Fantasia Diary 2015, Day 14: The Visit and The Demolisher
No-one’s a perfect critic, and I’ll readily confess to being less perfect than most. At any rate, sometimes a film’s best appreciated with a certain level of knowledge. Maybe you know too much about the film’s subject, and you see nothing new. Or you know too little, and you find yourself lost. In the latter case, at least, you can wonder whether your lack of knowledge is representative of a general audience, if not of whatever audience the artist has in mind. No critic’s going to be able to hit the sweet spot of knowing just enough, not every time out. Nobody’s perfect.
Monday, July 27, I saw two movies, both in the De Sève Theatre. The first was a documentary called The Visit, examining what would happen if aliens landed on Earth — what the response would be from human governments and scientific organisations. Then I watched a suspense movie called The Demolisher, about a woman stalked by a mentally-disintegrating police officer. And I found myself wrong-footed in the first case by knowing too much and in the second by knowing too little.
Before The Visit a short film screened: “Testimony of the Unspeakable” (in the original French, “Témoignage de l’indicible”). The director, Simon Pernollet, spoke briefly beforehand setting up the film, a story told by one of his friends about his childhood in Mexico and strange things that happened around his family’s home. We hear a voice telling several anecdotes about unexplained happenings; the stories have the feel of real experiences, in the way they seem to build up an atmosphere more than a connected set of incidents. Meanwhile, the camera moves around an empty house at night, catching shadows, creating an atmosphere and sense of place. At six minutes long, the film manages to subsist on the spooky magical-realist feeling it evokes without feeling as though it’s outstaying its welcome.
There’s what you expect from a movie, and then there’s what you get. Sometimes a good movie can be a little disappointing, because it gives you only more-or-less what you’d been expecting. And sometimes a movie can surprise you with just how good it is. So if I say that on Sunday, July 26, I had a good day at the Fantasia Festival, it actually means I had two very different experiences in the big Hall Theatre. First was a documentary, Monty Python: The Meaning of Live. And then a supernatural thriller starring Henry Rollins, He Never Died. Both were good. The second was surprisingly good.
Saturday, July 25, was an odd day. At 4 in the afternoon I was meeting my girlfriend and some other friends to watch Princess Jellyfish, a live-action adaptation of a manga that had already been adapted into an anime series. But because I had to queue for it with members of the media, I’d actually be waiting in a different line than the people I’d be seeing the movie with. So I decided I’d go to the Fantasia screening room first, and watch another film: Mamoru Oshii’s Nowhere Girl.
Thursday, July 23, was the first day of the Fantasia Festival I chose not to see any movies. Wandering down to the screening room was a very real temptation, but I desperately needed to do laundry and other household chores — as well as to write about the films I was seeing. In fact as I made my plans it seemed that I was entering a relatively light stretch of the schedule, before what looked like a killer weekend. 
On Wednesday, July 22, I saw three movies at the Fantasia Festival — which made it an average day, to the extent I had an average day at Fantasia. It began at 1 PM, with a documentary called Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made. After that was a Japanese comedy-drama called 100 Yen Love. Then I made a difficult decision to pass on both the New Zealand horror-suspense film Observance and the American science-fiction film Synchronicity in favour of the Korean historical epic The Royal Tailor. I figured I could watch a later showing of Synchronicity, while Observance was available in the screening room. But this looked like my only chance to catch Tailor on the big screen, and I had an idea it was the sort of film that would take full advantage of the Hall Theatre’s scale.
I was at Concordia’s De Sève Theatre early on Tuesday, July 21, for a showing of a 35mm print of the Shaw Brothers’ wuxia fantasy Buddha’s Palm. After that, I had a decision to make. At 5:30 the Nigerian zombie movie Ojuju played directly against a re-release of the British-Canadian horror-suspense movie The Reflecting Skin. Which would I see? And then after that, the first live-action film by director Mamoru Oshii, Nowhere Girl, was directly opposite a quirky romantic fantasy comedy, Haruko’s Paranormal Laboratory. Again: which to see?
Some days at the Fantasia Festival I find a common theme among the movies I see. And some days I don’t. Sometimes the day’s movies are simply a wonderfully strange mix of things each wonderfully strange in themselves. Bearing that in mind, let’s jump into what I saw on Sunday, July 19.