Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

Fantasia 2024: Párvulos

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

To some extent, Párvulos suffers by its promotional material, which seems to promise something mysterious and dark, swirling ominously in the washed-out, arthouse colour palette which we saw in the first stills. In truth, and beyond that muted colour palette, the film is nothing like that. In fact, arthouse, in terms of theme and approach – is one thing which the film leaves out. Its influences, whilst no doubt selected with love and care by horror fan and director Isaac Ezban, jumble together rather awkwardly, because there’s just so much in there, as if this is the sole chance to honour them all. This leads to an overly long, tonally awkward grab-bag of horror types, tropes and plot points which don’t blend well. It’s a shame, and although all of this doesn’t completely detract from the fine set of performances from the young actors in the film, it does dilute the overall impact.

The film starts as it means to go on, blending lofty truisms about nature and the importance of ‘family’ (nota bene) as a natural constant, with an introduction to how three apparently parentless brothers are living in a post-apocalyptic setting – ickily, that’s how. Remember the saying that little boys are made of ‘slugs and snails and puppy dog tails’? That’s not far off here. I mean, why catch fish with the copious amount of worms you have, when you can make a worm (and honey!) smoothie instead? Why wouldn’t you eat a pet frog? Skin a dog? And so on; you get the picture.

The boys, with eldest brother Salvador (Farid Escalante Correa) keeping them all in check, are eking out an existence, apparently waiting for their parents to come home. As if all of this wasn’t strange enough, there’s something in the cellar which is being kept a secret from the baby of the family, Benjamin (Mateo Ortega Casillas) – something, or can we say someone, which the other brothers go down to feed. This secret is kept from the audience too for a little while, but after spending some more time watching the boys foraging for the absolute worst food you can imagine, making mistakes out in the wild, and noting some eyebrow-raising, post-pandemic inspired reveals about what brought the world to this state, we discover what’s down there. Little Benjamin is very surprised; some, shall we say, more jaded viewers may not be.

So, by around forty minutes in, we may be wondering where we go from here, given the film runs to two hours altogether. We know what’s in the basement, why the boys are providing food, what’s happened in the world outside, and why things are so complicated. The film has been, thus far, grotty, grimy and unpleasant, just as all post-apocalyptic films are; there’s always someone holed up in a house not their own, hoping for the powers-that-be to come through whilst hiding from the worst dregs of humanity who are always, inevitably, out there somehow. It could have carried on along these lines; countless films have, and some very successfully.

However, the film’s sudden lurch into a much lighter, even comedic tone is a genuine surprise, calling to mind different titles in the grab bag, particularly Braindead (Dead Alive), as some of the scenes and gags are similar. But unless this is going to turn into (and look away now if you don’t want to know the nature of the monsters being mentioned) My Pet Zombie, then what?

As it turns out, the arrival of an outsider – ah! – complicates things, even if briefly, and this means dropping the comedic tone quite sharply in order to turn the film instead into a much gorier, and once more, a much darker one. Leaving aside quibbles about the way in which the outsider character gets treated in the script – the inclusion of sex in the film definitely raises an eyebrow, too – here we can see Day of the Dead rising highest in the mix, melding together the same ‘zombies who remember’ idea with an almost identical gore scene, one which has long seemed irresistible to indie horror filmmakers – yes, that one. But then again, we’re still focused on some kids surviving against steep odds – the film’s title literally means ‘toddlers’ – and the ‘plucky kid’ interludes feel like a difficult sell now, too, especially when we’ve moved onto people getting literally splattered with guts. This level of disaster didn’t even happen in Lord of the Flies (another likely influence). Again – where do we go next?

It’s not until the last fifteen minutes or so that the film tries hard to resolve these questions and issues, but in so doing, it has to briefly introduce other, ideological ideas which cannot by this point be granted the time to really develop, meaning some rather squashed final exposition (even if replete with an appearance by the fierce Noé Hernández). Essentially, things change, change, and change again here, but always feel overly familiar as they do, even if these familiar aspects wouldn’t ordinarily occur in one project.

At its weakest moments, Párvulos feels sadly scatty, diffuse and derivative. It’s just so giddy with ambition that it suffers for it, and it pains me to come away feeling quite as frustrated by the film as I do, but hey, thus far I’m in the minority: other reviewers have praised its vision and ethos, and had no issues with its tone or content at all. See it and decide for yourselves; it’s certainly worth that.

Párvulos (2024) appeared as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Fantasia 2024: Black Eyed Susan

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

A viewing of Black Eyed Susan (2024) will, if you have any stomach to get through its blisteringly unpleasant quandaries and implications, leave you with many questions. However, for all of that, the one resounding question for this reviewer is: are we ten years away from this kind of scenario, or five?

Let me explain. Whilst it’s impossible to really call the film subtle, it comes from that popular, new style of science fiction and/or dystopia which eschews flashy SFX in order to ponder the philosophical ramifications of its world-building. Black Eyed Susan emphatically won’t be for everyone: some viewers will be blinded by the basic plotline, or repelled by the language used, or just unable to see past the most obvious and unpleasant aspects, which are there from the outset. But unpleasant or otherwise, this is a hell of a film: unseemly and uncanny, yet familiar and just realistic enough to get under one’s skin. It dares to question where modern moral lines are drawn, whilst providing a perhaps surprisingly intimate character study of a regular man – even an Everyman? – who finds himself in an unprecedented situation, with his own moral lines to ponder.

