A renter comes to accept that she shares her unit with a miniature black hole.
Tag Archives: Australian
366 UNDERGROUND: AFAR (2025)
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DIRECTED BY: Jason Trost
FEATURING: Jason Trost, voice of Tallay Wickham
PLOT: A private detective is tasked with finding a contestant from a doomed reality gameshow in the heart of the Australian wilderness.
COMMENTS: A strange saturation fills the spectrum, bringing unearthly hues and twitches in the transmission—and I’m not just talking about Aurora Australis. (Those are the Southern “Northern Lights”, if you will; I know this, and you know this, and so does depressed-and-intrepid private detective, Brian Everett.) Jason Trost is a product of his times, and like so many of his (and my) generation, he has a strange nostalgia for the objectively inferior media formats of days of yore. Videotape can radiate the warmth of bygone familiarity, even while harnessed to augment creepiness.
And there’s creepiness, mystery, and tracking-issues aplenty in Afar, a film which takes multiple viewings to get a full grip on, because Trost has cut the story up into different kinds of journeys, selectable on-screen by the viewer. Do you want Brian to Run or Help? (One of those may kill him.) Do you want him to investigate the River Bed, or the Mysterious Ruins? (One of those will kill him, while the other only might…). And so on. Every few minutes or so, you will be presented with a choice to be made. There’s no “saving” your progress, but the director is good enough to allow a re-think on occasion after a jagged font informs you that Brian has snuffed it thanks to your poor decision.
Having made it this far into the review, I presume you wish to continue. Afar is a neat little movie, and I say that in no way to sound dismissive. Jason Trost has, once again, crafted something new and nostalgic on his own terms, staying true to a guiding ambition, and the result is both intriguing and entertaining. Presuming you enjoy Trost’s screen presence (which is something of a must, as he’s in the frame perhaps nine tenths of the time, as a cross between Tex Murphy and Henry Jones, Jr.), you’ll have a fine time digging around the various clues, back-stories, and pathways tucked within his interactive horror film. And while I enjoyed Afar on its own merits, I am hopeful that it will eventually stand as more of a “proof of concept.” I’d be most pleased to experience a grander, deeper, and more labyrinthine narrative interaction, even if it results in many more “You are dead” cut-screens.
The film is available to download on Steam (that’s a first), or to buy on DVD from Kunaki, There’s also a tie-in choose-your-own-horror paperback.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
2025 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: TRADITIONAL CUISINE, PART THREE
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Montréal 2025
More than once I was quickly impressed by a film’s animation only to discover that I was only watching the production company credits.
7/30: Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo
Crank down the musical score by half, and this would land in a far better place. Tsai Chia Ying attempts something risky here as he aims to fuse deep character emotion with ghostly horror. Chia Ming awakens every morning from an overhead drip. Every morning: this love-struck fellow is stuck in a loop wherein he witnesses the object of his affections die somehow while on a hiking trip taken to search for the remains of a mutual friend lost to the haunted mountains. Major No-No Points are awarded to the original trio, who decide to cut through a rather creepy barrier in the surrounding woods, accidentally disrupting an esoteric ceremony. Very nearly ending badly, the movie upgrades from regrettable to merely “meh” with its final, actual, conclusion.
$Positions
Mike meets his daily struggles with unwavering optimism and friendliness, which is no small feat in face of director Brandon Daley’s ceaseless abuse. Crypto (oh how I loathe you) sinks its talons in our hapless hero, clouding his judgment with every dip and spike. We follow a series of increasingly nasty twists of fate (and concurrent ill-decisions) as Mike’s already crummy life hits rock bottom—making true an early, optimistically-stated declaration that no, he’s “nowhere near the bottom yet!” With polyamory, drug addiction, medical debt, and somewhat more urine consumption than I might have preferred, $Positions is simultaneously icky, wacky, and heartfelt. Special shout-out to leading man Michael Kunick. I passed him after the screening commending his performance as one of the best depictions of Job to hit the screen.
Désolé, Pardon, Je m’excuse
Like many of her generation, office-worker Ella loves Internet videos. Unlike many of her generation (at least, I hope), she loves Internet videos released by a Continue reading 2025 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: TRADITIONAL CUISINE, PART THREE
CAPSULE: PETROL (2022)
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DIRECTED BY: Alena Lodkina
FEATURING: Nathalie Morris, Hannah Lynch
PLOT: Eva is unsure of her film thesis subject until she meets a cryptic young performance artist named Mia.
COMMENTS: Petrol. Petrol. Petrol. (“Petrill?”) After twenty-four hours, I’m still chewing over this title, and how it relates to what I saw. It’s a slippery little movie, so perhaps that fuel’s slickness should come to mind. Alena Lodkina’s sophomore efforts defies easy description. It’s a character study, sure; it’s an exploration of filmmaking (our protagonist is a final-year film student); it’s got some inter-generational stuff going on. And it might just be one of those “coping with loss” kind of explorations.
