What’s hot at Montreal’s great genre festival? Some true vanguard filmmaking and ten films we recommend watching:
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
Jane Schoenbrun is an emergent voice in indie cinema and our present best purveyor of identity-driven film. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, like Jane’s past work, opts for a metatextual approach, this time bent towards campfire slasher movies — a woodsy, psychosexual awakening, and another slice of intriguing identity discovery.
Her Private Hell
It’s been a decade since the last film and Opening Night at Fantasia marks the return of modern auteur Nicolas Winding Refn. Her Private Hell is more neon-soaked cinema from Refn, an ephemeral story about a woman looking for her father and an American GI trying to save his daughter from Hell. This, choked with brightly-lit mist. Welcome back, Mr. Refn.
The Samurai and the Prisoner
When a samurai castle is besieged by an enemy troop, inside the walls of the surrounded fort, a series of mysterious murders take place, causing the lord of the castle to seek the counsel of a clever strategist he has imprisoned inside. Made in the mode of classic jidaigeki movies like those made by Akira Kurosawa, Masaki Kobayashi, and Kenji Mizoguchi, The Samurai and the Prisoner represents Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s first stab at the genre and a dream project for the prolific director.
Buddy
Where did you get that cast?!, we all collectively say, as Casper Kelly gathers Cristin Milioti, Topher Grace, Keegan Michael-Key, and Michael Shannon together for a mascot horror movie with a difference. The difference is that the Too Many Cooks (2014) director is leaning hard into the same absurdism that made his Adult Swim short film an internet sensation.
You Are the Film
Makoto Ueda has become a must-see Fantasia-centric filmmaker at play with form and genre — see: Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2021) and River (2023) — and returns to festival with a new meta experiment. The high concept goes: What if folks existing in different movies within the movie could interact with and influence each other? Ueda’s joyous love for fun concepts is always worth turning out for.
The Peril at Pincer Point
Microbudget fun from writer-directors Jake Kuhn and Noah Stratton-Twine, who capture in monochrome the quirky adventures of a movie sound recordist lost in an absurdist nautical adventure.
The Village of Eight Gravestones & The Mouth
Receiving career award honors at Fantasia is Japanese genre godfather Takashi Shimizu, creator of Ju-on: The Grudge, who is premiering two new genre works at the festival: The Village of Eight Gravestones (world premier) and The Mouths (North American premier). Some 25 years after Ju-on, Shimizu is still working away at horror, with folk and body horror offerings at this year’s show, with longevity and a youthful spirit animating his long-running filmography.
God Skin
Dubbed a “Muay Thai Melee!,” God Skin centers on a Bangkok fighting circuit, where our hero is inked with mystical tattoos which grant him powers in fighting, as he battles for his mother’s life. Ought to be a brutal genre bash with notable action and a good excuse for some martial arts cinema.
Grotesqqque
A triptych of animated segments — Æliens, 4649Girl, and Nocturn: En Cette Nuit Grotesque — converge in wildly experimental form from renowned studio CloverWorks. A world premier at Fantasia, Grotesqqque is ggguaranteed to be a form-splitting, psychologically invigorating bit of animated trickery.
The Leader
If you’ve heard of American religious cult Heaven’s Gate, who believed humans were vessels for extraterrestrials, eventually leading to a mass-suicide event, you’ll readily understand why The Leader ought to make for a compelling narrative feature. Starring Tim Blake Nelson and Vera Farmiga as cult leaders, The Leader will capture our national fixation with religious cults, and those who follow them.