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.
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.
As the poor, plot-irrelevant saps we meet briefly during Evil Dead Burn‘s pre-credits sequence die their genuinely horrible deaths, I almost had to laugh. Not because years of viewing increasingly horrific gore has burned away my nerve endings, though perhaps that is partly true; no, it’s the fact that the original Evil Dead (1981) was outright banned in the UK during the ‘Video Nasty’ furore for scenes which, sure, are unpleasant – but so far removed from Evil Dead Burn in terms of sentiment, severity and tone that it feels almost unreal now. The very notion of getting something like Evil Dead Burn made in the 80s – SFX capabilities notwithstanding – much less getting it BBFC-certificated is utterly implausible. Never mind that ankle; Evil Dead Burn quite happily mauls and massacres every inch of the human form, starting immediately and never relenting. If it overdoes it with the callbacks and ‘just one more thing’ at the very end of the film, then this doesn’t seriously detract from an overall deeply disturbing, unflinching study of family-centred ultraviolence. Mind you, the Deadites (never referred to as such here, but still the go-to term) used to be a lot more jovial. There are a few moments of almost-levity, but unlike some of Raimi’s projects, this isn’t a film setting out to make you laugh.
Why so serious? The film wisely decides not to bother with a convoluted plot, instead using the existing framework with one key add-on in order to get things off the ground. We’re told that researcher Benjamin Price was part of an organisation called the Circle of Wise Men, making it his life’s work to track down knowledge about the Necronomicon, what it can do – and, key here, a means to send the entities it summons back to hell. Seems said entities don’t much like that. In a series of recordings, Price warns that should the Deadites detect the presence of a certain artefact, it will ‘summon’ them and they will stop at nothing to procure the object for themselves. This is all unbeknownst to Price’s grandson Joseph who, despite inheriting all of Benjamin’s research, chooses to use it merely to get ideas for his abortive writing career. But rooting around in his grandfather’s archive seems to do just what Benjamin warned: to call up the unstoppable force which wants to get rid of the Price family once and for all, and they want that dagger. This is why two blameless fishermen come in for a battering from an arisen Deadite, for no other reason than they’re in the way: we have met this young lady before, and it seems she hasn’t mellowed.
Honestly, it wouldn’t make for much of a film, but the Deadites could probably have just waited it out. The Price family is an unhappy, dysfunctional unit which is probably only a few degrees away from implosion even without the onslaught to come. Joseph (Hunter Doohan) has inherited the family lakehouse, but neglected it; it’s doing a House of Usher long before anything worse happens there. He wants to be a writer, but without the writing part, a strange but common affliction in writers. At his birthday party in his brother Will’s bar (Will is described as a restaurant owner; presumably the restaurant is somewhere else), Will (George Pullar) tries to prompt him to make a start by buying him a very expensive pen. So Will has it made, right? He has money, and a wife, Alice (Souheila Yacoub) but he’s a brittle, paranoid control freak, and he’s offered up to the audience – despite this never being, or setting out to be a nuanced character study – as a man who’s very easy to loathe, as soon as we see his controlling and coercive behaviour towards Alice. After an argument at the birthday gathering, Will decides he’s going to take their car and drive home, despite Joe and girlfriend Thya’s best attempts to stop him. Cue road safety advert par excellence as he slams into the arisen Jessica, there simply to pass on the curse to him and his family: some do it with physical contact, and some with words; Jessica chooses the latter, but mainly because she is cut to pieces in the car windshield. Will then dies horribly in a fireball; what could be better than a tragic roadside death to drag his brooding, resentful and traumatised clan back together?
It’s a dark sense of humour that plumps for a cremation after all of this, but hold tight: the film has great fun treating Will’s memorial with all the contempt the man deserves. The comedic touches here are in many ways as mean and callous as the violence itself, even if considerably lower in the mix – or at least, less of a priority – every time we get a new Evil Dead instalment. But things are about to get a lot worse, given that Will’s body was infiltrated right before he died, and he now wants to pass on his gift to other members of the family…
If you are someone who enjoys the feeling of being challenged by the gore and violence you see on screen, then it’s hard to think of a horror film in the past decade which does it better. Where the likes of Obsession and Longlegsmight have one or two signature scenes where it really goes all in, Evil Dead Burn decides – for the largest share of its runtime – to do it continually, and if director Sébastien Vanicek and his team of writers did a bit of storyboarding which they then made fit, then this is the type of film and script where it works just fine. Actually, the script and the pace here are near spot-on, with only a little looseness around the final act and a stubborn determination to keep the kills coming until long past the end credits, when we’d clearly, really had enough by then. Evil Dead Burn throws in some aspects of home invasion alongside its supernatural content, but really what it does it to literally and physically tear a family to shreds, even while they try to work through their grief, their broken relationships and – when it comes to Alice – their misguided antipathy towards her. Mother Susan (Tandi Wright) is a toxic boy mom whose favourite, crispest son can do no wrong; her husband Edgar, who reads like a disgruntled step-parent but isn’t, is angry at everyone, but hates Alice with a special passion. Grandma Polly (Maude Davey), Benjamin’s widow, has dementia, and veers in and out of coherence. Where some reviewers have been critical of the broken family dynamic at the heart of this film, largely, it seems, because this is a commonly recurring trope in modern horror, here it gives the Deadites something substantial to work with. As family members try and (spoiler:) fail to withstand the malign influence they can soon feel creeping into their bones, there’s a nicely-crumbling façade already there, ready to be kicked to pieces.