But it’s hard to say. As Eva shyly navigates life—and the pursuit of a film degree—chance intervenes: first, when Eva accidentally comes across a performance arts troupe whilst traveling a cliffside with a small boom mic, capturing the ambient sounds; second, when she observes one of those performance artists dropping a locket in town. When Eva returns the locket, so begins her relationship with an enigmatic (and altogether Artsy) young woman named Mia, who by all accounts is “living her life” and, as evidenced by the narrative’s sometimes desperate indications, is a rather “deep” person.
Frankly, I didn’t find her all that deep; just young and a touch lachrymose—if perhaps occasionally whimsical. Kind of like this movie’s general energy. Magical realism rears its head at least six times. A finger snap brings a picnic spread into existence, pre-referencing a literary passage which appears later in the film; a couple of pertinent winks of the eye—one appearing from a coffee surface reflection—and strange “reflections” from behind make us question both Eva’s and our own perceptions. Who is Mia? What is art? What is film, in the context of art? Are we interconnected?
And so on. Petrol kept my interest, despite me neither knowing too well what was happening nor caring too deeply about it. Eva’s film professor is a highlight, his brief appearance a master class in diplomatic guidance as he civilly remarks that it’s important to have mastery of film rules and tropes before subverting them; and there’s her fellow student with his down-to-earth ambitions to make a movie about an abattoir cleaner contrasting nicely with Eva’s more ephemeral ambitions. But for the most part, Petrol feels like it’s running on fumes: it gets you to the destination, but not without the worry you’ll end up nowhere at all.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
![Petrol [DVD]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41UVc3BF5qL._SL500_.jpg)
- DVD
CAPSULE: PSYCHOSIS (2023)
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Psychosis is currently available fro rental or purchase on-demand.
DIRECTED BY: Pirie Martin
FEATURING: Derryn Amoroso, Kate Holly Hall, James McCluskey-Garcia, Pj van Gyen, voice of Lindsay Dunn
PLOT: Van Aarle, a criminal “fixer” who hears voices (but is not otherwise obviously schizophrenic) reluctantly takes a case involving drug dealers, zombie-like assailants, a vigilante, and a master hypnotist drug kingpin with a connection to his own past.
COMMENTS: “They said you’d be weird,” observes a dim-witted pusher after Van Aarle explains how his paracusia (auditory hallucinations) give him a “unique perspective” that helps him to tap into “unknowing awareness.” We, the audience, directly experience that auditory condition—sometimes as a murky choir of overlapping advisors who sound quite a bit like those YouTube videos that try to put you inside the head of a schizophrenic, and sometimes in the form of an omniscient narrator, whose commentary may or may not be audible to Van Aarle. The voices are sometimes helpful to our fixer, alerting him to the presence of hidden enemies or whispering clues, but just as often they’re warning that everyone is going to die, or simply reminding him to keep up his psychotic coffee regimen (Van Aarle apparently does not sleep while on a case). Although Derryn Amoroso looks more like Serge Gainsbourg than a matinee idol, Van Aarle is in the lineage of hard-bitten, haunted, and cynical-yet-decent private investigators: the great-grandson of Mike Hammer or Phillip Marlowe or Sam Spade, with an Australian accent. The official narrator, a chatty sort who fills in quiet spaces and is sometimes almost comically redundant (“in the distance, he sees something”), adds another film noir note to a movie already flavored with dashes of action, horror, psychological thriller, and science fiction.
Stylistically, you will immediately notice that Psychosis is (95+%) black and white, and with a boxy 1:1 aspect ratio, the narrowest I’ve ever seen in a feature film. You actually get used to it fairly quickly, but along with odd camera angles and other tricks (one scene is shot upside-down) it puts your mind in an odd space. Unusually for a film of this budget, there are a lot of action scenes, and director Martin compensates for a lack of ace action choreographers and athletic stunt doubles by shooting scenes in disjointed styles: schizophrenic editing, strobe lights, woozy double-vision cam for an under-the-influence melee, the upside-down sequence previously mentioned. The fights aren’t as involving as the movie’s concepts, but their ingenuity allows for a richer and more exciting cinematic experience.
Obviously, there is a lot going on in Psychosis—-we haven’t even gotten into the hypnotically-induced hallucinations, or the Batman-like LoneWolf character prowling about. While there is some “is he hallucinating or not?” ambiguity—heck, the title suggests as much—Psychosis doesn’t lean into that motif, but treats its world as if it were a genuine alternate reality, one where advanced mesmerists have almost magical mind-control powers. This means the struggles of Van Aarle (and LoneWolf) have real stakes—that punch to the gut hurts, that knife slashing at him is no metaphor, and the villain may really kill our hero, or drive him insane. A few scenes drag, and not every stylistic embellishment feels utterly necessary, but overall Psychosis is an insanely ambitious debut film that nails the madness of a man whose mind is in the process of being shattered.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: