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| Foreigner Photo: Saarthak Taneja |
Outsiders frequently imagine that genre film is a hostile environment for women. That may once have been the case – indeed, one could say it about most of the film industry – but a dip into this year’s Fantasia selection gives a very different impression. Here there’s a wealth of female-centred films to look forward to, to the extent that it was difficult to narrow down this list. Special mentions should go to The Bearded Girl and Lucid, which in any ordinary year would have made the cut. 2025 is special. If you plan to attend, here are some titles you won’t want to miss.
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| Hellcat Photo: courtesy of Fons PR |
Brock Bodell’s stunning début is a high concept thriller which really delivers on twists and turns. it hinges on a riveting central performance from Dakota Gorman as a woman who wakes up in the back of a moving camper trailer with a nasty wound on her arm and only vague memories of the night before. As a male voice comes through a speaker, telling her that she’s in danger and he’s racing to get her to the hospital, she frantically searches for clues to what has happened and a way to escape. Viewers will find themselvces increasingly uncertain what – and who – to believe as expectations are subverted and even the mood of the film shifts in unpredictable ways. First class set dressing and technical work further enhances a wild and unsettling ride.
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| The Virgin Of Quarry Lake Photo: Courtesy of Sundance Institute |
Amber Wilkinson writes: Magic reality bites in Laura Casabé's latest, which pairs Carrie-like abilities with a considerably more modern antiheroine. Her film - adapted by Benjamín Naishtat from two short stories Mariana Enríquez - sweats not just with the heat of an Argentinian summer of 2001, when the country was rocked by economic crisis, but also with teenage hormones. Natalia (Dolores Oliverio) and her friends have the collective hots for Diego (Agustín Sosa), who is slightly older than them. That means it's no big surprise when he has his head turned by Sylvia (Fernanda Echevarría), who is a few years his senior and arrives with tales of travel. As a shopping trolley festers in the heat, jealousies flourish and tensions reach snapping point. Laura Casabé told us: "It’s like the supernatural leaks through the cracks of reality."
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| Redux Redux |
The second film by the McManus brothers, whose impressive The Block Island Sound plays at Fantasia 2020, Redux Redux is an independent film made on a modest budget, but right from its breathtaking opening scene it looks like a blockbuster, and it will fans of sci-fi action. Michaela McManus plays a mother whose response to the echoing trauma of her daughter’s murder is to get hold of a machine which lets her travel between parallel universes, desperately searching for one in which the girl is still alive. Failing that, she will kill the man who hurt her, again and again and again. It never eases her pain, however, and her itinerant status means she’s utterly alone – until a chance meeting with a troubled teenager changes everything. Blending edge-of-your-seat action sequences with a very human story, this really delivers.
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| Foreigner Photo: Saarthak Taneja |
Foreigner An Iranian-born teenager tries to put down roots after being transplanted to Canada in Ava Maria Safai’s lively but sinister satire. Caught between her father and grandmother’s traditions, the allure of the popular girls who take her in, and the even stranger world shaped by their expectations of her, she struggles to find an identity of her own, making her vulnerable to a certain type of predation. Whether this is a supernatural monster or the equally brutal forces of capitalism is ambiguous, but going blonde has consequences. Safai explores a suite of well known teenage horrors from a different angle, and the film works in large part because of her deep understanding of how girls that age think and communicate and comprehend the perils they face.
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| Sweetness Photo: Fantasia International Film Festival |
There’s a different, equally astute take on girlhood in Emma Higgins’ Sweetness, which sees a shy 16-year-old slowly go off the rails when she finds herself unexpectedly responsible for the boy band singer on whom she has a crush. Taking it upon herself to cure him of his drug addiction by keeping him prisoner in a room covered with pictures of his face, she embodies every virtue middle class parents strive to inculcate in their kids, but of course it all goes horribly wrong, and desperate circumstances prompt desperate measures. Sharply observant and rooted in commonplace psychology rather than some grotesquely rendered notion of madness, the film explores the potential consequences of a society that tells girls their only value lies in service, desirability and love. It’s very sweet and very, very dark.
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| Anything That Moves |
Although it’s female voices that dominate this year, and although some similar ground is covered by the female-led Fucktoys, which is also impressive, it would be remiss to recommend anything at this festival without giving a mention to Alex Phillips’ marvellous Anything That Moves, which combines an outré murder mystery with a tribute to the porn heyday of the Sixties and Seventies. Shot on Kodak film with gorgeous colours throughout, it follows the misadventures of a bicycle courier (Hal Baum) who sells sex on the side but finds himself in trouble when people he has recently slept with start turning up dead. There is intermittent gore and eroticism, but it is humour and heart that come through most clearly. It’s wonderfully observed and a delight to watch.
The Fantasia International Film Festival opens on Thursday 17 July.
