Black Gate

Don’t Say Its Name is a feature film from director Rueben Martell, co-written by Martell with Gerald Wexler, that had its world premiere at the 2021 Fantasia Film Festival. It’s a film set in a northern Indigenous community divided by an offer from a big mining company promising money in exchange for the rights to tear up the land. But then murders start happening, some of them apparently supernatural.

The story starts with the murder of anti-mining activist Kharis Redwater (Sheena Kaine) one night on an isolated icy road. As law enforcement investigates, in the person of middle-aged Betty Stonechild (Madison Walsh), other killings happen — violent deaths, victims torn apart by some invisible force in front of witnesses. Betty deputises Park Ranger Stacey Cole (Sera-Lys McArthur, also at Fantasia this year in the short “She Whistles” in the Born of Woman showcase). But even her experience fighting in Afghanistan, which has left her with a bad case of PTSD, is tested by the mysterious entity.

The film’s been billed as a horror movie, but I’d call it dark fantasy. This genre quibble speaks to the effect of the film. There are horrific killings, and there is a supernatural entity responsible, but the main characters aren’t terrified by it. They’re cautious, of course, as they’d be cautious of a creature like a maddened bear or wolf, but their actions aren’t driven primarily by fear, they don’t break down in terror or even come close, they never panic. Confrontations with the creature are marked by desperation but not mindless terror. The point of this is that the story is not one of an isolated community terrorised by the supernatural, but a story of resourceful and determined women trying to protect their home and loved ones.

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“Reklaw” is a 12-minute short by Polaris Banks, starring Lance Henriksen playing somewhat against type as the pacifist ringleader of a group of talented vigilantes who drive around trying to keep people out of jail by destroying evidence before the police arrive. We learn this through watching one specific case where they attempt to save a woman from the law only for violence to rear its head. The film moves well, with an interesting structure and a few clever ideas, and there’s a good mix of men-at-work humour with serious commentary on society. But the backstory’s opaque, and probably could have used more room to breathe. There’s an interesting idea here, which could make a feature film or a TV show (and indeed Banks has said the short’s a proof of concept), but is probably not displayed at its best in a single 12-minute short.

Bundled with the short was Yakuza Princess. It’s a Brazilian film, from director Vicente Amorim, who co-wrote with Kimi Lee, Tubaldini Shelling, and Fernando Toste. They were working from a graphic novel called Samurai Shiro, by Danilo Bayreuth, which I have not read. It’s an action movie based in the Japanese community of Sao Paolo, Brazil.

20 years ago there was a massacre of a Yakuza clan in Japan. Today, Akemi (Masumi) is a young woman in Sao Paulo’s large Japanese community who has grown up studying swordplay but unaware of certain key truths about her family. Elsewhere in the city, a young man (Johnathan Rhys-Meyers) with amnesia, nasty battle-scars, and a katana wakes up in a hospital. The film proceeds to bring these things together, with a healthy dose of gunplay and swordfighting.

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Things That Go Bump In the East 2021 was this year’s iteration of Fantasia’s regular showcase of short genre films from Asia. This year brought a collection of eight films from six countries, including the US (“for a dash of diasporic bedevilment,” as the Fantasia program notes observed).

It started with “Chewing Gum” (“Chingum”), from India. It’s an 18-minute piece directed by Mihir Fadnavis, who co-wrote with Srinivas Annamraju. One stormy full moon night, a deceitful man boards a train. But something’s in there with him. And it demands a kind of tribute: chewing gum. He flees, and the monster pursues, and the farther he goes, by whatever means of transport, the faster it follows. This is an incredibly well-done film in black-and-white — mostly black, in fact, as Pratik Shah’s cinematography covers the screen in gorgeous shadows, pushing the classic horror atmosphere. I’ll note that I’ve seen an intriguing review (confirmed by an official synopsis of the film for another festival) that points out a political subtext I didn’t catch; it’s another layer to a stunningly well-crafted spooky film about a supernatural nighttime pursuit, with a subtle soundtrack and a splendid build.

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For each of the past several years Fantasia’s gathered together short genre films by women into annual showcase presentations called Born of Woman. I’ve seen all of them, and they’ve all been strong collections. So I was eager to see this year’s version, with eight films from six different countries.

The first was “Lucid,” from Canada, directed by Deanna Milligan from a script by Claire E. Robertson. It’s a 17-minute story about Mia (Caitlin Taylor), an art student in the early 1990s, who presents her class with a self-portrait that’s critiqued remorselessly. The movie that follows shows her digging deep into herself to find a project that will give her a good grade, and presents us with the gory yet oddly cheery results. The film looks very nice, with lush saturated colour, and an impressive long travelling shot at the start following Mia into and through her school. I found the period background didn’t come out very much, though that may be a function of the film trying to speak to the art world and art trends of that time, with which I am basically unfamiliar. At any rate, it’s a funny, weird, and engagingly gross movie.

