FrightFest Day 5

 

FrightFest Day 5

ODYSSEY

Director: Gerard Johnson

Cast: Polly Maberly, Rebecca Calder, Tom Davis, Mikael Persbrandt, Peter Ferdinando

UK

 

If ever a film felt like a workday, this is it. Polly Maberly commits an excellent performance as an arrogant Estate Agent storming through her financial downfall and cognitive dissonance into dilemmas with the underworld, but belabours its point and takes too long. The filler is good but there are times when spotting locations for Londoners (Dublin Castle!) becomes the focus. It’s a fine character study of a reprehensible character and the unlikeable mob around her, until Mikael Persbrandt turns up to provide some gravelly control, but not much else is proven except the protagonist’s steamrolling ego until a crowd-pleaser massacre to finish up.

 

MOTHER OF FLIES

Director: John Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser

Cast: John Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser, Lulu Adams

US, 2025

 

A young woman facing terminal cancer turns to folk horror for a cure. Or rather the film, being a horror, posits how close New Age healing is to witchcraft; and further to that, in the Q&A afterwards John Adams aligned magic to the science that treated his own and his wife’s cancer. Mostly, this is a triumph of fairy-tale visuals and atmosphere on a tiny budget. This is apparently the Adams’ family back yard. Houses made of trees (more than a treehouse), snakes and rocks imagery, a corpse reciting poetry… The dreamy aesthetic, judicious use of effects (helped some canny editing so that any weakness doesn’t register), a simple mission to outflank impending death and grief and a seamless blend of grunge rock and folk horror make this another fascinating minor gem from this filmmaking family.  

 

BAMBOO REVENGE

Director: Edgar Marie

Cast: Audrey Pirault, Paul Deby, Constantin Vidal, Jimony Ekila.

France, 2025

 

Slick enough but confused revenge drama where the convolutions that allow for the title could surely have been resolved at the time (‘Moso’ on the title card). It never truly addresses the psychosis of revenge (see ‘Redux Redux’) and never truly comes to a tangible conclusion, just payback based on the wrong assumptions.

 

 

THE ROWS

Director: Seth Daly

Cast: Brindisi Dupree, Lara Pictet, Marcus Woods, Hans Heilmann

USA

 

With every moment belaboured to flatness, even with the score trying to insist on thrills sporadically. Beautifully shot with a deux ex dog and a Moon Man (?) to interject when things get impossible.

 

 

 

INFLUENCERS

Director: Kurtis David Harder

Cast: Cassandra Naud, Lisa Delamar, Georgina Campbell, Jonathan Whitesell, Veronica Long, Dylan Playfair.

USA, 2025

 

Polished sun-soaked sequel. “How did you get off the island?” is asked many, many times, to which the film answers, “Yeah, but we don’t care.” Rather, we get more shading to CW, who it seems has properly fallen in love, but she can’t give up her old ways and she has a boatload of psychotic past to cover up. With gorgeous locations – France; Thailand – cat-and-mouse games and a focus on social media and character manipulations, it all goes down smoothly. Cassandra Naud is great, Lisa Delamar beguiling, and a little moral murkiness is presented in an attempt for substance: Jonathan Whitesell is the influencer selling toxic masculinity but he doesn’t cheat and it seems like his girlfriend is actually the one in the driving seat. It romps home with a gleeful showdown that both does and doesn’t offer a conclusion, just leaves us with the excess of a serial killer slaughtering social media types that we don’t care for and irritate us anyway.  

 

 

 

SUMMARY

 

The theme that struck me this year is that genre is really starting to get to grips with incorporating social media, AI, deep fakes and its manipulations, from ‘Cognaitive’ where it just wants to get online to save humanity from itself, to the deep fakes that spiral into blodbaths in ‘Approfraniacs’, to someone else taking over your public persona in ‘Influencers’. If horror is how we identify social fears, it’s getting scary out there, and it’s not the sentience of the digital world we should worry about but – as ever – the people using it.

