New Life launches the viewer in medias res, with Jessica Murdock (Hayley Erin) walking down a suburban street, her face covered in blood that is in fact not her own. She lets herself into the house that she once shared with her fiancé Ian (Nick George), and just has time to clean up and grab her hidden engagement ring (a token of the new life on which she was about to embark), before shadowy intruders force her to flee out the bathroom window.

Meanwhile, her lead pursuer Elsa (Sonya Walger), a professional fixer recently diagnosed with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and aware that her own body is giving out on her, is working with a team of private operatives to stop Jessica crossing the border into Canada. For all Jessica’s ordinariness, she is clearly at the centre of something serious and dangerous. Both flashbacks, and need-to-know information passed onto Elsa by her handler Raymond (Tony Amendola), will gradually fill in the narrative gaps, revealing just why Jessica is fleeing, and what is at stake for both her and possibly humanity.

“Not too many people are too kind these days,” old farmer Frank Lerner (Blaine Palmer) warns Jessica. The truth is, though, that Frank and his wife Janie (Betty Moyer) are more than kind to Jessica, as is small-town bartender Molly Presser (Ayanna Berkshire), all perfect hosts sharing their food, drink and homes with this polite young woman in obvious trouble. What none of them realises is that they are all leaving themselves exposed to whatever is plaguing their guest. Elsa may increasingly require a crutch, but as the gauntlet tightens and the collateral damage of Jessica’s flight spreads, no one is walking away from what is unfolding.

Writer/director John Rosman’s feature debut is structured a little like Andrew Davis’ The Fugitive (1993), as our sympathies are divided between an innocent civilian on the run, and a pursuer who seems equally well-intentioned, while a broader conspiracy and cover-up emerge on the margins. Here, cat and mouse are caught in the same trap, as clandestine corporate concerns trump national, even international security.

“You will experience all of the stages of grief and mourn your old life,” Elsa will be advised by another woman with ALS, “so you will learn about the weakness of the human spirit, but also about its strength in deep and profound ways.”

These are key themes in New Life, equally applicable to Jessica’s rapid unravelling, which runs parallel to, and is modulated by, Elsa’s advancing disease and her need to prepare for it physically and psychologically. Both these women are losing control as their biology defies their will and a new life takes over.

Though at its heart a chase movie, New Life infects itself with other elements – one straight out of a well-known horror subgenre, another lifted from recent lived anxieties about pandemic – to create a paranoid vision of life where the impulse to escape and evolve and “see the world” is in no way unique to our species. It is a tense, breathless dash, suffused with sadness for what might have been.

New Life has its world première at Fantasia 2023

Eight Eyes starts as it intends to finish: with an unsettling enigma.

The camera tilts down through the darkness of night to a big fire, onto which some clothing is placed, and in which a charred human head is ablaze. A mask made of wax is held up in the foreground, as a male voice says, in subtitled Serbian: “Who is this? Our new sister. Very good. As if Mama is staring back at me.” And then the film’s title appears, in both English and Serbian, and also in a bright yellow typeface that immediately evokes the stylings of the Seventies (as does the score by Morricone Youth). Whatever the specific details of this prologue might signify, it seems clear that the road travelled by the film will lead to a messed-up family and a murderous ritual – and that we are being taken backwards.

Sure enough the narrative proper begins with black-and-white footage of a Serbian wedding party which New York couple Cass (Emily Sweet) and Gav (Bradford Thomas) have crashed on their belated honeymoon in Belgrade. Gav keeps filming on his newly acquired Super 8 camera, which explains the initial monochrome presentation, and while the rest of Eight Eyes, apart from the odd additional insert of Super 8 footage, is in colour, that too has been shot by cinematographer Sean Dahlberg in now outmoded 16mm on a range of antique cameras.

Yet as the couple’s smartphones and Cass’ headphones will show, the film’s setting is very much post-millennial, so that both Gav’s and director Austin Jennings’ choices to shoot in older media are a backwards-looking affectation, as though both desire to view the present with past eyes. One might even at first suppose that the film’s mystifying title involves a reference to Gav’s Super 8 camera and the archaising perspective that it offers – at least until a different meaning for it will eventually come along.

