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Capsules

2025 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: TRADITIONAL CUISINE, PART ONE

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Montréal 2025

The Fantasia commercial, about the Fantasia audience, before the Fantasia screening, really spoke to me.

7/16: Fragment

The festival pulled a fast one on me this year, adding a day to the front end. Arriving at the bus depot just after 5 o’clock, I made it first to my hotel, then to the accreditation office around 6:15: just in time to wander into Kim Sung-yoon’s directorial debut. Fragment is a well-acted drama about grief and culpability. A little disjointed at the start (as could well be appropriate, considering the topic and title), it finds its footing as the characters creep toward a reconciliation of sorts with their circumstances. The young leads are all commendable, with a special shout-out to the kid sister. She suffers no nonsense. Fragment is not a film made for me, but nonetheless I must admit it left me touched. (A good touch, that is.)

7/17: The Wailing [El llanto]

Pedro Martín-Calero, you fiend! There is a great deal to enjoy about this story of the supernatural: an evil presence (creepy old dead guy, from what I could glean) has haunted a series of women in a family, moving from mother to daughter when the former succumbs to despair. This is something of two movies in one, when I feel it should have been three. The chronicles of the characters are all well paced, and the scares are real. (The hook here is: this entity can only be seen through video capture, be that the large camcorder of the mother as a youth, or the ubiquitous smartphones of the latest victim.) Sound design is dead on, with the titular wailing emanating from a tower block whose second story room is always up for sale. The mood is set, details established, and then, BAM: it’s over.

I suppose there are greater sins in filmmaking than leaving me all too curious how this occult situation is resolved.

7/18: “Nyaight of the Living Cat”, Episodes 1 – 4

Tomohiro Kamitani and , judging from their specially recorded video introduction for the Fantasia screening, are two chill middle-aged guys with a love for cats. Or at least a love of global apocalypses involving cats. Although, perhaps the feline menace is safely Continue reading 2025 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: TRADITIONAL CUISINE, PART ONE →

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FATA MORGANA (1966)

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AKA Left–Handed Fate; Fata/Morgana

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DIRECTED BY: Vincente Aranda

FEATURING: Teresa Gimpera, Marianne Benet, Antonio Ferrandes, Alberto Dalbés

PLOT: When a literature professor predicts an advertising model will be the next victim of a black-gloved serial killer, a secret agent sets out to save her life.

Still from Fata Morgana (1966)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Inspired by quick-change artist extraordinaire Leopoldo Fregoli, Fata/Morgana dons the garb of several genres (fumetti, spy thriller, science fiction, giallo) only to disrobe just as quickly. Set during an unspecified cataclysmic event anticipating ‘s The Falls, the viewing experience mirrors an unsettled narrative reality. The killer’s identity is revealed early on but leads to an entirely unexpected outcome, and a closing scene eerily similar to Blow–Up‘s contentious and equally inconclusive ending (released the same year). Like the main character, the viewer is adrift amidst a world of shifting symbols. The eclectic style, along with the mysterious backdrop, ambiguous characters, and a uniquely bizarre murder weapon combine to create a Pop Art concoction with a seriously unhinged vibe.

COMMENTS: What would you do if you accidentally bumped into a blind man on the street and he said you were going to be murdered today? Poor Gim understandably freaks out. She doesn’t want to die, but she’s decided to stay behind while the rest of her unnamed city’s residents flee en masse. A mysterious catastrophe has occurred in London, and fear of it happening in other cities has rapidly spread around the globe.

Introduced via comic book panels set to an uptempo jazz beat, Fata Morgana aligns itself with the artistic sensibility of European adult comics and the beginnings of the giallo craze (‘s Blood and Black Lace was released two years earlier). The Professor (Ferrandis) prepares to present a lecture on the career of an unidentified serial killer, seen in black and white photographs clad in classic fedora with black trench coat and leather gloves. His victims are all young female models. The Professor’s careful study of horror literature, advertising imagery, and popular films leads to his “premonition” that cologne spokesmodel Gim (Gimpera) will be the killer’s next target.

Gim meets with friends and attends her modeling shoots, trying to retain some semblance of normality. Someone slashes her car tires, so she’s left to walk deserted streets between appointments. Her chance encounters with the city’s remaining inhabitants become increasingly threatening. A gang of silent teenage boys roams the city stealing billboards and appliances to create their own modernist clubhouse. The Professor gives a lecture on how to identify the victims of future crime, then stalks Gim while wearing a series of improbable disguises. Miriam (Benet), a survivor of the London event, spends hours in an “art chamber” staring at sculptures, before wandering the city in an aimless quest to find her lover Jerry (though enigmatic flashbacks suggest he’s already dead). Meanwhile, Agent JJ (Martí) desperately tries to save Gim from the killer while being thwarted by The Professor and everyone else he meets.