The film opens in medias res, midway through a conversation between a man, Alan (Scott Fowler) and a young, as-yet unnamed woman. She seems unusually fearless, even though Alan is clearly agitated; she even starts to goad him, belittling his brittle masculinity until he starts to physically assault her. Every blow he lands, she deems pathetic. As this scenario unfolds, he becomes increasingly aroused by the abuse he’s inflicting on her, but things shift when it becomes apparent that someone else is watching them. Voyeurism in this film is multi-layered, and always repackaged as having some neutral, exploratory purpose. So we’re watching them, also being watched by as-yet unseen and unknown others.

If, from the opening seconds, this situation feels unsavoury, as if we are spying on abuse, it becomes differently unsavoury when it’s revealed that this is in fact a kind of training session. The young woman isn’t a woman – she’s a state-of-the-art sex doll, designed for men who like a dash of domestic abuse with their sex lives. Alan is a tester, working on behalf of tech start-up guru Gil (Marc Romeo). Whatever he does to the doll, helps it to learn – which makes it not just okay, but important work. Gil, who has made an artform out of his detachment from any potential ethical concerns involved with this work, comes to speak to Alan and invites him to admire the realistic bruising – although getting a black eye ‘right’ is something they’re still working on. But he feels they might get better results if Alan agrees to test the doll in a non-lab environment: perhaps he’d like to borrow Gil’s second home in upstate New York?

Three months later, there’s been a death. Alan is no more. What can have happened in the interim? We aren’t explicitly told, but at the memorial, Gil runs into an old mutual friend, Derek (Damian Maffei). They discuss Alan, but talk soon turns to the gritty realities of modern life: money, work, prospects. Derek is down on his luck at present, so it’s roundly unsurprising that Gil asks if he’d consider taking Alan’s place as a tester/trainer. He sells it to him not just by proudly talking him through his doll’s ultra-real physical traits, but by making claims that these dolls will function as pressure valves for stressed men. In effect, these dolls are deemed necessary: Derek will be helping to perfect the technology by training the device, mordantly nicknamed Black Eyed Susan by the team.

It’s not immediately clear whether or not Derek accepts Gil’s claims about the doll’s purpose, and when he gets started, he struggles with the idea of striking the doll, but he gets through the first session. He also agrees to go forward with the role, as much as he’s uncomfortable that everything he does with (and to) Susan is being recorded – by Gil, and by the film’s only other – sorry, only tangible female character, the unseen team member, Amanda, who can see what he does through Susan’s own eyes. It’s decided pretty early on that the project might benefit from some field testing. Perhaps Alan would like to borrow Gil’s second home in upstate New York?

We’ve heard this before, so at this point the audience diverges from Derek, who agrees to take Susan to the house. As he spends time with her, she starts to mirror his expectations and desires: he shows little inclination for abuse, and as such, she begins to behave like a loving, sympathetic woman who doesn’t want to be beaten. Susan has capacities which even Gil and Amanda never realised, but this is nonetheless a complicated situation where, over time, Derek’s own emotional connections begin to act as a complicating factor. Just as Susan is being trained by what she is asked, so is Derek: Susan is teaching him. It’s the extent of these lessons, based on their interactions, which ultimately grants the film its darkest aspects.

The murk and bile seeping from this film’s earliest scenes are hideous, true, but the meticulous, bold, careful construction behind the murk displays incredible prowess. There’s an art to generating discomfort, and whilst people may opt out, dismissing all of this as deliberately vile and nothing more, there’s so much more going on here. Forget about its violence for a moment (which, by the by, only turns into ultraviolence in a handful of seconds). Its use of language, for example, where wearisome, pornographic epithets like ‘slut’ and ‘whore’ clash with occupational lexis from the world of business, with words like ‘intermediary’, ‘the device’, ‘the mechanism’ and the disconcerting ‘arousal history’. Susan isn’t just talked about, she’s written on, with ideas about how to modify her appearance actually scrawled onto her skin. This is modern life, folks – dysphemism, euphemism, problems with talking clearly and openly. Derek tries to get to that point, but he is hamstrung by the fact that his selected confidant is a ‘device’ programmed to be a ‘slut’. He’s clearly lonely, and what he really wants – there’s that Everyman thing again – is love, companionship. His material and emotional hardship is exploited by Gil, but that’s not the only exploitation Gil has in mind, as the film gets steadily more and more challenging.

And, as Derek’s story progresses, we’re invited to consider the same things he’s made to consider. Where do our morals come from, and are they immoveable? The film itself – director and writer Scooter McCrae has opted for Super 16mm – is ideal for this kind of soul-searching. The film’s deep darks and heavy grain, which edge into chiaroscuro in places, are perfect for this demi-monde and its struggling, unshaved, rootless men. If the film appears to warm up as it goes, with more of a conventional, conventionally-lit domestic setting, then it’s worth contrasting this with Yvonne Emilie Thälker’s pitch-perfect performance as Susan. She successfully enacts the aspects of fantasy associated with Susan, but seems to have a mysterious, chilly inner life somehow. It’s intriguing. The camera has her naked body in shot for a great deal of the time here, which must have made for a challenging experience as a first-time actor, but nonetheless, she always seems to be in control somehow. We need to remember that we are looking at a ‘device’ which is also a conduit for the observations of an unseen woman, Amanda. That’s a big ask for an actor, but Thälker does it. It’s helpful that she has such a good script to work with, one which skirts just the right, uncomfortable amount around conversational norms. It seems at times like Susan has ‘learned’ to be empathic, but then she, or it, shows that this isn’t the case. Some of her lines are even kinda funny. Then there’s the wraparound soundtrack by none other than Fabio Frizzi, whose work always lends a strange ambience to the films in question.

