffany. (It was in Mega Python vs. Gatoroid.) In any case, it was (and still is) a wild time, with a slew of low-budget titles designed to be derivative and lowbrow, pivoting around old, dependable exploitation cinema tropes like giant sea creatures, mad robots, aliens, zombies and of course, the mockbusters designed to ride the coattails of whatever Hollywood is doing at that particular time. But how do these films get made – and who makes them?

Mockbuster (2025) is one answer to that question, giving us a rare behind-the-scenes perspective from a first-time feature director, Anthony Frith, tasked with directing a spin on The Land That Time Forgot (and providing a voiceover for this film). Frith starts by acknowledging the quandary of getting involved with such a studio: you have to start somewhere, but you might never get past it. He got the gig, incredibly, after sending The Asylum a tentative email asking if they were looking for directors. Be careful what you wish for. Turns out, they were, provided said director can work to a six-day shoot, perhaps sub as an actor when needed, and of course abandon themself to the process, even when it’s not fully clear what that process is.

Frith, not only as a newbie but as a newbie getting his first experience of directing under, shall we say, unusual circumstances, is perennially humble and surprised during Mockbuster; he’s open about not feeling very comfortable in front of the camera, but he’s at his most organic when he seems to almost forget about the documentary, abandoning himself to a kind of harassed laughter when for example, he finally receives the script – late, with a vast array of locations, characters and developments. He’s less amused when they then cut his already miniscule budget and expect the same content, but hats off to Asylum producer Brendan, who arrives to cut corners like a pro and saves the day.

Yes, you will need more than a passing interest in this kind of behind-the-scenes detail, but on the whole, the whole thing is rather endearing. it shows that you do need to give any film your all to get it made, regardless of whether it’s going to be rammed full of CGI dinosaurs in post-production (great work if you can get it) and everyone who works on this film seems to come round to it, really wanting to give their best. It provides a new, or at least an expanded perspective on the filmmaking process, and a reminder as a reviewer to be constructive wherever possible (though lambasting a film is always acceptable if someone is just phoning it in). Asylum, to do them credit, sort of are ‘phoning it in’, but there’s an earnestness there to counterbalance their cynicism which means they just about get away with it. Perhaps they’re the reason we should start grading cynicism, sort of like a Beaufort Scale. By the way, the Head of Production at The Asylum looks comfortingly and exactly like you’d hope he looked, and actually, all of the people employed at the LA head studio are utterly disarming, Whisper it, but they even make some solid points about the Hollywood machine. Their ethos is: always make a film for less than you think that film is going to make as a profit. It’s not art and it’s not Tarkovsky, but it has its place and in the spirit of honesty, some of his could really use some dinosaurs.

Mockbuster shows the filmmaking process for what many of us may know, or at least expect it to be: fun, but frustrating and filled with snags. And the film gets made! Will The Land That Time Forgot ever make it onto anyone’s favourite film list? It’s highly unlikely – though not completely impossible – but seeing it come together is entertaining, the preview screening at the end looked like an absolute blast and despite the Asylum Wiki coming in quite hard on the studio as a team of slavedrivers (see second paragraph), they were willing to take a chance on a first-time filmmaker when most wouldn’t, and that has to count for something. There’s a lot to be said for that kind of shrug of optimism.

Mockbuster (2025) is available on digital from 27th July.

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.