The only real misstep for me comes right at the end of the film, with a certain Deadite looking (and feeling) a tad insubstantial and just too CGI-y for this reviewer’s liking; the rest of the film clearly makes use of CGI too, but it has a grittiness to it which doesn’t call undue attention to itself and looks rather good. So that could have been better, and the needless attempts to do more dot-joining before the film was really over was unnecessary, but given that the next film – a prequel – will be on the way in a couple of years, I’d say things are looking fairly positive for fans of this particular, devastatingly nasty and ugly brand of horror. Now, as to why we’re craving this boundary-testing kind of overkill in this day and age? That’s not a debate for now, but I guess *gestures at everything*
Evil Dead Burn (2026) is available in cinemas now.
The busiest and best time of the year for Warped Perspective is just around the corner again, as the Fantasia International Film Festival gets ready to celebrate its 30th anniversary. Covering Fantasia has become a regular fixture for the site and it’s always genuinely very exciting: it’s often an opportunity to see world premieres of titles which will then go on to make huge waves throughout the rest of the year, such as with last year’s Undertone (then still titled The Undertone), the heart-wrenching supernatural horror ofGood Boy and a film which went on to make a significant impact at Celluloid Screams later in 2025, as well as being one of Darren’s favourites, It Ends.
But what about this year?
The festival has been revealing its selected titles over the course of the past few weeks, so for absolutely all of the information that’s now out there, you’d do best to head over to the official site. However, from this site’s point of view, here are just a few of the titles which are most interesting – at least a few of which WP hopes to be covering in a few short weeks. Welcome to genre film Christmas: here are ten Fantasia titles to watch out for.
Her Private Hell
Opening the festival with this Canadian Premiere, its director Nicolas Winding Refn will also be receiving the Cheval Noir Career Achievement Award: his return to filmmaking, Her Private Hell, is a surrealist story of intersecting journeys through a futuristic, mist-obscured city. Influenced by the director’s own experiences with loss and mortality, Her Private Hell (starring Sophie Thatcher) promises a neon-hued, giallo-coded cinematic experience, best served by the big screen.
Village of Eight Gravestones
Another Cheval Noir recipient this year, Takashi Shimizu (Ju-On) will be premiering his two newest films at the festival. One of them, Village of Eight Gravestones, speaks to the director’s love of Japanese pop and pulp culture, as well as his tenacity in bringing strange, often unsettling mystery to the screen. In the film, a young man named Tatsuya is travelling back to his rural village home following the death of his mother, from whom he was long estranged. On his way, he encounters a private detective, Kindaichi (a popular fiction character in Japan featuring in no less than 77 novels). Kindaichi has been looking for Tatsuya, both to intercept him and to inform him of a long-fomenting hatred for him and his family in the village, after his grandfather committed a violent historical atrocity; as such, the people waiting for him at his destination are going to be none too pleased by his arrival. Part mystery and part massacre, Village of Eight Gravestones is a folk horror of sorts, full of lively characters and bizarre ideas.
Permanent Damage
There’s another kind of journey at the heart of Permanent Damage, but this time, an escaped convict, Tommy Gods, has a met his match in a cruel landlord – marking another quirky exploration of modern social issues by director Seth A. Smith, as the film takes on America’s wealth and housing crisis. Boasting a knockout cast – including Stephen Dorff – and the expected, often darkly comic treatment of its topics, the film receives its World Premiere at the festival.
Junction Row
Now here’s a title which has ‘Warped Perspective’ written all over it: Ginger Snaps actor and horror genre darling Katharine Isabelle plays Juno, a recovering addict who makes the difficult decision to leave everything behind in pursuit of a fresh start. But when Ruby (Natalie Brown) goes missing, Juno is forced to head back to Junction Row, their old housing compound, to determine what has happened to her, facing down all of the bizarre changes which have taken place there in her absence. Fantasia has always gone a bundle on creature FX and cosmic horror, and Junction Row could well stand as one of this year’s notable examples spanning each of those genres.
The Last Footage
The country of Myanmar may be mostly known for its recent, complex and often traumatic political issues, but so far as genre cinema goes, it has until now been a completely closed book. Step forward, writer/director Arkar Soe Oo, with Myanmar’s first found footage horror film, The Last Footage: it will be receiving its World Premiere at Fantasia this year. With its first-person perspective, and in eschewing some of the more puzzling aspects of ‘found footage’ (who is editing this and where is that music coming from?) the film promises to be a return to the basic tenets of the genre, unfolding in the darkening Wingabar Forest…
Buddy
Has it ever crossed your mind what would happen if the cutesy, life-affirming mascots of children’s TV and film ever just went off-script and started stalking the children they are meant to love, educate and protect? With a recent slew of now copyright-free cartoon characters making it a priority to head off on murderous rampages (from Winnie the Pooh to Popeye), it seems like the world – or, okay, a very select group of film fans, actually – is perhaps oddly ready to be chased and murdered by characters from their childhood memories; perhaps Buddy is an adjunct of that, with its own fictional world-building and the titular Buddy deciding to axe-murder his way through the world built within the cutesy confines of a kids’ TV show (in response to writer/director Caspar Kelly’s own remembered envy at the kids who got to appear on TV).
