Black Gate

On the 3rd Day (Al Tercer Día) is an excellent horror film from Argentina, based on the novel 3 días by Gonzalo Ventura. The book was turned into a script by Ventura with Alberto Fasce, and the adaptation directed by Daniel de la Vega. It’s from the same production company that brought the world last year’s The Undertaker’s Home (AKA The Funeral Home), and there are some passing similarities: both are well-shot films that have fun playing with traditional horror elements, and indeed have all the zest of classic horror stories, while also making interesting structural choices and telling a good story in thoughtful ways.

There’s a limit to how much one should describe the plot of On the 3rd Day; part of the fun of the film is in figuring out what’s happening at about the rate the main character does. That character is Cecilia (Mariana Anghileri), who abducts her son from her abusive husband one night and then ends up in a bad car accident involving a strange old man named Enrique (Gerardo Romano), who himself is carrying a curious cargo. Three days later Cecilia wakes up in an old house with no idea of what’s happened since the accident and no idea where her son is. We follow her as she wanders off to find out the secret of those missing days, and in a parallel track of story follow Enrique as he tries to solve some mysteries of his own connected with that night.

We soon get an idea of what kind of story Enrique thinks this is, one in which he’s a hero fighting terrible darkness. But is he right? Much of the early part of the movie revolves around the mania that appears to drive him, implicitly set against with the mystery that grips Cecilia. Enrique’s very certain about many things, perhaps too certain, while Cecilia’s part in the story is defined by her uncertainty. It makes for a good contrast, and the film’s incredibly effective at slowly revealing the truth of what’s going on — not just in measuring out how much to deliver when, but also how to exceed the promises it appears to make about the kind of movie we’re watching. What looks like a suspense film becomes utter horror, and one that goes all the way into a kind of dark romanticism, a gothic tone that nods to classics of German Expressionism.

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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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