One of the best things about Fantastic Fest is the programming team’s willingness to import hits from other festivals. It’s actually the fest where I finally caught up with “Anora” last year, believe it or not, and some of the biggest FF films this year launched at Cannes too, including Oliver Laxe’s stunning “Sirat” and the prize-winning “The Plague.” TIFF darlings like “Obsession” and “Honey Bunch” were arguably even more well-received here in Austin. So this dispatch is built around three films that have played at a trio of other fests: Toronto, Fantasia, and Edinburgh.
The Toronto one is the best of the three (although only by a small margin). Debut director Taratoa Stoppard has taken a genre that’s built on stories of place and people who stand on a ground filled with buried secrets and has used it to tell a story of Indigenous subjugation and colonization as a whole. “Mārama” uses the structure and visual language of Gothic Horror to tell a story of discovery and empowerment, and it’s a phenomenal debut, a confident piece of work that takes a familiar genre and makes it feel perfect for the story its telling. With excellent costume and production design—both essential for the Gothic Horror genre—and a striking lead performance, it’s a movie I expect to gain momentum as it continues its fest circuit, including the Chicago International Film Festival next month.
A Māori woman named Mary (Ariaana Osborne) receives a note from a man in Whitby that promises the truth about her family. She takes a difficult journey of 73 days, only to discover that the man is dead. The writer’s brother Nathaniel (Toby Stephens) takes her in and asks her to take care of his granddaughter Anne (Evelyn Towersey), who is also of Māori lineage. Nathaniel’s home is filled with Māori artifacts and signs of an obsession with the culture that seeks to own it instead of understand or respect it. A sequence in which an employee of Nathaniel’s does a Māori dance complete with fake bloodshed that makes the culture look like brutal warriors is one of the best of the year: a scene of wealthy idiots taking something pure and deforming it for their own entertainment. Mary’s response to the cultural insult is unforgettable.
“Mārama” is more than just a story of appropriation as the increasingly terrifying visions send Mary spiraling into the truth about her sister that the note promised but only something more powerful than mankind could reveal. Stappard has a strong sense of the genre, refining an atmosphere of dread instead of relying on jump scares or loud noises. And Osborne is key to the film’s success, turning in a multi-faceted performance that captures grief and fear, but also resilience.
The latest from the Adams family has already been covered here but let me join the rising chorus of love for “Mother of Flies,” a deeply personal story of witchcraft and survival from one of the most impressive filmmaking units in the genre. Even as much as people loved films like “The Deeper You Dig” and “Hellbender,” there seemed to be a bit of a curiosity around the Adams production team. If you don’t know, father John Adams, mother Toby Huser, and daughters Zelda and Lulu Adams do everything on their productions: starring, writing, directing, camera, editing, catering, you name it. And that DIY approach made for a bit of “othering,” a sort of “isn’t that neat” aspect of watching their films. That should end. They need to be considered not just as an answer to a horror festival trivia question but as some of the best filmmakers in the genre today, especially Zelda Adams, who becomes a more striking, confident performer with every outing. She gives one of the best performances of the year here in any film, anywhere, even the ones where the creators weren’t related.
Zelda plays Mickey, a college student dealing with a mortality diagnosis due to the cancerous tumor in her stomach. With no options left, she answers the call of a healer named Solveig (Poser), someone who lives in a house deep in the forest that appears like it has emerged from the earth and root. Of course, she’s a witch, and she promises Zelda and her father Jake (John Adams) cures if they take this difficult journey with her. Jake is skeptical, but Solveig sees sadness in him that needs curing too, and the trio begin a psychedelic journey that seems wedded to hundreds of years of witchcraft. At the same time, we see flashbacks to a long time ago that fill in Solveig’s background. Maybe she truly is immortal?
“Mother of Flies” uses Argento-esque visuals that tie Solveig’s practices to something that feels like it pre-dates civilization. Maggots wriggle, snakes slide, and bodily fluids spew forth. They deftly keep us wondering what Solveig’s end game might be. Is she actually trying to save Zelda? Is she the good witch or the bad witch? It’s a moving allegory for any treatment for cancer in that one never knows if the torture of something like chemo will actually work. Why not try something else? Something ancient?
Poser is good at actually underplaying what could have been a caricature, but the MVPs here are John’s fluid editing and Zelda’s grounded performance, one that keeps us with her through the film. She’s subtle in ways that other performers wouldn’t consider, giving the piece a resigned melancholy instead of the overplayed image of a cancer patient fighting against the dying of the light. Toby’s editing slides in and out of the past and the present, showing us startling images just long enough before moving on to something else. These creators are talented in every way one can use that word, and that would be true even if they weren’t working with their most loved ones.
Finally, there’s one of the most striking examples of “one for them, one for me” in my critical life. Ben Wheatley made the “Nobody” riff “Normal” for TIFF and made the more personal “Bulk” for Edinburgh and now Fantastic Fest. Perhaps turned off by his experience on “Meg 2: The Trench” as well, he’s gone back to basics here, making a black-and-white sci-fi thriller that looks like it was shot on a weekend for what Ben had in his pocket. If “Meg 2” was an attempt at a crowd-pleaser, this is a crowd-annoyer, a surreal experiment in DIY filmmaking that has a few good ideas buried in a script that circles the same drains so many times that it almost visually and audibly runs out of ideas, beginning to question its own existence right in front of your eyes.
“Bulk” exists as a film that could almost be watched on repeat, meaning things like rising action, a climax, or tension are non-factors. It drops you into the story of a man (Sam Riley) who looks like he’s been kidnapped by characters played by Alexandra Maria Lara and Noah Taylor. They tell him that he’s in a house that basically allows jumping between multiverses, parallel realities that could look like the future or past. It allows Wheatley to get downright goofy with some genre parodies that include futuristic battles made up entirely of miniatures and cut-outs hanging from strings and to put Taylor in an outfit that makes him look like a caveman. There’s even a fight with a rock monster.
A filmmaker as ambitious as Wheatley making a movie that feels inspired by what he saw in the middle of the night on black-and-white television sounds more fun than it is in practice. The characters start to reference the experiment with Lara saying that there are only about 56 minutes left before the end of everything right around when there’s the same time left in the film, and that all of this will be wrapped up in 90 minutes. “Anything longer seems like an indulgence.”
The truth is ALL of “Bulk” seems like an indulgence. And the 90 minutes feel like 180. I’ve defended Wheatley’s flights of formal fancy before and would rather see him playing in his imagination here than junk like “Meg 2,” but that’s in theory more than practice. I can be happy Wheatley is trying stuff like “Bulk” and still regret being experimented on by it myself.
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