Fantasia International Film Festival 2024 Capsule Reviews
There were tons of cool movies to discover at the Fantasia International Film Festival this year. Here are capsule reviews of several that I was fortunate enough to screen.
Cuckoo - 17-year-old Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) is forced to stay at a resort in the Bavarian Alps with her father Luis (Marton Csokas), stepmother Beth (Jessica Henwick), and mute half-sister Alma (Mila Lieu). The owner, Herr König (Dan Stevens), is clearly doing something nefarious there, as Gretchen discovers when female guests begin inexplicably vomiting and a screaming lady starts following her around.
The title Cuckoo is appropriate because director Tilman Singer (Luz) favors in-the-moment madness over strict storytelling coherence. You don’t always know what’s happening with the plot, but that’s seemingly intentional. The point is that Gretchen is trapped in a hellish scenario. Schafer gives an effective turn as the scared teen, and Stevens is hilariously sinister as König. Horror buffs who want to have everything fully explained at the end might be mildly frustrated by the film’s desire to remain somewhat vague. If that doesn’t bother you, the sterling performances, crazy developments, and overall unpredictable tone provide some fun.
Penalty Loop - We’ve all seen time loop movies like Groundhog Day and Happy Death Day. This Japanese thriller utilizes the concept in a manner that’s fresh and inventive. The hero is a guy named Jun whose girlfriend was murdered. He sneaks into the workplace of the killer, Mizoguchi, and brutally kills him. The next day, he wakes up and Mizoguchi is still alive. This leads to a loop wherein he must slay his enemy on a daily basis. In a cool twist, both men become aware they’re in a time loop. The film shows how their relationship develops as they’re forced to reenact the same scenario every day.
Penalty Loop keeps you guessing from start to finish. You never know quite where it’s headed, but each step on the journey is twisted fun. Underneath that fun are some unexpectedly poignant themes about revenge and mercy. Hopefully the movie will get a stateside release at some point because fans of twisty sci-fi will lose their minds over this one.
The Tenants - In this comedy from South Korea, a young man named Shin-dong finds himself facing eviction. To get around that, he decides to rent out a room to a married couple. They choose the bathroom over the living room. And when they have financial problems, they rent out part of the bathroom to someone else. That’s just the start of the madness.
The Tenants imagines a dystopian future where working-class people literally live on top of each other while dreaming of finding a way into fancy new cities designed to keep them out. With its black-and-white visuals and emphasis on absurdity, the film is almost like the love child of Jim Jarmusch and Terry Gilliam. The pace may be on the slow side, but the story's skewed vision deserves respect.
Hollywood 90028 - Fantasia always features a few revival screenings of hard-to-find underground classics. One of this year’s entries was this 1973 drama from director Christina Hornisher. It stars Christopher Augustine as Mark, a porn flick cinematographer who has a kink for strangling women to death. He suffers a crisis of conscience, then meets what may be the woman of his dreams. Or maybe she’s not.
Rather than being plot driven, the movie takes an approach similar to Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop, wherein not much happens on the surface but a lot goes on between the lines. Hornisher utilizes actual Hollywood locations in a fascinating way, especially during a scene where Mark peruses an adult bookstore. It’s a portrait of his loneliness, his horniness, and his anger over an inability to get further ahead in show business. Grindhouse Releasing has given an impressive new 4K transfer to this ‘70s curiosity.
© 2024 Mike McGranaghan