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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)

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CAPSULE: TOUCH ME (2025)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Olivia Taylor Dudley, Jordan Gavaris, , Marlene Forte

PLOT: 27-year old underachiever Joey and her troubled trust-fund baby pal Craig spend time at the retreat of an alien, becoming addicted to the heroin-like touch of his tentacles.

Still from Touch Me (2025)

COMMENTS: I don’t think Gen-Z’ers are really afraid of, or attracted to, alien tentacle sex. What the characters in Touch Me are deeply afraid of is a life devoid of purpose, or even of a reasonable infrastructure to be able to pursue their dreams. Joey is unable to advance her journalistic career, a slave to student debt and just-over-minimum-wage barrista and bartender gigs. Craig’s privileged background and philosophy degree put him no closer to finding dreams; in fact, they’ve left him depressed and unemployable. Meaningless sex, drinking, New Age-y spiritual exercises, and, eventually, the blissful, numbing touch only an alien can deliver offer them relief from their anxieties. Heck, even procrastinating alien Brian can’t get his act together to either take over the world, or to save it from itself. As the characters struggle to find a place in society, the alien’s euphoric touch serves a metaphor for the distractions and temptations of co-dependent romantic relationships and, more explicitly, drug addiction.

The acting is remarkable for a low-budget indie horror. Olivia Taylor Dudley is a revelation: dreamy in a languid, damaged way, remaining likable even when engaging in vile drug-seeking behaviors. She begins the film with an 8-minute monologue about her first meeting with a track-suited, environmentally responsible alien with hair that’s the “good kind of wet.” It’s not quite a tour-de-force, but it is the kind of thing that makes you sit up and jot down the actress’ name. Veteran character actor Pucci is also sexy as the complicated, hip-hop dancing alien who might be a cosmic narcissist or might be a well-meaning but clueless visitor who can’t comprehend human relationships. Gavaris is believable, if mostly relegated to comic relief (although his friendship with Joey plays a crucial role in the movie’s emotional makeup), and Forte puts in fine work as Brian’s unappreciated human assistant resenting the presence of younger and more attractive visitors.

On the other hand, director Addison Heinmann’s tonal shifts and unnecessary stylizations can pose a challenge. Joey’s panic attacks are accompanied by swarms of picture-in-picture popups, and a flashback is done as a Japanese silent movie but with spoken dialogue. These bits sometimes aren’t deployed purposefully, taking us out of the story. Furthermore, the attempts at comedy don’t always arise cleanly out of the more serious themes. Henimann throws a lot of absurdity at the screen, and not all of it works (one thing that does work are Brian’s dance scenes, which are both fun to watch and endearingly quirky). The hazy, neon-lit interspecies sex scenes are also a blast; they’re almost tasteful.

Because of the undisciplined approach, this is an odd movie, as well as a weird one. That said, Touch Me is nowhere near as alienating as its miserable current 4.8 IMDb rating would suggest. Most of the negative sentiments seem to come from people who were hoping for a more straightforward live-action hentai sci-fi horror, and are along the lines of “this was a little too out there for me.” Regular readers of this site will likely find this on the low-to-average end of the weird scale, and uneven, but far from boring. You’re invited to Touch Me: you might enjoy it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The cherry on top of this admittedly weird cocktail is a strong streak of genuine sensuality – if it’s your first encounter with tentacle sex on screen, you might be surprised how appealing Heimann and his cast have managed to make it seem.”–Catherine Bray, The Guardian (contemporaneous)

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CAPSULE: FRESH KILL (1994)

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DIRECTED BY: Shu Lea Cheang

FEATURING: Sarita Choudhury, Erin McMurtry, Abraham Lim, Jose Zuniga

PLOT: When their daughter disappears after developing green-glowing hands, her moms begin to suspect a mega-corporation involved in a tainted cat food scandal.

COMMENTS: Claire and Shareen are just trying to get by. Shareen works as a trash picker. Claire waits tables at a trendy sushi joint called “Naga Saki,” whose only perk is the free sushi she brings home to their daughter. Honey, one of those unusual four year olds who prefers raw fish and wasabi to mac n’ cheese, can’t get enough of Naga Saki’s specialty roll, “kissing fish,” a variety with obscenely red lips. When the little girl starts intermittently glowing green—a phenomenon her mothers never directly witness—they take her to various specialists. A pediatrician, a child psychologist, and a fortune-teller all fail to figure out the cause of the “green.” Honey then mysteriously vanishes, as stories about glowing cats begin to take over the news.Fresh Kill innovatively conveys its central mystery through endless streams of information. News reports, radio broadcasts, snippets from talk shows, and commercials regularly interrupt the narrative, adding clues to the overarching plot. Accounts of the real-life debacle with the infamous garbage barge alternate with fictional news items, like the corporate takeover of a major television news station by “GX,” a conglomerate that over the course of the film also buys up pet food products. The GX slogan, “because ‘We Care’” ominously repeats amid stories of a stray hydrogen bomb “harmlessly” dissolving in the ocean and a recall of GX’s recently acquired cat food brand.