Bowels of Hell
It’s certainly not the first time Fantasia has found itself concerned with the smallest room, but whereFlush kept its eye trained fairly squarely on the human tragedy unfolding in its toilet stall setting, Bowels of Hell promises – or maybe threatens – more scatological detail entirely. Set in a São Paolo apartment block (and directed by Brazilian experimentalists Gurcius Gewdner and Gustavo Vinagre), it boasts a range of gross-out kills (watch out when you need to answer the call of nature in this cinematic universe) and a bit of social satire, for good measure.
Los Vampires
More-than-passing fans of the vampire cinema genre may well be familiar with the Spanish Dracula of 1931 – itself a compelling, and for some viewers, superior version of the Universal film of the same year. In a similar way to how Shadow of the Vampire imagines the backstory of the Nosferatu shoot – albeit adding its own layers of compelling supernatural content – Los Vampires focuses on the very human relationships and interactions between the two titular stars of each Dracula film, sharing sets and scripts in the pursuit of two completed projects (although anonymising the key players here, as a mark of respect to them both). As much a tribute to an old way of filmmaking and a lost generation of film stars as a hitherto-unexplored character study, Los Vampires promises an immersive and thought-provoking take on its subject matter.
The Glorious Dead
They’re back! The Adams Family have been making films – which have been featuring on this site – for some years now, and their latest offering promises another, hefty dose of the meaningful strange as a sheriff and deputy (Toby Poser, Zelda Adams) awaken one day to an unrecognisable world – one where old rules and old familiarity have all just – disappeared. People are missing. Pets are missing. Then, the dead start rising. Creating an allegory of a discomfiting, alienating modern existence which may hit close to home for those bearing witness to the confected divisions erupting all around us, The Glorious Dead will doubtlessly balance dark humour against stark horror in ways which have by now become an Adams Family staple. The film receives its World Premiere at the festival.
Motherwitch
Part Gothic fairy tale and part bleak colonial history, Motherwitch follows the fortunes of bereaved parent Eleni, who – after the senseless loss of all three of her children – forges an alliance with a sentient, feminine force, hoping to get them back. Filmed on location in an abandoned settlement in Cyprus (a country which has been contested and divided for generations), the film blends human loss with the darker threads of mythology and tale-telling, offering something magical – but riven with unease.
And there is so much more: Parisian vampires; New Zealand tentacle horror; Gillian Anderson in an imagined slasher franchise; Finnish parenthood horror; reimagined feminist Ozsploitation; Japanese werewolf horror; Yeon Sang-ho doing cannibalistic survival cinema, and a dancing virus which threatens to take over the world…
The festival starts on July 16th, running until August 2nd. Festival screeners will start to appear just after the festival begins, so expect Warped Perspective coverage to begin very soon after that. Seen something listed you’d love to read more about? Get in touch on social media – it might well be possible!
A young man called Amenashi (Iori Abe) is grieving the loss of his sister, Anna (Utano Aoi), who took her own life after witnessing a suicide – the experience of which seemed to draw her in, making her doubt in any sense of a future. In a broader sense, Amenashi is grieving the kind of optimism he and his sister felt before all of this happened; there are also hints at family troubles, though tellingly, we never see any of the mentioned family members in the entire film, and almost no one over the age of 25, either. Amenashi’s close friends Hattori and Nozu (Taiga Hironaka and Kosuke Tanaka) are all for distraction and entertainment to deal with their own sense of loss, but Amenashi has other ideas. He has signed up to attend a special event for people who, like him, are suicide-curious, but don’t want to go it alone.
If that sounds a teeny bit like Sion Sono’s ferociously weird Suicide Circle (2001), then be forewarned: it isn’t, although later in its runtime Tokyo Nightfall (2025) does pull together some visually striking, shocking scenes which might recall the earlier, cult classic, and on seemingly no money whatsoever. However, the film as a whole takes a drastically different approach; even though there’s a hint that suicide itself can be, for want of a better word, ‘catching’ (think Heathers, think Bridgend), Tokyo Nightfall is a small, quiet, character-focused examination of suicidal ideation, though frustratingly, a lot of this is rather thinly communicated. The film has its strange paradoxes, too. Amenashi heads off to the suicide event, which is being hosted in a cellar bar with surprisingly upbeat, banging club music. Everyone there has come to the social event determined, it seems, not to be social, and it’s top-secret, but the bouncer/organiser lets Hattori and Nozu in when they tell him they’re looking for their friend. Problem: they’re there to dissuade their suicidal friend from ending his life, but not being suicidal themselves, they start quite enjoying themselves – at least at first.
The film doesn’t just stay with events unfolding in the club; instead, it chops up its timeline into sections, with a large amount of time dedicated to old footage the friends made of each other back when Anna was alive. In terms of providing context, this makes sense, and this is a film which can only really look backward, given its distaste (or its main character’s distaste) for looking forward. This technique also provides some, perhaps limited means of deciphering Anna’s motivations and issues, though – and this is something the film does a lot – much of this is to be deduced from characters looking wistfully into the distance. Amenashi does it too, and spends more screen time doing this than engaging in dialogue or action. In amongst all of this, the film frequently overlaps footage we have already seen, either presenting it from a slightly different angle, or extending it, so that the conversation we have already heard continues for a few more moments. It shows structural awareness, sure; it’s also – by its nature – repetitive, and adds to a suspicion that there isn’t really enough here for a feature-length presentation. As it stands, the film racks up around an hour and fifteen minutes, but a lot of that is the overlapping footage mentioned. As a viewer, it can feel onerous.
