It’s that time again for my sojourn to Fantastic Fest, the annual Alamo Drafthouse week long love letter to horror, fantasy, sci-fi, action and just plain fantastic movies from all around the world. This year’s festival runs from Sept 24-October 1, here in Austin at the South Lamar location.

As in year’s past, I begin my coverage with a multi-part/day preview.

Fantastic Fest Preview Day Five

The Missing Girl

Mort lives a lonely and disillusioned life. In debt, single and unable to make ends meet, he relies on his brother and mother for loans, still drives his dad’s old car and spends most evenings listening to self-affirmation tapes that he personally recorded. However, there’s one ray of hope within his life: the new employee he’s hired for his comic book shop. Ellen is everything Mort is not, a smart, aspiring graphic novelist with an acerbic wit. However, Ellen also has her own share of secrets, and the return of Mort’s bullying high school friend will be the catalyst for events that will change everyone’s lives forever.

THE MISSING GIRL is the new effort from genre director A.D. Calvo, who, for the first time, expands his efforts into something very, very different: the story of everyday people. It’s a smart character study, a black comedy with a genuine heart.

Blessed with brilliant lead performances from Robert Longstreet and Alexia Rasmussen, the film is a beautiful, low-key exploration of the consequences of our actions, our connection to others and our obsession with the past. Shot with a subtle and melancholy color palette, THE MISSING GIRL also uses chapter headings and split panels to create an ever-expanding sense of being an independent comic book. All the way from the first frame to the end credit sequence, the film’s look successfully combines storytelling and comic book imagery.

Without ever resorting to grand statements, THE MISSING GIRL slowly, quietly explores its relatable characters’ lives with intense kindness and understanding, leading all the way to satisfying conclusions, both emotional and narrative. It’s a low-key wonder of a film which will remain in your thoughts long after the lights come up. (Evrim Ersoy)

February

Set over the course of the winter break at a rural boarding school, Kat and Joan are forced to become companions. However, what neither of them know is that an evil presence is stalking Kat, and what they experience will resonate across time and affect the lives of everyone they know.

Smart, frightening and emotionally astute, Osgood Perkins’ FEBRUARY might just be the most audacious and brilliant horror debut of the year. Taking classic horror themes and reworking them, Perkins cleverly crafts an intense film with razor-sharp tension and a suffocating, intense atmosphere which grips from the first frame and doesn’t let go.

FEBRUARY unravels at its own deliberate speed. What might initially be perceived as disjointed scenes start linking, and before long the whole horror of the story is revealed. But, in an unexpected move, the film also packs a brutal emotional punch, and will leave unsuspecting viewers with a huge lump in their throat for days.

Emma Roberts and Kiernan Shipka capture the aspects of being a high school student, but also a sense of loneliness. Their isolation is palpable, and the outstanding cinematography not only captures the emptiness of the school during winter break, but also the relentless chill of the winter outside. It creates a thick and suffocating atmosphere, giving the audience no respite whatsoever.

Easily one of the most brilliant efforts of the year, FEBRUARY establishes Osgood Perkins as a genre director with great visual talent and a remarkable number of important things to say. (Evrim Ersoy)

Schneider vs Bax

This should be a very simple day for Schneider. A domestic day. His day. It is, after all, his birthday, which he intends to spend helping his wife and two lovely daughters with preparations for his own party.  But those plans are all thrown out the window with a single phone call.

“Ramon Bax must be killed,” it says. “It has to happen today.” And, as if to underscore the urgency, “He is a child killer.” And so, with a sigh and a groan, Schneider’s quiet day off is canceled and it’s back to his secret life as a contract killer. If there’s an upside, though, it’s that Bax lives close enough that the job should be done by lunch.

Things never go as planned in this life, and that’s certainly the case in the darkly constructed fantasies of Dutch auteur Alex van Warmerdam (BORGMAN), who slyly turns the hitman genre on its head with his latest effort, SCHNEIDER VS. BAX.

Bax (played by Van Warmerdam himself) turns out to be a more formidable target than first assumed, one that comes with a witness – his emotionally unstable daughter – that Schneider must deal with. Throw in a string of unanticipated obstacles and Schneider’s fastidiously planned day is quickly shot to hell.

Following the deep (and dark) thematic work of his previous BORGMAN, van Warmerdam here sets out to deliver the polar opposite, a pure piece of entertainment, and he delivers a delicious comedy of errors (and bullets) that unfolds with his trademark precision and sly wit. Flawlessly cast and delivered in the helmer’s deadpan style, SCHNEIDER VS. BAX may never break beyond a brisk walking pace but it’s nevertheless a wry and sly romp. (Todd Brown)

The Assassin

A ninth century assassin (Shu Qi, JOURNEY TO THE WEST: CONQUERING THE DEMONS) fails to dispatch a corrupt government official when the presence of his young son stirs her heart. Returning to her monastery in disgrace, she’s given a reprieve and instructed to return to her home province on a mission to murder her cousin, the ruling lord of the region and her former betrothed (Chang Chen, CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON) as a means of curing her of her sentimentality. Upon her reluctant return, she discovers that the city is on a political knife’s edge, at risk of falling out of favor with the Imperial Court, and party to a conspiracy between her cousin’s jealous wife and a black magic wizard. Torn between compassion and duty, the assassin is pressed to decide where her allegiances lie.

