This year’s Fantasia International Film Festival opens this week with an exciting line-up offering many different types of genre work. Here, in anticipation of our further coverage, we take a look at some of the highlights of what’s in store.
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| Oddity |
Oddity
Blind women in horror films have traditionally been helpless victims, sometimes empowered to survive and serve as witnesses by way of carefully designed environments or clever tricks. From the moment that psychiatrist Ted walks into Darcy’s antiques shop, however, we know she has a power deserving of real respect. He’s dubious about the supposed supernatural side of it, but her intelligence and force of personality are unmistakable. His wife, her twin, has been killed, and she plans to use the anniversary of the event to find out who did it. With just a handful of actors, minimal locations, a glass eye and a disconcerting life size wooden mannequin, writer/director Damian Mc Carthy will give you some serious chills. It’s a tightly plotted, deliciously satisfying work.
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| The Tenants Photo: Fantaspoa |
South Korea’s housing crisis already has people depending on tiny carved-up sublets in order to live close to where they work, and in Yoon Eun-kyung’s bleak imagined future the situation is much worse. Shin-dong is already struggling, longing to move to a new dome where cleaner air might ease the burden of his asthma, when he learns that his landlord, Mr Bastard, is planning to evict him. By renting out part of his apartment to strangers, he can take advantage of an obscure clause which prevents this – but the increasingly strange behaviour of those strangers makes him realise that he might have bitten off more than he can chew, and that’s before he starts to question other aspects of the world as he perceives it. It’s an inventive little science fiction thriller with surrealist tendencies and a dark wit.
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| The G |
Amber Wilkinson writes: Dale Dickey gives this revenge thriller plenty of extra kick as a gran who isn't going to take abuse lying down. When hard-nosed Ann Hunter (Dickey) and her frail husband Chip (Greg Ellwand) are targeted by a legal scam they find themselves locked in a care home under the instruction of a corrupt "guardian" (Bruce Ramsay). Soon Ann is calling on friends from the past and her own steely resolve to exact vengeance, while her granddaughter Emma (Romaine Denis) also starts to dig herself in deep in order to help her gran. Karl R Hearne takes a serious subject and spins it into a taut thriller that makes the most of Dickey's talents. Read what Karl R Hearne told us about the importance of having an older female character in the central role and our chat with Dale Dickey, who said: “You don't find those kinds of roles for women my age that are strong and forceful. It is a very interesting script."
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| Infinite Summer |
Infinite Summer
Opening with a discourse on palace gardens and zoos whose relevance to the rest of the narrative you might take some time to figure out, Miguel Llansó’s story about three young women who wish their summer holiday would go on forever unfolds like a wistful hippy daydream before going to very dark places. It’s set just a little way into the future, when dating sites use holograms and it doesn’t seem like a big step to ditch joints and pills for bespoke high tech respirators when in search of a psychedelic experience. For all its deliberately distracting quirkiness, it builds in effective thriller elements and a tender portrayal of the relationship between a liberal father and the daughter he comes to fear for at a point when it may already be too late. Cosmic horror was never this whimsical before.
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| The Missing |
One of the great challenges of directing animation is getting the whole team to grasp the same vision. Carl Joseph Papa’s breakthrough hit, which has commanded worldwide attention, is an animated film about animators, one of whom, Carlo, is trying to help another, Eric, to finish a project whilst dealing with a crisis brought on by his uncle’s death. one of the things that Carlo can’t see – but the audience can – is that Eric has no mouth with which to articulate either his vision or the terror he feels as he seems to come under attack from a monster which threatens to steal other pieces of his body. This simple device enables Joseph to address an experience that’s very real to many people – that of having been through something too awful to speak about – yet it’s a horror leavened by the deepening affection between the two young men, which might give Eric the strength he needs to confront his past.