Early the next morning Cass and Gav will run into Ivan Zuber (Bruno Veljanovski), a local stranger who oddly prefers to go by the name Saint Peter, and who claims to have seen the couple (with his one good eye) at the wedding the day before. Outwardly charming, Ivan easily wins Gav over, although Cass is quick to see the ‘creepy’ side of his forward masculinity. Zuber offers to be their personal guide through Serbia and Macedonia, and no matter how many times he is shaken off by them, they will keep crossing paths with him, in a manner which makes Cass even more suspicious.

Like Gav, but in his own way, Ivan too is fixated on the past. He carries obsolescent VHS cassettes on his person, and the first stop to which he takes the couple is an old munitions factory, abandoned in the 90s, where his dad once worked. Ivan helps his uncle (Jovan Ristić) sell watches, and keeps trying to palm off on Cass a ring with a clock built into it that once belonged to his mother (played on old videos by Gordana Jović). Indeed for Ivan, who will emerge as something of a Norman Bates figure, time stopped when his beloved mother died, and ever since he has been trying to revive her memory.

Eight Eyes sets itself up to belong to the ‘tourist trap’ subgenre – think Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005), John Stockwell’s Turistas (2006) and Christian Yafdrup’s See No Evil (2002) – wherein foreign visitors come a cropper against locals only too happy to exploit their cultural disorientation. For in being bilingual where its American characters are not, Jennings’ film places Cass and Gav at an alienated disadvantage, always dependent on the unreliable Ivan to interpret what is going on, and always knowing less than the viewer (who at least has access to the subtitles).

Still, even as we meet more of Ivan’s family, and things start to go all Texas Chain Saw Massacre in the Zubers’ remote mansion outside Skopje, few will be able to predict the unhinged turn that the film will take.

Like Bigas Lunas’ Anguish (1987), Antonio Tublén’s LFO (2013), Adrián García Bogliano’s Black Circle (2018) and Rob Schroeder’s Ultrasound (2021), this film carefully mesmerises both its intradiegetic and extradiegetic viewers, before finally delivering a full-on Seventies freakout – a cheesily lo-fi lightshow that we can only hope is not having the same influence on us as on Cass.

For here, as in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), old video recordings are the medium for a transformative possession which brings the dead back to life in the viewer, and which cannot ever simply be left behind or forgotten. Perhaps that is all that cinema has ever been or done.

Co-writing with Matthew Frink, for his feature debut Jennings has crafted a heady love letter to Seventies exploitation cinema, while showing that all the paranoia and xenophobia, sexism and violence of that period die hard. For in this holiday movie, every tourist – and perhaps every cinemagoer – takes back home with them something of what they have experienced, as the old country migrates to the new, and a mummified skeleton finds new flesh.

Eight Eyes has its world première at Fantasia 2023. Read more reviews at SciFiNow      

What You Wish For is a story of haves and have-nots, and the morality-challenging divide that exists between them.

More than a mere have-not, gambling addict Ryan Mosely (Nick Stahl) is also massively in debt, and has had to flee his Dallas home, in fear for his very life. The fact that he is being pursued by an aggressive loan shark named Rabbit is an early signifier of just how readily the rôles of predator and prey can be interchanged and reversed. Ryan may land, at the film’s beginning, in an unnamed Latin American country with just $10 in his pocket (currency that the locals will reject), with zero prospects and with a relentless lender threatening to harm his loved ones, but his fortune is about to change, driving him, willingly or otherwise, up in the world and in the food chain.

Ryan does have one set of special skills – not subterfuge, or kickass fighting, or violent recovery, but a talent for cooking which he acquired back in culinary school. Now, with nowhere else to turn, he is hoping to reconnect with his old friend Jack (Brian Groh), whom he has not seen since they studied together to be chefs 12 years ago. Ryan is surprised to be picked up at the airport by a chauffeur, and even more surprised to be driven to a large, remote house with infinity pool and Edenic views of the surrounding rainforest – in short, Paradise, with all the luxurious appointments and extra trimmings.

This is not Jack’s home, but rather a temporary residence, where he is due to cater a special dinner for a small group of superrich clients. As Jack explains, the Agency for which he works has him moving around the world for high-end gigs like this at similarly exquisite, similarly private settings, and pays him well for the local food that he personally sources and prepares.

While Jack seems jaded, even haunted by his lucrative, jetset lifestyle serving a global élite, Ryan sees only what he himself would like to have. After all, both men come from similar backgrounds, are the same age, and Ryan is smarter and even arguably the better cook than his friend – yet there he is, a desperate loser on the run, while Jack has everything he could ever want, not to mention, as Ryan discovers after a sneak peek at Jack’s computer, well over a million in the bank.

“I read somewhere,” Jack will tell Ryan in what is as much a warning as a philosophical reflection, “that the reward always matches the atrocity.” Ryan is about to discover what that really means, after he crosses an ethical line and finds himself having to impersonate Jack as solo chef for a very special evening and a very unusual meal – and unlike a financial debt, certain moral debts can never be repaid.

The proverbial phrase ‘what you wish for’ comes with an implicit ‘be careful…’, and sure enough, this taut, tense film, written and directed by Nicholas Tomnay (The Perfect Host, 2010), is a cautionary tale about the irresistible imperative – and moral emptiness – of class envy, when those at the top have neither empathy nor any other admirable qualities, and those who feed them to advance themselves become compromised by, and complicit in, a closed system of unspeakable consumerism.

Based around a dinner, this is a little like Guto Parente’s The Cannibal Club (O Clube dos Canibais, 2018) or Mark Mylod’s The Menu (2022), focussing as much on the hired help – besides Ryan, the immaculate hostess Imogene (Tamsin Topolski), the troubleshooter Maurice (Juan Carlos Messier) and two local servers (Maria Fernanda Gomez, Bria Acuna) – as on the privileged diners (David Tominaga, Norma Nivia, Megumi Hasebe, Evan Sudarsky, Raphael Philippon).

This “extraordinary experience” is certainly exclusive, but room is still found at the table to accommodate uninvited guests like the two suspicious policemen (Randy Vasquez, Ariel Sierra) sniffing around with uncomfortable questions, or the Australian tourist (Penelope Mitchell) looking to hook back up with Jack.

Also on the table is a generous serving of social allegory, as we see not only fastidiously prepared culinary rarities, but also the source, labour and means of production required to put them on the plate for the delectation of an aloof few. This selection of courses is cut and cooked at great human cost, exposing a globalised economy where only the 1% get to dine out on the strivings and sufferings of everyone else.

What You Wish For plays out as a sort of macabre farcical thriller, in which Ryan’s envious ambition, whether expressed through reckless gambling or through cosying up to the superrich, proves a trap in which, one way or another, everything that he truly values will be lost. After all, when it comes to the games of the affluent, the rest of us will always just pawns, slaves or morsels.

What You Wish For had its world première at Fantasia 2023. Find more reviews at SciFiNow

“The film you are about to see is a work of fantastic fiction, ooh, but it’s realer than you think,” states Cryptessa (Etcetera Etcetera) to the camera at the beginning of Alice Maio Mackay’s third feature, T Blockers.

Shot in monochrome, dressed for gothy glamour and lit like a queen of the silent screen, Cryptessa embodies the spirits of TV horror hostesses Vampira and Elvira, not only promising campy pleasures to come, but also framing Mackay’s film precisely as a film.

“It’s only a movie,” the gender-ambiguous Cryptessa repeats mantra-like at the end of their spiel – and sure enough, T Blockers (formally designated “a transgender & queer film”) occupies the slippery space of metacinema, offering films within films and reality converted to filmic fantasy, with Cryptessa reappearing at various points to offer chorus-like commentary on self and otherness, monstrosity born and made, integrity and alienation, and other elusive dichotomies that preoccupy both trans experience and horror movies. Cryptessa is sometimes outside the principal narrative, and sometime within it introducing other, inset films, and the boundaries between all these constructed, interpolated realities are constantly blurred, so that Cryptessa’s equivocal status as both outsider and insider comes to reflect the mixed feelings of protagonist Sophie Castle (Lauren Last) about her own shifting identity.

Like writer/director Mackay, Sophie is both a trans woman and an independent, ultralowbudget, Adelaide-based filmmaker, using her art to work through, and give expression to, her individual emotions. When we first meet her, she is writing an autobiographical script dramatising her difficult coming out to her family, but even as she types “sounds of thunder rumbling”, she is interrupted by an actual rumbling. This is, in fact, an earthquake, unleashing an ancient worm-like parasite which spreads itself through weak, vulnerable and gullible men, amplifying their hatred and aggression, making them even bigger homophobes, misogynists and transphobes then they already were.

