Tag Archives: Fantasia Festival

All Movie Reviews, Horror, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Home Bodies — Fantasia Festival 2026 Movie Review

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Home Bodies is screening as part of the 2026 Fantasia International Film Festival.

In Home Bodies, directed by Casey Walker from a script by Marcus Sullivan and Adrian Murray, two children live alone in a small, two-story home that simply doesn’t look right. Dark, cavernous hallways have an industrial quality to their architecture. The appliances in the kitchen, or “food room,” as the kids call it, are out-dated, yet they produce hot food instantly. The children watch VHS tapes that re-run episodes of a single, low-budget children’s television show set on a farm. If things don’t read as peculiar by this point, the children speaking to a disembodied voice anthropomorphized in the form of a pulsing white light, a voice they refer to as “Father,” leaves no room for debate. These siblings are being held hostage in some sort of psychological experiment.

On premise, Home Bodies is very Twilight Zone slash Black Mirror adjacent. It has one central, fantastical sci-fi concept that it rides for 95 minutes. The answers to its questions Continue reading Home Bodies — Fantasia Festival 2026 Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Drama, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Backstage Madness — Fantasia Festival 2026 Movie Review

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Backstage Madness is screening as part of the 2026 Fantasia International Film Festival

Backstage Madness, a film from Kyrgyzstan from director Amanbek Azhymat, opens with a frenetic, violent sequence fueled by its central character’s inner rage. The character in question, an unnamed screenwriter (Bolot Tileberdiev) typing away at his office typewriter, first appears to be writing a script commissioned by an overtly creepy young man looking to live out his fantasies of non-consensual sex on-screen. The screenwriter loses his cool with the festering creep when the young man starts describing his real-life sex crimes. The scene shifts in tone at least three times as the humor sours into a disgust which begets on-screen violence (which, frankly, evoked some confusion in this dear viewer). It is evident that this all takes place in the imagination of the writer, who culminates the sequence gunning down a crowd of angry people (in his mind, of course).

There is perhaps a meta-textual commentary to this opening sequence, given that the plot immediately turns to focus on Continue reading Backstage Madness — Fantasia Festival 2026 Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

After School (Straf) — Fantasia Festival 2026 Movie Review

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After School is screening as part of the 2026 Fantasia International Film Festival.

“We’re men, but we also have a little boy inside of us … a little baby inside.”

After School is something of a comedy of errors, in which the prime error is leaning into all the wrong ideas about masculinity. It is not a satire, per se, but its characters present as exaggerated versions of what the “manosphere’ produces and invites. Edwin (Rutger de Bekker) is a schoolteacher who has no control over his classroom. This is a metaphor for his life in general. His coworkers mostly step over him. His wife left him for a shaman peddling hallucinatory drugs. His daughter is embarrassed of him. His students have made him an internet lolcow, posting classroom pranks to the point where his viral status causes him to lose a promotion. He is the perfect candidate for a midlife identity crisis.

When alcohol, boxing, and male camaraderie combine, Edwin is inspired to stand up for himself in the classroom. The next time his students prank him Continue reading After School (Straf) — Fantasia Festival 2026 Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Horror, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: Sugar Rot — Fantasia Festival 2025

Sugar Rot had its Quebec premiere on Aug 1 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Sugar Rot is billed as a feminist, punk rock, body horror film. It does involve the horrific transformation of a body, that of the protagonist fittingly named Candy (Chloe Macleod). One location in the film presents a few punk rock bands performing. And the John Waters-esque story world produced by director Becca Kozak is obsessed with female body standards and the normalization of the exploitation of women’s bodies. So, check, check, and check on the billing. At face value, at least.

There is a cruel contradiction at the sugary core of Sugar Rot. As Candy’s body becomes candy (literally), every character wants to Continue reading Review: Sugar Rot — Fantasia Festival 2025 →

All Movie Reviews, Drama, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: Lurker — Fantasia Festival 2025

Lurker had its Canadian premiere on Aug 1 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Alex Russell’s debut film Lurker is about obsession. It is in one sense about the parasocial relationships fostered by celebrity, but more accurately it is about the mind of a person who manipulates the world around him in order to embed himself within one celebrity’s orbit. It is a film about a sociopath, essentially.