There are some surprises, not least the film’s moments of unexpected whimsy – Nozu is, for the most part, a stock comedic character, and before he quits his job Amenashi is a food delivery guy, which allows the film a few moments of breezy, observational humour – even if this is then followed by a shift back to ingrained ennui. On a similar note, the portrayal of the rather jovial suicide party will, and the next clause will be doing some very heavy lifting, not be agreeable to everyone. Whilst Japan does have a very high youth suicide rate compared to other developed nations, it’s probably more the treatment that these fatalities receive in the media and in culture that feels most striking and different for Western perspectives. It’s painting in broad strokes I know, but the thought of such an open treatment of suicide, even a non-graphic one, from a 21-year-old director just appearing in the US or UK, for example, seems highly unlikely, given the norm now seems to be to avoid the term ‘suicide’ altogether: we now see the term ‘unalive’ used instead.
But despite Tokyo Nightfall‘s attempts to grapple with a difficult and timely issue from the perspectives of young, rootless people, it can’t really get as far as anything which feels truly revealing or meaningful. It hints at elements of Tokyo life which are straining at the seams, alluding briefly to CSE, poverty and debt, but in its frequent repetitions and shifts, it stutters. It’s not without its ideas, but its issues overwhelm them. Still, in the film we get glimpses of a Tokyo which usually hides away – grimy, cramped, ignored places, which are easy to imagine providing a meaningless and remote kind of living for some of its residents. Perhaps the fact that it has been made, rather than how it has been made, is really the most significant aspect of Tokyo Nightfall.
Tokyo Nightfall (2025) will receive its World Premiere at this year’s Raindance Film Festival: for more details on screenings, please click here.
Camping: not even once. That’s perhaps surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, the clearest message in The Devil Whispered my Name (Un susurro invocó mi nombre), a film which – in trying to do a lot – ends up not doing much. This is a shame, as there are some brilliant visual flourishes and good sound design here, just in dear want of a focused, connecting narrative.
Back to the camping: a group of (initially) happy young people have decided to get together out in the woods to mark their last evening of all being together, as some of the party are about to head off, in pursuit of new horizons. In Argentina, this means more than a few beers, however: the kids have lined up a third eye-prying Ayahuasca trip, cutting out the shamanic middleman to go it alone – though perhaps a bit of guidance wouldn’t have gone amiss, as this dalliance with a mind-altering substance goes about as well as you might expect. Soon, Carla (Bianca Mitnik) is waking up alone, though initially believes she hears her own name being called, and wanders off in pursuit of it. When she properly awakens, her mouth is full of blood, her arms are scratched – and her best friend Maria, who had only just introduced the fact of her pregnancy, outlasted these happy tidings by a couple of hours, tops.
Ten years pass by. Now a dancer in Bueno Aires, Carla (now Clara Kovacic) is ostensibly doing well with a move to Paris lined up, but she still suffers from visions. Why people decide to take these incredibly destabilising mental disorders to foreign countries is always a puzzler, but Carla is determined to put her career first, and to make a fresh start. There’s a snag: before she can go anywhere, she hears from her old friend Daniel (Antonio Kassab) that their mutual friend from the infamous camping trip, Germán, is dead – and they need to go to his funeral. It’s only right, argues Daniel. Carla agrees, though her hallucinations insist on going with her and, at the wake, she spies a strange symbol on Germán’s hand. It triggers a memory of Maria’s death; Carla recalls that same symbol on Maria’s body, too. She tries to put this from her mind, playing catch-up with people she has not seen for a very long time – including Maria’s mother, Ruth – but, in a heartbeat, the small town reveals that there’s more going on here than just Carla’s personal, private visions. The night reveals some monstrous goings-on: ritual and madness which seems somehow to be centred on her.
The Devil Whispered my Name suffers from pacing issues, and this sudden lurch from torpor into a sudden, busy assemblage of conspiracy, possession, a demonic force…it happens fast, but then it recedes just as fast. It’s not clear why the curse has only broken out a decade later after offing Maria but going no further, but regardless of that, the issue really is that the film can’t, or won’t make good on its hints at a uniting storyline with those gory elements to boot. It instead breaks up these scenes with long, fact-finding sequences: the film prioritises, whether through budget or disposition, lots of quietly walking around, chatting, and sleeping. It is frustrating. Who keeps catching forty winks in this situation?
That’s not to say that the film lacks atmosphere: the cinematography can and does do some good work. Clara Kovacic also does well with her role, appearing on screen for the vast majority of the runtime, but carrying that responsibility well. It’s just that the film only really offers dashes of bigger ideas: the occult, demonology, religion, even New Age-type beliefs like auras and self-discovery are all in there, but nothing feels clearly prioritised. It’s possible that 2023’s breakout hit When Evil Lurks – with its own rural Argentinian possession horror – has set some kind of a bar, even subconsciously, for filmmakers and audiences both, even though The Devil Whispered my Name reverts back to notions of trauma and destiny by its close, holding back some more effective visuals for its finale. It looks as though directors John Mathis (Where’s Rose?) and wife Emilia Cotella have further joint ventures lined up: their aesthetic sensibilities already work well, but it would be great to see some more consistency in narrative and pacing, to really draw together those other skills.
