Day 4, Sunday at Fantastic Fest, the last day of the “first half”, and it was a banger! It starts with a Finnish double shot.
The Squirrel – In a controlled, hygienic future like the one in Demolition Man, where there are no more animals or sex or dirt or strong emotions allowed for your health and safety, a robot-dog designer who comes across like a Finnish Ryan Gosling (in hapless everyman Lars and the Real Girl mode) discovers a real squirrel, which rocks his world. Can he discoveee a non-hermetically sealed life without getting dragged off to reeducation by the environment suit guys from Monsters Inc.? A great meditation on where modern culture is going. The production design was a future IKEA fever dream and the acting was great. Apparently all the animal wranglers told them it was impossible to do this with real squirrels and it took them years to find some Czech squirrel whisperer to pull it off. It just got tapped to be Finland’s entry for the international film Academy Award which would be well deserved in my opinion, 5/5 best of the fest so far.
The Finns keep putting up wins! First sc-fi, now holiday horror.
Red Snow – It’s Christmastime in Finland and a vampire is replacing house call Santas (a thing there I guess) and eating families instead of milk and cookies. Except this time, the family is feckless Finnish Robert Patterson, his Twilight-worshipping daughter, Finnish Jennifer Lawrence, his mail-order Vietnamese bride, and his equally feckless son, and an aging suicidal vampire hunter, Finnish Willem Dafoe and his goth home nurse, collide into a bloodbath. Funny, gory, schlocky, a good add to your Christmas horror lineup. 4/5
The day is going strong and getting stronger.
Girl in the Night – A Slovenian deadpan absurdist indie comedy about a convenience store worker who meets a girl who is a… well, nighttime vigilante is a strong word but she graduates from finding lost ferrets to beating up bike thieves pretty quickly. He steals her bike so she’ll come around more. It’s like if A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night and Kick-ass had a Slovenian baby. I really enjoyed it, it was very well filmed despite being shot virtually entirely at night outside in the Slovenian town of Škofja Loka and the humor translated really well. Right up my alley! 5/5
Well! Two 5/5s and a 4/5 today, I am content. I was not expecting what was about to happen to me…
Pathetic Fallacy – I am not entirely sure how to describe this – it was something new. Which is a rare thing.
Apparently the writers of Ant-Man had a nervous breakdown and wrote this and the director (Adam Egypt Mortimer) secretly turned it into a musical. But it’s not a musical. It’s psychedelic, but it’s not a psychedelic film. It has a slasher, but it’s not a slasher film. It defies categorization and at no time did I know where it was headed, at the beginning it seemed like 2 entirely unrelated movies, but it was confident in getting there and bringing it all together.
This movie made me go look stuff up! The pathetic fallacy, coined by Victorian critic John Ruskin, is the practice of attributing human emotions or responses to nature, animals, or inanimate objects (derived from pathos, meaning emotion, and fallacy, meaning falseness). He originally used it to criticize poetry that let false emotions distort reality.
I am not sure how to describe the film. It has:
- Scott Mescudi, aka rapper Kid Cudi, in his first lead role as a man whose lover, Jessica Rothe, passes away from cancer in a gripping sequence that is, I am sad to report from personal experience, highly accurate
- Axe murders, some butt naked
- Talking animals, mostly groundhogs
- Musical sequences, some fully diegetic with an in-movie band
- Fully psychedelic sequences (think Pink Floyd – The Wall)
- Soundtrack by Johnny Jewel, which is as much a part of the film as Angelo Badalamenti’s score is in Twin Peaks
- Natasha Lyonne in a toothsome supporting role as a spider. Imagine an evil Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web encouraging Wilbur to kill. “Be a bad pig!”
- Lush full 35mm cinematography filmed at night by a commercial/video cinematographer that didn’t know you couldn’t do that on an indie budget
- Plenty of mind-bending effects done with no AI
- Rage about the death of those in your life
But that’s just a reductive list that doesn’t in any way explain what this amazing movie is. In the Q&A afterwards the director said that “In genre film, the emotional violence should equal the physical violence.” It came over me in a rush that is what I find missing in a lot of the genre films I’ve been seeing lately, which hinge brutality on the most absolutely tenuous emotional stakes. And he did it, you fully understand and feel the pain and trapped feeling and thwarted love of Kid Cudi, who acts his absolute ass off in the film.
This movie has turned genre film into art without making it pretentious. I was amazed and delighted, it’s one of my two favorite films I saw at Fantastic Fest this year. And amazing work and acting from everyone involved. Disney should replace Jonathan Majors with Kid Cudi for the Kang the Conqueror role, and Jessica Rothe showed she has serious chops that will go well past horror and rom-coms. I feel like this movie can maybe be described as “David Lynch for the newer generation” – the same thoughtful, holistic combination of the grotesque and sublime. Go see it! 5/5
I was going to see “No Way Down” in the midnight slot but I had to go hit the Pathetic Fallacy after-party instead, where Johnny Jewel and the band from the movie performed. The director, Natasha Lyonne, Kid Cudi, and Jessica Rothe were in attendance. No Kid Cudi on stage though, alas (I guess, I still am not sure… Oh… OK, I’ve heard “Day ‘N’ Nite” on TikTok a bunch, now that I go looking for his music.)
Since then I’ve been continuing to think about the movie. Were the animals and mountain evil, or not? Usually when demonic animals tell you to “kill”, that’s what we usually say is a “bad thing” but in this case… Did he really? If he did was it actually OK given the ending? Was this all a Jacob’s Ladder scenario because he really did take a handful of pills 15 minutes in? I don’t know! One reading is just that it’s a meditation on grief at a last-episode-of-Evangelion level.
I do know that it just makes sense to get butt naked if you’re about to axe murder people so you have clean clothes to put on though. So there’s one solid takeaway.