Next was “Inheritance,” a 14-minute American movie written and directed by Annalise Lockhart, about a Black family in Vermont who are haunted by still silent White ghosts. When the youngest of the family of three, Norra (Victoria A. Villier), inherits the deed to her family’s cottage she sees the ghosts for the first time, and we follow her as she tries to find a way to free herself and her family from constant surveillance on their own property. The end’s a bit surreal, moving from horror or dark fantasy to science-fictional themes with a traditionally Vermont flavour; the way out of past threats is in this case Afrofuturist technology. It works, but there’s also some ambiguity in the solution Norra and her family find. Still, the story has a strong feel, establishing its characters as rich individuals, and memorably insisting on their dignity.

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Last year I reviewed a movie called Kakegurui (映画　賭ケグルイ, Eiga: Kakegurui). This year served up Kakegurui 2: Ultimate Russian Roulette (also Kakegurui Part 2: Desperate Russian Roulette, originally 映画 賭ケグルイ絶体絶命ロシアンルーレット, Kakegurui the Movie: Zettai Zetsumei Russian Roulette), the second movie in the franchise, like the first directed by Tsutomu Hanabusa and co-written by him with Minato Takano. And this is indeed a franchise; starting with a manga (written by Homura Kawamoto and illustrated by Toru Naomura) it branched out to an anime, a live-action TV show (streaming on Netflix), and these two live-action films starring the cast of the TV show — as well as spin-off manga, light novels, and a now-discontinued video game. After being entertained by the first movie last year I added the show to my Netflix queue, although I haven’t watched it yet (I have only so much time to dedicate to watching TV, and the Criterion Channel has a lot of films and many of them are really good). The second movie played this year’s Fantasia bundled with the first one, and remembering that there was a lot of plot in the first, I decided to check it out again and then catch the sequel.

What I said last year still applies. The movies are set at a private school in Japan for the rich and powerful, with no adults or fixed classes; the curriculum is entirely based around gambling, as students bet vast sums in complex games of chance. Students who lose too much money become the pets of the winners, kitties if girls and doggies if boys. A tyrannical student council oversees the whole affair, but is troubled by a mysterious transfer student named Yumeko (Minami Hamabe, also of Ajin: Demi-Human), our heroine. The first movie follows events at the school as a village of anti-gambling students secede from the main campus.

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Last year at Fantasia I reviewed a movie called Climate of the Hunter, directed and co-written by Mickey Reece, an underground filmmaker who’s made over two dozen features. Reece is back this year with Agnes, a strange take on exorcism and nunsploitation films, which like Climate he co-wrote with John Selvidge. It’s a bit like Climate in that it takes horror-movie conventions and upends them; I think it’s overall more successful, though I’m not sure it works overall.

Agnes opens at a convent where a young nun, Agnes (Hayley McFarland), has apparently become possessed by a demon. To take care of the matter the Catholic hierarchy sends a veteran priest, Father Donaghue (Ben Hall, in Climate last year and also at Fantasia this year with a role in What Josiah Saw) and a bright-eyed idealistic younger acolyte named Benjamin (Jake Horowitz). Things do not proceed as planned. And then comes the midpoint of the movie, and the story jumps ahead in time, and the plot of the first half is largely abandoned to follow a secondary character from the convent, Mary (Molly C. Quinn), who is now trying to make her way in the world despite all the things she’s seen and the doubts she now has about her God.

The two halves of the picture have different tones. The first half, surprisingly, has more comedy. Father Donaghue is funny and charismatic. The nuns are eccentric, but human, and Mary Buss as the Mother Superior in particular is both of those things as the problem of Agnes continues to resist easy exorcism. And then in the second half Mary in the outside world faces a colder reality. Not only is there not much obvious genre content, there also isn’t any obvious sense of the divine or of otherworldly powers.

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“Cloud” is a 29-minute film from France, directed by Joséphine Darcy Hopkins and written by Hopkins with Jean-Jacques Kahn. Hopkins is part of Les Films de la Mouche, a collective that (per ScreenAnarchy) aims to “mix very personal obsessions with ‘genre grammar.’” That’s visible here, in a story about a radioactive cloud descending on a small town, which prompts 15-year-old Eugénie (Cypriane Gardin) to run away with her friend Capucine (Solène Rigot) and Capucine’s ailing mother (Catherine Salée). The movie takes some unpredictable twists, and spends much of its time as an unusual character-centred buddy movie. It looks very nice, with some lovely natural backgrounds in a forest at night and among the mountains by day; the threat of the cloud is sometimes distant, but never entirely absent, flavouring the story with a science-fictional overtone. I thought the ending was a touch too ambiguous, but then again it’s difficult to see a better resolution.

