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CAPSULE: ALMA & THE WOLF (2025)

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Alma & the Wolf is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Ethan Embry, Li Jun Li, Lukas Jann, Jeremie Harris, Kevin Allison

PLOT: Ren, a deputy in an out-of-the-way town, investigates a dog-killing wolf at the behest of his old high school crush, Alma.

Still from Alma & the Wolf (2025)

COMMENTS: A word of advice: don’t go into Alma & the Wolf expecting a standard werewolf movie, or any standard horror movie, for that matter. Focus instead on Ethan Embry’s fine portrayal of Ren, a peaked-in-high-school separated dad struggling with a drinking problem. You’ll be much happier with that approach.

“Nothing good ever comes from here, but lucky for the wider world, nothing ever leaves,” Ren says of the rural town of Spiral Creek. Ren himself is a former high school pitcher whose career ended prematurely with Tommy John surgery and whose life has been in a downward spiral since. Now a failed husband and deputy cop who’s been on this rural beat forever without much hint of promotion, he’s pinned all his hopes on his son, Jack, who’s following in his athletic footsteps and has serious athletic prospects. Ren is also interested in Alma, who seems (at times) to reciprocate his feelings, despite being a hot mess alcoholic herself. (This is a very boozy movie). Rounding out the small-town cast are a newbie cop Ren can bounce backstory off, a comic relief sheriff more interested in promoting Buddhist breathing techniques than hard policing, and a handful of colorful, trashy yokels.

As good as the acting is—Embry, as mentioned, is excellent, and the rest of the cast supply no weak notes—the special effects are noticeably poor: the mangy wolf costume is neither realistic nor frightening, there’s a head-on-fire effect that looks like it might have been made in ChatGPT, and at one point the use of rubber glass to substitute for a shattered windshield is painfully obvious. Given that Alma is more focused on drama and psychology than actual horror, these slip ups aren’t fatal, but they do imbue the film with a sheen of cheepnis that’s out of step with the professionalism of the rest of the production.

The first weird thing that happens in the story occurs when Ren suddenly promises to kill the wolf for Alma, despite his obvious reluctance and his warning that they’re a protected species and it’s a “class C felony” to kill one. Then comes his first encounter with the wolf, followed by recurring hallucinations where he glimpses the lupine taunting him. As the movie continues, the weird stuff intensifies, from the relatively subtle (whispering voices) to the elaborate (a well-staged pagan dream sequence in the woods with Alma and the talking wolf at a pagan bonfire flanked by a pair of goat-people). By the time we reach the one hour mark, confusion reigns, as the narrative seems to be spinning out of control, and occasionally contradicting itself.

Alma & the Wolf‘s twist ending turned off a lot of people. That’s understandable for viewers who didn’t go in bargaining for a weird movie: the final act makes some of the events of the rest of Alma feel arbitrary and irrelevant, and if you get invested in certain red herrings, you could feel cheated. But although the movie doesn’t quite stick its landing—it’s not tightly scripted enough, and it could have used more foreshadowing—it’s far from as abysmal as its 4.6 IMDb rating would suggest. I admire the ambition and certain aspects of the execution—specifically the performances—and although I wouldn’t give it a general recommendation, I wouldn’t advise you to steer away, either. If you’re in the mood for a well-acted, modestly-budgeted, artistically ambitious psychological thriller, you could do worse than hunting down Alma & the Wolf.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a one-of-a-kind, surreal, nightmarish journey that will give  audiences emotional whiplash.”–Molly Henery, Blogging Banshee (festival screening)

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FANTASIA 2025: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DOG OF GOD (2025)

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Dieva suns

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DIRECTED BY: Lauris Abele, Raitis Abele

FEATURING: Voices of Armands Bergis, Agate Krista, Karelins Kristians, Madi Madara, Einars Repse, Jurgis Spulenieks, Regnars Vaivars

PLOT: A shamanistic traveler looms on the outskirts of town, while a local priest accuses a tavern owner of witchcraft.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Erotic parrot-mask dancing, cat-licking, distillate of priapism, a lascivious leech encounter, and parting Hell’s seas are among the weird things to devour in in this diabolical delicacy.