All Gim’s friends spout philosophy while trying to process their own impending doom in revealing yet pretentious dialogue:

“When we are awake, we all live in the same world, but when we dream, each lives in his own.”

“A chessboard has no place for dreams. Who wins in chess, loses in life.”

“To be or not to be. To die. To sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream,” Gim chants in stream of consciousness while displaying a bottle of cologne. “But I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.”

“Very good, very good. Repeat just the last sentence,” says the photographer, “but this time smile.”

Like Blow–Up seen from the other side of the camera, the female model grapples with the deceptive nature of photographic images, well aware of advertising’s false promises. In a collapsing world, do luxury goods and status symbols still have meaning? When official loudspeakers announce that people can actually live without “superfluous objects” and all you need to start a new life is a suitcase small enough to carry onto a plane? The anti-consumerism now seems like another random element in a narrative constructed of jumbled ideas, but Fata Morgana‘s themes obviously resonated at the time of its release. Echoes can be seen in films by directors as disparate as , , and Peter Greenaway.

The tone, alternating fatalism and optimism, still feels relevant today. In the end, the professor’s theory proves to be wrong, the London event goes unexplained, but Gim’s valiant struggle to maintain her humanity continues. She keeps walking, leaving the city behind as the camera moves away from her until a green field fills the frame.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a wild, disorienting, surreal mash-up of Pop Art, science fiction, thriller, and horror.”–Michael Barrett, Pop Matters (Blu-ray)

Fata Morgana [Blu-ray]

Fata Morgana [Blu-ray]
  • First U.S. Blu-ray release for this 1960’s psychedelic Euro-thriller.
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE COMING OF SIN (1978)

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La Visita del Vicio;  AKA Vice Makes a Visit

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DIRECTED BY: José Ramon Larraz

FEATURING: Patricia Granada, Lidia Zuazo, Rafael Machado

PLOT: An orphaned girl haunted by prophetic dreams becomes the maid of a wealthy young widow.

Still from the coming of sin (1978)

COMMENTS: If asked by a producer to make a “sexy movie,” not many directors would combine the unsettling atmosphere of Belgian weird fiction with the Tenebrism of the Spanish Baroque, and then mix it all up with an ancient Greek myth about bestiality. José Ramon Larraz does just that. The tale of Pasiphaë provides the surreal imagery; the painting of Diego Velazquez the light and shadows; and the setting, an isolated country manor house, is straight out of Thomas Owen, along with the film’s shockingly violent conclusion.

Trianna (Zuazo) suffers from a recurring nightmare. An orphan without any family, she ends up working for Lorna (Granada), an eccentric and independent widow living alone in the remote countryside. When Lorna asks Trianna about her dream, she says there’s a man on a horse and he frightens her, but she doesn’t want to talk about it. They drop the subject and soon fall into a cozy domesticity which eventually develops into a full-on Sapphic relationship.

When the subject of her nightmare appears in real life—a nude young man riding a black horse bareback—he terrifies Trianna (and tramples the rose bushes in the process). Trianna greets him with a double-barreled shotgun. “That’s no reason to shoot somebody,” Lorna tells her.

Lorna insists Trianna’s nightmare results from her fear of sex and/or men; she has books that will explain it all to her, but illiteracy saves Trianna from having to read volumes of pop psychology. Instead, she visits the local fortune-teller, who asks why she even bothered to come, since her fate is sealed. Trianna is the devil’s child; and if she and the man on the black horse ever become a couple then someone will die.

After this disturbing revelation, the young man on the horse becomes a regular guest at Lorna’s house; she insists he learn some manners, so he begins wearing pants when he joins the ladies for tea. Eventually Chico (Machado) becomes the lover of both Trianna and Lorna, despite Trianna’s fears. Though Chico wants Trianna, Lorna begins aggressively pursuing him, unbalancing their fragile love triangle.

In between orgies, they visit the local museum, a nightclub where two female dancers perform a tango, and Lorna convinces Trianna and Chico to pose half-naked together for her latest painting. Lorna insists the pair would make a fine couple, even as she continues her clandestine visits to Chico’s shack down by the river. To make her assignations, Lorna passes through towering reeds, a landscape vividly described in Owen’s “The Conquered Beauty and the Troubadour,” wherein gunshots obliterate the post-coital calm of a summer afternoon.