Matthew (Theodore Pellerin), this sociopathic personality, works at a clothing store occasionally patroned by an up-and-coming musician named Oliver (Archie Madekwe). Matthew plays a song over the speaker that is calculated to get Oliver’s attention. When he gets it, he pretends to have never heard of Oliver’s music. He, of course, has heard it. In fact, he relentlessly stalks Oliver’s social media to gain Continue reading Review: Lurker — Fantasia Festival 2025 →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Drama, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: $POSITIONS — Fantasia Festival 2025

$POSITIONS had its Quebec premiere on July 30 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

It is hard to shake the resemblance between Brandon Daley’s $POSITIONS and Benny and Josh Safdie’s Good Time. The two brothers at the center, the economically motivated premise, the ill-conceived choices, the propulsive synth score. The two films are so similar, in fact, that by the time this review goes live, every other person on the Internet will likely have already made the comparison.

The biggest difference between the two films is in the tone, where $POSITIONS is more overtly comedic. More specifically, it is a comedy of errors meets grossout comedy sort of cringe comedy. And its gags get so Continue reading Review: $POSITIONS — Fantasia Festival 2025 →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Drama, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: OBEX — Fantasia Festival 2025

OBEX had its Canadian premiere on July 29 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

It’s 1987. “Computer” Conor (Albert Birney, who also directs) spends his morning talking lovingly to his dog Sandy and watching the news on one of the three television sets stacked in a row in the middle of his living room. He works from home, rapidly typing out on his Macintosh computer digital recreations of photographs that people send to him. His neighbor Mary (Callie Hernandez) arrives weekly to check up on him and bring him groceries, but he never opens the door.

While thumbing through a computer hobbyist catalogue, Conor stumbles upon a mysterious ad for a video game called “OBEX.” Not only is it a game, but it is Continue reading Review: OBEX — Fantasia Festival 2025 →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Drama, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Fantasia Festival 2025 Reviews — Lucid and Every Heavy Thing

Lucid and Every Heavy Thing had their world premieres on July 21 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Lucid

Mia (Caitlin Taylor) is an art student without inspiration. When she screws up her self-portrait, she nails a dead fish to it at the last minute and hurries to the studio. Her instructor and most of her classmates are unimpressed. Desperate for Continue reading Fantasia Festival 2025 Reviews — Lucid and Every Heavy Thing →

All Movie Reviews, Horror, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Review: Hellcat — Fantasia Festival 2025

Hellcat had its world premiere on July 25 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Brock Bodell’s Hellcat is immediately intense. A rickety mobile home tearing down the highway is our setting. Inside is Lena (Dakota Gorman), who wakes to the jolting movements of the vehicle the home is hitched to. Assessing her situation, she finds herself padlocked inside with nothing in her pockets. A voice over an intercom (Todd Terry) tells her that she is “infected” (in a nice touch, the voice comes through the mouth of a taxidermy wolf head). This driver, Clive, claims to have found her injured, and that he is driving her to a doctor. But the red flags quickly start to mount as Lena investigates the trailer.

My immediate thought on being presented the premise is that the title of the film was likely giving the twist away, or that the title was a red herring. In either case, I would have preferred the lack of clarity that the film dropped me into. There is enough ambiguity to what is going on—until Continue reading Review: Hellcat — Fantasia Festival 2025 →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Romance

Review: I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn — Fantasia Festival 2025

I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn had its world premiere on July 23 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Shina Mizuhara (Ui Mihara) is a bored actress. Promoting her new film, she lazily answers softball press questions. When she doesn’t get anything satisfying out of the interview, she turns to the camera and starts drooling. Completely unmotivated, Shina strives for a change of pace by vacationing in New York City.

Jack (Estevan Munoz) is an imaginative and passionate wannabe filmmaker. Growing up on Nirvana, George Romero, and Takashi Miike, Jack wants nothing more than to bring a punk rock ethos to film. Instead, he is a lowly intern for a New York studio, slaving away while only getting slightly closer to his dream.

When Shina and Jack get drunk at the same dive bar (and Jack finds Shina outside lying in someone else’s puke), an unlikely Continue reading Review: I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn — Fantasia Festival 2025 →