COMMENTS: Opening your movie with an aged warrior using a chain-loop to tear off Satan’s massive testicles as they rest below a massive upright phallus is a ballsy move. But by the close of Dog of God, it is clear that ballsy moves are just what this crew do. Brothers Lauris and Raitis Abele pull an ancient (?) trial from fastidiously transcribed historical documents and wrench it by the neck (and possibly elsewhere), squeezing it through a gritty, -cum- palette, setting the dirt and violence and hallucinations to a throbbing synth-metal soundtrack. Dog is not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach.

For your consideration: a guilt-ridden priest with masochistic tendencies; an female alchemist running a tavern; a crippled young monk pushed too far; an obese baron determined to sire an heir; and a tattooed dog man recently returned from the underworld with bad news. These characters, and others, are grimily brought to life through a somber palette daubed occasionally with the vibrant hues of blood, piss, and vomit. This is not a glamorous Middle Ages; this town seems to have almost nothing in it but drunkenness, poverty, guilt, and weeks of torrential rain.

The grimy atmosphere and morose characters could easily have acted as a drag, but elements enliven it. The film score is metal to the bone, with crashing blasts of evil notes underscoring the literal Hellscape as the story travels to the figurative Hell on Earth.  A pungent darkness infects nearly all the characters, with perversions never far from the surface, and cruelty never far from action. The priest’s obsession with a pathetic relic (a piece of straw, somehow “holy”) seems both to awe and arouse the evil pastor. The rotoscope treatment adds a haunting element of the uncanny, as these grotesques flirt with human form and motion. And the stifling atmosphere leaves the viewer forever checked into a nasty state of anticipation until the violent, mind-popping climax.

In short, this was amazing. A blast; I laughed, I gasped, I winced, and, once or twice, just about reeled. The Abele brothers were inspired by all the right people; and as they related in the Q&A session after the screening, “Latvia is very dark and cold most of the year, so you’ve got nothing to do but use your imagination.” Drinking some probably wouldn’t hurt, nor would white-spotted toadstools. However they distilled their multivarious inputs, the important thing is Dog of God emerges from the fetid haze of history and hopelessness — landing on the eye of the viewer like a cackling splat from the backside of an ill-omened bird.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Fans of midnight madness should look no further than Dog of God… a visually scrumptious 17th century trip somewhere between Witchfinder General and Mandy.“–Payton McCarty-Simas, Film Inquiry (festival screening)

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FANTASIA 2025: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: TAMALA 2030: A PUNK CAT IN DARK (2025)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Voices of Kana Aoi, Daisuke Kasuya, Atsuko Nakata, Sayaka, Kei Taniguchi

PLOT: A missing-persons case steers Tamala and her friend into a world of corporate nefariousness, deep-time conspiracy, and staggering cosmic implications.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: To quote Fantasia programmer Rubert Bottenberg: “The Japanese kawaii paradigm of Hello Kitty and Hatsune Miku collides with cabalistic capitalism, cataclysmic prophecy, and the ruptured realities of , , and in… a deviously dreamlike, metaphysical mind-melt of high-fructose, retro-futuristic, paranoid pop-art brilliance.”

COMMENTS: Having your eyes bombarded at the end of a long day can be rather refreshing: something to wipe away the accumulated impressions, and leave your perception open to embrace the crazy world anew. This effect was indeed welcome, for as Tamala likes to say: “Another f*cking day is about to begin.” This line, delivered in a childlike, brat-girl, cutey pie kind of way, kicks off the (*deep breath*) Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in the Dark experience. An experience unlike any other I’ve witnessed on the big screen. An experience, if I may, whose existence hinges on the manifold developments of the past century and a half, and on the strange minds of the enigmatic t.o.L team.

For those unfamiliar with the Tamala phenomenon (as I was, until the screening), she was introduced to the world—at Fantasia, I believe—in 2010. Per her bio, she is “[a] young female cat, born in the Orion Constellation on the Odessa star; cute, but uses much foul language. She was genetically engineered in Cat Year 1869 to always remain a year and a half old, in order to be the immortal mascot of the mega-conglomerate CATTY & Co.” Which should give you the gist of things.