Black Eyed Susan may be discomfiting, but my god, it’s worthwhile. Ten years away? Five years away? Ethically impossible? Ultimately, whether near or far, it confronts the viewer with a rich and unsettling array of questions which burn themselves into your psyche. It’s not easily forgotten, and deserves the queasy, rapt attention which it must surely generate.

Black Eyed Susan received its World Premiere as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Fantasia 2024: The Silent Planet

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

How do you solve a problem like the Oieans? Dune-like, The Silent Planet (2024) opens with a proverb being spoken in an alien tongue: Earth is now host to an alien species called the Oieans, though they are not the straightforward, superior civilisation which we might expect. Rather, they have arrived to Earth seeking help (and receiving mistreatment). It seems that intergalactic opportunities also bring new social problems. The situation on Earth, however, quickly recedes into being largely contextual. Our focus is elsewhere.

On penal planet #384, Earth issues are seemingly lost on the lone prisoner there, who is required to spend his time mining for a certain ore, which he then transports to an orbiting craft. To cope with his isolation, he spends his time talking to his wife, Mona. He doesn’t do this literally; he has no access to any sort of device which could facilitate this, it seems. But he dreams of her, and he imagines that he’s conversing with her. It’s his only escape from the enforced rigmarole of his days, and we also see the escalating impact of loneliness; we’re led to believe that he has been here for a number of years for some as-yet unspecified, if serious, crime.

Things change when a young woman – whom we have briefly already met – arrives on the planet with a living pod of her own, charged with offences relating to her connections with the Oieans on Earth. This blindsides the as-yet nameless man: he assumes she must be there to harm him, especially given his recent tampering with some of his prisoner kit. We soon find out more about the woman – Niyya (Briana Middleton) – who has actually been sent here under the false belief that her predecessor is in fact already dead (a penal colony of one seems strange, perhaps, but presumably the powers that be have plenty of room to do it). When the two meet theirs is initially a difficult relationship, even needlessly difficult perhaps, though this provides an opportunity for the man, now giving his name as Theodore (Elias Koteas), to develop as a character. He’s fretful and vulnerable, whereas she’s initially taciturn and much, much tougher.

But they bond, and as they do, it reveals that Theodore is clearly deeply affected by the presence of someone else after so long. This introduces us to the film’s key themes – selfhood and memory – as this new, unexpected connection kicks up a lot of dirt regarding the past for both Theodore and Niyya, all taking place under the strange influence of the planet itself.

Budgetary constraints are somewhat evident here, but for the most part The Silent Planet offers more of the modern, low key sci-fi which is popular today, and it’s here that the film plays to its greatest strengths. There are some flashier effects – some spacecraft, briefly, some planetary views and some brief depictions of the Oieans themselves, though these aspects are the film’s weaker moments aesthetically. The CGI here even occasionally risks taking the viewer out of the real story being told. However, the vistas of the penal planet (filmed in Newfoundland) look good, and the film’s finer details, such as the interiors, are more visually consistent, forming a a decent backdrop for the close focus on the cast of two, and a space where most of the film’s plot exposition and development occurs. Along the way there are some neat surprises, and excellent acting throughout.

However, the film can’t do all it perhaps strives to do, and a depleted final act means that we lose sight of some of the bigger/biggest questions and ideas. Some overreliance on flashbacks and some patchy plot points are an issue here – but perhaps most of all, the film’s clear points of comparison to Duncan Jones’s Moon (2009) reduce some of its impact. The same isolation, the loss of self, the combative relationship with a newly-arrived Other, the presence of Janey, which is an awful lot like GERTY; there’s even a fairly similar mining project taking place in both films. That’s to the detriment of the newer film, purely because Moon is so successful and – pardon the pun – so ground-breaking.

For all that, though, The Silent Ocean is still an engaging entrant into the sci-fi genre. It’s a film which has plenty to recommend it but most of all, it’s the formidable, intensely watchable performances from Middleton and Koteas which really elevate it.

The Silent Planet (2024) received its world premiere at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Fantasia 2024: In Our Blood

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Whatever you think you’re watching, you aren’t. What you think is going on, isn’t. That’s an early lesson to take away from In Our Blood (2024), a film which uses everything at its disposal – including its shooting style – to disorientate and surprise its audience. The film opens on an upset, afraid young woman, Emily (Brittany O’Grady): whatever is troubling her, she seems to be done with it, but before we get too comfortable here, it’s revealed that this is filmed footage: it suddenly zips into rewind, showing us instantly that someone has ownership over all of this. It’s a risky strategy, beginning with what seems like the end (or more usually, about 90% of the way along), and lesser films have gone instantly astray with this approach. In Our Blood keeps a firm hold on its storytelling, however, showing itself as more than equal to this decision.

We encounter Emily again at some point before all of this, now accompanied by boyfriend and filmmaker Danny (E.J. Bonilla) and on a road trip to Las Cruces, NM. These two are making a documentary, though the subject matter is unusual: Emily is reuniting with her estranged mother Sam (Alanna Ubach), and has chosen – with Sam’s go-ahead – to make a film about it. Emily asserts that the film will be an important document, helping her to heal old wounds, but found footage fans may also note the double-distance being offered by the camera. Like The Blair Witch Project a generation before, filming offers a way of negotiating with a tough reality: it’s safer, looking down a viewfinder.