Gifted, thanks implicitly to her T Blockers, with the ability to sense the presence of the infected, Sophie at first struggles to work out what is going on – but fortunately there is a recently rediscovered film, Terror From Below, shot in 1991 by underground trans filmmaker Betty (Calliope Jackson, voiced by Cassie Workman), which recreates the circumstances of the parasite’s last emergence and Betty’s violent resistance. Now armed with information and a cause, not to mention with baseball bats and hockey sticks, Sophie, her roomie Spencer (Lewi Dawson), new boyfriend Kris (Toshiro Glenn) and tough-as-nails bartender Storm (Lisa Fanto) form a masked vigilante group determined to turn the worm – and to continue Betty’s legacy with their own sequel.

“This monster stuff would make a sick movie,” Sophie is told by her ‘early 20s Araki type’ brother London (Joe Romeo). He is referring specifically to the ‘hungry monster inside’ that is his drug addiction, and laying out in explicit terms both how monsters can be metaphors, and how readily such metaphors can be realised in films. This is programmatic for T Blockers, which is both an allegorical story of a trans woman gaining self-confidence and learning to fight for who she is, and a B-movie, inspired by lots of other B movies, full of aliens and arse-kicking.

Sophie’s anxieties – about her identity, about her career, about her place in an often hostile and terrifying world – are here transformed into a collection of palatable movie tropes which might for some be a mere entertainment, but for others are, like Betty’s film-within-a-film, a guide to surviving a life periodically taken over by “every skinhead and incel… running around town with a tiny little hard-on”.

Lit in stylised colours that might – simultaneously – be described as giallo-esque or bisexual, T Blockers is a celebration of LGBTQ esprit de corps, a call to arms against fascist oppression, and also a fun psychotronic schlockfest. Think the gonzo spark of Ed Wood and John Waters (both duly name-checked here), resurrected to address male insecurity and female solidarity in contemporary South Australia.

T Blockers has its Canadian première at Fantasia 2023              

“You can’t step into the same river twice,” is a quote attributed to the Early Greek philosopher Heraclitus, as an illustration of stability’s absence in a world of flux. Yet in Junta Yamaguchi’s latest, River, the staff and residents of a sleepy inn off-season in Kibune, Kyoto will find themselves reliving a brief period of time on a recurring loop, Groundhog Day-style.

Two staff members will even literally step into the river by the inn – one of them indeed two times – despite the wintry conditions. Yet given that the loop lasts exactly 120 seconds, Yamaguchi, too, is stepping into the same river  (“Every two minutes,” as one character comments, “ring any bells?”), reprising the high concept of his mind-bending debut Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes (2020), while finding a whole new narrative (non-)trajectory for this second feature’s division into recursive two-minute segments.

The riverside Fujiya Inn, and the nearby Kifune Shrine, are an idyllic retreat – a place of peace and reflection, offering a brief respite from the everyday hustle and bustle of life. There waitress Mikoto (Riko Fujitani) would not mind time to stop so that her relationship with restless chef Taku (Yuki Torigoe) can go on forever. Likewise, the writer Obata (Yoshimasa Kondo) and his publisher Sugiyama (Haruki Nakagawa) would rather that the deadline for the next instalment of Obata’s serial novel never come – and others too would happily extend their sojourn.

Yet when suddenly they all find themselves caught in an ever-cycling moment, long enough to give them the illusion of progress while short enough to guarantee their every effort to do something is greatly curtailed, with only their consciousnesses not looping so that they all remember their multiple experiences, then the constantly refilling bowls of rice begin to pall, the relaxing bath becomes a trap, and existential panic sets in – even if apparently none of their actions, even the most desperate and extreme, have any consequence in a world where everything keeps resetting.

As the dramatis personae here – all very broadly drawn, almost caricatures – race to figure out what is going on, the exposition is not only excessive, but uneconomically repetitive, with seemingly each and every character at several points either saying or being told (or both) that they are in a time loop. Where Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes would keep upping the narrative ante, expanding and confounding itself every time the viewer began to get a purchase on its workings, River just replays the same concept as nauseam, relying on the different recombinations of its ensemble cast to keep things varied.

