Austin’s best-known film festival may be SXSW, but Fantastic Fest might be its best. Created by the Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League, it offers the best in genre filmmaking: horror, sci-fi, fantasy, thrillers and so on. This year’s fest was a slightly muted affair since actors and writers were on strike, and you wouldn’t know it from the crowd, the sort that wear “Music by John Carpenter” baseball hats, or have tattoos of Michael Myers as a sloth. We are at Fantastic Fest, where we’re reviewing the gnarliest movies so they’re on your radar before anyone else’s.
Restore Point
The sci-fi thriller Restore Point is a source of pride for the Czech Republic, where it was developed and filmed over eight years. Directed with an attention to detail by Robert Hloz, it is the kind of “hard” sci-fi that should appeal to fans of Blade Runner or Minority Report. Its chilly, no-nonsense approach make it just as cerebral as it is involving, although parts of its dense plot are tough to follow.
It is the early 2040s, and the “restore point” refers to a new technology that allows a shadowy company to resurrect people after their untimely deaths. The script, co-written by Hloz with two others, takes its time to develop the full implication of this creepy tech, which is just as well since the central conceit is a murder mystery. A detective (Andrea Mohylová) gets assigned to a double murder – a restore point scientist and his spouse – then something unexpected happens: the scientist appears from the dead (Matěj Hádek) to help investigate his own murder.
Restore points are easily prone to corruption – to the shock of no one – which is what the detective and her unlikely partner ultimately discover. It is not always clear who is deceiving whom, or why, so Restore Point smooths over dense plotting with smart world-building details. This is a vision of Europe with unlikely skyscrapers, self-driving cars and hyper-realistic holograms. Many of these special effects are an attempt for Hloz and his home country to prove that, yes, they are also capable of Hollywood-level sheen. What eludes them, however, is the broad appeal from their source material. Restore Point can be a single-minded as a procedural, a clinical genre exercise for those that who find levity and character development too distracting.
In My Mother’s Skin
In the brutal In My Mother’s Skin from the Philippines, Kenneth Lim Dagatan combines modern and folk horror to create an unhinged period horror film. The basic structure follows a fairy tale, right down to an innocent girl who’s manipulated by a supernatural creature, and we must not forget that most actual fairy tales – not the kind popularized by Disney – were not shy about nasty outcomes.
Set at the end of World War II, Dagatan focuses on a family on the outskirts of all the fighting. We see everything from the perspective of Tala (Felicity Kyle Napuli), a girl old enough to feel alarmed by what happens and still a touch too naïve to fix the problem. After Tala’s father leaves under mysterious circumstances and her mother (Beauty Gonzalez) suffers from an unspecified illness, she looks for answers in a kind-looking Fairy (Jasmine Curtis-Smith), who has a reassuring smile and a gorgeous, ornate costume.
The fairy offers Tala a cure for her mother, and of course Tala should have been more careful what she wished for. This is enough of a premise for Dagatan to show how things start bad, only to get worse in ways that are both supernatural and a consequence of wartime amorality. Dagatan prefers a stately approach, filming most of In My Mother’s Skin like a classy haunted house film, at least until her mother transforms into an insatiable, grotesque monster.
Like many other horror films at Fantastic Fest, this film has the courage to follow its disturbing premise to its natural conclusion. This means there is no happiness for Tala and her family, only a cruel acknowledgment that there was nothing to prevent the girl, who started so wide-eyed and innocent at the beginning, from learning brutal life lessons that leave her utterly alone – in more ways than one. Some audiences may find this approach too “mean,” whereas Dagatan and his cast would protest and say it is not mean. It is honest.
Sleep
Jason Yu, the director of the Korean horror film Sleep, worked as Bong Joon-ho’s assistant director on Okja. Director Bong’s influence on Yu is clear from the first scene of Sleep: they both share an affection for their characters, a sneaky way of making inevitable twists all the more shocking. And like his mentor, Yu has crafted a crowd-pleasing horror film with an ingenious, deceptively simple premise.
Expectant parents Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) and Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun) are in a state of shock because Hyun-su’s sleepwalking has become dangerous. Not only does he talk in his sleep, he scratches his face until he has a nasty wound, and even attempts to jump out the window of their apartment. After Soo-jin delivers the baby and sleep studies are inconclusive, she becomes increasingly convinced that a supernatural spirit is the source of their troubles.
