This Christmas, a reindeer in the living room loses its legs, a helicopter hovers over the dinner table, and a yeti dances around the tree.
CONTENT WARNING: A.I- generated.
POD 366, EP. 148: LATE XMAS IDEAS AND SOMEONE ELSE’S “SURREALIST” MOVIE LIST
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Discussed in this episode:
Bugonia (2025): Read Gregory J. Smalley’s Apocrypha Candidate review. The Bugonia Blu-ray will drop two days before Christmas (showing you just how much big studios value new-releases on physical media these days). Pre-order Bugonia. Also available in 4K UHD or 4K Steelbook editions (both come with standard Blu-rays included).
Kill the Jockey (2024): Read Giles Edwards’ Apocrypha Candidate review. The surreal Argentinian film about a drug-addicted jockey with a truly life-changing concussion arrives on VOD; free on Amazon Prime, with physical media arriving later. Watch or rent Kill the Jockey.
Perfect Blue (1997): Read the Canonically Weird entry! Shout! Factory’s lavish 4K edition of Satoshi Kon‘s anime psychological horror (released two days before Christmas, sadly) includes a 4K UHD disc, standard Blu-ray, booklet, art cards, poster, almost two hours of never-before-seen lectures from Kon, and more. Pre-order Perfect Blue.
Reanimator (1985): Read Giles Edwards’ List Candidate review. We already discussed this Ignite Films release in great detail in Pod 366, Ep. 118; this is just a notification that the standard edition (4K UHD + Blu-ray) is now available on Amazon and other retailers. Buy Reanimator.
Taste of Cinema 100 Best Surrealist Movies list: See the complete list here. This list does not appear on Taste of Cinema’s regular website, it’s a social media exclusive.
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:
Pod 366 is off next week. In written content, however, Micheal Diamades gets into the holiday spirit with the depraved torture of Melancholie der Engel (2009), Giles Edwards gets stuck in Rabbit Trap (2025), and Shane Wilson takes the Polar Express into the uncanny valley. Io Saturnalia, and onward and weirdward!
CAPSULE: THE MYSTERIOUS GAZE OF THE FLAMINGO (2025)
La misteriosa mirada del flamenco
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DIRECTED BY: Diego Céspedes
FEATURING: Tamara Cortes, Paula Dinamarca, Matías Catalán, Pedro Muñoz, Luis Dubó
PLOT: A family of drag queens raise an orphan girl in the shadow of a mining operation in Chile in 1982, but the miners blame them for a deadly plague they believe is spread by the gay men’s gaze.
COMMENTS: The setting of Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo is more than somewhat absurd. A house of cross-dressing men (they call themselves “transvestites,” in the lingo of the period, not “trans” in the modern sense) stands alone at the base of the mountains, at the edge of the village where the miners live. The family within is tolerated by the macho community, although disparaged with slurs. The men avert their gaze, superstitiously believing that the deadly plague spreading through the village is passed through the transvestite’s gaze. The half-dozen occupants of the house raise Lidia, an orphan girl of about 11, with the glamorous Flamingo serving as the girl’s surrogate mother. Other than the prepubescent Lidia and, perhaps, the ambiguously gendered older matron of the clan, Mama Boa (played by trans actress Paula Dinamarca), there are no (cis-)women in the community; even the miner’s children are exclusively male. Perhaps for this reason, the transvestite’s home also serves as the community bordello, with the women putting on evening drag shows and beauty pageants. The more intrigued, or desperate, miners opportunistically sneak into the girls’ rooms to sate their carnal needs. This creates an eternal tension, with the miners tolerating, fearing, and sometimes desiring the transvestites, leading to the ever-present threat of violence—and the girls aren’t afraid to get into a scrap, when their seductive charms fail to get them what they need.
The straight world, therefore, is halfway accommodating, but always harbors a threat. It’s a dynamic that may be familiar to modern gays, although appearing here in exaggerated form. In this fairyland, the transvestites are free to be who they are; but that freedom comes with a price. They are eternal outsiders. True love is hard to find in this desert. Flamingo nurtures her maternal instincts through surrogate motherhood, and Lidia is fiercely loyal to the queer clan, but death—from violence, or disease—always threatens.
The Chilean mountains and desert valleys, reminiscent of the mythical American west, are captured beautifully through Angello Faccini’s excellent cinematography—although the unnecessary use of the 4:3 academy ratio sadly robs us of some of the classic grandeur we might hope for. The film is not quite magical realism per se—nothing actually impossible happens, outside of a dream sequence or two—but it’s of course heavily influenced by the movement. Flamingo is, instead, a slightly dreamlike dramatic fable set in a highly improbable world. It is, perhaps, the world as seen by Lidia, a pre-sexual being who loves the only family she knows, but is on the cusp of learning about the wages of the sinful world.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
366 UNDERGROUND: HAUNTERS OF THE SILENCE (2025)
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DIRECTED BY: Tatu Heikkinen, Veleda Thorsson-Heikkinen
FEATURING: Tatu Heikkinen, John Haughm, Veleda Thorsson-Heikkinen
PLOT: Strange events beset a grieving husband in the wee hours of the night leading into October 31st.
