FANTASIA20 REVIEW: Fellwechselzeit [Time of Moulting] [2020]

What about final wishes? Young Stephanie (Zelda Espenschied) is utterly alone. It doesn’t matter that she lives with her parents (Freya Kreutzkam‘s Mom and Bernd Wolf‘s Reinhardt) because their physical presence pales in comparison to their emotional absence. And nothing will ever change. It can’t. Stephanie’s mother is too far lost in the past to think about the girl’s childhood when memories of her parents keep her forever longing for the childhood she herself wasn’t afforded. Stephanie’s father is conversely too busy living in the present to worry about anyone…

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FANTASIA20 REVIEW: Undergods [2021]

All will be fog. We all like to think we have control—kings of our proverbial castles. It’s all a ruse, though. We’re actually slaves to a system that seems more and more likely to fail with each new day and each new declaration that its imminent demise is a call to arms to save it rather than move on and evolve. That false sense of control is thus a mechanism we use to combat the fear of knowing how little we truly possess. We dream of other men failing so…

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FANTASIA20 REVIEW: The Dark and the Wicked [2020]

What’s going to be okay? No matter how staunch your atheism, there still exists a surefire way to get you believing in God. It’s not hearing His voice or seeing His work, though. Those can easily be laughed away or chalked up to coincidence. God is an abstract catchall in which His faithful are conditioned to place their faith. They rely on Him as their savior while atheists rely on themselves. His deeds are inconsequential to those recognizing how “good” can always be explained by their own actions first. It’s…

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FANTASIA20 REVIEW: Freies Land [Free Country] [2020]

My dream killed them. From post-Francoist State Spain to post-reunified Germany, director Christian Alvart moves Alberto Rodríguez and Rafael Cobos‘ Goya Award-winning thriller Marshland to a newly democratized remote village outside of Berlin via Freies Land [Free Country]. Considering detectives Patrick Stein (Trystan Pütter) and Markus Bach (Felix Kramer) are thrust together despite building their careers in the West and East respectively, Alvart and co-writer Siegfried Kamml have ample room with which to retool things through a prism of their own nation’s potential for dark political secrets and guilt-ridden pasts.…

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FANTASIA20 REVIEW: Survival Skills [2020]

I sure don’t! The world isn’t what it used to be no matter how vehemently a republican believes the opposite when explaining that the 1791 ratification of an American’s “right to bear arms” includes the civilian purchase of military-grade automatic weaponry. Technology exploded exponentially over the past two decades and our laws, infrastructure, and politics have been very slow to adapt. The reason is simple of course: the patriarchy. It’s why our country still believes it holds jurisdiction over a woman’s body. It’s why we funnel finances from education and…

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FANTASIA20 REVIEW: Une sirène à Paris A Mermaid in Paris] [2020]

The ghosts of my memories are leaning on the bar. Gaspard (Nicolas Duvauchelle) has lived his entire life in pursuit of fulfilling a promise from his grandmother that he’s never quite understood. She was the matriarch of a family that reached well past blood to encompass a group of artistic “Surprisers” who gathered at her famed Flowerburger—an underground speakeasy of sorts doubling as a safe haven for anti-fascist disruptors during the war where song and dance led to poems and love. With a wealth of important Parisian history many will…

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FANTASIA20 REVIEW: The Oak Room [2020]

Goose the truth. It starts with a bottle of beer hitting a bar before an off-screen fight gets that glass bouncing along to the impact of bodies we never see. And it finishes with a similar still life that may or may not be the exact same beverage—a question left in limbo considering bottles are hitting bars past closing time throughout the entirety of director Cody Calahan and screenwriter Peter Genoway‘s film The Oak Room. There are a lot of these almost cyclical moments during its brisk, dialogue-heavy ninety-minutes: drifters…

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FANTASIA20 REVIEW: Clapboard Jungle [2020]

The reality doesn’t always live up to the dream. If you know anything about the independent film world, it won’t be surprising to discover the project writer/director Justin McConnell is hoping to get off the ground at the start of Clapboard Jungle isn’t going to be much further along in its pre-production process four years later. That’s the nature of the beast. You’re going to have moments of elation when it appears that funds have come through and the inevitable spiral downward when those plans evaporate. You’re going to hit…

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FANTASIA20 REVIEW: Fried Barry [2020]

Some things you just can’t run away from. Barry (Gary Green) is a piece of work. He’s a deadbeat husband to Suz (Chanelle de Jager), deadbeat dad to their son, and all-around deadbeat to Cape Town on the whole considering he’s shooting heroin when he’s not roughing up people who owe him money because he’s been facilitating their habits too. As far as we can tell by the cursory introduction writer/director Ryan Kruger provides, Barry deserves every single insult Suz hurls his way when he strolls home well past the…

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FANTASIA19 REVIEW: 8 [2019]

I am the wanderer and you are mine forever. It’s a chicken and egg conundrum. Does a demon named Utuli roam the earth in search of souls to consume, feeding on the weakness of those who’ve endured lost to serve as its host? Or does it create turmoil and tragedy precisely to enlist those willing to give themselves over to its quest for satiation—causing the pain it feeds on rather than opportunistically finding the pain we create for ourselves? No matter which choice proves to be correct, we are left…

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FANTASIA19 REVIEW: Sator [2021]

He will make you pure. Writer/director (and pretty much every other behind the scenes position a feature-length film demands) Jordan Graham‘s grandmother used to hear voices and write the words being spoken down as though they were messages she needed to both understand and follow. She called the orator Sator, “his” name scrawled upon the pieces of paper that ultimately gave these trances permanence through physical form. I can’t imagine how it must have felt for Graham to experience the phenomenon—especially considering June Peterson wasn’t the only one in his…

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