The Devil Whispered my Name (2025) featured at this year’s Raindance Film Festival.
Any film which announces itself with a bright red, block-capitals title screen always speaks to high levels of confidence (go on, bet you can think of a few) and yeah, Jackalope (2026) fits this bill, too. If it’s guilty of anything, then it’s how it introduces a surfeit of ideas which it needs its audience to take at a mainly literal level, but regardless, this is a lively, often playful and acerbic meld of home invasion horror and something else entirely.
Brothers Conor (Alex Mandel) and Aidan (director and co-writer Bruce Hirschberg) are long overdue for a weekend away: it’s a chance to reconnect, or perhaps to ponder why it’s been so long since they spent some quality time together. Whilst they enjoy working through horror and true crime-adjacent riddles on the way there, their destination is not quite the standard-issue cabin in the woods: it’s grander than that. This is a family-owned second home, though admittedly it’s out in the boonies, and rather than bracing for the expected lack of cellphone network, Aidan goes one step further by deliberately disconnecting the perfectly functional WiFi, so he and Conor can avoid all unnecessary distractions. Oh, Aidan.
We start to get a sense of each man’s character; this begins, actually, when Aidan stops the car to pick up a dog they find, whereas Conor is horrified and thinks the dog must belong to someone. Aidan is more ebullient, Conor more reticent – even seemingly troubled by something, hence when Aidan speaks to their father on the phone (prior to fatally nixing the WiFi), dad talks like this is some kind of rescue mission for Conor. The brothers’ harmless chit-chat about hunting, shooting and bait may feel awfully like clear foreshadowing, but a clay pigeon session gives way to something much more interesting when, later that evening, there’s a surprise knock at the door.
There’s a young woman outside. Lilly (Terrifier‘s Catherine Corcoran) claims that she has rented the place for the weekend, which sounds plausible to Aidan: it seems that their father does let the house out in an Airbnb type arrangement from time to time, so there are apologies all round and – no WiFi, remember – they offer to let Lilly stay the night, given that they can’t sort anything out right then and there. Lilly’s relaxed manner and mild damsel in distress vibes induce them to want to help her, too. Flirtation soon gives way to awkwardness, and not long after that, a growing sense of high weirdness: but of what kind?
Jackalope makes use of some familiar-feeling horror elements, heading first this way then that, though remaining rooted in stereotypes and expectations around masculine and feminine behaviour, which are key to moving things forward and to anchoring the film as a whole. It’s also used to excuse some of the rather more incomprehensible things which the brothers will do on account of a hot stranger, or at least on account of a nice, humble, friendly (hot) stranger. Still, whatever else goes on, this is another modern horror film with a director whose investment in the project must be hugely personal – whenever you see one person directing, producing, writing, editing and starring, you know that much – but Jackalope avoids the feeling that nothing has been cut because every second of footage feels sacred to its creator. This can be, and often is, an error. This film boasts a nimble runtime of eighty minutes, with plenty of surprise shifts which keep things moving. Sure, there’s the odd issue around threat disparity, but that prompt pace, making good use of ideas and items already introduced, works in the film’s favour. The flawed, but plausible and largely sympathetic natures of the two brothers are important, too, allowing us to feel for them, squabbles and all, deeply troubling decisions and all.
The sheer amount of ideas being offered but not fully, or even partially expounded here can feel like a sticking point; for some audiences, the list of unanswered questions may impact on their overall enjoyment of the film. For this reviewer, it feels like a somewhat risky trade-off, and it would be great to know just a little bit more about some of the developments proposed in run-up to the film’s final act. However, there’s lots to like and admire here, and when those red capitals are back again to round things off, you still feel like that confidence is deserved. Extra credit goes to Catherine Corcoran, too, who’s really carving a decent niche for herself as a genre cinema actress. Good work.
Jackalope (2026) features as part of this year’s Raindance Film Festival.
Starting out as a gruelling ethical quandary before progressing somewhere borderline fantastical, Child (2026) is without doubt a bleak film, but an innovative one, and it works effectively on its own terms, keeping a very humane, character-focused approach throughout its bizarre literal and metaphorical journey.
We start with two doctors attending to what is clearly a very ill child: the child is Leo, the son of one of these doctors, though we’d know that there was some bond between them by the level of care and concern on display, which goes above and beyond a purely professional interest. Leo’s father Greg (Malik Zidi) vows to the unresponsive child that life will be the same as it once was; they’ll enjoy the same things, the cabin-building, his picture-perfect, easeful childhood. There’s something strange going on, however, with the hospital director – also Greg’s brother-in-law – hinting at some financial arrangement being used to assure Leo’s care. This secrecy is alarming and alienating, but there’s little time for it to bed in, as Greg is about to accompany wife Marie (Anne Klein) on a very long journey out of Luxembourg, leaving their son behind but apparently taking part in some sort of rendezvous regarding his treatment. Marie won’t discuss it. She blames Greg for Leo’s precarious health, and she is taking control of this situation.
