Black Gate

Prisoners of the Ghostland was one of the most anticipated films at Fantasia 2021. It unites madcap director Sion Sono (last seen at Fantasia with the feature version of Tokyo Vampire Hotel) with a certain mister Nicolas Cage. You might reasonably expect a full-throttle over-the-top ride. And that doesn’t quite happen.

Written by Aaron Hendry and Reza Sixo Safai, the movie takes place in a part of the world scarred by a spill of nuclear waste. A village called Samurai Town is ruled by a rapacious Governor (Bill Moseley) who, as the film begins, hauls a criminal named Hero (Cage) out of prison to look for his granddaughter Bernice (Sofia Boutella), who herself has fled the city for the dangers of the uncontrolled territory called the Ghostlands. Hero’s given a deadline and a booby-trapped suit that’ll blow up parts of his anatomy he’d rather keep if he fails to return on time, or if he thinks impure thoughts around the Governor’s granddaughter.

He drives off into the Ghostlands on his quest, and you might expect a long odyssey to follow. Instead he finds Bernice quickly, but also gets taken prisoner by a group who dwell in the Ghostlands. Revelations and subplots follow; there are glimpses of a parallel track of story back in Samurai Town, following the governor’s bodyguard Yasujiro (Tak Sakaguchi, Musashi in last year’s Crazy Samurai Musashi); there are flashbacks to establish Hero’s backstory; and you can see clearly how it’s all going to lead to a showdown back in Samurai Town.

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“Cuckoo!” is a 7-minute short film from the Netherlands directed by Jörgen Scholtens, who co-wrote with Jörgen Van Weeren. It’s a surreal piece about a tiny man (Frank Lammers) who lives in a cuckoo clock with his even tinier cat. He’s responsible for popping out on the hour, but one day things go wrong and lead to a cascade failure. It’s an absurd piece about routine, and it has a good production design involving old technologies. It’s a bittersweet story that works.

With it was bundled Kratt, an Estonian feature written and directed by Rasmus Merivoo. In 2017 I loved November, a film about the superstitions of a small Estonian village in the 18th century; one of those superstitions was the Kratt, a monstrous servant you could get the Devil to bring to life to do your will. The Kratt needs to always be doing work, or it’ll turn violently against its masters. To be clear, this film is nothing like November, which was a downbeat arthouse fantasy; this Kratt is an oddball comedy-satire, mixing straight-faced gags with moments of outright gore. Still, I was interested in seeing another spin on the Kratt story, not least because of the different tone this movie promised.

Kratt takes place in the present day, when a couple of young kids, Mia and Kevin (Nora and Harri Merivoo, the director’s real-life children) are left with their grandmother (Mari Lill) in a small village somewhere in Estonia. The kids are unimpressed with farm life, and when they find out about the legend of the Kratt they think they have a solution. Things, of course, go wrong. Their quest to build the Kratt and the consequences of their actions unfold against the background of village life and its controversies, which include protestors trying to prevent deforestation and a middle-aged politician (Ivo Uukkivi) caught up in corruption and playing both sides.

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Satoshi Kon was one of the great geniuses of anime. Born in 1963, in his twenties he worked briefly in manga, then became an assistant to Katsuhiro Otomo, scripting a segment in the anthology film Memories. The first movie of his own was Perfect Blue, in 1997, a suspense story about an actress pursued by a stalker. It blurs the line between real and unreal, which would become a hallmark of Kon’s later work — as with his next film, 2002’s Millennium Actress, in which documentarians investigate the life story of a retired actress. Tokyo Godfathers, from 2003, is a more straightforward look at three street people in Tokyo who find an abandoned baby; Kon followed it with Paranoia Agent, a 13-episode anime about a mysterious series of street assaults. His final completed film was Paprika, in 2006, another film examining the fragmented nature of identity and dreams, this time based on a science-fiction novel about a dream terrorist. Kon was at work on another movie, to be called Dreaming Machine, when he was diagnosed in 2010 with pancreatic cancer, dying later that year at age 46.

It’s tragic for anyone to die that young, and the tragedy’s compounded by the greatness of Kon’s cinematic achievements in his relatively brief life. Every one of his films can be described as a masterpiece, and his influence spread far beyond anime even to mainstream Hollywood filmmakers. This year a new documentary about Kon played the Fantasia Film Festival (whose prize for top animated feature of the year is named for Kon). Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist is an 82-minute examination of Kon’s work from Pascal-Alex Vincent, and it’s a solid introduction to his achievements.