Larraz started his artistic career as a comic book illustrator, and Spain’s then-restrictive censorship laws drove him to other parts of Europe. He turned to directing films after a chance meeting with Josef von Sternberg in Brussels, where Larraz also met Owen, friend of Jean Ray, the author of the novel Malpertuis. The influence of these two men shaped the course of Larraz’s idiosyncratic film career. The Coming of Sin was made in Spain upon his return at the end of the Franco regime.

In interviews, Larraz claims that every one of his films is actually a Thomas Owen story. Larraz wears this inspiration on his sleeve, but anyone who hasn’t read Owen’s work won’t recognize him as Larraz’s muse, and he’s never mentioned in the credits. Owen was a fan of old dark house stories (one of his collections is titled “Les Maisons suspectes”), and Larraz clearly shares this obsession. His first film, 1970’s Whirlpool, takes place in an isolated house outside of London, where the protagonists get up to artsy, sexy, and occasionally murderous menages á trois, as they do in The Coming of Sin.

In Owen’s stories uncanny events fracture mundane life. Old mansions reveal to strangers worlds unto themselves, where the normal rules of everyday existence no longer apply. The Coming of Sin exists in numerous cuts and under a plethora of titles (S&M scenes were excised from some versions, or augmented with hardcore footage in others), but Owen’s themes are the focus in Larraz’s original. When Trianna and Chico intrude upon Lorna’s den of solitude they set in motion the hand of fate.

The films of Larraz (AKA J. R. Larrath) are admittedly something of an acquired taste. Like and , his pacing can be slow, the scenery repetitive, the amateur acting impeded by stilted dialogue. He had the makings of a genuine auteur; his film Symptoms was England’s submission to Cannes in 1974, where it received favorable notice from French audiences. Despite that success, Larraz primarily worked in low budget Eurotrash productions, his wild imagination sacrificed to excessive sex scenes and gore at the behest of producers. But no matter how cheap or sleazy the film, Larraz always retained his artist’s eye, and he speaks in his own voice, a unique downbeat tone with a heart of weird fiction hidden at the core.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

‘…another Larraz offering that is almost weirdly suffused with a near hallucinogenic, dreamlike ambience, despite some of the more shocking aspects of the visuals.”–Jeffrey Kauffman, Blu-ray.com (Arrow box set)

Blood Hunger: The Films of José Larraz ( Whirlpool / Vampyres / La visita del vicio ) ( Whirlpool / Vampyres / The Coming of Sin ) [ Blu-Ray, Reg.A/B/C Import - United Kingdom ]

Blood Hunger: The Films of José Larraz ( Whirlpool / Vampyres / La visita del vicio ) ( Whirlpool / Vampyres / The Coming of Sin ) [ Blu-Ray, Reg.A/B/C Import - United Kingdom ]
  • Blood Hunger: The Films of José Larraz ( Whirlpool / Vampyres / La visita del vicio ) ( Whirlpool /
  • Blood Hunger: The Films of José Larraz
  • Whirlpool / Vampyres / La visita del vicio
  • Whirlpool / Vampyres / The Coming of Sin
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Capsules

CAPSULE: THE PLATFORM 2 (2024)

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El hoyo 2

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Milena Smit, Hovik Keuchkerian, Natalia Tena, Óscar Jaenada, Bastien Ughetto, Ken Appledorn

PLOT: A messiah reigns supreme over a cadre of “loyalists” in the pit, whose merciless enforcement of the law both maintains and threatens the lives of those volunteering to survive the platform.

COMMENTS: Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia might have done better just sticking to this franchise as a platform for various character studies. The kinds of people who “volunteer” for probable death by starvation are bound to be interesting: life’s losers casting the die for one last chance, be it for success, salvation, or something else. Gaztelu-Urrutia’s opening salvo in the original Platform allowed for dissection of society (rich at the top—literally, at least, food-wise—doomed at the bottom) and how individuals fit in to the whole mess. In his second outing, we meet some interesting people, and witness how zealotry in the name of the masses typically leads to a whole new flavor of injustice.

The platform’s new recruit, Perempuán, begins as a cipher, and despite staggered reveals pretty much remains so. She is the audience’s new window into this purgatorial nightmare, kept company for a time by an ogre of a fellow who may or may not be a mathematician, but is certainly a screw-up. But her pot-bellied cellmate is never a problem; indeed, he’s a sensitive soul with no aspirations to harm anyone other than himself. Harming others is left not just to the platform’s overseers in this outing, but also to a group of fanatics who have taken it upon themselves to enforce “the Law,” which was hinted at in the first film. Eat only your share. Do not eat the food of the dead—’cause it’s unfair. Disobey the Law, and you will be strictly disciplined.

