Curation is the name of the game when it comes to film festivals, and the Fantasia International Film Festival is one of the best in the world when it comes to programming a compelling slate of genre releases. The emphasis is on the word “international”. Every year I find some of my favorite foreign language films at Fantasia: The Incredible Shrinking Wknd (2019), The Divine Fury (2019), The Columnist (2020) and Punch Drunk Boxer (2020) to name a few recent gems. At risk of lapsing into sports metaphors, the Fantasia International Film Festival has a deep bench when it comes to curation.
In my film critic fantasies, I hop a flight annually to Montreal and stay there for three weeks to take in all the Fantasia goodness on the big screen. I feel certain the on-the-ground vibe at this festival is something special. Their passion for cinema is reflected in their festival slate every year.
This is the first of two posts looking at the films offered during the 2023 edition of this impressive festival.
Where the Devil Roams: If the band Nirvana wrote and directed a horror film, it’d look and sound a lot like this newest project from the Adams family (John, Lulu and Zelda, not Gomez and Morticia). Their previous films, The Deeper You Dig (2019) and Hellbender (2021), established their grunge horror aesthetic and their bespoke approach to filmmaking. This talented family is in front of the camera, behind the camera and even performs some of the music for the scores of their films.
Their latest effort follows a group of sideshow performers in what feels like a Dust Bowl era carnival although the time period and setting are never explicitly stated. Our cast of characters (played by the Adams and their frequent collaborator Toby Poser) travel the countryside, performing for the impoverished locals … while murdering folks in each little podunk town along with way. Mix in a magical needle and thread that can repair damaged limbs and organs, and Where the Devil Roams takes the audience down a nightmare rabbit hole into a grimy world of death and rot.
The gorgeous visuals stand in stark contrast to the dark, bleak narrative of the film, creating a phantasmagoric experience. You cringe and want to look away, but you can’t because the action unfolding on the screen is far too compelling. Much like its carnival sideshow setting. The film won Best Cinematography at the 2023 Fantasia Film Festival and deservedly so. I can’t wait to see it again which is about the highest compliment I can give a film.
#Manhole: The “single character trapped in a single location” genre requires some cinematic sleight of hand. From Ryan Reynolds waking up in a coffin in Buried (2010) to a member of a film crew stranded at the bottom of an Olympic-sized swimming pool in The Pool (2018), genre audiences have seen many of the tricks of the trade with this sub-genre over the years. Luckily, when it comes to #Manhole, screenwriter Michitaka Okada and director Kazuyoshi Kumakiri assume they have a savvy audience and wisely choose to turn the premise of their film on its head.
Shunsuke is getting married in the morning. His workmates throw a bash for him at a local watering hole. He emerges from the party in the wee hours of the morning and stumbles to hail a taxi. As he wanders down an alley, he falls through an open manhole, plummeting to the bottom. He awakens dazed, injured and trapped by the sheer concrete walls of the storm drain.
In the standard version of this thriller, Shunsuke drops his cellphone in the street as he falls. He can’t call for help and must devise a way to climb out of the inadvertent trap in which he finds himself. Been there; done that. In #Manhole, Shunsuke has his cellphone and it’s fully charged. It’s amusing as his link to the outside world proves less helpful than he might have thought. He also suspects that this was no accident. That someone may have intentionally set him on a collision course with this “random” event.
#Manhole unfolds on two levels simultaneously: Shunsuke’s efforts to extract himself from his accidental imprisonment and his efforts to figure out who would devise such a diabolical fate for him on the eve of his wedding. Using video and selfies from social media to help piece the night together is a particularly clever modern narrative device. The twists and turns are endless and (mostly) satisfying. You can’t come to a premise like this without suspending your disbelief. The final twenty minutes are a jaw-dropper. This is mandatory viewing for thriller lovers.
Restore Point: It’s not easy making a science fiction film on a reasonable budget. With all the CGI and green screen work that’s typically required to render a believable version of the future, a science fiction film usually costs north of $ 100 million these days. This is why Restore Point, a lower budget sci-fi narrative from the Czech Republic is all the more impressive. (Lower budget never equals “cheap looking”. The production design is impressive.)
It’s the year 2041 in central Europe. Medical technology has advanced to the point that the human body can be regenerated if it suffers a fatal injury. However, you must have your memories and personality backed up to the cloud every 48 hours so they can be downloaded into your resurrected body if needed. A giant corporation stores all of the brain backups for its millions of subscribers. Citizens are literally slaves to their future selves. (I love the jabs at capitalism run amok in the screenplay by Tomislav Cecka and Zdenek Jecelin.)
When the head of the mega corporation that created the restore point technology is found murdered, the investigators discover that his backup has also been deleted. He’s truly dead. At the same time, a virus begins ravaging the system containing all of the subscriber backups, making everyone susceptible to actual death. Agent Em (Andrea Mohylova) is brought in to find the killer(s) and get to the bottom of a conspiracy that threatens their entire society.
Like the best science fiction films, Restore Point focuses less on the trappings that come with the genre and, instead, hones in on the sociological issues at the root of the story: the artificiality of immortality and the value of life being found in its fleeting nature. This isn’t Star Wars style space opera with starships and galactic battles. This is organic, idea-based science fiction in the vein of Blade Runner, Minority Report and the idea-driven fiction of writers like Philip K. Dick.
Does Restore Point ever reach the heady heights of those influences? Not really. But, it definitely punches above its weight class, delivering a story that is both entertaining and at times thematically powerful. In a cinematic world where science fiction films are rare even at genre film festivals, Restore Point is a welcome change of pace.
Read the full article here