They arrive at Sam’s house – Sam, never ‘mom’ – and it turns out that they’re there for Thanksgiving. The dinner itself is given little screentime, as Emily and Danny are keen to get on with more of an interview set-up, although Sam is not instantly comfortable with this – accidentally fidgeting with her microphone, not quite knowing where to look, and so on. But she begins to explain what has driven her to contact her daughter after so long. She recently lost a friend to violence, and it led to an awakening conscience about all the things she had done wrong in her life, including her treatment of Emily. Sam openly discusses her previous issues with addiction – something which seriously impacted upon Emily’s earlier life, too – and is keen to tell Emily that she has beaten her problem, with a new job and a new outlook. Trying to head off Emily’s rising anger about their shared past, Sam suggests that she and Danny could visit the clinic where she works on the following day, as evidence that she has now made good.

However, when Emily and Danny arrive the following morning, Sam hasn’t turned up. The clinic supervisor, Ana (Krisha Fairchild) doesn’t know where she is, though she provides them with some B-roll footage for their film, just by explaining what they do there. They also get to speak to some of the addicted and homeless people who live, semi-rough, in the clinic’s vicinity. But Emily begins to fear a relapse, so they begin to try to trace Sam’s last steps. She’s not at home either, but they begin to notice strange changes to her place (which they’re able to corroborate by looking at their footage from the previous night). The more they find out, the more they begin to get the sense that they’re not welcome in Las Cruces – are they getting followed? Targeted? The film – ours, and theirs – begins to take a series of threatening, strange turns, gradually opening up a bizarre story, hidden in plain sight.

The ‘found footage’ genre, as influential as it has turned out to be, has come to be defined by a number of pitfalls and clichés. The wildly spinning cameras, the frequent (and pertinent) question, ‘Why are you filming right now?’ and above all, the use of the shooting style as an excuse for the general lack of focus and clarity has, arguably, harmed more films than it’s helped. Thankfully, things have changed: the tech is better, the genre is more self-aware, and social media has – for all its sins – led to a number of titles where the people doing the filming clearly care about the quality of their film. This brings us to the mockumentary format, which has also grown increasingly refined as time has passed, giving us a kind of planned footage, rather than found footage. In Our Blood has plenty of confidence in straddling the divide between the two. There are a handful of questionable snap-shut cuts, and a few mega-zoom shots which aren’t really needed, but for the most part, this is a plausible, smooth piece of film. The whole purpose of the film is neatly transformed by Sam’s disappearance, too, as the film itself becomes part of a puzzle: its initial function as a film about family becomes instead a primary source for finding a missing person.

It is clever, clever work, as are the earnest, believable performances which underpin it all. Further verisimilitude is granted by the film’s setting near the Mexican border. There’s no telling us what to think, but we are invited to think: casual mentions of the ‘wall’, glimpses of the problems being caused by immigration policy and policing, and all the attendant issues of crime, poverty and homelessness provide a jagged, uneasy backdrop to the film. Director Pedro Kos, whose filmography up until this point has focused on real-life social issues, has successfully brought a lot of that realism to bear on this, his first narrative film.

Alongside all of this, the film’s ratcheting sense of the strange continues to unfold. Every clue, every discovery seems to lead somewhere steadily darker. Clarity and visibility is doled out really carefully, so that making sense of these events necessarily unfolds at a steady, slow pace, with only one quick bout of exposition which really differs from this (though it, too, only tantalises other world-building beyond the limits of this narrative). In essence, In Our Blood is a highly effective, razor-sharp piece of storytelling which manages to surprise and horrify as it goes. Just as an addendum, it’s one of those films where, having followed it to its close, you find yourself going back over the dialogue, reinterpreting it in light of what you’ve learned. It’s a clever, thought-provoking and surprisingly innovative horror.

In Our Blood (2024) screens at the Fantasia International Film Festival on Wednesday, 31st July.

Fantasia 2024: The Dead Thing

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Could The Dead Thing (2024) have a simple strapline? If so, perhaps ‘this is hell we’re in’ would suffice, bearing in mind how – at least for the first couple of acts – modern technology is crucially important, and a key factor in raising a specific kind of hell. Today, there are all sorts of exciting opportunities for meaningless, short term connections and Alex (Blu Hunt) is all over them. For her, the tech-enabled gamut of swiping left or right on a dating app which isn’t Tinder, but kinda is, takes up a lot of her time. She actively avoids real-life connections, preferring to scroll, scroll, scroll, and often, to follow up the scrolling with a brief encounter. Perhaps she likes her encounters easy to manage, navigate and delete? Well, perhaps, but she doesn’t seem particularly happy in herself. She even seems to see people she engages with in real life as a sequence of body parts or attributes, each comparable with the last, so that one guy’s appearance recalls another, and another, and another. The ‘ping’ of notifications runs through all of her day-to-day. It looks like classic addictive behaviour.

If it is addictive, then this perhaps explains a dissatisfied, if brief rant about the nature of existence, including the proximity of a meaningless death – which pops out of nowhere on her next date, with a nice guy from the app called Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen). Oh, nice to see House of Psychotic Women in the nightstand, by the way. If this conversation disrupts the norm for Alex, then so it does for Kyle, but it appears that her sudden honesty about her state of mind appeals to him. Or, in any case, they get a lot closer, enjoying the time they spend together. What we’re shown here seems very authentic, even heart-warming, given the clinical briefness of Alex’s prior dates. Sadly, it’s not that simple and after the intimate space they share, it appears that Kyle ghosts her. He doesn’t respond to her messages – he doesn’t even read them.

Hurt and surprised, she tries to track him down. When this fails, it looks for all the world as though she is just going to go back to the old, familiar business of bad dates and one night stands – except that, on her next date, she sees Kyle again. My god, he’s even turned up in the same bar where they met. Intrigued and not a little hurt, she follows him as he leaves with another woman. Or does she? When she tries to track him down again – wanting answers – someone at his old place of work hands her a funeral notice. So did she really see Kyle?