With every thesis (the platform), there is antithesis (the cult of Law), morphing eventually into synthesis. Synthesis, in this case, is a rebellion against the rebellion. The prisoner’s law, as interpreted solely by an impressively mobile messiah—how he travels around the 333-level deep complex never quite clicks—raises some interesting questions: when does enforcement for the greater good become mere barbarism? Is pure equity something to pursue even when it means bringing everyone down to the same level of misery? At one point the messiah’s methods are questioned; he rejoins that they kill now so that they needn’t kill in the future. I’ve heard that before: tyranny thwarted by a rebellion, which turns into a horrible new tyranny. Gaztelu-Urrutia seems to suggest there’s a third, middle-way.

That sensibility usually gets lost in the fervor—and particularly so in the case of The Platform 2. There is much to enjoy this time around: the inmates are fleshed-out people pushed to desperate extremes; the vagaries of populist autocracy are dissected; and spiritual undertones manifest in a semi-elegant allegory. But as other viewers and critics have observed, a muddle (a frenzied, violent muddle) develops. Though the film gnaws at interesting themes, there are a few too many, and the climax feels like an under-chewed story to gulp down as the credits roll.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Eventually, the movie skips ahead to something more novel: an eerie, green-lit sequence that brings both sci-fi and slow-building suspense back into the proceedings. (Even the ever-present blood splatter becomes more poetic.) Then it barrels ahead further, into a head-scratching final stretch that doesn’t gain any clarity by continuing on into the end credits.”–Betsy Reed, The Guardian (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: WAITING FOR DALI (2023)

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Waiting for Dali is currently available for rental or purchase on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: David Pujol

FEATURING: , José Garcia, Clara Ponsot

PLOT: A restaurateur in ‘s hometown of Cadaqués in the 70s dreams of luring the artist to visit his Dalí-themed “El Surreal” bistro, and catches a break when a master chef on the lam shows up in need of work (and a cover story).

Waiting for Dali (2023)

COMMENTS: Movie about Dalí (at least the ones we’ve covered) all seem to be rooted in realism: Little Ashes focused on Federico García Lorca’s crush on the young Dalí, while ‘s Daliland largely contended itself with depicting the extravagance of the painter’s lavish celebrity lifestyle. Perhaps Dalí himself would appreciate the irony; no director dares attempt to even approximate his hallucinatory genius. (We suspect surrealist will end this trend soon when he releases his “real fake biopic” starring multiple actors as Dalí later this year.) When Jules decorates his El Surreal bistro with plastic clocks melting in the trees, a lobster glued to the telephone, and mannequins seated at the tables, it seems like a cheesy Vegas-style tribute to the surrealist icon rather than anything legitimately surreal.

The surrealist cuisine crafted by master chef Fernando, however, does show originality: an airy mountain of carrot mouse modeled off a local landmark, “hot-and-cold pea soup,” various oddly shaped mini-loafs painstakingly decorated with tiny springs of herbs, and an array savory lollipops served on a bed of mud. The artistic journey in the film belongs to Fernando, who learns to incorporate controlled chaos into his craft, which had previously been ruled by strict order and proper French culinary procedures. Fernando’s gastronomical reinventions suggest the way Dalí mastered the basic techniques of painting before warping them to his own imaginary landscapes. Restaurateur Jules (who looks uncannily like a young Spanish Robert Downey Jr.), on the other hand, essentially serves as dapper comic relief: he is a Dalí fanboy who invents with multiple unsuccessful schemes to lure the object of his obsession to his dining establishment. In the end, it is only Fernando’s audacious menu that offers any chance of attracting the master.

Dalí himself is only an aspirational figure in the tale; if you are waiting for him to appear, you may be disappointed. You will also not learn a lot about the artist; the film, made for a Spanish audience, assumes you have a baseline of knowledge about the time, place, and players. A single introductory sentence explains that the story takes place at the end of the Franco dictatorship, and from there you’re on your own. The film expects you to know who Gala is when she appears, and to recognize the various Dalían tributes Jules has set up in El Surreal. Franco’s police play a role in motivating the plot, but they are hardly a serious threat; they are almost comic foils, and not even important enough to bother tying up the loose threads they leave at the end. The film is instead surprisingly light and frothy, like carrot mousse, and sunny like the Catalonian shore, a celebration of creativity that shines even in the darkest days.

Director David Pujol’s had directed two previous documentaries about Dalí, and also a television miniseries documentary about avant-garde chef Ferran Adrià, so he obviously knows his subjects well.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the cast’s willingness to do all the heavy lifting elevates the otherwise puzzling yet predictable film that wants to use a turbulent era for the setting of a feel-good, romantic film but ends up feeling random, inconsistent, and scattered.”–Sarah J. Vincent, Boston Movie News (contemporaneous)