Yet amidst all the frantic running about, which appears designed to maintain a veneer of momentum in a plot where time passes without the possibility of any real progress, there is wryly humanistic humour, and some palpable observations on the difference between chronologies as they are perceived and as they are realised, with Yamaguchi inviting us – again and again – to experience for ourselves, along with his characters, just how much dialogue and business can be crammed, against the clock, into each of his emphatically finite narrative episodes.

After several red herrings, the eventual explanation of what is happening may be kooky – and not a little hokey – but that is in keeping with the tone of this small-town sci-fi farce. Everyone in this sweet little village is similarly sweet-natured and just wants to find an agreeable way to get on with their lives.

Playing out its snow-globe fantasy in real time – yet in discontinuous handheld episodes that always have the same starting point – River ever returns to its fluid source, even if the weather seems different from one scene to the next (a phenomenon described, if not quite explained, as a shift in the ‘world line’).

There may be scientific and spiritual frames on offer here, but ultimately these give way to the philosophical. For in a plot which, like the Early Greek philosophers, places stasis and kinesis in a paradoxical dialectic, the more things stay the same, the more they change, and these folk, frozen in time, are pursuing a future ever beyond their grasp – as in fact the future always is for everyone.

After all, as Socrates is reported to have said in response to an interlocutor who quoted Heraclitus’ famous aphorism on flux at him: “Well, you can’t even step into the same river once.”

River has its North American at Fantasia 2023

After a group of Christmas carollers leaves the front porch of an ordinary suburban house, four people watching from the darkness move in, immediately stabbing in the neck the man (Douglas Kidd) that greets them at the door, and then holding his wife (Isabelle Boulton) down to carve open her belly and paint a sigil on the window in her blood – all to the ironising strains of L.A. Witch’s Kill My Baby Tonight. This Manson-esque home invasion that opens The Sacrifice Game is ingeniously filmed in a single fluid shot from the outside, looking through various windows at the murder and mayhem within.

Inside and outside count in Jenn Wexler’s second feature, set near the end of 1971. While almost all the staff and students at Blackvale School For Girls are heading out home for the holidays, four people are being left behind in the institution’s spacious interiors. Sent there against her will by her stepfather after the death of her mother, Samantha (Madison Baines) has just learnt that she will be staying through the vacation, and is now stuck inside with “quiet girl in the corner” Clara (Georgia Acken) – a reserved Wednesday-like figure who doesn’t like “to let people in”, hides away in the basement to read “the books they don’t want us to see”, and secretly cuts herself in the toilets. Left looking after this mismatched pair are kindly teacher Miss Rose Tanner (Chloë Levine, also star of Wexler’s debut The Ranger, 2018) who dreams of getting out of this place for a “public school job back in civilisation”; and her boyfriend the handyman Jimmy (Gus Kenworthy), who would prefer Rose to settle there with him.

Blackvale is also the final destination of the so-called ‘Christmas killers’ – charismatic psychopath Jude (Mena Massoud), class of ’64 alumna Maisie (Olivia Scott Welch), hulking, haunted Vietnam vet Grant (Derek Johns) and lovesick alcoholic Doug (Laurent Pitre). Having left a trail of bodies on their spree, and collected blood and other human samples from their victims, they are intending to raise hell in this boarding school with a history, guided by Maisie and the page that she once stole from an arcane book there.

Now helpless captives, Rose, Samantha and Clara seem destined to play a part in a long-planned sacrificial ritual being conducted by callous, sadistic murderers – but something in the shadows has been waiting much, much longer for an opportunity to emerge, and in the panic and pandemonium that unfolds, rôles will reverse and tables will turn as, in keeping with the school motto, “Blackvale girls look out for each other.”

With an attentive script (co-written by Wexler and Sean Redlitz) that humanises even its most monstrous characters, The Sacrifice Game is nasty but also often very funny. Cleverly remixing motifs from The Shining (the snowbound building, the paradoxical photographs, the axe, the hand-holding ‘sisters’), it inverts the values of Christmas, celebrates female solidarity, and lets the devil both in and outside, as it gradually puts a smile on the faces of its otherwise lugubrious teen characters.

Make no mistake, this is a ‘coming out’ movie, perhaps not quite in the way – and yet exactly in the way – that you think. It is also a refreshing blast of fresh air to the face, that leaves us, as at the beginning, out in the cold looking in, with a whole world of diabolical desire just within reach.

The Sacrifice Game has its world première at Fantasia 2023. Find more reviews at SciFiNow.