Beginning in stark monochrome before bursting into vivid 35mm color, Taiwan’s chief art-house auteur Hou Hsiao-Hsien (CITY OF SADNESS; THE FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON) has conjured perhaps the most transfixing and beautiful wu-xia film of all time. Drawing from the patient and precise tradition of King Hu (whose seminal COME DRINK WITH ME is screening at this year’s FANTASTIC FEST), Hou’s action is a whirling dervish of percussive glimpses which punctuate the frame as if the warriors supernatural abilities are too agile to capture, but it’s when the swords are sheathed that Hou’s sublime talent for profound stillness manifests itself. Be it in the quiet play of children, a warrior’s contemplative walk through a silver birch forest, or the immortal signature of cinema: the wind in the trees. There’s a reason Hou won Best Director at Cannes. (Peter Kuplowsy)

Der Bunker

It seems a simple enough goal for any student: Find a quiet place to live and work, an oasis to center your mind and go about your business. And that’s all the eponymous Student (Pit Bukowski) at the center of  Nikias Chryssos’ debut feature wants. Just a quiet place. A safe place. Preferably a boring place. And he thinks he’s found it when he comes across a room for rent with a family living in a converted military bunker. With Mother, Father and young Klaus, all will surely be well. But things are not quite what the Student expects when he arrives.

In retrospect, the fact that the family lives in a bunker should have tipped the Student off that things weren’t quite normal. But while he was willing to overlook that, he couldn’t possibly overlook meeting young Klaus… who looks closer to thirty than his supposed eight years of age, despite his youthful attire and homespun haircut. Did the ad mention that the Student would now be expected to take over tutoring duties of the homeschooled “youngster”? An education the Student is encouraged to beat into young Klaus with the cane hanging on the wall? An education prescribed to prepare young Klaus for a future as the President of the United States by Heinrich, who’s the alien creature living within the swollen leg of Mother?

After a string of acclaimed short films, Chryssos has cooked up a supremely odd feature debut with DER BUNKER, a picture that The Hollywood Reporter happily proclaimed “the best German-language movie featuring a talking leg, ever” after its Berlin premiere. Flawlessly composed and deeply committed to its own sense of oddity, DER BUNKER is a striking and promising debut from a unique young talent. (Todd Brown)

Follow

Quinn Woodhouse longs for something more. He and Thana, his beautiful girlfriend, rent a house from a kindly old man who lives next door. Quinn is a typical starving artist, working in a bar to make ends meet. Just before Christmas, he goes to work like any other night. But when he comes home, Thana has an enigmatic early Christmas present for him. Her behavior is strange and unsettling, but before Quinn can figure out what’s going on, he blacks out. When he wakes up the next morning, he finds his entire world crashing down. Once things take their turn, FOLLOW embarks on a tense spiral into the darkest recesses of paranoia and the most inhuman corners of human nature.

Owen Egerton is an accomplished novelist, screenwriter and stage performer. Fantastic Fest audiences may also know him as a founding member of the Master Pancake comedy troupe and, most importantly, the best damn MC ever, proven time and again at our annual Fantastic Debates event. He bursts onto the indie filmmaking scene with his feature directorial debut, for which he also wrote the screenplay.

FOLLOW is a closely contained film, featuring an intense and chaotic spiral into madness. Noah Segan gives a gut-wrenching performance as the increasingly crazed Quinn, a man walking his sanity’s breaking point. Filled with tension and mystery and punctuated with the incongruously happy notes of Christmas music, FOLLOW is a bold, brash and bloody series of increasingly bad decisions. (Luke Mullen)

Hard To Get

Young TK (Pallance Dladla in his first lead role) is a dangerous sort of charmer, a big fish in a small pond gifted with the sort of natural good looks and confidence that women fall for. And, oh yes, he knows it very well. So well that the time it will take to bed a new arrival at the township restaurant where he works has become a sporting proposition amongst the regular clientele.

But TK has no idea what he’s walking into when he sets his sights on Skiets (the equally fresh-faced Thishiwe Ziqubu), a beautiful young woman who stumbles through the door one day while on the run from small level thugs. Skiets is the sort of challenge TK can’t resist. But to have a prayer, he’ll have to prove he’s her equal in all ways, and that includes her disregard for the law. This scenario results in the pair fleeing town to escape the wrath of a charismatic local gangster, and putting themselves in the line of fire of a much bigger fish in the city while their sexual power game develops into something more significant.

A remarkably accomplished debut from impossibly young writer-director Zee Ntuli – he was only 25 when the film made its premiere – HARD TO GET proves remarkably adept at shifting gears from scene to scene, deftly moving from high octane action to steamy romance to shocking violence and sly comedy, all in the blink of an eye. A hugely entertaining ride crafted with skill and gifted with a cadre of hugely charismatic performers put to great use, HARD TO GET is an auspicious debut from a significant talent. (Todd Brown)