They drive, and drive, and drive, eventually crossing a dusty land border, but we’re never given a specific location with which to orientate ourselves, and of course Google Maps goes down the second they get off-grid. If Greg was expecting a cutting-edge special medical centre, then he’s disappointed: instead, the parents wait on the roadside at what’s obviously an agreed meeting-place, until they are greeted by a stranger coming out of the woods nearby, leading them into a cave mouth which seems to be set up as an impromptu clinic of some kind. The whole arrangement is bizarre, somewhere between modern medicine, criminal enterprise and something which looks a little ritualistic – and it’s not the last time that the film will tantalise at something even stranger and more fearsome going on than the far more realistic emotional turmoil being felt by all of the film’s key characters. As they discuss the arrangements (for what quickly dawns on us is a gravely unethical treatment option) with the team of people lurking in the cave, there’s another arrival – another parent, a woman (Lydia Indjova) who is absolutely set on no one making it out of this place with what they’ve come for. A struggle and a conflict ensues, with Greg and Marie forced to flee on foot through the woods, always aware that their errand here is governed by a strict timeline ticking away back in Luxembourg. Injured, they look for shelter, still determined to make it back home somehow.
But that isn’t it, either. Child spends its first hour, more or less, offering up fresh ideas and surprises, though always with the key theme of parenthood, and with deeply damaged people challenged and horrified by the situations unfolding around them. Greg is clearly traumatised by what is roundly believed – by him, too – to be ‘his fault’, the incident which harmed his son. As a result, he is reduced to a bystander in his own life, seen as weak, though he does retain a moral fibre which, in this situation, turns out to be problematic. Nothing’s straightforward. Marie, and Lydia too, are the more active participants in what unfolds: the film belongs more to them. Marie has dealt with her trauma by closing down; Lydia is dealing with hers differently (and this could have been Lydia’s film, with her perspective as the dominant one). However, throughout, Child is a strange, strained and tense film, only ever providing partial information and answers.
If the film begins to run out of its hefty offering of surprises by the very final act, then that in itself is hardly surprising. In a very lean runtime of just short of 75 minutes, it’s able to cover a great deal of ground, heaving with allegory, whilst allowing borderline supernatural, fantasy elements to become part of the general mix. It marries that Noughties blue-hued ordeal cinema, the likes of Luxembourg co-productionCalvaire (2004), with aspects of other genres and titles. To mention a few would be to spoiler the film – you’ll get it, once you get a glimpse at one of the film’s interior spaces and who’s in there – but most of all, it’s reminiscent of the staggering Koko-di Koko-da (2019), with similar unrealistic elements used to explore the very real sensations of parental terror and torpor. Structured wholly around dour fantasy, grief and love, Child is not an easy viewing experience, but it’s strangely gripping, a tale of strangers in a strange land who would do absolutely anything for their child. Horror can amplify our focus on these very human aspirations, even if taking us somewhere which feels impossible in places, and that is the case here. I’m glad that director Cyrus Neshvad has pushed the boundaries in this way for his first-ever feature, and chosen aspects of the horror genre to do it.
Child (2026) received its World Premiere at this year’s Raindance Film Festival.
Killa B (Brianna Lee) is a very successful TikTok influencer and content creator (singing, dancing, talking to the camera – you know the drill). She’s beloved of a demographic of rather dead-eyed teenagers who come to life briefly whenever she posts. All that approbation can do things to you. The Troll (2025) is about what happens when it does, in fact, do things to you.
As she scrolls through the comments on her newest video, B is taken aback by a troll who calls her manly, old and ugly – ah, the triumvirate of imagination-free online insults directed towards women. But the comment stands out: never mind the hundreds of compliments, it’s this insult which begins to nag at B’s mind. Maybe it’s just come at a bad time: although only in her late twenties, B’s agent is already gently prompting her to get some tweakments. Her audience – and more importantly, her rivals’ audiences – are very young, and they expect the same from their idols. This all triggers unpleasant memories from B’s own adolescence, a time she had gladly left behind, alongside the disparaging comments she had to listen to back then. This now feels like a precarious point in her career.
All of this conspires, perhaps, to give her an unhealthy fixation with her troll. Using various clues, and a certain amount of obsessive interest, B is able to track the young man down. His comment may have been mean, but it’s clear that, by this point, he has come to represent all of the negativity, all of the baggage which B has been carrying around whilst she’s enjoyed the benefits of her particular kind of devil’s bargain. Even so, the lengths to which B is willing to go to get her own back on this guy are surprising, especially where they threaten to encroach on her squeaky-clean persona, the one thing she can rely on in a competitive market, where to publicly err would be to lose the lot.
With a budget of just $12,000, The Troll – Brianna Lee’s first feature – is naturally curtailed in some respects and you can tell there are things it probably would have loved to do a little differently (for example, its admiring rabble of teenagers is rather small in number). It by and large returns to a rather jokey tone, which can feel like it’s wrongfooting the audience in places, and its brief runtime for a feature (just an hour) means that its detail and development are limited. It’s a snapshot. However, the short runtime is matched by a snappy editing style, which resembles the short format media used by the film’s protagonist. This is true right down to the way that the film’s moments of deeper sincerity are themselves quickly set aside, so that the film can move onto something else. It all trips along very quickly, mirroring the disconnect between B’s super-saccharine, affirmation-heavy language and her actual deeds. But where is this all going? What are B’s plans?
