Black Gate

Written and directed by David Mataró, “Tongue With Capers” (“Llengua amb tàperes”) is a 15-minute Catalan-language short involving the walking dead. Months after a zombie apocalypse, a man (Toni De los Ángeles) holed up in a bar rescues his neighbour (Aina Cortès), who has a strange plan to communicate with the zombies. The film plays as a huis clos, two actors in a single location, with quick dialogue and a twist at the end. Like most zombie movies, it’s about human beings and how they behave to each other; in this case there’s something to say about how well we knw each other and maybe what it’s like to be in community with each other. It’s a nice piece, with a fair bit of nastiness but little gore.

Bundled with the short was the classic 1972 Spanish-Portuguese feature Tombs of the Blind Dead (La noche del terror ciego, also known in English as The Blind Dead, Tombs of the Evil Dead, Legend of the Blind Dead, Mark of the Devil Part 4: Tombs of the Blind Dead, Mark of the Devil Part V: Night of the Blind Terror, and, in a recut form with a tacked-on prologue, Revenge From Planet Ape). Written and directed by Amando de Ossorio, Synapse Films spent over a year creating a painstaking high-definition restoration of the movie. Tombs was quite successful on its initial release, spawning three sequels (while inspiring many other films and at least one comic) and helping to start a boom in Spanish horror cinema. I was pleased to see how well it holds up, especially in the lovely Synapse restoration.

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The Fantasia International Film Festival does a good job matching genres when they bundle a short together with a feature. So Tin Can, a feature-length claustrophobic near-future science-fiction film, came with “Death Valley,” an 11-minute tale of a future of environmental devastation; both about isolation and both featuring protagonists isolated from the world. THe short, written and directed by Grace Sloan, follows a woman in the future living in space who is determined to travel to Death Valley on a barren Earth in order to practise yoga as the sun sets, and then go back into space to attend her friend’s New Year’s Eve party. Things do not go as planned. There’s a nice retro feel to the movie, which looks like it was shot on film, and the effects have the bargain-basement feel of an analog era without feeling cheap for the sake of being cheap — rather, they feel cheap for the sake of an aesthetic, which is perfectly fine. The film’s a little opaque, narratively, but at least provides scope for contemplation; I take it as a piece about the clash between a promised future and the never-quite-dying past.

Then came Tin Can, a Canadian science-fiction movie with strong horror overtones. Directed by Seth A. Smith and written by Smith with Darcy Spidle, it takes place in the near future as a pandemic named Coral ravages eastern Canada. One researcher, Fret (Anna Hopkins) thinks she may have a cure, but then she’s kidnapped and finds herself waking up in a suspended animation pod. The movie’s about her slow struggle to get out of the oversized tin can and learn the truth of what’s happened to her; we as viewers slowly find out as she does.

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I ended my second day of Fantasia 2021 with another feature-and-short bundle. The short film was “The Machine,” a 12-minute piece about a man, newly hired for an office job, who’s given the task of figuring out the purpose of a mysterious machine in the basement. The film was shot on an obvious budget, and though the actors give it their best efforts, the material doesn’t really work. In particular, there’s a shot right at the end whose placement suggests it’s delivering a piece of information crucial to the story — but if it is, I couldn’t figure out what the information was supposed to be. There’s an interesting Kafkaesque idea somewhere in here, but unfortunately it isn’t brought out very well.

The feature was Broadcast Signal Intrusion. It’s written by Phil Drinkwater and Tim Woodall, and directed by Jacob Gentry, who also directed 2015’s Synchronicity. Like that film, Broadcast Signal Intrusion is dark and moody, following a man whose reality becomes radically destabilised. In this case, it’s a computer guy named James (Harry Shum Jr) in Chicago in 1999. He’s archiving old TV broadcasts, and becomes obsessed with a couple of weird incidents when pirates briefly took over the airwaves for a couple of minutes: broadcast signal intrusions. Driven to figure out the meaning behind them, he goes further and further down a dark path.

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“A Piglet’s Tale” is a 12-minute dialogue-free animated short film written and directed by Fabrizio Gammardella. A co-production of the UK, France, and Italy, it starts out looking like a traditional heartwarming family cartoon, with lovely 2D artwork — flowing lines and watercolour backgrounds — and a story about a couple who struggle to have a child. They’re gifted with a birth, and find the child has a rare characteristic. And just as you think you have an idea of what kind of film this is and where it’s going, it takes an incredibly dark swerve, almost as baffling as it is disturbing. Title cards at the end explain: this is a film with a specific polemic purpose.

It’s a purpose I broadly agree with, but I wonder if the film succeeds in supporting its cause. There’s no doubt about the craft involved; the story’s told not only well but in exactly the kid’s-movie style that needs to be caught in order for the short to be effective. In particular, hints at foreshadowing turn out to be feints, an effective touch. But at the same time this means there’s a randomness to events at the end, which risks coming from too far out of nowhere. Ultimately I think the film succeeds, as the randomness can be seen to reflect the experience of (not to be too specific) those whom the film is about in the real world. It’s certainly powerful; the stunned feeling I was left with certainly wasn’t entirely bafflement. It’s a strong movie, and despite early appearances, not for kids.

Bundled with “A Piglet’s Tale” was the feature film Bull, written and directed by Paul Andrew Williams. Ten years ago, Bull (Neil Maskell) was a legbreaker for Norm (David Hayman), the head of a criminal family in a small English town. Then he vanished, betrayed by Norm’s gang. Now he’s back, looking for his ex-wife Gemma (Lois Brabin-Platt), Norm’s daughter. Bound up with that quest is revenge for what happened ten years ago. The movie tells its story along two tracks, one in the present and one in flashbacks showing what led to Bull’s betrayal, and it all builds to a climax where we see and understand his vengeance — and are left with a final harrowing twist.

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