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Midnight (미드나이트, Mi-deu-nai-teu) is a suspense thriller from Korea that revolves around Kyung-mi (Ki-joo Jin), a young deaf woman who, one night on her way to meet her mother (Hae-yeon Kil), comes across a grievously wounded woman named So-jung (Kim Hye-Yoon). So-jung’s been attacked by a maniacal serial killer, Do-sik (Wi Ha-Joon, Squid Game), who now sees Kyung-mi and selects her as his next victim. Meanwhile, So-jung’s frantic brother (Park Hoon) is desperately trying to find his sister. Whether he’ll be able to help the women is unclear; Do-sik’s crafty, daring, and manipulative. But Kyung-mi’s resourceful herself.

Writter-director Oh-Seung Kwon presents a Hitchcockian story in which an unsuspecting and basically innocent person finds themself isolated from society by a scheming, ruthless murderer. There are scenes with security officers that demonstrate how adept Do-sik is at using the system and turning it against itself; there’s no help for Kyung-mi from that quarter. Involving the police, or indeed any outside source, just gives Do-sik more tools to use.

The film unfolds over the course of a single night, not quite in real time, and the lack of any major temporal jumping-forward emphasises the remorselessness of events. If things are sometimes convenient for the plot, as can be the case in Hitchcockian thrillers, then having everything take place in one stretch of time helps: Do-sik doesn’t need to come up with permanent con games, he just needs to keep people busy and set things up so he can do what he wants. The background of night in a big city works as well; the cityscapes are mostly empty, streets unpopulated. I don’t know how much of a part budget concerns played in the lack of extras, but it’s effective in building the sense of isolation. There’s nobody to help, nobody to see violence play out. Only quiet houses and deserted streets.

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I’ve generally been reviewing one movie a day as I work through my experience of the 2021 Fantasia Film Festival, but today I’m doing something a little different. One of the movies available on-demand this year was a reworked version of Junk Head, which I reviewed when it played Fantasia in 2017. Another movie at this year’s festival was Mad God, the brainchild of veteran special-effects man Phil Tippett (who worked on the original Star Wars trilogy, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Robocop, and a lot of other things). Both are works of stop-motion wizardry; both involve stories of explorers from a realm above descending into a world of darkness and pain. And both have religious themes in mind. I decided to watch the new edit of Junk Head, follow it with Mad God, and then write about the first movie briefly as a way to in to the second.

Junk Head is fundamentally the same movie as it was in 2017, and much of what I wrote then still applies. It’s the creation of Takahide Hori, who wrote and directed and edited and did the cinematography and the animation, and it’s a science-fiction story with elements of horror. In the far future, human beings live atop skyscrapers like gods but are threatened by a plague. One human descends into the lower levels of the world, long since abandoned to mutated clones, seeking the secret to defeat the illness. Things do not go as planned.

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“Prophet” was written and directed by Reza Gamini; it’s an 18-minute horror short about the survivors of an attack from creatures drawn by sound. The monsters return periodically, killing people at the slightest noise. Which becomes a problem for babies and the parents of babies. This is a dark story about people responding to a brutal situation — refugees gathering on a beach, fearing the next attack, where previous waves of refugees have set up some social structures with basic rules. The cinematography’s striking, with harsh lights and shadows, and the dialogue’s tight and tense.

Bundled with the short was Martyrs Lane, a film from British writer-director Ruth Platt. Leah (Kiera Thompson) is a moderately unhappy tween daughter to an English vicar, living with her parents and older sister in the vicarage. And then she starts to see a winged ghost (Sienna Sayer) at night. The two girls, living and dead, strike up a friendship. They begin to play a peculiar game like a scavenger hunt, in which Leah goes searching for odd objects in odd places; and finds them. But what is their significance, one wonders, and what is the real game the ghost is playing?

There are some lovely narrative ideas here, like an M.R. James story with little girls instead of aging academics. And there’s some equally lovely technical craft, with strong sound design and cinematography that alternately washes the screen in light and freezes it in chilly hues. But for me the story doesn’t quite come together, because I found I was lost for much of the film, lacking some basic context with which to understand the story.

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“She and the Darkness” (“Ella y la Oscuridad”) is a 13-minute Spanish film from director Daniel Romero, who co-wrote it with Rubin Stein. A janitor (Beatriz Arjona) suffering from extreme depression sees something unexpected during a stress-driven walk one night, a girl who should not be alive. Which discovery leads her into some strange and violent situations. This is another short that’s heavy on atmosphere and shadows, but has minimal dialogue. Often, as here, the attempt to tell a story purely visually results in points of incomprehension; we understand the girl means something to the woman, but not exactly what. In turn, again as here, this insistence on the visual at the expense of the verbal ends up with a well-crafted but frustrating film, as the audience is left to imagine possibilities never paid off by the movie as it actually is.

