The Features
Of the features, the two most obvious standouts were Luz (*****, Germany, Dir: Tilman Singer) and Friendly Beast (*****, Brazil, Dir: Gabriela Amaral). Both deservedly won two awards each from the festival’s judges (Best Cinematography and Best Film, Best Performance for Luciana Paes and Best Director respectively). Both of those are reviewed separately.
The rest of the features showcased a dizzying array of styles and subgenres. For fans of classic horror, He’s Out There (***, USA, Dir: Quinn Lasher) throws every cliché in the book at the screen. Masked killer. Isolation cabin in the woods. Conveniently stolen mobile phones. You can see the plot beats coming a mile away. Yet what makes the film worth watching? It’s just superbly well put-together. It won Best Editing for a reason, because even though all the parts are well-worn, the end result is intensely satisfying and pleasurable. We all knew what we were getting from the off, and the film delivered on every promise without ever mugging the camera with irony or overextending its ambition or trying to explain things away. Consider the amount of amateurish, boring tripe that fills up the lower reaches of Netflix and Amazon Prime’s horror/thriller catalogues, and this is a distinct cut above.
Of course, if you like your slasher films with a bit more socio-political context, there is Children of the Fall (****, Israel, Dir: Eitan Gafny). It’s not quite as sharply edited or well put-together as He’s Out There, but this is as fine an example as any of the way genre cinema, with its stock characters, tropes and pre-supposed scenarios, can be used to reference or approach any number of taboo topics. In this case, we have Israeli filmmakers openly criticising the country’s lurch towards xenophobia, paranoia, and fear. Set during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, we follow Rachel (Noa Maiman) a young American who joins a kibbutz in the hopes of getting in touch with her ancestry (though only her father is Jewish). The kibbutz is populated by a mix of Israelis, trigger-happy IDF soldiers, a small collective of young foreigners who were enamoured by the idea of joining a kibbutz, and a grouchy Michael Ironside living in a nearby abandoned shack. Soon enough though, the young foreigners are punished for their sinful ways, with their sexing and their marijuana smoking.
The film’s core is the dynamic between the young folk that we follow and get to know and the xenophobic arrogance of various members on the Israeli side. The foreign volunteers are generally treated like dirt by the local IDF, and they’re given an isolated house at the end of the kibbutz, with the women treated especially cruelly. Even the friendlier Israelis seem to be harbouring dark pasts here. Children of the Fall is finely-crafted. Again, though you can see the plot beats a mile away, it’s fascinating seeing how a change of location and setting makes a genre film fresh again – suddenly, the subtext and the approach is wholly different, and there’s more subtextual meat to dig up.
One interesting outlier amongst the selection was Smaller and Smaller Circles (***, Phillipines, Dir: Raya Martin). Adapted from a book by F.H. Batacan, with plenty of rain, dirt and gruesome killings this is a handsome, well-scripted serial killer film in the mould of say, Bong Joon-Ho’s Memories of Murder. We follow two Jesuit priests, Father Saenz and Father Lucero (Nonie Buencamino and Sid Lucero respectively), as they help the (mostly incompetent) local police track down a serial killer stalking young boys in the neighbourhood. It’s a mostly gripping police procedural that also tackles the scandal of child abuse in the Catholic Church head-on; we find out that Father Saenz has caused a lot of trouble for himself within the Church because of his outspokenness against it.
Unfortunately, the film is either too long by about 20 minutes, or as one festival-goer kindly pointed out, arguably too short: Smaller and Smaller Circles could have worked as a fine miniseries, allowing its novelistic source material full flower. The issue is fundamentally that the subplot around abuse in the Catholic Church feels a bit tacked-on and underdeveloped, especially the eventual denouement and reveal. The journey there however, is a fine example of genre filmmaking in countries where we traditionally see almost nothing arrive on these shores culturally, backed up by fine performances all round.
Fractured Visions made sure that it looked back into horror’s past too – there was a double bill by the British horror veteran Norman J. Warren. His early 60s work are mostly now-forgotten sexploitation films, common to low-budget filmmaking of the era, but in the 70s and 80s he struck out as a director of low-budget horror amidst the video nasty era – although his work is hardly as demented as the stuff that terrified the censors. Present for a Q+A, he is in person a smart, funny, talker. Funny how the directors who churned out the grim stuff end up being the ones who seem the sanest in person.
The two films of his shown were Terror (**, 1978) and Bloody New Year (****, 1987). Terror is very much in-debt to Dario Argento’s Suspiria, with mad colours and plenty of stylistic marvels. The first ten minutes or so are brilliantly nutsoid filmmaking, but unfortunately the film doesn’t sustain its energy. It’s solid fun for what it is, but it feels rather more like a collection of kill scenes than a fully fleshed-out slasher flick, hampered by the low-budget at times (he spoke openly of how those budget limitations affected the films at times).
Just as low-budget but admittedly much funnier was Bloody New Year. Filmed on location all over Barry Island (yes, that’s right, Barry bloody Island), this is a great little mix-up of classic haunted house and teen-movie clichés. Despite the funding issues with the film – Warren talks of issues with the executive producer drinking most of the budget on champagne – there’s a great sense of fun to the film, with a litany of cheap and cheerful effects, backed up by a few genuinely impressive moments – people disappearing behind walls and wooden snakes coming to life. There’s also great use of Barry fairground in the 80s – it’s great to see films use local character properly. Today in Wales we have a ton of international film companies using our beaches, forests and mountains for filming, but they’re always stand-ins for generic beaches, forests or mountains. It’s great to see Wales being used for Wales, even if the film doesn’t mention Barry by name.
words Fedor Tot
The rest of Fractured Visions is reviewed below
Friendly Beast + Luz – the highlights