Yu’s tight script is so inexorable that you almost do not notice just how bad things really become. Yes, Hyun-su’s nighttime behavior is erratic, and yet he is a dutiful, patient husband who submits to all of Soo-jin’s demands, whether it’s wearing gloves or wearing a skin-tight sleeping bag. But as a new mother, there is a madness that infects Soo-jin – who looks at her husband with increasing desperation – and what makes Sleep so pleasurable is you understand her point of view even after she resorts to extreme measures, then grabs a power drill.
Sleep is tight as a drum. No character or prop, not even a cute Pomeranian in a dual role, is out of place. And while there is a supernatural element to the film, Yu prefers to keep all special effects and twists grounded in the story of a husband and wife who struggle to empathize with one another. That’s the central, all too uncomfortable truth behind this film, one of the best at the festival: you may think you know your partner, yet they can surprise you in ways that are not always welcome.
The Last Stop in Yuma County
Part of the excitement of any film festival is to watch films that do not have distribution. Most of the films I’ve reviewed will be in theaters or available to stream soon enough, while the future is not so assured for the crime thriller The Last Stop in Yuma County. It is old-fashioned in the best possible way, the kind of movie that would have been a modest hit in the 1990s when studios were clamoring for the next Tarantino knockoff.
Almost all the action takes place in a diner in the desert, one where weary travelers post up because the adjacent gas station is empty until a fuel truck arrives. It is all mundane until two bank robbers (Richard Brake and Nicholas Logan) arrive, and they have no choice but to take the waitress Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue) and a knife salesman (Jim Cummings) hostage. What follows is an increasingly tense situation, one that no one fully understands, a special kind of problem when seemingly everyone is armed.
Writer and director Francis Galluppi might groan at the Tarantino comparisons, although he kind of invites them. He sets the films in the 1970s, a period of pulpy thrillers both directors somewhat fetishize, and the plot twists – coupled with sudden violence – are a lift from The Hateful Eight. What distinguishes Galluppi, and makes his film worth celebrating on its own, is his exploration of morality and irony. His characters are full of surprises, finding themselves in situations where compromise and the promise of a quick buck lead down a harsh road with the potential for so much to go wrong.
Languid and sudden in equal measure, Galluppi has a tight grip of tone and tension, another way of saying The Last Stop in Yuma County is never boring. Side characters and pop culture references create a sense of self-awareness, and yet the film never loses sight of its unfair distribution of karma. Most first-time filmmakers do not find an ending that is both surprising and inevitable, qualities typically reserved for longtime storytellers. Galluppi nails it in his feature debut.
The Coffee Table
Before anyone at Fantastic Fest saw The Coffee Table, an ultra-dark comedy from Spain, director Caye Casas apologized to the audience. Deadpan jokes like that are a provocation, especially for a crowd that prides itself on enduring transgressive subject matter, and yet Casas’ apology was wholly justified. This is a grim, grim comedy, one that starts on the note of absurd tragedy and turns the screws into an anxiety-ridden exploration of our capacity for denial.
The film follows Jesus (David Pareja) as he gets ready to host his brother and his brother’s girlfriend for dinner. Something terrible happens while his wife is running errands, and so the rest of the film follows Jesus’ attempt to cover-up his mistake. To say anything more than that would rob The Coffee Table of its macabre pleasures, which involve shock and disbelief that Casas is, in fact, taking his film in the direction we think he is.
Dramatic irony and imperfect information are what makes the story so compelling. Like the Safdies or Todd Solondz, Casas flouts good taste by thinking about what someone might do in such an extraordinary situation. Jesus suffers quietly, barely keeping his veneer of sanity, and some lines of dialogue twist the knife of just how badly he fucked up. Casas films with an escalating sense of claustrophobia, his camera squeezing on Jesus’ pained face, while adding macabre details that suggest the secret will not be a secret for much longer.
When the floodgates open and everyone realizes what happens, the action escalates quickly. The film becomes a cruel metaphor for what lines cannot be crossed, and what might drive someone ordinary into extreme behavior. The spoiler-heavy details of The Coffee Table sound like a sick joke, and yet Casas embellishes it with plausible, three-dimensional characters who are awful and likable in equal measure. It is a remarkable feat. Just do not let anyone, especially not any critic, tell you about Jesus’ unfortunate accident.
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