Aporia, Hundreds of Beavers, and Emptiness are screening as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 20 to August 9.

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Aporia

A year after Sophie’s (Judy Greer) husband dies, her daughter remains despondent. She is truant from school, failing classes, and she wants nothing to do with her friends or mother. When her late husband’s best friend (Payman Maadi) shows her a time machine he’s been building, Sophie decides to bring her husband back for the sake of her daughter.

Jared Moshe’s take on the time travel trope works to ground the concept of the butterfly effect by using it as ammunition for a message about how there is no easy cure-all for grief. Initially, the drastic change in Sophie’s family brought on by the machine is a utopic band-aid, but it is always clear to the audience that another shoe is waiting to drop. This unease keeps the first half of Aporia moving and suspenseful.

But the film’s later knotty twists struggle to increase the stakes and fail to satisfactorily dive deeper into the central, fable-like message. The food for thought that comes with the monkey’s paw consequences of altering the past do not go far enough beyond the conventional thought experiments that comes with any time travel conversation. And while the emotional tradeoffs are explored with an effectively dour grounding — and Greer channels the emotional weight of it all with aplomb — the film does not break new ground in the genre.

Aporia: C+

Hundreds of Beavers

Ryland Brickson Cole Tews and Mike Cheslik collaborated previously on Lake Michigan Monster, a film with a big imagination whose humor I ultimately found I did not fully jibe with. With Hundreds of Beavers, Cheslik and Tews double down on a hyper-specific sense of humor that worked even less for me. Borrowing from silent comedy and its kin (most clearly, Looney Tunes), the film is a journey of survival and fur-trapping in which a drunkard (who also sells drink) sees his business chewed apart by beavers (played by actors in full beaver costume). Soon, he finds himself hunting down the animals that turned his life upside-down.

Humor is subjective, and if a nearly two-hour live-action Looney Tunes cartoon is something you’re after you will probably find this endlessly amusing. But Buster Keaton this is not (the main reason being, Buster Keaton did not scream and mumble nonsense for minutes on end). And, of course, there is the whole brevity is the soul of wit thing. The unfolding of Bugs Bunny logic is charming in certain scenes. But by the time our applejack salesman is donning a raccoon head as a cap and hunting beavers like it’s a video game objective, the entire ordeal becomes circular (literally) and tiresome.

Still, you have to hand it to the team for making two features now that burst forth with a manic creativity. It is unlikely that you will see a film this year with an aesthetic and tone like that of Hundreds of Beavers.

Hundreds of Beavers: C+

Emptiness

Onur Karaman’s Emptiness experiments with themes of paranoia and confusion that are threaded into a psychological thriller involving escalating tensions between three women. Suzanne (Stéphanie Breton), her recent memories clouded, is unsure of where her husband is. Nicole (Anna Rydvald) and Linda (Julie Trépanier) are ostensibly there to help her, but Suzanne increasingly finds their presence to be alienating and frightening. As uncertainty mounts, Suzanne finds herself haunted by something else in the house.

The film ultimately leads to a major plot twist that I will not reveal here. It is the type of final beat that aims to cast the entire narrative in a new light, such that viewers leaving the theater will be compelled to rethink everything that they have seen. While the twist is far from illogical, the attempt at being profound by concealing the reality of the characters and the story falls resoundingly flat. It causes the characters’ interactions and arguments throughout the film to be, to their detriment, vague and stilted. The subject matter here is certainly worthy of exploration, but such serious subject matter being relegated to an unsatisfying twist ending makes the message ring hollow.

Emptiness: C-

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Twitter, Letterboxd, Facebook)