Tag Archives: Kristine Froseth

Capsules, Essays

SITGES FILM FESTIVAL 2026 RECAP

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As a lifelong fan of horror, I’d been longing to attend the Sitges Film Festival for a few years, but  for one reason or another I never had the chance. At last, with my best friend in tow, this year I jumped at the opportunity to experience the 59th edition of the festival and secured seats for five screenings. While the festival started on October 8 and ended on October 18, I spent the long weekend of October 9-12 there, coinciding with Spanish regional and national festivities.

Sitges itself is a quaint coastal town with peaceful white streets that, in line with the film festival, were decorated with skeletons or monsters. Main streets were crowded with both locals and foreigners, and posters along the street announced the festival. This year, the main focus was the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Carrie, alongside the recent rise of religious horror. A festive atmosphere hung over these streets, and T-shirts reflected a love of horror and fantasy cinema.

My friend and I stayed in a  hotel close to the three main venues premiering movies: Auditori Melià, Casino Prado Suburense, and L’Escorxador. Melià is the largest venue, L’Escorxador the smallest—it’s a former slaughterhouse, which feels appropriate for the festival. These venues are only a 10-minute walk away from each other, and you can enjoy nice views of the beach and sea on your way to Auditori Melià, and stop at stands selling merchandise, meeting points for fans, or just have a drink. There’s a street food area on a hill where food trucks sell expensive—albeit somewhat healthy—fast food, both salty and sweet.

Having familiarized ourselves with the area, we went to our first movie at Auditori Melià at 11pm: Joshua Giuliano’s River, starring Jany Levy and Jessica Rothe. Naturally, such iconic names and an intriguing premise—three siblings grieving over their dad’s death are stalked by a faceless killer on a river—had us hyped up in advance. Unfortunately, this first film was the greatest disappointment of our festival experience, but at least it made us hopeful that the next four movies would be an improvement! The problem lies not in the acting, which is great, as one would expect from the cast, but in the many plot holes and unexplored links. Scenes honoring previous classics can be easily detected, but River struggles to get its own story right in this mix of references, leaving viewers with many questions as to what the movie was about. It felt like it was trying to communicate something about trauma and the passing down of harmful Continue reading SITGES FILM FESTIVAL 2026 RECAP →

List Candidates

FANTASIA 2026: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: HER PRIVATE HELL (2026)

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DIRECTED BY: Nicolas Winding Refn

FEATURING: Sophie Thatcher, , , Charles Melton, Dougray Scott, Diego Calva

PLOT: It’s Elle’s birthday, and her father is heading out of town, leaving her in the company of her BFF-turned-step-mother and a beautiful new “sister,” as a sinister fog heralds the arrival of The Leather Man.

Still from Her Private Hell (2026)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Refn doesn’t waste our time with nonsense like clarity. Space encounters with Candy Flux ray-guns, mega-crystal caverns, rent rib cages, and daddy issues laid on as thick as the ambient mist is all we need to get by in this surreal fairytale.

COMMENTS: It’s kind of a chamber drama, with a cast of six. Plus two. Plus some flashback goons. And it all takes place in the penthouse suite of a luxury hotel. Except, of course, those bits on a movie set. And that violent string in post-WWII occupied Japan. And, now that I think of it, that club consisting primarily of sharp shadows, strobing neon, and dozens and dozens of Romanesque statues. Oh, and that nebulous underworld with the jutting rods of serrated crystal, too. And Refn’s exploration of a lachrymose psyche would have been incomplete without the pair of seamstress-cum-manitous manipulating events, one of them maneuvering like an interpretive dancer.

Suffice to say, the story is one of remorse, grief, sibling rivalry, and just about everyone being very attractive and dressed in the highest of bleak-chic.

This last bit is true, at least for the trio-plus-two of the female protagonists. The fellows look more along the lines of middle-aged Harry Dean Stanton (Elle’s father, Johnny Thunders), young Harry Dean Stanton (Nico, adversary of said father), and violently clean-cut angel of vengeance in a US army uniform (Private “K,” also a father, who’s lost his daughter to a mythical murderer who manifests mainly with diamond-studded gloves and seems unbound by temporal limitations). Regardless, these half-dozen orphic oddities keep events moving forward, from the lobby to the suite to the sinister backrooms of 1940s Japan to the candy crystal caves.

