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Montréal 2026
An ace of diamonds signed by a cartoonist rests alongside its fifty-one unadorned companions.
7/30: Recluse
Henry Chaisson goes full tilt 1980s BBC spook story here, with his slow pacing matching the gloomy atmospherics. A sound engineer (a profession seemingly irrelevant to the goings-on) must return home to attend to her dying father, a famously troubled artist who suffers a nasty gasoline burn at the film’s beginning. The lead is, appropriately, a cipher, with costars carrying various degrees of mysterious weight (shouts-out to Fantasia regulars Toby Poser and Kimball Farley). If you can slip into the measured nature of the game, Recluse is a satisfying little spooker.
The Leader
Alternately funny, sinister, and unbelievable, The Leader chronicles the rise and devastating fall of Marshall Applewhite and his “Heaven’s Gate” cult. Members are harvested from the dejected and hopeless masses and molded into a helpless existence. Tim Blake Nelson positively shines in Michael Gallagher’s docudrama, but the real gem is Vera Farmiga as co-founder Bonnie Lu Nettles. Here down to earth seriousness gives weight to the experience, making Bonnie’s death in 1985 a preemptive death knell. Well-crafted and very unsettling.
Never After Dark
After the serious let-down of The Mouths, Dave Boyle’s J-Horror restored my faith in the phenomenon. There’s the expected blue-cold darkness, and a ghostly fellow with slashed mouth hunting for something at certain hours of the day, but there’s also warmth and fun. Airi is a ghost hunter with a sidekick in the form of her deceased older sister (appearing in mirrors as a young girl, having died many years prior) and a disinclination toward live people (her semi-flirtations with a new client’s skeptic son are delightfully awkward). Her rig to visit the other realm is a doozy, involving a zoetrope, a candle, and a receptacle to burn a lock of hair, and the mid-century quaint hotel setting allows for plenty of corners to hide behind. Be advised: anyone with teeth-related fears should think twice about this one.
7/31: TOKYO BURST: Crime City
One buddy I encountered after the screening declared Eiji Uchida’s film to be stupid; another forthrightly declared, “Now that’s entertainment, dammit!” I agree with them both—and not just because I’m diplomatic by nature. Tokyo Burst (which is a power-beverage name if I’ve ever heard one) is gloriously entertaining, and gloriously stupid. It is well executed, though, with fun violent showcases, peopled by lovable heroes and villains. The story is… erm, let me try to remember. Something to do with a rookie cop who’s an erstwhile yakuza, teaming up with a South Korean special agent in pursuit of a pair of goons who disturb both the peace and gangland profits. Great kicks and head butts, as well as a delightful “high speed” chase on bicycle through the crowded city.
8/1: Cocoon — One Summer of Girlhood
Beautiful film, bleak subject matter. To be expected, for the former, from a studio descended from the famed Ghibli peeps, and for the latter, by the late World War Two setting on a southern island in Japan. Yukimitsu Ina tells the tale of a group of high school girls conscripted into hospital work for the failing Japanese forces. San is the soft-souled protagonist, who must navigate increasingly dangerous circumstances with her tough-as-nails pal, Mayu. Mayu is protective of San for reasons beyond friendship. As the hammer falls, San’s retreat behind rose-colored lenses accelerates, until we see flower petals spewing from the bullet wounds suffered by her compatriots. She grows as a person, though, and so develops a strong mind to match her creative one. A melancholy, beautiful experience.
God Skin
Paween Purijitpanya, you had me fully on board for seventy minutes and then you pulled a fast one. The open half of God Skin is an amazing romp of arena violence, with MMA stylings augmented by nano-robot induced spirit animal attacks. Marwin’s a nobody (worse than that, perhaps, in that he’s a food deliveryman nobody) with a mountain of medical debt to pay on his mother’s behalf—and lo, he bumps into old friend/current fight promoter Itt, who draws him into the latest sports-violence craze. The usual Outside Works From the Bottom to the Top trope is deftly pursued until just over the halfway mark, when God Skin tilts fast and hard toward a weird conspiracy/reality subterfuge thing, and loses all feeling for the hero and the villains. The subsequent beatings just aren’t as satisfying, and not just because they no longer featured electro-light spirit beasts. A pity.
8/2: The Peril at Pincer Point
You were looking for a feature-length comedy in the vein of “The Mighty Boosh” and Toast of London, right? If so, look no further than Jake Kuhn and Noah Stratton-Twine’s “period” piece (set in 1999) about a foley designer sent off to some crummy island town by psychotic director P.W. Griffith, in order to record a sound no one has ever heard before. Jim, the sound man, runs across various seaside stereotypes as he dives headlong into his assignment, learning the sinister legend of a sea captain who harvests souls via crabwork. (This description is, I swear, rather accurate.) Would make for a fun double-feature alongside Hundreds of Beavers, it’s shot in a Maddin-style of false antiquity.
Bagworm
My goodness, this was a trial. I have no doubt, however, that director Oliver Bernsen intended it as such. Protagonist Carroll is a charmless doomer with social aspirations matched only by his raw talent for alienating people. He’s also a “Handmer” salesman (this tool is designed to be a better-fitted-handle-on-a-hammer for all kinds of people, including the “Three-fingered Filipino”), but loses the gig over a Zoom meeting in his burnt-out California home. In one respect, I suppose, this film is very good, as the performances are all compelling, and the descent is real. However, I’m not partial to this much abuse piled on the protagonist (and by extension, the viewer). The modestly optimistic conclusion prevents me from condemning Bagworm, but I do not care to witness Carroll’s ordeal—or his rotting, tetanus-infected leg—again. However, there is an audience out there who might want to sink their teeth into this Job-ian odyssey.
Freaks Part II
Guess who’s back, back again? Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein are back, tell a friend. Eight years ago, I enjoyed an anti-MCU imagining from this pair, which now has a sequel. Freaks Part II is another contemplation on the mutant theoretical: as a minority of individuals present a catastrophic challenge to the rest of us (the premise suggests that each subsequent generation of “freaks” is more powerful—and dangerous—than the previous), what should we do? Ideally, we don’t go on a killing spree. Also, ideally, a mother shouldn’t coerce her daughter into her own killing spree to exact revenge on government agents involved in her other daughter’s murder as an infant. The tone is both personal and societal, with regrettably psychotic behavior on all sides, interspersed by sympathy and near-misses of understanding.