Fantasia International Film Festival usually winds up giving me a large share of my films of the year: it’s second to none in sourcing and selecting a frankly daunting array of fantastic new features. Now about to launch its 26th edition, and after bearing up under a couple of years of Covid restrictions, it will take place in and around the film theatres of Montreal from from July 14 to August 3. As usual, it will run a number of new and exclusive genre entries, many of which look like a suitable blend of thought-provoking, unsettling, entertaining, disorientating and disturbing. In terms of titles to look out for – and fingers crossed, Warped Perspective will be running coverage on as many of these as we can! – here are a few for your edification. Don’t stop here, though: you can take a look at the full program at the festival website.
Polaris
Many post-apocalyptic visions take place in an urban, or post-urban sprawl, but this isn’t so with K.C. Carthew’s vision of a snowy, bleak and post-technological world inhabited by a girl and her polar-bear mother: the two are following the North Star to its zenith, but – journeys of this kind are seldom uncomplicated, and the girl must use her wits and to escape from the events which overtake her. Action meets magical fantasy meets eco-drama in this festival opener.
House of Darkness
American director Neil LaBute is back after a run of short films and TV work: his newest feature, House of Darkness, is described as a darkly-comic battle of the sexes. Hap (Justin Long) has met a beautiful woman (Kate Bosworth) who seems to be very much interested in him; heading back to her fairy-tale home, the chemistry between them seems to develop further – but is it all too good to be true? Hap begins to suspect that the house is not what it seems, as the film examines the power-play between these two people. Who is leading whom?
Glorious
Rebekah McKendry has made the bold, if not completely unprecedented decision to set her new horror in a toilet stall: but, even if horror has proven itself to be a little scatological in the past, then it’s not quite been done like this where protagonist Wes (True Blood‘s Ryan Kwanten) winds up embroiled in a bizarre question-and-answer session with whoever is in the cubicle next door…it transpires that to get out of that stall at all is going to require quite a lot from this already suffering (and badly hungover) guy. ‘Weird’, ‘twisted’ and ‘Lovecraftian’ are words which have already been used to describe Glorious, and that’ll do nicely.
Speak No Evil
It’s great to see Denmark – and The Netherlands – represented in this year’s horror releases – and it sounds as though Speak No Evil is going to pack a real punch, doing what good horror does: fusing a relatable, real-life scenario with such an escalation in tension that it has been described as “profoundly uncomfortable”. In the film, a Danish couple agrees to go and stay with a Dutch family they met whilst on vacation, going against their better judgement in order to remain polite. Most people would follow suit, no doubt, but the film explores what happens as boundary after boundary gets crossed, with misunderstandings soon escalating into something incredibly ferocious.
Next Exit
Death as a destination? In Next Exit, set in a very, very close futurescape, the technology now exists to track the dead into the afterlife – which, it turns out, is real after all. The pioneer of this research, Dr. Stevenson (Karen Gillan) needs volunteers to help her with her work: step forward two strangers, Rose and Teddy, who agree to take the plunge, helping Dr. Stevenson to chart this new frontier whilst escaping from their own personal issues along the way. Described as “equal parts ghost story, misfit road movie, speculative science-fiction and heart-rending tragicomedy,” Next Exit promises to be an affecting, engaging, multi-layered experience by first-time director (but experienced producer) Mali Elfman.
This is, of course, just a handful of the films to come. Watch this space for coverage of the festival, coming very soon.