Fantasia 2018, Day 4, Part 3: The Scythian, AKA The Last Warrior
My last movie of Sunday, July 15, was a film I knew little about going in. It was The Scythian (Skif, Скиф), a Russian film directed by Rustam Mosafir from a script he wrote with Vadim Golovanov. It started late, and for most of the day I’d been unsure whether I’d stick around to watch it; in the 11 hours between leaving my house and the time it started, I’d ingested a few handfuls of peanuts, one (1) tin of off-brand cola, and a few mouthfuls of water. Still, I took my seat, the movie started, and then I quit paying attention to my physical body for one hour and forty-seven minutes. The Scythian is one of the best action films I’ve seen in years. It’s engagingly violent, and the violence is done well — but more than that, it’s filled with cleverness and unexpected twists. If you’re a fan of sword-and-sorcery or sword-and-sandal movies, you owe it to yourself to see this movie, and as soon as possible. (And I note it’s being released August 14 under the title The Last Warrior on VOD, Blu-Ray, and DVD.)
The story’s set in Russia in the Middle Ages, as the Russian Lord Oleg (Yuriy Tsurilo) is conniving to gain control of Kiev. Among his most trusted warriors is a man named Lutobor (Aleksey Faddeev), whose wife Tatyana (Izmaylova Vasilisa) has just given birth to a son. But then Tatyana and the baby are kidnapped by Scythians, specifically by a clan of elite assassins who’re the last remnants of their people. But one of the Scythians, a man named Marten (Alexander Kuznetsov), is betrayed by his own people and captured by Lutobor. Lutobor now intends to take Marten as his guide, trek into Scythian lands, face down the clan of trained killers, and recover his wife and son — not to mention find out who hired the Scythians in the first place.
It’s hard to know where to begin in talking about this movie. It’s not especially deep, though it is conscious of itself as a piece of heroic fiction — it begins by talking about its era as “a time for new heroes brave at heart and strong in spirit.” The key is that everything it does, it does very well. Most crucial, I suppose, is that it tells a ferocious story with some surprising character choices, presents a strong relationship between the two male leads that deepens over the course of the film, and evokes a sense of a whole world beyond the specific plot to hand. This is nominally historical adventure, but in fact it pushes “historicity” to the edge and beyond, incorporating magic potions, omens from the gods, and surreal costumes and props. To me, this is absolutely sword-and-sorcery, a classic pulplike fantasy set in (or in this case near) Central Asia, something out of Robert E. Howard or Harold Lamb or Arthur Howden Smith’s Grey Maiden tales.
My third movie on Sunday, July 15, was a France-UK co-production called Cold Skin. It was scheduled to start at 5:10 in the Hall Theatre, and ran 107 minutes. At 7:15, across the street at the De Sève, there’d be a showing of the 1911 Italian film L’Inferno, an adaptation of the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Musical accompaniment to the silent film would be provided by Maurizio Guarini of Italian prog band Goblin, well-known for providing the soundtrack to Dario Argento’s 
Sunday, July 15, was going to be my first really busy day of the Fantasia Film Festival. There were four movies I planned to see, with a chance of a fifth, depending on how things worked out. The day’d begin at the Hall Theatre; first, I’d see Destiny: The Tale of Kamakura, a lighthearted Japanese urban fantasy. Then would come Aragne: Sign of Vermillion, also from Japan, a horror anime.
After my first two films last Saturday, I left the large Hall Theatre to see a documentary in the 150-plus-seat De Sève Theatre across the street. The documentary was called Boiled Angels, and it presented the case of zinester and comics creator Mike Diana, whose transgressive work led to him being arrested and put on trial in Florida in the 1990s. I’d followed Diana’s plight at the time through reports in The Comics Journal, and was intrigued to learn more about it now. But if I personally was interested in the film as a look at comics history, I was surprised to find that much of the rest of the crowd was drawn by the chance to see new work by horror director Frank Henenlotter, creator of works like Bad Biology, Frankenhooker, Brain Damage, and Basket Case. 
Weekend days are busy days at the Fantasia film festival. Weekends are when most people are most often free to see movies, so the programmers obligingly schedule a lot of films for Saturdays and Sundays. Last Saturday I had three movies I wanted to see. On the Sunday, I had five. Which meant that Fantasia was well and truly underway.
Fantasy’s described by fantasy: consider John Crowley’s Little, Big, a novel about a faerieland where the further in you go the bigger the land becomes. A powerful image, it echoes the way fascinations gain in depth and scope the more you explore them. How familiar experiences can become strange the more you dig deeper into them, birthing mystery, growing weird. Art and story perhaps most of all. So I am about to begin my coverage of the 
Last Sunday I ran my first session of Torg Eternity, meaning I can now finish my review of the game by discussing how the rules worked in practice (the first part is 
Later today, early tomorrow, sometime next week, the world began to end.
With another year’s worth of Fantasia reviews now finished, I thought I’d take the time once again to look back at what I saw and write a general overview of the films as a whole. Doing so this year, though, leads to thoughts about film on a slightly larger scale than just Fantasia alone.