COMMENTS: The facts, as best they might be determined, are these: 1) the unnamed lead character has lost his beloved wife, and 2) his night-vision exterior surveillance camera picked up more than just a midnight rodent behaving in a silly manner. As for the rest of Haunters of the Silence, it’s just about all up for interpretation. A faded photographic image loses a balloon, a father (?), and finally a boy; ceremonial drumming may be a temporary cure for mind de-anchoring; and if a dream facsimile of your dead wife mutters “It’s okay”, perhaps it’s best to take her at her word.
Or not.
In the hopes of better explaining the Haunters of the Silence experience, I quote from director Tatu Heikkinen’s IMDb bio: “His work embraces abstraction and emotional stillness—rejecting the fast-paced editing in favor of grounded, contemplative storytelling.” This statement, as reflected in Haunters, is true in many ways. Heikkinen (and his real-life wife and co-director, Veleda Thorsson-Heikkinen) embraces abstraction and emotional stillness. Abstraction comes in many forms, many of them being unlikely camera foregrounds framing background action, for instance, but also long stroboscopic sequences, and plenty of forays into straight-up dream imagery. (The protagonist retreating through a large storm drain through the center of the Shadow Man’s menacing outline in the cosmos is of particular note.)
Haunters of the Silence does have fast-paced editing, though. Shots hastily flicker from one to the next, which might risk leaving the viewer disoriented if weren’t for the meticulous, subtle, and grounding sound design: the listener, as it were, is rarely if ever jarred from the dream-logic ordeals put before them. This sensory-tension works nicely with the temporal-tension: time does not pass per usual in this film, and the Ancient and the Modern co-exist, with incense-burning and buzzing smartphones pulling upon each other across the millennia of human ritual.
As the reader will have noticed, my remarks fell into abstruseness more quickly than usual here, but I blame that on what I saw (and heard). Haunters of the Silence is a weird thing to experience—and it is more in the realm of an experience than a customary film. Tatu Heikkinen and Veleda Thorsson-Heikkinen have built a precise sequence of sounds and images, which is as often baffling as it is beautiful. I give nothing away with this observation on the final scene when the Shadow Man emerges through the bedroom door of now-waking protagonist: life—like time, memory, and grief—does not finish so long as we are on this Earth.
If not longer.
Currently streaming on Relay, check the Haunters of the Silence official website for future updates.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
64*: CITIZEN DOG (2004)
Mah nakorn
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DIRECTED BY: Wisit Sasanatieng
FEATURING: Mahasamut Boonyaruk, Saengthong Gate-Uthong, Sawatwong Palakawong Na Autthaya, Raenkum Saninn, Nattha Wattanapaiboon
PLOT: Pod leaves his remote homestead for the bright lights of Bangkok, ignoring his grandmother’s warning that he will grow a tail in the big city. There, he loses a finger working in a sardine factory, then falls head over heels for cleaning lady Jin, who is intensely focused on a book that she found after it fell out of a crashing passenger jet. Her curiosity leads her to monomaniacal environmental activism, leaving no attention for Pod, who tries to remain close to her through a series of odd jobs that bring him into contact with some of the city’s more unusual residents, including a man who licks everything, an undead motorcyclist, and a child-like woman in a passive-aggressive relationship with her teddy bear.
BACKGROUND:
- Based on a novel by the director’s wife, Koynuch, which Sasanatieng illustrated. The novel was, in turn, based on Sasanatieng’s unpublished screenplay.
- The title is a pun on the city’s name, “Bangkok, Great City.” By changing one letter in the Thai translation—Krung Thep Maha Nakorn to Krung Thep Mah Nakorn–-the name becomes “Bangkok, City of Dogs.”
- Narrated by director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, whose films include Last Life in the Universe.
- Boonyaruk is a musician (some of his music appears in the movie) making his film debut here. Gate-Uthong is also a film novice, having worked previously as a fashion model.
- The foreigner handing out protest leaflets who Jin dubs “Peter” is played by Chuck Stephens, an expatriate film critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and Thai cinema expert, who also worked on the movie’s subtitles.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Sasanatieng’s candy-colored Bangkok is rife with visual pleasures, but none as dramatic as the literal mountain comprised of plastic bottles that Jin recovers and carefully cleans, a peak which Pod and Jin separately ascend in a desperate search for meaning and jointly summit in celebration of love. Just as Bangkok itself is portrayed as an urban nightmare made beautiful by the people who live and love there, this mountain of trash is transformed into a wonder by the community.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: A chain-smoking woman-child’s love-hate relationship with her teddy bear; Grandma’s gecko rap
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The one thing that’s guaranteed to come up in any discussion of Citizen Dog is a reference to that milestone of quirky romance, Amélie. The comparison is not without merit: the two films share a bemused enjoyment of life’s pleasures. Sanasatieng looks to do the French hit one better, though, marshaling all his resources to highlight the strangeness of his characters, be they main, supporting, or background. No one in Citizen Dog zigs when they could zag, and strangeness and silliness are very much the norm. The opening scene in which everyone sings along with the soundtrack would be a musical number in most contexts, but here it feels diegetic, the voice of a community singing as one.
Original Thai trailer for Citizen Dog
COMMENTS: Life in the big city is hard. Say you get a nice job slicing Continue reading 64*: CITIZEN DOG (2004)