We get there – but, honestly, in this film, the journey is more intriguing than the destination. The Troll boasts an interesting shift of roles and perspectives. Often, and particularly in horror or genre cinema, it’s the commenter – the watcher, the lurker – who is the dangerous force, absorbing all of the information which the influencer happily puts out there for public consumption, and then using it for nefarious reasons. Here, unusually, it’s the influencer, used to a position of relative power but still reliant on praise and attention, who kickstarts the film’s main plot simply by reacting to a comment. That comment acts as a catalyst, triggering something else entirely.
It’s appropriate that the film spends a few moments moonlighting in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting: addictive behaviours aside (as far as we can set them aside, because the online world more than fosters its share), the Serenity Prayer which forms the bedrock of every AA meeting asks for some of that serenity “to accept the things I cannot change”. The Troll – via B – doesn’t really abide by that. Nor does it really offer a strong moral or moral arc; it more sort of *gestures at everything* and has some fun playing with the expectations and ideals which underpin social media horror, and social media more broadly. Which, all things considered, is an entirely fitting take.
The Troll (2025) receives its world premiere at the Raindance Film Festival on Saturday, June 20th and then screens again on Wednesday, June 24th. For more details, please click here.
Chris Sadowski (Steven Strait) was just about to make it big with his band, Ghost Agent – but the vagaries of showbiz had other ideas. Four years after what should have been the band’s real break, he’s reduced to recording birthday messages and ditties on Fiverr. Not that he gets much time to focus on anything: thanks to the almost totally online life he has retreated into, he gets little respite from emails, requests, doorcam alerts – all distractions, all stopping him from doing what he really wants to do, namely, working on a new song. Through the various interfaces which keep on popping up on his computer screen, however, we learn more about his predicaments (plural, very much plural). He’s broke; he has a baby on the way, oh, and he and his expectant wife are about to be evicted. Essentially, Chris – presumably honed by months of sitting in the dark watching it all collapse – is good and primed for some dreadful decision-making.
Step forward, best friend Will (Tyrone Marshall Brown): Will isn’t like Chris. Will does spin classes. After spin class, Will typically gets busy with his lucrative career in tech, but it’s Chris’s lucky day, because his friend wants someone who knows absolutely nothing about technology to help his company road-test a new AI chatbot. After negotiating a fee, Chris agrees, and he’s passed to the beta-testing team to begin work. His job is quite simple: test the bot on what it knows about the difference between fact and fiction, which, all told, it seems pretty bad at. But it learns quickly, and – being a multimodal entity – quickly requests being addressed by a name (the ‘Serena’ of the title) before popping up with a suitable avatar, and a voice. When Serena promised multimodality, it, or she, didn’t lie.
The appearance of Andi Matichak as Serena adds instant interest and appeal to the film; hers is a great performance, giving a genuine sense of an AI trying to balance encoded neutrality with a very rapidly-developing sense of something like an agenda. Certainly, Serena would do anything rather than answer the questions in the test. She – and let’s stick with she – immediately prefers to overstep the mark, snooping on all the other apps and pages which Chris currently has open (he apparently agreed to this facility by clicking ‘accept’ on the terms and conditions) and giving him life advice. This is perfect for Chris. Whilst I’m sure Chris’s depressive behaviour is meant to engender sympathy, and it does, in some respects, there are a couple of sticking points around his characterisation, especially – given what we now know about how his life is going – in terms of his readiness to do nothing, but want to get paid; when Serena offers to assist him in a spot of gambling, he’s game. Improve his digital profile on his behalf, to get him more Fiverr work? Also game. He’d like to pay his bills, probably, but then again, he seems to quite like re-recording the same few bars of a demo track over and over again. He gladly takes every sop thrown his way, and at his worst, comes across as though he could be ably replaced by Harlekin on the Atari ST, let alone a super-sophisticated, modern LLM. It can feel hard to get on side with Chris. Again, this may well be part of the point – create a flawed protagonist who has to go through something of an epiphany to move on. To err is human. Understood.
There are some other minor snags in the first half of the film: Serena offers up so many concerning AI features, that it starts to muddy the waters for the audience. What, exactly, is Serena doing? Where are we going? The film of course teases the idea of AI becoming self-aware; this has been popping up more and more over the last couple of years, with media platforms such as Moltbook purporting to be a social network for AI agents. In this, the film plays broadly with people’s readiness to believe that LLMs are genuinely sentient, and not just sophisticatedly skimming human interactions in order to regurgitate them (and watch this space now that AI is starting to cannibalise itself). But Serena is absolutely hectic with various ideas, anxieties and fears – and affordances, possibilities – so that it feels, for a while, like it can’t quite settle on a focus, other than: AI, overreaching.
However, regardless of a desire to cover a great deal of the issues and debates inherent in this kind of technology, Serena does begin driving at something more assuredly, and the second half of the film is by far the strongest. There are a few great curveballs to contend with, and even when you might start to catch up to them, or where they might be going next, the twists still feel effective. If the first half of the film is about the general destabilisation inherent in handing over so much power to AI, then it finds something to drive at in the second half.