Where the gist may slip from your grasp may depend, but having missed the gist before the Tamala movie screening, I was still a happy viewer as Tamala 2030 washed over me like a wave of strange black and white purréed media. Tamala dances, Tamala curses, Tamala munches on pocky, and all the while the movie spools out impossible amounts of ambient details. Seven cities in seven different prefectures have seen simultaneous disappearances of seven different two-year-old cats. (The fact that one of them handsome spurs Tamala to join her boy-friend’s [?] investigation of the matter.) The specifics clatter on-screen at a blistering pace as Tamala, always boing-boinging in her steps, saunters fearlessly through class riots, cabalistic postal machinations, and onward to her empyrean duel amongst the stars.

t.o.L. manage the difficult hat-trick of fusing several graphic styles into a cohesive—albeit capital-“I”-Incredible—world. Tamala 2030 is a symphony of sight, walking a devilishly narrow through-line of technique where any slight variation would have catastrophically cacophonous results. Echoes of late ’90s screen-saver loops, mid-19th-century advertisement figures and fonts, flash™-y forms, and 3D-celestiality are all here, and all coexist. This film is a dizzying march through time and space, an appropriately epic-length adventure with pathos, frog-licking, reincarnation, cow spotted sports cars, intrigue, graffiti—and more than one explosion of Tamala into swarms of mini-Tamalas.

Oh yes, this will cleanse and flush your mind’s palette, and you’ll feel jumbled and pumped and ready to rock—’cause another f*cking day is about to begin.

Tamala‘s theatrical release date is uncertain, but Deaf Crocodile has acquired the physical media rights and plans to release the film in 2026.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

No other reviews were found at time of publication

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FANTASIA 2025: IT ENDS (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Alex Ullom

FEATURING: Phinehas Yoon, Akira Jackson, Noah Toth, Mitchell Cole

PLOT: Four friends miss a turn on the road, and it appears their route will now go on forever.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Riffing on The Exterminating Angel, four Gen-Z are trapped in much shabbier circumstances, and doomed to wonder when—or even whether—they end.

COMMENTS: It’s a simple, and pleasingly silly, little game: you choose two options for defense, and the two unchosen options are tasked with taking you out. The options are as follow: one man with a gun, 5 gorillas, 50 hawks, and 10,000 rats. Theoretical nonsense, of course, but not a bad way to spark conversation. James doubts the hawks’ merit, Fish thinks a lone gunman can’t amount to much, Day hasn’t been paying much attention (though later favors gorillas, after teaching them to shoot), and Travis wonders just why the heck he returned to town to catch up with his recently graduated high school buddies.

These friends are pleasant company, which is good: we viewers are trapped with them inside their Jeep for the better part of ninety minutes. Conversation becomes panicky, aggravated from time to time by mysterious forest dwellers, who swarm the vehicle whenever it stops, all of them screaming desperately for help. Inside the Jeep, it is safe. Kind of. Did you ever find yourself stuck in a car ride with someone and it went on a few hours too long? Imagine that extended across untold tens-of-thousands of miles along a generically forested highway, with the threat of violent death waiting just beyond the tree line.

It Ends is a simple movie, with one mobile set, and it runs a gamut of emotions. It goes on and on and on, its protagonists trapped and spurred by fear and boredom and the ever-so-rare flicker of hope. (Is it taking longer for the forest freaks to suss they’ve stopped? Is that another car off the side of the road? And… is it raining for the first time in months?) As with any road trip, particularly infinite ones, I suppose, things get cyclical. James, ever stoic, ever cerebral, and often a bit of a cold-blooded jerk, begins to wonder if that cycle is part of the key. Day, Fish, and Travis might be right, too, in feeling that an eternity of traveling down a highway is all that’s ahead. It Ends sprinkles comedy throughout, too, as the youths’ banter delightfully combines an entering adulthood flippant wit with  crumbling coping mechanisms.