Bundled with the short came All The Moons (Todas las Lunas), a Franco-Spanish co-production directed by Igor Legarreta and written by Legarreta with Jon Sagala. In Spain in 1876, the violence of the Third Carlist War leaves a young girl (Haizea Carneros) alone and wounded. A woman (Itziar Ituño) offers to cure her pain, and does, but what she does to the girl causes other issues — including flesh burning when exposed to sunlight, and a sudden aversion to garlic soup. The girl ends up separated from the woman, but finds another surrogate parent; and then risks losing him as well.

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“Ghost Dogs” is an animated short film from Joe Cappa, who directed and co-wrote the script with J.W. Hallford. It’s a fine 11-minute piece about a dog exploring his new home and finding more than he understands. There’s no dialogue, being entirely from the perspective of the dog wandering about the not-quite empty house, and the movie gets some fine effects by having him uncover things that mean nothing to him but tell human viewers quite a bit. The 2D animation has a style that gets across both weird humour and moments of horror. It’s a strange movie, and a very good one, macabre and satisfying.

With the short was bundled the feature film Strawberry Mansions. It is a deeply weird work from the writer-director team of Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney, in which Audley also stars as James Prebble. Prebble works for the government auditing dreams, and one day he wakes from a dream filled with suspicious friends and product placement and goes to audit the long-unlooked-at dreams of an old lady named Arabella Isadora (Penny Fuller). He sets to work, reviewing dreams as far back as the 1980s, and finds himself falling in love. Complications ensue, including time loops, objects falling out of the sky, an unexpected death, a plot to manipulate dreams, and an endless trove of metamorphoses.

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“The Horse Guessing Game” is a 9-minute short by Xia Leilei. It’s a beautiful piece of work made of stop-motion paper dolls and shadowplay, mostly black-and-white, with colour used briefly and well to heighten the significance of one sequence. I can’t claim to understand it entirely, but it opens with a woman or girl isolated from those around her, and appears to show her entering into a shadow-world with great potential and great danger where she might gain a voice and learn to speak to those around her, or else might be swallowed up and lost. As I read the film, it’s about imagination, a bit like Plato’s cave. But there is a lot of ambiguity to the story, and it took a second viewing for me to properly follow it. The movie takes a bit of effort, in other words, but is worth it. You can judge for yourself, as the film’s online here.

Next came Cryptozoo, written and directed by Dash Shaw. It’s an animated story set in the late 60s, about a woman named Lauren Gray (voice of Lake Bell) who rescues mythological creatures, cryptids, from around the world. She’s part of a team under the direction of an older woman named Joan (Grace Zabriskie) who plans to open Cryptozoo — a place where the creatures of myth can live and work with regular humans. But the American government has nefarious plans to use the Japanese dream-eating creature called the Baku (AKA the Tapir, also seen at Fantasia this year in Hello! Tapir) to eat the dreams of the counterculture. A violent chase to find the Baku ensues, and at its core are the questions of whether the zoo is the best future for the cryptids, and whether they really can integrate into human society.

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One Second Champion is a feature film from Hong Kong directed by Sin Hang Chiu and written by Ashley Cheung, Siu Hong Ho, Ho Tin Li, and Wai Chun Ling. Chow (Endy Chow) was born brain dead for one second, and somehow this gave him the power to see one second into the future — but only one second. As a kid he had a brief period of fame for his oddball talent, but he was never able to find a way to turn it into a lasting career. Then, as an adult, fallen on hard times and with a son to support, he breaks up a fight at the bar where he works, and his ability to see a second ahead turns out to be incredibly useful in a fight. A boxing promoter with a failing gym, Yip Chi-shun (director Chiu, who also contributed to the soundtrack with his band ToNick), happens to see him in the brawl and, struck by his skill, offers to train him and make a career for him in the ring.

And so the movie becomes a sports film, in which Chow rises through the ranks of the local boxing federation while Yip’s family-owned gym starts to make money. There are complications and reversals, and it all builds to a final boxing match. There’s some comedy here, but the film chooses to become more of a drama the further along it goes. In general the fantasy aspect of the one-second precognition becomes de-emphasised, too, a way into the boxing scene rather than an element to be explored on its own. The precognition’s a means to the end of finding a new spin on the form of the boxing movie.

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