Fantasia 2016, Day 18, Part 2: Commitment to Genre (Before I Wake and The Top Secret: Murder in Mind)
As the evening of Sunday, July 31, began I was looking forward to two films I planned to see at the Hall Theatre. The directors of both movies had interesting track records. Before I Wake, following the strange events surrounding an orphan boy whose dreams cross over into reality, was a new film from Oculus director Mike Flanagan. After that would come The Top Secret: Murder in Mind (Himitsu the Top Secret), a science-fiction murder mystery from Keishi Otomo, maker of the Rurouni Kenshin historical samurai-steampunk movies. One of these two films would (more or less) live up to my expectations.
First came a short film called “Quenottes” (“Pearlies”), written by Pascal Thiebaux and directed by Thiebaux with Gil Pinheiro, in which a boy (Matthieu Clément-Lescop) losing the last of his baby teeth brings out the supernatural mouse that hoards old lost teeth. A nastier version of the Tooth Fairy, the mouse cannot be cheated of its bounty, and this causes problems for the boy and his father (Lionel Abelanski). An excellent soundtrack helps the story move sharply along to a final disaster. The film’s an effective horror short with the feel of an old unDisneyfied fairy tale.
Before I Wake is a story about a married couple, Jessie and Mark (Kate Bosworth and Thomas Jane) who adopt an orphaned eight-year-old boy, Cody (Jacob Tremblay). Cody seems like a perfect child, but he’s had problems with previous foster families. We soon learn the boy has a psychic gift that makes his dreams come to life for so long as he’s asleep. His nightmares have killed already, so Cody’s doing all he can to stay awake as long as he can. But he can’t keep his eyes open forever.
Usually when there’s a question-and-answer session after a film I report it after giving my impressions of the movie. This is one of those cases, though, where the comments of the creators have such a direct relevance to what I thought of the film that I want to present them first. What follows, as always, comes from handwritten notes (possibly inaccurate in specifics though I believe generally representative of the gist of things) recording the the comments of director Mike Flanagan, star Kate Bosworth, and Producer Trevor Macy.
On the morning of Sunday, August 1, I was in no particular hurry to get to the Hall Theatre. I planned to see the Korean zombie movie Train to Busan, but knowing it had already played the large room of the Hall once I didn’t anticipate I’d have difficulty finding a seat. I intended after that to go across the street to the De Sève Theatre, where I’d watch Operation: Avalanche, a found-footage fiction about filmmakers who’d faked the moon landing in 1969. Then I’d go have a bite to eat and come back for two more movies. It sounded like a nice well-spaced day, but when I got to the Hall ten minutes before Train to Busan was scheduled to start I found I’d radically underestimated the film’s popularity. As the doors opened to let the ticket-holders in, the line stretched around the corner, up to the next street, and then around the corner there. Luckily enough, I was able to find a good seat in the back of the Hall, where I watched the auditorium fill up with an enthusiastic crowd.
Saturday, July 30, I had hopes of seeing four shows at Fantasia. In the event, I saw three — and ended up with an interesting chat after the last one. First came an animated teen dystopia from Martinique, Battledream Chronicle, in which a young woman fights to free her homeland from digital colonialism. After that came a collection of short films, the International Science Fiction Short Film Showcase 2016 (one of the shorts being an adaptation of Ken Liu’s short story “
Last July, I was lucky enough to see Anna Biller’s film The Love Witch at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival. After screening there and at various other festivals, it opens today in New York, with more cities to follow. Here’s how I described it back in August: 
By July 29, the sixteenth day of the Fantasia Festival, I was beginning to feel exhausted. I’d had some thoughts of watching three movies that Friday, but in the end could only manage two. I made it down to the Hall Theatre in the afternoon to watch the Korean satire Collective Invention (Dolyeonbyuni), then came back right after for the raucous Japanese comedy Too Young To Die! (Too Young To Die! Wakakushite Shinu). Neither struck me as flawless, but both in different ways were interesting experiences.
At 7:30 PM on Thursday, July 28, I was in a seat in the De Sève Theatre waiting to see a screening of an American independent horror-comedy called Lace Crater, about a woman who catches a venereal disease from a ghost. After that I’d cross the street to the Hall theatre for a showing of the Iranian horror movie Under the Shadow. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from either film, which from experience I knew was often the best way to come to a screening at Fantasia. I was pondering this when the lights went down and Adam Kritzer, producer of Lace Crater, was introduced to the crowd. He thanked us for coming, and urged all of us in the audience to turn to our neighbours, whether we knew them or not, and say whether we believed in ghosts. There was an aisle to my left. I glanced to my right. The man beside me shrugged. “Not particularly,” he said in French. “Same here,” I replied. 
I had errands keeping me away from the Fantasia film festival on Monday, July 25. Now, interruptions are a sad fact of life, but sometimes it’s easy to get back into the swing of things; and as it happened the next day I made it back to the De Sève theatre to watch an American horror film called We Go On, which served to get me back into the Fantasia spirit. Then the day after that I saw two more movies at the De Sève, an odd Swiss romance called Aloys followed by a French horror film called Therapy. The latter had been directed by 16-year-old Nathan Ambrosioni — his second feature film. Together the movies made an odd meditation on life, death, and horror.
Impossible to predict some things. Notably: you can’t know how you’ll react to a work of art until you’ve experienced it. Looking at the movies Fantasia offered on Sunday night, July 24, I thought I’d try If Cats Disappeared from the World (Sekai kara neko ga kietanara), which promised a tale about a terminally ill man who makes a surreal Faustian bargain. After that, I decided I should watch Superpowerless, as it was a genre piece about an aging superhero who’d lost his powers. In truth, I had my doubts about both movies; Cats looked it might suffer from excess of romanticism and forced whimsy, while Superpowerless seemed like some kind of mumblecore satire treading ground comics had worked over decades past. In the event, I was wrong to doubt. If Cats Disappeared from the World would be likely the best movie I saw at Fantasia, and probably my favourite. Superpowerless, meanwhile, turned out to be the festival’s most pleasant surprise, the film which most greatly exceeded all my expectations. 
I’d marked four screenings on the Fantasia schedule to attend on Sunday, July 24. The first two were both at the small De Sève Theatre: a presentation of the 1983 Shaw Brothers film Holy Flame of the Martial World (Wu lin sheng huo jin), followed by a short film showcase. The showcase, Fragments of Asia 2016, promised half-a-dozen pieces from across Asia, both animated and live-action. Afterward I’d have time for food, and then two more movies would follow. Before all that, though, came one of the films I’d immediately highlighted when I first saw what was playing at this year’s Fantasia.
The evening of Saturday, July 23, was going to be busy for me, with three shows at the De Sève Theatre. First, a showcase of short films called Born of Woman, which the Fantasia program told me would feature nine films by women directors “centred largely around themes of the body and interpersonal malaise.” Then after that two science-fiction features. The first would be Realive, about a man from our time (or close to it) who dies and is cryonically revived in 2083. The second would be Tank 432, about a squad of soldiers seeking shelter from a surreal battle within a battered tank. It looked like a promising night, and it got off to a good start in the late afternoon with the Born of Woman showcase.