Objective reality which, let’s face it, always felt like it was going to be in short supply here, quickly begins to fracture as Alex seriously comes to doubt her senses. Perhaps doing the only thing she has any faith in, she resorts to the app again, and decides to try something. She uninstalls it, and then reinstalls: hey presto, there’s Kyle, and when she matches with him, he arrives for another date, with seemingly no recollection of meeting her before.

Whilst The Dead Thing grows increasingly thematically close to other films – it feels like somewhere between Nina Forever and Soulmate, if closer to the latter – then neither of those cover the same ground in such an eerie, meticulously detailed way. It’s an uncanny spin on a world starved of genuine connection, and more than that, it’s good at showing how the ways we understand and interpret death have been changed irrevocably by social media. People are gone, but there; they’re absent but present. At the heart of it all is Alex, and Blu Hunt does an incredible job conveying the world of barely-contained emotions she experiences, all sensitively directed by Elric Kane (and the intimacy coordination work here is very good too, responding carefully to the challenging world-building, and the absence, surrounding it). As circumstances grow weirder, we come to rely on Alex as our single point of relatability, as she is our only constant. That being said, it does feel tricky at some points, such as when she seemingly gives up on the mystery for a while, even if her willingness to go back to some sort of normality is understandable.

This is an interesting-looking film, too, which utilises an array of modern tech and its attendant preoccupations, but looks like something which could have been made decades previously. Its horror soundtrack, its framing, lighting, colour and shadow all look as though they could come from a different era. The ominous roar of traffic is 80s Fulci – as are the women in sexual peril, come to think of it, though The Dead Thing never focuses on the grisly details of bodily trauma and its supernaturalism never takes over, even as it grows to feel more familiar as we head into the final act. It’s much more about emotional ordeals, and it does deliver on those. And, as we explore these, we see that everything in The Dead Thing unfolds for us a mere version of reality. Nothing is anything more than ephemeral. Alex scans documents for a living – she literally makes copies. Her roommate hangs out in a wedding dress, when there’s no wedding. Reality is piecemeal, and something to be handled carefully, if not avoided altogether.

There’s plenty of space for horror in this kind of environment, and even as it settles into more expected tracks, the film has plenty of merit to offer in terms of its updated concepts of hauntings and bereavement. Many of its horrors may ultimately be age-old, but this parable of modern loneliness has more than enough brilliant, unsettling and resonant moments along the way. And, hey, perhaps we’re ready for this kind of limbo – the location for which almost, almost made me smile – and for the terrifying blackness pressing in on its edges, which didn’t make me smile once.

The Dead Thing (2024) featured at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Fantasia 2024: Dirty Bad Wrong

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

A fraught, uneasy atmosphere seems to pervade Dirty Bad Wrong (2023) from its very opening moments. There’s something about the ways in which young mother Sid (Michaela Kurimsky) sits, distracted, as her young son Jesse (Jack Greig) fidgets and investigates their surroundings in ways which quickly suggest they aren’t at home. And, as she is called out of the room by a nameless man (Cody Ray Thompson), it is quickly revealed that she is a sex worker. She puts her headphones on her young son, instructing him not to remove them; it’s all she can do, given she’s had to bring him along, to protect him from the realities of her own life during these moments. Our John Doe shows some brief consternation that Sid has brought her son along with her, but not enough to stop him doing what he wants to do. In fact, given there’s more money in the envelope than Sid expected, it seems he wants her to do more than she wishes: she rebuffs him.

As it stands, the childcare issues which brought Jesse into this house in the first place return to the fore when, as small children do, he simply can’t sit still, and starts wandering around, injuring himself in the kitchen. A distraught Sid calls the whole thing off and leaves with her son. But, with his birthday coming up and a new, sudden financial issue, she needs money. Reluctantly, she has to return to John Doe and take the work she was so adamant to avoid.

Whilst the metaphor of consumption – particularly based around the relentless selfishness of the male libido (oh, come on, yes it is) – is pretty clearly addressed here, even going so far as to touch upon body horror, Dirty Bad Wrong ensures that this is always intermeshed with a plausible normality, with a young woman who has normal concerns, needs and wants. This is carefully done in the film’s brief runtime, showing us a loving relationship between mother and son. Jesse, in only a few lines, is presented as a patient, kind but often sad little boy; his mother, who only faces the camera in full when she’s with Jesse (otherwise glimpsed from the side, or the back) is fiercely reserved when she can be, but it’s very much her and him against the world. It’s also hinted that other women are in a similar situation, juggling the deviance of others with the normality they ordinarily embody. In short, the film invites us to consider what sort of a world this is, and whom it harms.

In some respects, Dirty Bad Wrong is reminiscent of Simon Rumley’s short film, P is for Pressure, taken from the anthology film The ABCs of Death in 2010, even though Sid doesn’t harm others in her own unsavoury assignment. But the love for one’s children, and hoping that through deviant means they can have a normal life, is definitely there in both films. Dirty Bad Wrong is a quiet, clever film which only ever needs to hint at Sid’s defiance and will; in less than fifteen minutes it achieves a great deal, with well-delineated characters and their motivations displayed against a backdrop of a mean-spirited world, but one which – despite the oppressive feel at the start of this film – can clearly be overcome with love.

