Here are the highlights from Fantastic Fest 2021:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Written and co-directed by Sarah Appleton and Phillip Prescott, The Found Footage Phenomenon<\/em> <\/strong>is a spotty but thorough look at a still-blossoming cinema approach to an ages-old oral tradition. The usual suspects like The Blair Witch Project<\/em> are covered, sometimes so extensively that notable 2010s entries like As Above, So Below<\/em> are noticeably omitted. Gems like Lesley Manning\u2019s BBC faux-doc Ghostwatch<\/em> is hailed as a fantastic example of real-life media informing cinema, to Host<\/em> and the Unfriended<\/em> films manufacturing reality with the latest tech. Appleton and Prescott differentiate enough between subgenres and styles to navigate the sheer variety of found footage cinema, while also tipping the hat toward progenitors across eras and mediums, such as Orson Welles\u2019 live War of the Worlds<\/em> radio broadcast. Over a wide cast of horror luminaries – including Patrick Brice (Creep<\/em>), Aislinn Clarke (The Devil\u2019s Doorway<\/em>), and Ruggero Deodato (Cannibal Holocaust<\/em>) – the experts weigh in with a collective sense of excitement and mirth, eager to gather more film fans into the fold. The celebratory nature pays off in an exponentially grown watchlist alongside the likes of 2021 documentary Folk Horror<\/em> wtih Kier-La Janisse, and a new understanding of reality, its malleability, and the ability of great storytellers to weaponize it to broach the unreal in a believable way.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cForget everything you heard about my movie,\u201d director Julia Ducournau appealed ahead of her film\u2019s Austin screening. Fitting, since Titane<\/strong><\/em> is the kind of movie you go into blind and come out emotionally mutated. Forget the salacious bits being spoiled on social media; Ducournau has thrust into Tetsuo: The Iron Man\u2019s<\/em> crucible and pulled out an operatic meditation on the essentials of humanity and connection, determinism be damned. Newcomer Agathe Rousselle reminds, at times, of Andrea Riseborough\u2019s pensive turn in Christina Choe\u2019s 2018 drama Nancy<\/em>, also playing an impostor claiming to be a long-lost child. At others, Rouselle\u2019s steely-eyed serial killer star Alexia (eventually shaving her eyebrows and claiming to be Adrien to elude the law) is constantly out of her element, even when she\u2019s stabbing someone with a hair spike. Alexia cannot relate to people, shunning handshakes and vomiting after attempted sex. As the story goes on, Alexia\u2019s arc undergoes its own fusion process as she is thrust into a situation that demands a selfless sacrifice, one she was never in a place to make. Belgian cinematographer Ruben Impens (whose lens graced Ducournau\u2019s 2016 flesh frenzy Raw<\/em>) showcases bodies on parade in various stages of suppression or enhancement, through repeating fire and metal imagery. While the pregnancy horror\u2014strange leaking fluids, itching skin, engorgement\u2014will no doubt gross out enough men to dominate conversations around the movie, Ducournau has nonetheless crafted a communal interrogation of masculinity, motherhood, and ultraviolence with the femme in mind, making good on the potential her debut teased just five years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the players of Titane<\/em> thrash and struggle immensely to associate to one another, so do the youths of Eskil Vogt\u2019s bad seed horror The Innocents<\/strong><\/em>. Mister Rogers used to sing, \u201cWhat do you do with the mad that you feel\/When you feel so mad you could bite?\/When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong\/And nothing you do seems very right?<\/em>\u201d Norwegian director Vogt gets this encapsulation of emotional power, both weak and invincible, and refracts it through the hideous in a strong sister story to his screenplay for the 2016 psychokinetic horror Thelma<\/em> (directed by Joachim Trier). A Nordic quartet of young children learn that they share a sympathetic mental response\u2014Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim) can hear the thoughts of her mute playmate Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), and Anna\u2019s sister Ida (Rakel Lenora Fl\u00f8ttum) can repeat a whispered word from out of earshot. But Ben (Sam Ashraf) is a bad news bear, with the power to move objects and influence others\u2014an ability that turns deadly as the little sociopath is crossed in any way. The Innocents<\/em> carries such a potential to be hokey, but Vogt pulls it off with a stellar cast. There\u2019s a structural sleight-of-hand here; fewer lines rest uncomfortably on your child actors if you have them communicate non-verbally for most of the two-hour runtime, but Asheim, Ashraf, Ramstad, and Fl\u00f8ttum mingle well enough to be believable playmates and sworn enemies as alliances change. For a tale so focused on the Sisyphean task of self-regulating our emotions, Vogt opts for the slow-burn creeps over shock value, and so while there is blood and a modest body count, this horror film will exact its toll in gut punches, not massacres. The Innocents<\/em> is a taut fable, a grownup\u2019s acknowledgement of the inherent messiness of what to do with \u201cthe mad that you feel.