Along with the short came Glasshouse, a post-apocalyptic tale from South Africa and director Kelsey Egan, who co-wrote with Emma De Wet. It’s set some time in the future, when Earth’s atmosphere’s been contaminated by a plague called the Shred, which destroys human memories. One small family — consisting of an old matriarch (Adrienne Pearce), three sisters, and a brain-blasted brother (Brent Vermeulen) — all live together holed up in an expansive greenhouse, a self-sufficient ecosystem where the plants create clean air (don’t ask where the family’s protein comes from, because I don’t know and the film isn’t really interested in that kind of detail). A mysterious stranger (Hilton Pelser) enters the house from outside, his memories apparently more-or-less intact, disrupting the family dynamic and unearthing old secrets. The oldest sister, Bee (Jessica Alexander) is drawn to him; the mother is more suspicious.

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“Katu” is a 16-minute short from Sweden’s Oskar Johansson. It opens, as a title card tells us, five years after humanity lost its language. More precisely, after mysterious visitors took language from us; human beings can now only mutter syllables unintelligible to each other (in a nice touch, the nonsense words spoken onscreen are ‘translated’ by subtitles in an alien alphabet). In a large house a man and woman live. One night there is a knock at the door. They have a human visitor, and must struggle to find out what he wants before the alien language-thieves come. This is a moody piece, which feels like a part of a larger story. The glimpses of odd rites are difficult to parse, but the frustration of people not understanding each other is clear. Visually it’s dark and shadowy and effective, to the point that while I did not always understand the story I wanted to see more.

Bundled with it was The Righteous, one of the best feature films I’ve seen this year. Written and directed by Mark O’Brien, it stars Henry Czerny as Frederic Mason, an older man who years ago left the church to marry Ethel (Mimi Kuzyk). The movie mostly takes place around their rural home, when, in the aftermath of the death of their adopted daughter, a young man (O’Brien) stumbles from the woods with a damaged ankle. He becomes a long-term guest as he heals, but there’s a sinister aspect to him, and slowly the truth comes out — about him, and about Fredric.

This is a black-and-white horror movie, and it strikes you immediately with its visual power. The lighting and chiaroscuro effects are stunning, not only attractive and not only atmospheric but symbolic: illumination and shadow feel as though they represent spiritual realities. The promotional material for the film uses Bergman as a point of reference, which is clearly visible in the film’s emotional tone as well.

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“Anita McNelson,” written and directed by Canadian Luke Whitmore, is a 15-minute suspense film about an elderly woman who finds hints that her husband is having an affair. It’s nicely shot, apparently a period film, and unfurls with minimal dialogue. It’s effective because it gets across not just the emotional situation of the characters but also a history that shapes their present situation and actions. The story’s simple but effective, though at one point it apparently depends on a conveniently-open door; and it has a final sting that at least borders on the gratuitous, as though Whitmore didn’t trust the strength of the rest of the short and had to provide a cute little bow. It’s unnecessary, because the rest of the film does work just fine.

Bundled with it was Stanleyville, a feature-length satire directed by Canadian character actor and filmmaker Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, who co-wrote with Rob Benvie. It’s his debut feature film (after three shorts), and he drew an interesting cast, notably including Julian Richings (whose extensive body of work includes last year’s Anything For Jackson as well as 2014’s Patch Town). In a question-and-answer period (available, as usual, on Fantasia’s YouTube page) Richings talked about how McCabe-Lokos’ background as a character actor informed the structure and craft in the script, which puts a set of quirky characters in a room together and sets them at each others’ throats. You can see that craft, and what comes out of the performances; how the story hits may depend more on the viewer.

The film begins with Maria (Susanne Wuest), an office worker with a family, who one day at the mall is met by a stranger (Richings) who gives her the chance to throw that life away to take part in a contest. She’ll be locked up with four other people, and they will be given a series of contests, and the one who wins the most contests will win authentic personal transcendence. And also a new SUV. The other four people are each deeply strange, but so are the contests they’re given — blow up and pop as many balloons as they can in one minute, or write a new national anthem, or build a telecommunications device. Some of the other contestants will stop at nothing. And it looks as though whoever’s behind the game is making things up as they go. And then the contestants make contact with a voice beyond the room, and there are mysteries there as well.

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