At Fantastic Fest, the genre festival based in Austin, Texas, there is an amusing incongruity between the vibes among the attendees and the films we all see. Everyone is friendly, eager to chat about what they saw and loved, and yet the programmers have opted for dark, even grim films about ordinary people pushed to the brink.
The first film I saw was Plastic Guns, a French black comedy with the deadpan surrealism that Quentin Dupieux helped popularize. Director and co-writer Jean-Christophe Meurisse starts with a father who murders his entire family, then leaves France for Argentina. While making a new life for himself, a case of mistaken identity causes another man’s arrest for the killings by the Danish police. The men sort of look alike, but that is almost incidental. The police have made up their minds, to the chagrin of the wrongfully-accused man, and his woes do not stop there. A pair of middle aged and amateur YouTube investigators want to get to the bottom of the murders—and find themselves in the home of the man who barely escaped Copenhagen.
Truth and justice are punchlines, since the real murderer starts an exciting new life, while the YouTube investigators do not even care they are pursuing the wrong person. They have made up their minds, seeking an outlet for their loneliness, and the climax involves someone getting their eyeball scooped out with a dessert spoon. All of this is over-the-top, handled with a strange irony, so the violent playfulness is like an amuse bouche for the festival, a way to whet the appetite. It only gets weirder from here.
The opening night film was Never Let Go, the post-apocalyptic thriller starring Halle Berry. Never mind that the film was wildly available worldwide on the same night of its Fantastic Fest premiere; Berry and director Alexandre Aja introduced every screening at the Alamo Drafthouse, to the delight of eager fans, so it hardly matters to everyone who traveled for the festival could have just as easily made a trip to their local multiplex. The film splits the difference between Bird Box and A Quiet Place, a family drama that uses a mysterious evil to explore the burdens of motherhood. Screenwriters Kevin Coughlin and Ryan Grassby cannot strike a balance between suspense and allegory, so the story beats land with confusion, not surprise. By the time the final minutes arrive, a twist that turns the downbeat story on its head, it hardly matters; Aja and Berry cannot sustain a script that hardly does them any favors.
The tortured family dynamics in Bring Them Down, an Irish thriller by Christopher Andrews, are much more successful. Christopher Abbott plays Michael, a farmer who gets into a deadly feud with his neighbors, led by Gary (Paul Ready) and his son Jack (Barry Keoghan). The mere appearance of Keoghan gives the film a nervy energy, a sense that the impasse between these angry, bitter people will spiral out of control. Although the film is set in rural Ireland and the story centers around sheep, Bring Them Down has the sensibility of a revisionist Western. These rugged individualists all have different ideas of justice and fairness, and Andrews never strikes a false note, even during tough scenes of animal mutilation (if you have issues with animal cruelty, you should skip this one).
What happens in Bring Them Down is never excessive for its own sake, and the actors excel in their portrayals of coiled anxiety. Abbott may be American, but he is convincing as an Irishman who knows the danger of losing his temper. He speaks Gaelic in the film, mostly with his father Ray (Colm Meaney), a man who has no paternal love but has a warped sense of responsibility and ego. Keoghan riffs on a character somewhat like Dominic, the simple-minded youth he played in The Banshees of Inisherin. He plays a boy who looks at his family with helpless desperation, then does not realize the implication of his violent conduct. If Bring Them Down has any flaw, it is that Barry – who is in his early thirties – is too young for his character by at least a decade. That miscasting barely matters, however, when he and Abbott face off in a slow-burn chase scene that finally injects some empathy to the drama, although their final attempt at reconciliation is already too late.
Another disturbed family Is at the center of Get Away, a horror comedy that had its world premiere at the festival. Nick Frost wrote the screenplay and also stars as a frumpy, middle- aged father who takes his family on holiday in Sweden. He goes to a small island for their annual festival, a lengthy passion play where they recreate the time two hundred years ago when the English – at the height of their imperial cruelty – left the island’s denizens so hungry they turned to cannibalism. Turns out that Frost’s wife (Aisling Bea) has an ancestor with the English soldiers who made life on the island a living hell.
At first, Get Away has all the trapping of folk horror, right down to weirdos who decline to tell the hapless family about their bizarre rituals. But then Frost, in a twist that would amuse his longtime collaborators Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, turns it into the total opposite of folk horror. What would you call such an inversion? Anti-folk horror? Imperial horror? Either way, there is gleeful fun in how the film plays with genre as the body count rises. Although it is a dubious choice to have it all play out in English, even when the Swedes are talking amongst themselves, realism hardly matters when characters shrug at their own literal dismemberment.
Camaraderie and violence is also important to Baby Assassins: Nice Days, a martial arts comedy from director Yugo Sakamato. His lead characters, a pair of lady assassins who cannot be much older than twenty, are adorable when they’re not dispatching henchmen with their bare hands. The plot involves a freelancer, someone who works outside the killer-for-hire guild to which the heroes belong, so Chisato (Akari Takaishi) and Mahiro (Saori Izawa) have no choice but to stop the interloper at all costs. The action is inventive, a mix of wild exaggeration and practical stunt work, and all the performers take palpable joy in acrobatic performances that are full of visual wit. And as someone from Washington DC, I was instantly endeared when I noticed Mahiro wears a Fugazi t-shirt for most of the film.
No matter the tone or sensibility, the titles at Fantastic Fest all use the familiarity of genre filmmaking to their advantage. These films are often about more than their surface meaning, and they deploy tropes to explore our most sacred relationships and institutions. At their most successful, the programming is utterly absorbing, an intense emotional experience that also creates a space for us to reflect and, above all, reconsider our biases.