This disjointed recollection of the characters and events is, upon consideration, probably more true to a narrative through line than I credit. Her Private Hell is very much about Elle: she is the first character we see, aside from the truly bizarre cityscape with towers, lights, a massive Ozymandiosian bust, and fog, fog, fog, which is a character in its own right. The hotel (named, I believe, “Fog Tower” or something like that) is a grim-glittery wonderment, as if gave ‘s Megalopolis a good once over. The props for the movie within the movie look like the best low budget doo-dads a groovy ’60s space epic could ask for. And while Elle’s birthday cake looks delicious, I’m not sure how we’re supposed to feel about her former BFF hand-feeding it to the anniversary girl before breaking into dog-speak.

At an early point in the movie, a choice presents itself: ponder deeply about symbolism and implications for clinical understanding of this grisly vision, or turn your brain off and allow scattered mental impulses to soar and bounce amongst the cavalcade of sickly grandeur summoned by this witch’s brew. I opted for the latter, and I believe Refn would approve. As he explained during his introduction, the point of a film is to enjoy it, with all the sex, violence, sickness, and humor that may have been tossed in the cauldron.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a bizarre new fantasia moodscape, a midnight movie of fear and dreamy disquiet…resists interpretation, like so many of Refn’s recent films, but executes a slow dervish swirl of hypnotic strangeness.”–Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (Cannes screening)

I think this movie is weirder than average
I think this movie is better than average

Capsules

CAPSULE: SNORKELING (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Emil Nava

FEATURING: Daniel Zolghadri, , Tim Johnson Jr.

PLOT: Teenagers Michael and Jameson start a relationship while delving deeper and deeper into the trippy landscapes concocted in their minds by a trendy psychedelic inhalant.

Still from Snorkeling (2025)

COMMENTS: Disaffected teens have been fertile ground for cinematic drama for decades. Going back to Rebel Without a Cause, and probably well before, young people have sought out entertainment that gets them, and the movies have responded with tales of kids whom the squares refuse to get. Snorkeling is a proud inheritor of that tradition, and seems especially in tune with a moment where teenagers are too beaten down to rebel; they just want to escape.

Snorkeling finds America’s youth in an especially despondent mood, and it’s hard to blame them. We only catch glimpses of adults, but the world they’ve created for their kids is a selfish one; they’re dedicated to satisfying themselves, leaving nothing behind for the next generation. We hear from several teenagers in quasi-documentary segments where they explain their rootlessness and highlight the relief that snorkeling brings. Our guides through this defeated landscape are Michael, a half-Iranian pothead who affably goes through his days just trying to put it all behind him, and Jameson, an effervescent young woman with a home life she is so over. (One suspects that her father named her after a bottle of his favorite spirit.) She introduces Michael to a new kind of high, and they embark upon a curious push-pull relationship where he always tries to get closer, and she’s always anxious to get away.

Looking inside their drugged-out world doesn’t tell us much about its appeal. Scenes take on a pink hue, featureless bodies writhe in the sky, and everyone seems to be caught up in a blissed-out, laid-back hippie vibe. Every now and then, the disconnect is so intense that characters literally become animated, swirling around in a hand-drawn fantasia for a few seconds of true escape from the real world. (These are the moments that take the most advantage of Nava’s background as a go-to music video director for stars like Ed Sheeran, Calvin Harris, and Eminem.) We have to take it on faith that this is as satisfying as the characters tell us it is. But while these peeks inside the hallucinations are mildly interesting, the truly shocking images are what these cosmic travelers look like back in our world. They’re half-comatose bodies, staring blankly into the sky with oxygen masks strapped to their faces, as if some titan had picked up a hospital and shaken all the patients out onto the ground. We’re trading one empty room for another.

The big paradox at the heart of Snorkeling is that Michael and Jameson—and presumably all their contemporaries—desperately seek connection, but their solution is to engage in the most isolating activity imaginable. That’s the driving force behind the awkward finale, which feels like adults showed up at the very end and shoehorned in a climax from an ABC Afterschool Special. It’s a relief to see them recognizing the trap they’ve escaped, but it feels stagey in a way that the earlier surreal naturalism did not. Snorkeling has some interesting ideas about the reasons the kids are not alright these days and is very sympathetic about why they’re downright anxious to get away from it all. But the only way out it can think of is to harsh everyone’s mellow. That’s disappointing, but for a little while, it’s a nice mild buzz.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…perfectly captures the disaffected mood of a generation through its stunning, hallucinatory visuals and immersive soundscape, creating a potent atmosphere of beautiful despair. However, this stylistic triumph comes at the cost of story and soul. The characters are hollow vessels, and the film’s sanitized portrayal of addiction feels like a profound failure of nerve.” – Naser Nahandian, Gazettely (contemporaneous)