Our final dispatch from this year’s Fantastic Fest is indicative of the remarkable range of the programming at the world’s best genre event: There’s a Spanish vampire movie, an Australian thriller, an American ghost story, and something almost indescribably built on dream logic. Three of them are worth a look when they get international release.
Let’s start with the best of the bunch, Adam Egypt Mortimer’s truly demented “Pathetic Fallacy,” a film inspired by the surreal horror visions of filmmakers like Nicolas Roeg, David Lynch, and Nicolas Winding Refn. It’s a work that defies explainer culture, unfolding like a nightmare one has while in the throes of unfathomable grief. Like “Lost Highway” or “Twin Peaks: The Return,” it doesn’t need to make practical sense as much as emotional sense, which allows Mortimer to craft a wildly unpredictable vision, one that’s set to new music by Johnny Jewel and star Scott Mescudi (aka Kid Cudi). To say that “Pathetic Fallacy” was like nothing else at Fantastic Fest would be an understatement. It’s like nothing else anywhere.
Cudi plays Asher, who has a meet-cute, romance, and tragedy in the first ten minutes of the film. The object of his affection is Iris (Jessica Rothe, in her third Fantastic Fest flick just this year), and her passing destroys Asher. Mortimer holds a scene in which she dies in Asher’s embrace a remarkably long time, her breathing getting shallower over about a full two minutes, one of the first signs that this is a filmmaker who isn’t scared to do things a little differently.
Before you know it, Asher has traveled to a mystical place known as Mount Samdi, a location that reportedly exists in between reality and fantasy, life and death. Mortimer takes him on an almost mythological journey, encountering monsters (like a serial killer played by Travis Fimmel), and even talking animals, including a spider voiced by Natasha Lyonne. Editor Vera Drew (“The People’s Joker”) spoke in the Q&A about likening Asher’s quest to that of a Disney character, except for the axe murders and nudity, of course. But talking rodents and people breaking into song? Very Disney.
“Pathetic Fallacy” is so brazenly original that its missteps are easily forgiven. It’s the kind of work that likely plays differently to its creator than its viewer, and that personal aspect can sometimes be distancing, resulting in a fantasy that’s going to be too weird for many. But sometimes art, especially genre art like the kind at Fantastic Fest, should be weird. It should be hard to unpack and predict and even explain to someone else in words. Like Lynch, Mortimer doesn’t hold your hand, challenging you to meet his undeniable vision halfway. It’s worth the effort.
More traditional chills unfold in the Spanish vampire thriller “Upiro,” a well-crafted piece of Gothic Horror reportedly based on an actual case recognized by the Catholic Church as vampirism. Writer Elena Munoz and director Oscar Martin use this story to unpack a film that’s also about gender roles in religion and the Age of Enlightenment. This moody film cleverly plays with issues of sexuality within the vampire myth, one that has been used to “explain” female desire for generations, but given a new, captivating twist here. In a Fantastic Fest of big names (Jessica Rothe times three!) and premieres from other fests (“Primetime,” “Victorian Psycho”), this was one of most-buzzed under-the-radar flicks.
Pauline Brisy is excellent as Ana, a novitiate at an isolated monastery in Spain in 1775. Her arrival seems to unearth something from the clay in this building, something seen watching the nuns from a malevolent POV, and eventually doing its bloodsucking under the cover of night. Martin films scenes of nuns being awoken in close-ups of their faces, a sucking sound coming from off camera as they convey something between pleasure and pain. One could read the scene as something the opposite of violent as Martin plays with the idea of a supernatural creature that leads to sexual awakening as much as immortal life.
This idea is taken even further when a Franciscan priest named Father Rubis (Diego Anido) comes to the monastery to figure out the root of the blood disease impacting these young women, and Ana, well, has an eye on him. Brisy, Anido, and others disappear into the fabric of this piece, one that feels truly transportive to a different time and place, an aesthetic enabled by top-notch production design and cinematography from Alberto Morago. “Upiro” sometimes feels a little longer than it should, but it reaches an unexpected final act with one terrifying reveal that stands among the best in the vampire genre in years.
Nick Kozakis’s “Kick On” made the double dip from TIFF’s Midnight Madness to Fantastic Fest, and it’s easy to see why it appealed to both programming teams. Early in the film, Kozakis actually has someone yell “Don’t do something stupid!” as a bar fight breaks out. This is a film about people “doing something stupid” over and over again to the point that most of them are dead.
The best way to describe it is if the Alfred Molina scene in “Boogie Nights” merged with the plot of “Green Room,” and all of it was bathed in intense, bloody make-up work. It’s one of those tense thrillers in which you wait to see exactly how it’s going to erupt into chaos, and Kozakis doesn’t hold back once it does, giving genre fans exactly what they want from a movie like this one. Some will argue that these characters are illogically stupid, but genre fans accept that kind of set-up when the pay-off is this viciously entertaining.
Like “Green Room,” the set-up is wonderfully simple: Four young people get booted from a bar and want to “kick on” to another party. These attractive Aussies find themselves in the lair of a Russian mobster named Ray (Nikolas Nikolaeff), an obvious lunatic who insists that they party with him instead of just buying their drugs and heading off into the night. Kozakis and his team put a lot of effort into designing and populating Ray’s space, as it’s pretty much the entire setting of the film. And, to the film’s benefit, they even drop in a few interesting characters around Ray, guys who will end more than mere soldiers for the bad guy.
The good guys are led by Eden (Markella Kavenagh), who makes the final dumb decision when she decides to steal some cash from the obviously unhinged Ray. Before you know it, Eden and her buddies are being beaten, attacked, and held prisoner for around 90 minutes.
Admittedly, Kozakis’s film turns into an exercise in style—we know almost nothing about anyone but Eden, who has a dying sister for whom she needs the cash, and Ray’s insecure role as the son of a famous crime lord—but it’s impressively rendered style, nonetheless. Yes, Saulnier’s obvious inspiration was better at finding ways to embed character beats into the non-stop action, but this movie has a slightly different goal—it’s far bloodier, playing almost like an “Evil Dead” movie in its bodily harm. It’s imperfect but also never boring, the kind of flick that works as well at midnight in Toronto as it does in Texas.
Sadly, there are large passages of “What Happened to Doris?” that qualify as boring, and it doesn’t really play well any time or any place. Nick Simon retells the story of Doris Bither, the reportedly true haunting that inspired “The Entity” over four decades ago, but he does so with too little veracity or personality, leading to a film that feels like little more than a “Conjuring” rip-off, and one that strands poor Heather Graham with direction that can’t get to a character that feels genuine. It may be a famous case, but it’s not a successful film.
Graham plays Bither, a single mother in Culver City who reported to experts at UCLA that she was being so aggressively haunted by a poltergeist that she claimed she had been sexually assaulted by one, and had the bruises on her body to prove it. Before you know it, a “Conjuring”-esque team of investigators are in the Bither apartment, including characters played by Marcus Coloma, Morgan Peter Brown, and Mimi Rogers, who is wasted in a part that’s basically just there to explain what might happening to Doris. She’s the answer to the title.
To be blunt, nothing in “What Happened to Doris?” feels like anything but actors on a set. There just hasn’t been enough effort put into the details to give it any texture, which means the scares and characters have no impact. Reading the Wikipedia page about the actual haunting is actually scarier.