Dirty Bad Wrong featured at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Fantasia 2024: Berta (2024)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Director Lucía Forner Segarra has a run of titles under her belt which are named for their female protagonists. Marta (2018) concerns a woman who aspires to be a serial killer; Dana (2020) tackles the discomfiting subjects of rape/revenge and (lacklustre) justice; completing this trilogy, her most recent short Berta (2024) takes us once again into such unpleasant territory, blending together some aspects of the plotlines which informed Segarra’s earlier films into another, clever, timely study. If, on paper, these plotlines sound tried-and-tested, then forget all about that: with a few deft moves and the powers of a razor-sharp script, these films both utilise horror and exploitation tropes whilst reconfiguring them, repurposing them. Berta may only be around sixteen minutes long, but it wrings something significant and thought-provoking from every on-screen moment.

Berta (Nerea Barros) works for a car impound service: at least, we think she does. There are always tantalising doubts here. She has access to a flatbed truck at least, and when the opening credits roll, she’s busy affixing a vehicle to her own – although, by using an online tutorial. The car owner arrives back just in time to challenge her; characteristically for him, as we learn, he spends some time denying he’s done anything wrong, before hesitantly accepting his parking violation and agreeing to accompany Berta back to her depot to pay off his fine and retrieve the car. But here’s where it gets nasty.

He does accompany her, but not as expected; Berta has other ideas and a separate agenda. Later, as they talk, what is striking – and a credit to the script – is that this man (Elías González) is very plausible. Is she in fact mistaken? Unhinged, even? There’s a few moments there where this question hangs in the air – and it’s a real credit to the film that it can achieve this in next to no time spent. His righteous protestations dissolve as time ticks on, but he has clearly made an artform out of seeming so reasonable. Even his later admissions are presented, again very cleverly, as if Berta is making a fuss over nothing. Her perceptions are off, that’s all. In presenting us with this, Segarra has created a kind of warped Everyman figure which feels instantly recognisable – a cultural archetype. His words and deeds place the audience on a level with our protagonist, who is played with formidable power by Barros. Berta is nervous at first, fumbling and fussing over the vehicle ruse, but as her certainty grows, she clearly rises to the challenge she has set herself, whereas Alex steadily panics.

I’ve mentioned many times that the appearance on-screen of a very specific trope – the old tied-to-something routine – has come to leave me cold, so formulaic has it seemingly become (and overnight, too). And a few filmmakers have tried to break away from the whole ‘woman strapped to chair’ thing, with varying levels of success – but what Segarra does with it is inspired. Not only because it all comes grounded in a disturbing and engrossing framework, but because it dispenses with everything you might be expecting (momentarily shifting emphasis from Berta to Alex). There’s a killer punchline, and room for pithy, impactful points along the way.

Berta doesn’t hector its audience because it doesn’t need to: what it has done is to find a smart, savage, at times comical route through its sinister subject matter that ends by feeling valedictory, with a clear set of character arcs and lots of ideas, expertly executed. It is very, very good at what it sets out to do. Whilst part of me wishes that Segarra would translate these skills to a feature-length film in future, equally, the short film format is used so well here that it feels counterproductive to wish it all away.

Berta (2024) is part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Fantasia 2024: Oh…Canada

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Director Vincenzo Nappi has featured on Warped Perspective a few times before: in fact, I’d go so far as to say that we’ve been following his career. First, the site covered First Bite, a fairly straightforwardly horror short film about – yep – vampires; then there was Filtered, around a year later, which featured some of the very current anxieties around technology and tech horror, as much as it offers just a hint of these in its oh-so brief runtime. And now, as it gears up to screen at this year’s Fantasia, there’s something altogether different.

I don’t know how you’d define Oh…Canada, and that is a bit of a bind as a) a reviewer, and b) someone who has actually just seen the film from end to end. But let’s try: Oh…Canada has a few surprisingly gory moments, but it’s not a horror. In fact, it’s a narrative film either. It pops up as a kind of mock up, retro advertisement for the pleasures of living in that great nation. It’s bilingual; it’s at least at first comedic; it spends more time featuring puppets and animation than live actors. We’re shown – in a roundabout way, with a visual style refracted through different kinds of layering – the joys of the open countryside, the flora and fauna (especially the beaver, emblem of the Canadians for its homesteading and resourcefulness) and overall, what makes Canada great.

But even across a six-minute runtime, the film grows increasingly oddball and sinister: it does have a political point or two to make, even if it gets to these via puppetry and the representation of faux patriotic pride (when you hear a national anthem in a film of this genre – well, get ready). As the film rolls to a close, what we are left with is a surreptitious version of Canada as a place which isn’t, actually, in the best condition. There are hints of environmental concerns, and issues around power and policing in society – even if addressed briefly, these are the main take-away from the film. It just happens to make those points in quite a strange, inventive – if brusque – manner.

Of course, in a short film it can be tricky to land heavyweight points, even if that’s your stated aim, and what we instead have here is a creative and deliberately stagey approach, blending a nub of a political point with a film geared around its particular visual style. It is creative, even if it can feel like it’s being pulled in two different directions, and it’s a world away from the narrative snapshot of the likes of First Bite – which is where this reviewer personally feels that Nappi’s strengths lie. But full points for taking on something wholly different in tone and style, diversifying the old filmography, and working in a different way.

Oh…Canada features as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Fantasia 2024: AstroNots

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

What’s your bluff limit? You know, your bluff limit. The point to which you are willing to overextend your actual abilities. Maybe yours is pretty low – maybe you’d never want the stress of exaggerating what you can do to get somewhere which may be rather stressful. Or, maybe you like the thrill of chancing your arm, seeing where it gets you – because it could get you very far. The third possibility is that there’s no plan – just a willingness to see what might happen – if no one susses you out, that is. See what you can do, and make your excuses later, if necessary. Brilliant careers have no doubt been forged this way.