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you\u2019ve seen the \u201cNick of Time\u201d episode of The Twilight Zone<\/em> (the fortune teller one with William Shatner), you\u2019ve got the framework for Junta Yamaguchi\u2019s Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes<\/strong><\/em>. Cafe owner Kato (Kazunari Tosa) receives a message from himself in his apartment above the shop. Future Kato informs Current Kato that the TV screen in his cafe is precisely two minutes ahead of time. His friends discover the phenomenon and play around with time in a plausible, funny way (soon finding that knowing the future might be more trouble than it\u2019s worth), though the experiments do become more repetitive than is forgivable for such a premise\u2014that said, the overall runtime is a crisp hour and ten minutes, keeping the visit brisk and fun. Born of a theatrical workshop, written by Makoto Ueda, and shot on iPhone, Two Minute\u2019s<\/em> solid camerawork keeps the seemingly one-take feature from getting stale, and the result is an easy, lighthearted entry in the time loop subgenre as fun and endearing as Shinichirou Ueda\u2019s recent zombie comedy One Cut of the Dead<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Black Phone<\/em><\/strong> <\/em>perches itself as an American analog to the harrowing environments of Guillermo Del Toro\u2019s cinematic children. Rather than starting their tales from the Apollonian safety of white picket fences and domestic peace, the kids of Phone<\/em> come from a brutal late 70s jungle where pain, love, and violence are bewilderingly intertwined, catching crushing humiliations on the baseball field and rough beatings when Dad has had a few too many again. As such, director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C. Robert Cargill adapt and expand Joe Hill\u2019s short story of the same name with controlled sentimentality, leaving the heart mostly to their two young leads. As siblings Finney and Gwen Shaw, Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw share an exceptional chemistry, echoing the tender brother-sister pairing of Mike Flanagan\u2019s 2016 haunted artifact picture Oculus<\/em>.\u00a0 McGraw turns in a notably sandy performance akin to Maddie Ross in True Grit<\/em>, letting f-bombs and \u201cfartknocker\u201d trip off her tongue as easily as the pleases and thank-yous that the authority figures around her expect. The kids speak with a matter-of-factness that that stuns and endears in a Wes Anderson film, but here characterizes the savagery of their world, before The Grabber gets his hands on them. Playing against his own grain as a giggling child killer, Ethan Hawke acts with his mask instead of around it, letting his eyes make the threats and adapting the body language of a teenager at times and a sleeping giant at others. Rounding out the standouts is previous Derrickson collaborator James Ransone as an area man with theories on the local child disappearances; Ransone is quickly becoming a reliable character actor with the range and twinkle-eyed quality of William Sadler. The narrative does get repetitive in its flashbacks, bloating the second act with too many victims on the Black Phone\u2019s line, but it\u2019s a mere stumble in Derrickson\u2019s gallop. The final product heckles supernatural nostalgia cash-ins from under the bleachers, revealing a nastier depiction of childhood that has its own monstrousness and thus, its youths might be more equipped to come out alive from the beast\u2019s lair when they find themselves in it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The knee-jerk response is to call Netflix\u2019s latest teenage slice \u2018n dice offering There\u2019s Someone Inside Your House<\/strong><\/em> a nouveau-I Know What You Did Last Summer<\/em>, which makes some sense on the surface level. But from Stephanie Perkins\u2019 2017 young adult novel to Henry Gayden\u2019s screenplay adaptation to Patrick Brice\u2019s direction, There\u2019s Someone Inside Your House<\/em> speaks with an expanded vocabulary from that of the sardonic Kevin Williamson teen slasher of the 90s, while staying true to the genre\u2019s obsessions with identity. Not bothering with the crisp needle-drops and tube-socked camp counselors of Netflix\u2019s recent Fear Street<\/em> films, Brice doesn\u2019t lean on nostalgia and keeps its characters rooted in the present and future\u2014only being punished for their past. The premise has high schoolers being hacked up for prior crimes like hazing and spouting racist pseudoscience but loses its way when one poor character\u2019s capital offense is only opiate addiction, which in turns leads to an underwhelming killer reveal. But the expansion of characters on the slasher stage can lead to interesting evolutions of the scenes we\u2019re used to checking off in past chillers like Wes Craven\u2019s Scream<\/em>, like the inevitable post-slaying student memorial that brings out \u201cfriends\u201d who never were and admiration for qualities that didn\u2019t exist in the recently dispatched. Perhaps the next iteration of the teen slasher doesn\u2019t kick in the door, but invites you to sit at a bigger table for better conversation. This year\u2019s installment of Austin\u2019s genre film festival was a more muted affair, but there were still plenty of delights for horror and sci-fi fans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":586,"featured_media":17193,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1416],"tags":[1419,1436],"class_list":["post-17191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-festivals","tag-film-fests","tag-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/586"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17191"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22173,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17191\/revisions\/22173"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/black-phone-1024x652.jpg\")
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