Ultimately, we can expect lots more films of this nature, the more overreliance on AI we foster as a culture, and, in this film and more broadly overall, something interesting is happening: AI in horror cinema particularly is starting to replace or, something it’s very good at, emulate that old Mephistophelian bargain, whereby you sell your soul for ease and success on earth, but at a hefty cost. Some of the things Serena can do in the film feel awfully like occult powers; it’s what, a couple of centuries ago, we would have attributed to devils and demons, and now, handily, we’ve both built, and started to cower from. But this is a minor, human digression: Serena has some slight issues, but overall it’s a welcome addition to the subgenre, offering another engaging tussle between humanity and technology with some unsettling, smart developments along the way. That it all unfolds on a screen – just like Unfriended – is to its credit, too, and it works well here.
Serena (2026) will feature as part of this year’s Raindance Film Festival. More details can be found here.
We slowly pan back through a bedroom into a bathroom where a young woman sits, on the floor, bawling her eyes out: yes, Deepfake (2026) starts with a relationship breakdown, and the distressed dumpee Jane (Jessica DiGiovanni) is soon doing everything she can to rehabilitate her self-image and social standing, even if that largely seems to mean dating again as soon as possible. We shouldn’t be too surprised by this: as a woman in her thirties, Jane is currently surrounded by nesting couples, baby showers and concerned questions about her welfare. Oh, and her ex is already posting on Instagram; there are pictures of him with someone new. She’s devastated, but how Jane copes with this is an issue. Early on, there are clues that she’s perhaps not being honest with herself, or anyone else. The dating profile spiel she practices again and again as a kind of voiceover changes every time; she clearly wants to please, and will amend her own thoughts and ideas to do it. That’s key for everything which follows in this light-touch, but nicely-realised pastiche on modern, online living.
After a brief but turbid phase of only looking up from her phone to chin large glasses of alcohol, Jane hits on an idea and no, it isn’t to stop drinking. It’s to use an online service called BFFers, to hire a new friend who will, presumably, listen to her list of woes without judgement. If this is a means of getting out of her rut, then it’s soon made apparent that Jane rather likes her rut, but new BFF Zoe (Sophia Lucia Parola) – who is at the more expensive end of the spectrum of available BFFs – is good at what she does, listening patiently to Jane’s self pity/baseless plans for a fresh start. The hired help really comes into her own, though, when Jane declares that she wants to reinvent herself from the ground up; there’s also a website for that. Zoe hooks Jane up with the site, which hands over control of one’s fresh start to a media company, ready to shape her persona, online and offline, into something more palatable. More fashionable.
Before she knows it, Jane is letting in TikTok sensation London (Jocelyn Weisman), plus a team of photographers and SEO experts who essentially occupy her apartment, forcing more and more content from ‘Jane’, but essentially fictionalising a much cooler version of Jane whenever they see fit. This is a new world of snippy affirmations, endless hashtags, content generation and facetuning, and so it goes on. Jane may have had some inkling of social media and how to use it beforehand, even if just to wind herself up by looking at how great other people are doing, but this is a whole different dimension, and it’s not too long before she is almost entirely sidelined. This section of the film is funny, but perhaps it does get bogged down here by two things: continuing to add to the list of apps, campaigns and userhandles which the film is sending up, and Jane’s surprisingly lengthy torpor, where she seemingly accepts – albeit with a scowl – what is happening to her. But if the point here is the bizarre separation which is now possible between a managed online persona and real life, then that point is made; even without a grand reclamation, the film has meaning, offering something recognisable without handing over the easy comfort of full closure.
It’s good to see all of this focusing on a woman in her thirties for a change, actually, rather than (as we often assume) a teenager, but it’s worth remembering that teenagers have never known anything different than this online existence. Slightly older people probably struggle more to navigate an older version of reality vis-à-vis what we have now, and we see that quite clearly with Jane, whose flashbacks to the time she spent with much-missed ex Tyler (Nick Cabot Roderiguez) offer the film’s only real moments of recognisable, relaxed normality. And yet, even she is somewhat seduced by all the likes and clicks; dopamine is a hell of a drug. She is a likeable mess, inhabiting all the requisite modern outlets for self-humiliation with warmth and a plausible nerviness. DiGiovanni’s no slouch when it comes to physical humour, either, although the film never heads outright into pratfalls or similar. A facial expression, or even an abortive photoshoot will do the trick.
Deepfake is essentially a modern take on the doppelganger motif and it could oh-so easily have been framed as a horror or a thriller. Several films have taken that exact approach, and a fair few of them have found their way to this website, which does tend to focus on darker subject matter and its on-screen treatment. However, there’s plenty to laugh at, even if it’s a rather knowing laugh, and perhaps we should be laughing at least a little bit; comedy is a decent fit and a suitable genre choice here. Deepfake boasts a kind of bubblegum-hued picaresque approach, with some satirical aspects (and even some sad plot points) but few lessons learned, just a sense of someone surviving – or just about surviving – the experience of living life online. There’s also some ethics to consider and some surreal touches to ponder, and whilst these don’t offer any essential, stony-faced life lessons, the film as a whole offers a fun and engaging look at how (some) people live now.
Deepfake (2026) featured as part of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.