This brings us to AstroNots (2024), and the cockpit of the Ares 7. With the planet being in the state it is, the Ares is headed to Mars to scope out the possibility of terraforming the red planet: it’s a once-in-a-lifetime voyage in terms of its significance, so perhaps we can forgive Commander Thomas Collins (Adam Dunn) for running through the speech he’s hoping will go down in history. If optics were important in the Sixties, then they’re surely more important today, when everything is so dependent on public approbation – and when humanity itself depends on the mission. And yet, co-pilot Abe Adams (Aaron Glenane) doesn’t seem particularly excited. He doesn’t even have a speech prepared. Instead, he’s turning into a mess of snot and tears; he isn’t ready for this. Tom, who presumably starts out here wanting to avoid a long-term trip with someone given to panic attacks, keeps him calm. Remember your training, he reassures him. You have trained for this. You’re good.

Well, yeah – he’s trained for this in that he’s somehow got the boxes ticked and the certificates framed, but Adams is ready – with a couple of minutes to go until the launch – to confess that he is, if not the worst choice for the co-pilot seat, then certainly quite high on that list. His training has consisted of crashing things, breaking things and failing to understand the basics. Sure, he got through, but go to Mars? He’s upset because the crushing weight of realisation has hit him. He has overstepped his bluff limit by a staggering margin. So now what? What are they going to do?

As Tom talks him up and Abe talks himself back down, we get a sense of a neat script with a few nice moments of verbal trickery, but there’s more to AstroNots than just being an interesting farce. It has a gently serious punchline, but it also pokes timely fun at the fact that maybe very few of our motivations are selfless these days. Even Tom Collins, named for the drink he could probably use, is more given to ideas of his own reputation and legacy; he’s just as guilty, at a few points, of being willing to overlook more pressing concerns.

But the real joke – and the film’s heaviest moment – is saved for the end: here, the cockpit becomes a microcosm for a world where people like the ideas of things, but not so much the dedication and hard graft which go along with it. Sometimes, you just have to make do. This central conceit is nicely handled by director Andrew Seaton, alongside Dunn and Glenane, who are also the writers here. As to what happens to Collins and Adams? Well, watch this space because if plans come to pass, then there’ll be another instalment in a different format…

AstroNots will screen on 22nd July as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Longlegs (2024)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Please note: this review may contain mild spoilers, so if you are hopeful of seeing Longlegs with no prior knowledge – be warned.

Neon has put together an intriguing, long-game promotional campaign for Longlegs (2024) which has been appearing in tantalising parcels for the past few months. For this, they deserve credit: this film will get seen, and it will probably make its money back. When faced with jaded audiences and a crowded market, it’s no mean feat to spread the word quite as far and as wide as this, especially considering it’s an out-and-out horror flick, with no obvious pretensions to be anything else. Longlegs also boasts an appearance (really a cameo) from the master of the OTT strange, Nicolas Cage – albeit buried under a tonne of make-up (though as it stands, he looks like one of the few actors here still in possession of buccal fat). So far, so good – but can these things, these lofty expectations, work against a film in the end?

Consider the above the world’s most hackneyed rhetorical question: of course they can work against a film, if the film ultimately fails to deliver. It’s not all that unusual for a marketing campaign to overpromise – it’s all part of the expected bluster of advertising – but it’s the way it moots a groundbreakingly scary horror that really eats away at Longlegs. In the end, Longlegs is essentially another serial killer movie. And in the end, it feels like a slightly curdled amalgam of a lot of other, better serial killer movies, turning out to be a sequence of diminishing returns which never delivers on the nightmare initially promised. Sure, it’s atmospheric, but in fits and starts: this is TikTok levels of focus and heft, there-and-you’ll-miss-it.

So Longlegs plonks some familiar pieces on the board, even if it then tries to play fast and loose with the gameplay. FBI rookie Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), who has rudimentary psychic abilities, is put on a long-term case, a series of unexplained family mass killings which have been happening for a few decades. Linking these, there’s a sequence of coded letters signed by someone calling themselves ‘Longlegs’. Harker is able to crack the code pretty much instantly: presumably, in twenty years, the finest minds in detective work have failed to do so or else, couldn’t be arsed. In any case, Harker’s uncanny, nervy knack for solving elements of the case make her a perfect choice to try and crack it, once and for all. However, this seems to draw her into the strangeness: visions, hearing voices, possible flashbacks, that sort of thing.

It turns out there’s a supernatural element to all this, and that ‘Longlegs’ himself is only part of what’s been happening. Well, colour us surprised, right? Brace for a very thinly-delineated Satanic element which feels both familiar and yet inferior; then there are dolls, another shorthand attempt at bulking up on the weirdness, but like much within the film it all feels perplexing, and more cynical than successful.

It’s a shame that things peter out in this way, because the film does look good: it’s beautifully and evocatively shot, with some wonderful moments providing lots of invitations to worry about what may be about to creep into view. Cage, whilst deliberately underused in a kind of ‘less is more’ approach, manages a few of his characteristically erratic, unpredictable scenes which are still worth the wait. But a film is not a painting, and even with the film’s occasional approach to storytelling (with the plot clustering around ideas, rather than a sequential narrative) atmosphere alone will not sustain it. A paucity of characterisation and backstory, with a script more given to quirky, low frequency Americana and anti-maternal blather rather than telling us anything – even things which might scare us – renders Longlegs a patchwork of piecemeal squares, rarely scary and barely sequential. Any dread soon dissipates, and a montage of non-sequiturs takes its place.

