Fantastic Fest, the largest genre film festival in the U.S., specializing in horror, fantasy, sci-fi, action and just plain fantastic movies from all around the world, starts here in Austin in just 4 days.
As a lead up, I’m previewing the movies that I’m planning on attending and blogging about over the course of the week long festival.
Sunday, September 25th
THE CORRIDOR
Evan Kelly 2010 | AMD Next Wave, Feature, Guest in attendance, Horror, Sci-Fi | 100 min.
Director Evan Kelly live in person!
When Tyler’s mom Pauline OD’s, something snaps in his head. His friends arrive to find Pauline face down in the hallway and Tyler jumps out of the closet, sputtering nonsense. He cuts one friend’s face and stabs another in the hand before being restrained.
Several years later, Tyler’s getting out of the institution and his four best friends are meeting him to give Pauline a final farewell and scatter her ashes. They head out to the small cabin she kept deep in the woods, but the years have changed them. They’ve grown apart. Old wounds open and none of them are sure how to treat Tyler. While the meds he’s taking seem to be working, there’s a latent fear that they can’t acknowledge or ignore.
Tyler takes a walk late on the first night and discovers a strange hallway, some kind of supernatural corridor in the woods. While he wonders if his mind is playing tricks on him, he convinces his best friend to go with him the next morning and check it out. The other three follow them and they can all see and experience the corridor, allowing Tyler to breathe a sigh of relief at not being crazy. But the corridor has strange, supernatural properties and its effects will change the five friends in ways they could never expect.
First time feature director Evan Kelly delivers exactly what we are looking for in an AMD Next Wave film: a vibrant, fresh supernatural concept with unexpected turns and deeply developed characters. Look out for what Kelly does next. (Luke Mullen)
HEADHUNTERS
Morten Tyldum 2011 | Feature, Romance, Thriller | 100 min.
screens with…
THE CANDIDATE | David Karlak 2010
Based on Jo Nesbo’s bestselling book of the same name, Morten Tyldum’s HEADHUNTERS follows Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie of MAX MANUS), Norway’s most successful headhunter. He’s also secretly Norway’s top con artist, using his job to slyly recruit people he plans on stealing from. He’s charming but suffers from what’s called “Little Man Syndrome.” His wife Diana (an impressive first performance from Synnøve Macody Lund) is tall and beautiful. To make up for those lost inches, he steals from people and buys her things he can’t afford, putting himself deeper in debt than even M.C. Hammer could imagine. So, Roger goes for one final hit – the one that will cure all of his financial woes. That last job is a painting worth millions, and it’s in the hands of Clas Greve (Nikolaj Cster-Waldau of “A Game of Thrones”), a former mercenary with excellent hunting skills.
HEADHUNTERS eventually turns into a brutally satisfying game of cat and mouse. Throughout the chase, our characters discover the meanings of love, deceit, faith and revenge. There are virtually no truly likable characters in HEADHUNTERS, and that’s what really makes it work – you find yourself rooting for the bad guy, but he’s the good guy by comparison.(Chase Whale)
CARRE BLANC
Jean-Baptiste Léonetti 2011 | Feature, Guest in attendance, Sci-Fi | 77 min.
Director Jean-Baptiste Léonetti, Producer Benjamin Mamou, and Executive Producer Camille Havard Bourdon in attendance
After his mother leaps to her death from their high-rise apartment balcony, Phillipe attempts his own suicide only to be thwarted by his classmate Marie. Phillipe is sent to a school run by the government where he is molded into a fit member of society via physically and psychologically tormenting techniques. Years later, Phillipe (Sami Bouajila) is now a disciplined and successful business man putting applicants through strange, sometimes painful tests and is estranged from Marie (Julie Gayet) to whom he is now married. Marie, however, is determined to prove correct her inkling that there is still love in their relationship and that it is mutual.
Writer/director Jean-Baptiste Léonetti takes an aggressively economical approach to his first feature. The visual palette and sound design perfectly match the gaunt view of a future where capitalistic society has reached an extreme and is on the verge of endgame. Instead, he focuses on what matters, Phillipe and Marie’s relationship, leaving the viewer to fill in the blanks about the details of life in this future using clues mostly revealed via clever editing.
As the film progresses, audiences will become more and more familiar with their surroundings as they navigate through a world only barely familiar, one full of odd touches like a mysterious voice over a loudspeaker that constantly announces seemingly random numbers, body bags that share the same logo as packaged meat, and what seems to be a cultural obsession with croquet. It’s a tribute to Léonetti’s enormous talent that it never becomes overbearing, the initially surreal elements make sense and there’s a dark vein of wit that runs through it all. At times it would almost be funny if it didn’t feel so damn prophetic. In the end, it’s a small character story painted in strokes of big sci-fi ideas. (Brian Kelley)
Fantastic Fest preview Day 4 was originally published on The Geek Curmudgeon