 

 

My picks:

 

The ones where I really wasn’t expecting much but was pleasantly surprised were ‘Bone Lake’ and especially ‘Flush’. ‘A Serbian Documentary’ was excellent in its argument for a very difficult film, and there seemed to be many converts.

 

Approfreniacs

Flush

Crushed

Redux Redux

A Serbian Documentary

 

And for extra fun:

 

Bone Lake

Hold the Fort

FrightFest 2025 - Day 4

 

 

 

FrightFest 2025 - Day 4

 

 

 

213 BONES

Director: Jeffrey Primm

Cast: Colin Egglesfield, Dean Cameron, Toni Weiss, Liam Woodrum.

USA

 

At first, there’s the promise of a straightforward non-postmodern slasher providing horror comfort food, but it becomes quickly apparent that this has all the subgenre’s weaknesses too. Predominantly, it hinges on a thoroughly unconvincing bunch of college student victims, and its not clear how they managed to get this far in their studies as they don’t appear to have any critical thinking at all. It goes through the motions, the kills are humdrum and then the killer with the ridiculous motivation is unmasked and the audience goes “Wha?”

 

 

TOMB WATCHER

Director: Vathanyu Ingkawiwat

Cast: Woranuch Bhirombhakdi, Thanavate Siriwattanagul, Arachaporn Pokin Pakor.

Thailand

 

It has the chief elements to appeal to the Gothic sensibility: a big remote house, portraits of the dead wife and the corpse of the dead wife itself on the grounds. All the couple have to do is put up with the husband devoting to the dead body for one hundred days. The trouble is that the husband was cheating on the wife, and she wants the hundred days to exact her revenge from beyond the grave. Cue the long-haired Asian ghost and no one believing the haunted wife driven to near-insanity. It is a standard, traditional ghost story, but it looks good and carries out its tropes with elegance rather than excess, at least until its ending where it goes a little loopy. 

 

 

The DESCENT

Director: Neil Marshall.

Cast: Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid, MyAnna Buring.

UK

 

Even after all this time, you’ll be likely to jump at least once again. Perhaps the attacks are edited to the incoherent side, but what mostly struck me once more this time is how much David Julyan's forewarns the tragedy from the very start. You are so invested into the girls foolishly going deeper and deeper underground that you almost forget that they’ll be monsters. Marshall has so far never captured this classic status again.

 

 

BONE LAKE

Director: Mercedes Bryce Morgan

Cast: Marco Pigossi, Maddie Hasson, Alex Roe, Andra Nechita.

USA

 

Perhaps the opening promises something less graceful, just to get the attention, but what follows is a slick, silly and thoroughly entertaining romp. The great performances are essential to above-average characterisation, which is important when the fragility of couples is the whole discourse: Diego and Sage are thoroughly convincing as a decent couple struggling to get over themselves. Perhaps not quite as twisty and surprising as it thinks, but its thoroughly engaging, gorgeously shot and played and all you have to do is sit back and enjoy.

 

REDUX REDUX

Director: Kevin McManus, Matthew McManus

Cast: Jim Cummings, Derick Alexander, Raphael Chestang, Debra Christofferson

USA

 

Emotion-led lofi scifi is often a good place to find something fresh in the genre, and this excellent multiverse tale impresses with how packed with emotional grounding it is. From grief making our protagonist pursue a hellbent mission to visit all the dimensions to kill her daughter’s murderer to a streetwise brat finding her limitations, the measured pace allows the loneliness to surface even when foregrounded and tent-poled by action set-pieces. Although mostly a two-hander there’s uniformly great acting, lowkey and immersive atmosphere, pleasingly clunky dimension-hopping freezer unit, a script only interested in the characters with little need to linger on backstory, allowing the existential and relationship questions to dominate. Proof again that an indie film with single well written conceit and a solid agenda of investigating the human condition can generate full-blooded, unsettling and rewarding entertainment.