Along with the many communication technologies on display—from televisions, to radios, to Web 1.0—the diverse cast speak a variety of languages, often code-switching in the middle of a sentence. Despite an unconventional makeup, family remains the anchor of the narrative, even as it spins off into various directions. While searching for Honey, Claire and Shareen interact with the residents of a neighborhood homeless enclave, their friends, and their own difficult parents. Claire’s mother is the diva-like talk show host of a program on public access who refers to Shareen as “Shirley.” Shareen’s father is a retired cop whose wife left him because he could never be off-duty, and who hasn’t caught on that his daughter isn’t straight. Supporting characters represent such various voices as the queer community, Wall Street, the homeless, computer hackers, immigrants, and environmental activists, contributing to the channel-surfing aesthetic.

The owner of Naga Saki rushes to buy the last of the kissing fish stock, just as her customers, too, begin glowing green. One night,  a friend of the sushi chef/hacker Jiannbin sees the kissing fish glowing, but no one else does, and so they remain skeptical. Eventually, Claire puts two and two together, insisting the contaminated fish must have infected Honey. She convinces Jiannbin to hack into the GX website to see what he can find.

Director Shu Lea Cheang pioneered the use of what we called “new media” back in the ’90s. Primarily known as a visual artist who works with digital technologies, one of her early works comprised a website complete with interactive chat rooms. A similar sense of hypertext and polyphony pervades her first feature film. The messages of corporate news sources contrast with the word on the street. Text scrolls sometimes appear along the bottom of the screen, and -ian intertitles with phrases like “Security = Control” intercept the imagery.

The “green” people’s speech gradually becomes glitched and warped until it’s completely unintelligible. Just as the image modes skip around, the soundtrack features varying styles of music, like a radio set to scan all available channels. A song by Sheila Chandra, who rarely allows her work to be licensed, pairs beautifully with an emotionally charged moment of Claire and Shareen grappling with Honey’s absence.

While the story of a missing kid could easily get dark and depressing, Fresh Kill maintains an ironic sense of black humor. The script consistently plays on the many meanings of the word “green” and its cultural connotations. Everyone gets mocked, from the finance tycoons who speak in corporate buzzwords to people who mindlessly follow the “green” movement by buying into eco-branding.

It’s easy to see why Fresh Kill experienced a resurrection in the 21st century with a 2026 Criterion Collection release. The seeming prescience of its themes demonstrates how these “contemporary agita” were already a part of American cultural discourse thirty years ago. Green may equal “environment,” but Cheang never loses sight of how it also always equals “money.” In the closing scenes, Naga Saki gets re-branded as “Mumbo Gumbo,” now specializing in farm-raised catfish, completely free of toxins!

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Unfolding as a hallucinatory montage of Marxist critiques, ecofeminist diatribes, and queer, futuristic, dystopian imagery, the multimedia artist’s 1994 feature-length directorial debut is a prescient work of sci-fi agitprop from the early internet era. Think of it as a Godardian cinematic essay restructured for the MTV, channel-surfing age.”–Derek Smith, Slant (Blu-ray)

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Fresh Kill (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Fresh Kill (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

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    366 UNDERGROUND: BRAINSTARE (2025)

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    Beware

    DIRECTED BY:

    FEATURING: Fake AI actors

    PLOT: An employee of the futuristic Malos megacorporation submits himself to a mandatory scanning of his deepest and most profound memories.

    Still from Brainstare (2025)

    COMMENTS: Made a few months prior to the release of ‘s Incorporeal Man (2025), Brainstare was another attempt at creating a human- written script exclusively using  AI technology. While Incorporeal Man reveled in the unnaturalism of the final product, seeking a so-bad-is-weird cult status, Brainstare is determined to go for a more “decent” look and production quality. Some serious problems, though—especially in terms of pacing—make it an even more challenging viewing experience.

    Brainstare is divided into two acts, chamber dramas played in two different interior locations. The plot, set in a dystopian future, follows Anthony, an empolyee of the Malos Corporation, who has to submit himself to a scanning of his deepest memories or risk being fired and ostracized. The first act—with an exhausting duration of about one hour and twenty minutes—observes our protagonist in his home with his partner and colleague Sheba, as she tries to persuade him to proceed with the necessary tests. Their conversation develops gradually into the portrait of a one-sided relationship where Sheba seems to play the role of a reward for an obedient worker rather than a real love-partner.

