Fantasia Film Festival 2025
Here's what I saw at this year's festival. As usual, Hong Kong viewings over
here.
Great:
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Jane Schoenbrun): With a film pitched like this, even one small misstep will make the whole thing collapse in on itself. Schoenbrun has one of the steadiest hands in current cinema, evidently. A wonderful mixture of tones, moods, and ideas.
Sour Minnows (Harrison Atkins): I don't think I could defend the film or convince anyone else to like it, but its mixture of surrealism, absurdity, and mumblecore aesthetics (tho' if you told me the mumblecore dialogue was fully scripted, I'd believe you, it's delivered with such comedic timing) was pure pleasure for me. Two guys walking home discover a bunch of people all furiously licking the concrete, and reality comes apart from then on. Indescribable.
Good:
The Samurai and the Prisoner (Kiyoshi Kurosawa): See
here.
Tunnels: Sun in the Dark (Bùi Thạc Chuyên): a Vietnam war film told from the Vietnamese perspective, set primarily in the tunnel systems, showing how they worked, who peopled them, and how one carries out a guerrilla war against a vastly more powerful opponent all while living underground. The film's best aspects are its documentary appeal as well as an absence of propaganda or flag waving. Much of the interpersonal stories are conventional and at times sentimental, and the characters are thinly sketched. But the filmmaking is often thrilling and, at numerous points, anxiety provoking with its claustrophobia.
Gozu (Takashi Miike): Touted as a new restoration, but the thing still looked like shit to me, probably a result of its shot-on-video budget and equipment. A wonderfully absurd, surreal nightmare, one of the most original gangster movies ever made. Its biggest flaw is its slow pacing, which draws the movie out and contributes to its excessive length.
Fine:
Colony (Yeon Sang-ho): another zombies-in-a-limited-environment film from the director of
Train to Busan. Some novelty in how the zombies, er, infected 'upgrade' themselves via telepathic communication, but not enough creative avenues are exploited, and so much of the plot relies on contrivances, like the hero who always knows just the right thing to do at every moment, or the asshole who always makes the one stupid choice that'll endanger everyone. Plus a scenario founded on problem solving where no one solve obvious problems (don't want the bad guy to hear your plans, don't text each other, stuff his fucking ears!). A lot of great action and a certain amount of irritation.
Village of Eight Gravestones (Takashi Shimizu): adapts a novel from a very popular long-running detective series from Japan. I could tell, as I felt like I'd seen this exact movie many times before. No surprises, just a genial gothic mystery mostly well told and easy to forget.
Hot Spot (Agnieszka Smoczyńska): Um...a sci fi movie set in a post apocalypse where everyone's hooked up to an AI system, but also everyone loves the 80s, so they drive 80s cars, wear 80s clothing, and listen to The Final Countdown. It doesn't work and the plot is incoherent, but the loonier it got the more fun I had.
Ferine (Andrea Corsini): One of two movies I saw back to back centring on motherhood where a woman goes feral and starts eating people. Touted as a return to the savage, weird horror of Italy's heyday, but only resembled classic Italian horror in its inability to tell a comprehensible story. A mother whose baby born via surrogate is eaten by an escaped jaguar becomes a man-eating animal in turn. The plot makes no sense, is told incomprehensibly on top of that, and no one resembles a real human being. But the wildness and the willingness to follow this story wherever its scant logic took it was commendable.
Nightborn (Hanna Bergholm): The second of the two. This one's set in Finland, where a woman believes her baby to be some kind of forest spirit, a fact the woman's conventional British husband refuses to accept. This is meant to be an allegory for the difficulties new mothers face, but the allegory ultimately breaks down under the story's literalism. The film's bog standard second-wave feminist arguments are so easy to predict that the movie is emptied of excitement. There's also a 'men are evil' trajectory here that's hard to know what to do with given that Rupert Grint's obtuse father isn't appreciably evil in any way. In fact his behaviour and actions are technically rational and reasonable if you assume his baby is not, in fact, feral and shouldn't be fed cow's blood and raw meat. I think the movie's going for a 'believe women' statement, but that statement is technically 'believe women, including when they make claims absurd on the face of it'. Which I guess makes sense in a world with genuine supernatural entities, but I don't know how one would even begin to apply that argument to our own reality. So I didn't really know how to take this movie--I thought all the characters were treating each other unfairly, but that the movie rarely recognized the unfairness outside of its main character.
Ancestral Beasts (Tim Riedel): a horror film about family trauma set among the Métis in Manitoba. A lot of indigenous artists have made this exact story, and the amateurish acting did not help. But the lead actress delivered an excellent performance, especially in a couple of tough emotional scenes that she made fell very authentic. And the monster's design was novel.