The odd premise carried my interest, and if left to just that, perhaps I’d consider this to be some high-quality quirk. However, I’m inclined to pay substantial dues to a movie with a punchline, and this one hits hard, and sudden. Through tension, charm, and ambiguity, It Ends is a treat for film gabbers. Me, I’m choosing 50 hawks and 10,000 rats to watch my back. You?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“What begins as a casual late-night drive among recent grads quickly warps into a surreal nightmare… The film’s ambiguity works in its favor, leaving the story open to interpretation (although many are going to be frustrated by the finale).” — Louisa Moore, Screen Zealots (festival screening)

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FANTASIA 2025: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: REFLECTION IN A DEAD DIAMOND (2025)

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Reflet dans un diamant mort

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DIRECTED BY: ,

FEATURING: Yannick Renier, Céline Camara, ,  Koen De Bouw, Thi-Mai Nguyen,

PLOT: Retired superspy John D. finds his routine of drinking by the seaside interrupted when a lithe body washes ashore, triggering chaotic flashbacks to his days as a secret agent.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Cattet & Forzani whirl their inspirations in a blender while pushing a cornucopia of sub-genres up to and past the breaking point — including the popular kink, “CMNKWF”. (That’s “Clothed Male, Naked Katana-Wielding Female,” for those not in the loop.)

COMMENTS: There are two early giveaways that Reflection is going to be an oddity of excess. One is the long list of production companies. This is not uncommon for smaller-budget European films, but Cattet’s and Forzani’s film goes a bit beyond that, suggesting the filmmakers needed to scrape around to find brave investors. The second, foreshadowing the coming bombast, also appears in the credits: a blast of hyper-Bondian murder blasts and stabbings, with diamonds erupting from the colorful silhouettes of the victims, before a pleasure boat sinks down behind a growing blood-water column of text. And, as this is a European spy movie, there’s also the early topless scene, wherein a young woman exposes her breasts while tanning in a hotel’s private beach—exposing the diamond piercings that set off our film’s hero’s chain of memories.

And what a hero! Old John D. has the weathered good lucks of an erstwhile man of action, and young John D. has all the panache, pluck, and pizzazz that might reasonably (indeed, perhaps unreasonably) distilled into one superspy. The developments are a little hard to follow at the start, with intercuts of Old and Young John’s adventures. By the third act, we’re facing a massive explosion of double-dealings, glorious gadgetry, and face after face torn and otherwise peeled from John’s ultimate adversary, the manifestly deadly femme known only as “Serpentika”.

Cattet and Forzani exist somewhere above the speed of Ritchie and the grisliness of Tarantino, all while flirting with—and, on occasion, ravishing—the ambiguous meta-cinematic maneuvers of Fellini. With little room to breathe between outlandish capering (at least Old John’s timeline travels at a somewhat staid pace), the combined effect of the various shady machinations is to leave the viewer benumbed with bloody scintillation. Clawing together coherent memories of the chain of events, I can only roughly recall that one of Young John’s charges, an oil mega-baron, was murdered—but not before he kills John’s true love, a dashing young Black woman clad in a high-tech mirror dress, segments of which she leaves behind to allow John to follow her.

Or does the evil oil baron murder her? The narrator’s recollections are as murky as his cocktails. But there are roulette wheel orgasms, pentuplicate ninjas, art-and-murder by oil slick, and an unbelievable parade of increasingly dangerous (and art-house-styled) rogues standing between John and his vengeance. After you watch Reflection in a Dead Diamond, you will clamor for these Belgians to craft the next Bond movie. I’m sure the suits in charge of the franchise will gladly sacrifice the 100% clarity for the 100% boost in oomph and style.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“John’s drifting memories are a dizzying kaleidoscope of surreal free associations, lifted from the clichés and conventions – the cartoonish credits, the casino games, the clandestine meetings, the global players, the masked assassins, the absurd gadgets, the sadomasochistic sex and the kickass fights – not so much of a Bond movie (although Testi does resemble an older Sean Connery), as of the endless European ripoffs that appeared in the wake of Bond… a deep dive into the genre’s established imagery and grammar that goes beyond mere postmodern pastiche into something more artful and abstract, even quintessential, and all sexed up with the filmmakers’ characteristic kink.” — Anton Bitel, Projected Figures (contemporaneous)