    What an excruciatingly slow development that is! The AI does an acceptable job visualizing people and environments, with an uncanny aesthetic recalling rotoscope animation. The audio also presents no difficulties: both the characters’ voices and sound effects do their job. But the only aspect of the production real humans worked on —the script—-proves to be the worst element. Outrageously repetitive dialogues and an extensive use of the thesaurus make a telenovela seem brilliant in comparison.

    The second act, mercifully shorter than the first, shouldn’t be discussed too much to avoid possible spoilers. Not that the story has tremendous reveals and twists; let’s just say that the debates regarding the moral implications of a scanning of our most profound memories and thoughts continues, with new commentary on our relationship with the unconscious.

    There is material for a good “Black Mirror”-esque narrative here, but the execution is underwhelming, to say the least. Slow plot advancement and dialogue straight out of a soap opera make The Room, or even Incorporeal Man, preferable viewing options.

    Baldersion has made Brainstare available for free viewing on YouTube.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    No independent reviews found at the time of publication.

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    CAPSULE: IRON LUNG (2026)

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    DIRECTED BY: Mark Fischbach

    FEATURING: Mark Fischbach

    PLOT: In the far future, when humanity is dying off, a convict is sent to the bottom of an ocean of blood on a distant moon in search of… something or other.

    Still from iron lung (2026)

    COMMENTS: If you’ve heard the rags-to-riches DIY success story of the fan video game adaptation Iron Lung, which played in 4,160 theaters worldwide in early 2026 based purely on a grassroots campaign where fans of YouTuber-turned-feature-film-director markiplier (Mark Fischback) begged cinemas to show it on the big screen, and are wondering whether the non-initiate will enjoy this, my answer is a firm “no.” While the film is a phenomenal success story on its own terms, it was made for a narrow niche audience, and unless you’ve played the video game or count yourself among markiplier’s 38 million YouTube channel subscribers, you ain’t it.

    At least 90% of Iron Lung takes place inside a cramped submarine the size of a living room, crowded with metal apparatus and sensors. Convict pilot Simon (Fischback) is alone for almost the entire film, with occasional conversations over intercoms with bad connections to break his solitude. The craft is rickety, has no portals to see the outside world (which would just be a wall of opaque red anyway), has frequent blood leaks, and lunches a lot. You get to know every sharp corner and blinking light in the sub in the film’s 2-hour runtime; you almost feel like you could pilot this tub yourself. The detailed set conveys the feeling of a metal prison, and the sound design is superlative: drips, scrapes, static, echoes, thumps, all sorts of dreadful alarming noises to remind you that you are in a tin can surrounded by certain death. Based on the editing in the climax, I think that Fischback could direct a thrilling action scene—assuming you knew who, what, and where the antagonist was and what the hell was going on.

    But as impressive as the film’s technicals may be, the script is simultaneously boring and confusing. I mentioned that the film was 2 hours long, and it makes sure you feel every minute. Reports suggest the game itself can be finished in under and hour—an hour and a half if you dwaddle—so there is a lot of padding added here to convey the combination of tedium and dread the protagonist would experience. Watching the movie, you get the sense that the game is nothing but a long test of your ability to press buttons, flip switches, and turn knobs, because this mostly what Fischback does on screen. There is a part where he accidentally irradiates some of his handlers, which has no payoff. There is a tormented personal backstory delivered in monologue, meant to humanize the an anonymous explorer. But mainly, it’s Fischback flipping switches, turning knobs, and bemoaning his fate.

    The mystery of this abandoned moon is where the film’s claim to weirdness comes from. The premise itself is absurd: supposedly all the stars and planets have suddenly disappeared except for a single moon with an ocean of blood. Although the technology here comes from hard science fiction, the scenario is entirely mystical. The ocean floor contains mysterious artifacts (which I won’t spoil) and something that might be an entity—or, it could all be an oxygen-deprivation hallucination. There is some body horror, some monstrous visions, a blood-soaked cosmic climax, and no clear resolution. The lack of explanations would not be a problem if we cared about the protagonist in more than a theoretical sense, but it’s hard to become engaged with the convict’s plight. We root for humanity to survive more out of a sense of general obligation to the species than because the movie has caused us to care about this particular band of plucky survivors. So, in short: play the game first. If you want more, see the movie. Don’t reverse the process.

    Iron Lung is currently available for rental or purchase solely on YouTube.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “It’s slow, weird, and draining in a way that feels oddly beautiful.”–Roberto Tyler Ortiz, Geek Vibes Nation (contemporaneous)

    (This movie was nominated for review by “Anonymous,” who suggested it “[h]as enough questions about what f***ed up stuff we’re seeing is real or not, and ends with one of the goriest climaxes in all of film with a battle with a sentient ocean of radioactive human blood..” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

    I think this movie is weirder than average
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