Directed by Oz Perkins and not – as this reviewer wondered for a moment – David Robert Mitchell, it’s odd, therefore, to note that Longlegs winds up having some similarities to It Follows, the film which kickstarted Maika Monroe’s career a decade ago. A horror which centres a young woman, and the supernatural buck-passing which saves her skin; an approach to time periods which both suggests a specific time period (e.g. Bill Clinton’s presidential portrait hanging on the wall) but then ignores other period detail, blending perhaps deliberately into a rootless, timeless and disorientating timeline. It all feels oddly familiar, in some quite specific ways.

However, perhaps the most obvious point of comparison for me is also the thing which finally sounds the death knell for Longlegs. It feels for all the world like someone has tried to blend a serial killer horror with Twin Peaks, and/or Lynch’s films: take that Lynch strangeness, layer it with Satanism, and Bob’s your uncle? Surely, a winning formula? Well, Bob provides wardrobe cues for Cage’s character, definitely, but there are so many other moments which feel like they’ve been basically purloined from Lynch; Lynch fans may like to count them. All this has achieved though, in the end, is to underline how hard it is to really blend fever-dream strangeness with engaging storytelling. Lynch can do it; Longlegs, on the other hand, cannot.

Coming soon: Fantasia 2024!

Posted on by Keri O'Shea
Párvulos

For the past few years, Warped Perspective has been fortunate enough to cover the Fantasia International Film Festival remotely and, every year, it’s a high point in the film lover’s calendar. This year looks to be no different. Whilst the availability for press coverage varies, Warped Perspective has high hopes that we may get a sneak peek at some of the following titles: we’ll certainly be looking out for them. In any case, if you’re fortunate enough to be going to the festival in person, or if you just want some pointers for the autumn festival season (Fantasia often leads the way on genre releases which surface in other fests later in the year) then here’s a few titles to look out for:

In Our Blood

Found footage is a divisive subject at the site, for writers and for readers, but – love it or hate it – In Our Blood sounds like an intriguing spin on the style, coming as the first FF film from an already renowned documentarian, the Oscar-nominated Pedro Kos. In the film, a filmmaker called Emily Wyland (Brittany O’Grady, White Lotus) teams up with a cinematographer, Danny, to make a film about reuniting with her mother after a long hiatus in their relationship: however, the original plan for the film gets disrupted when her mother suddenly goes missing: now it’s a mystery about a missing person, and Emily and Danny must piece together the clues before it’s too late.

The Silent Planet

Science fiction has, overall, sacrificed some of its bombast in recent years: modern sci-fi often scales back the technology and the spacecraft and its other flashier hallmarks, electing instead to ponder deeper philosophical ideas, using the extraordinary situations and possibilities afforded by sci-fi to do so. This brings us neatly to The Silent Planet, directed by Jeffrey St. Jules. The setting here is a penal planet, and two prisoners sent there to mine the planet’s resources discover that they have a deep-seated connection – one which threatens and complicates their relationship, and their time in this faraway place. In the film, concepts of truth, meanings and responsibilities are explored via a whimsical, surrealist style.

Black Eyed Susan

AI and its increasing presence in the creative industries, not to mention in the world at large, is an ever-evolving source of anxiety these days; as such, it’s little surprise that horror and genre cinema – always ready to face and twist our deepest anxieties into new shapes and forms – has come up with the queasy, and probably five-years-hence storyline behind Black Eyed Susan. Desperate for work, Derek (Damian Maffei) accepts a role with a shady tech start-up, working intimately with ‘Susan’ (Yvonne Emilie Thälker in a powerful debut role), a BDSM sex doll which learns via sexual pain and punishment. The focus is different to The Silent Planet but again, here we have AI and sci-fi coming together to ask big questions about what it means to be human – and humane, in this film with its pitch-black, unsettling core. It’s also edifying to learn that the maestro of movie soundtracks, Fabio Frizzi, is back at work on the score to this film.

Chainsaws Were Singing

Whilst my personal experience of Estonian cinema is quite limited, the zany world-building of Kratt (which screened at the festival back in 2021) was a worthy, fun introduction, a film which showcases a bland of styles and genres to good effect. Sounding to be a similar kind of blend, Chainsaws Were Singing mixes slapstick, splatstick and – well, chainsaws, in a bizarre musical mash-up by director Sander Maran. Maran does the lot here, from direction to editing to writing the entire musical score, offering up a madcap palate-cleanser which neither takes itself too seriously, nor scrimps on the ludicrous chainsaw-based violence. If you liked Cannibal! The Musical, then this one’s for you.

Other highlights:

  • Steppenwolf: a bleak, post-Soviet Kazakh spin on the classic Hermann Hesse prayer to nihilism and self…
  • House of Sayuri: J-Horror is back (if it ever went away) but now it’s both self-referential and profoundly surprising…
  • South Korean movie The Tenants charts the course of property insecurity across the globe, with this macro storyline of a pair of lodgers whose strange behaviour escalates into a nightmare for their beleaguered landlord/housemate…
  • Párvulos -a gruelling Mexican dystopian horror about three brothers living together in a remote cabin. Hidden in the basement is a terrible secret which, as kids do, they have learned to accept but – the worst is yet to come. Seven years in the making, Isaac Ezban’s feature is likely to bring shock and awe to the festival.
  • Timestalker sees director Alice Lowe take comic aim at the heart of the romcom genre, in her new story of a woman seeking out the (presumed) love of her life across time…
Timestalker

Watch out for our coverage coming very soon, and in the meantime, head over to the festival’s official website for a look at what else is on offer.