Fantasia Fest 2021: Dispatch 4
Taking cues from excellent Spanish ghost stories like The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and El Orfanato (2007), Ruth Platt’s Martyrs Lane offers plenty of well-timed creeps without resorting to the usual hackneyed tropes found in most American horror productions. Set in a large house in the English countryside, Martyrs Lane forgoes jump scares and gore, opting instead for atmosphere and mystery. The result is a wonderfully oppressive sense of foreboding that permeates every dark corner and shadowed background of the film.
Lead by a pair of stellar child performances from Kiera Thompson and Sienna Sayer, Martyrs Lane might not break new ground in the Gothic Horror tradition, but its young stars embody the senses of sadness and loneliness (and, eventually, viciousness) that have come to define the most tragic of genre heroines. It might not be fresh, but its old-fashioned feel is as comfortable as it is unnerving.
On a superficially slight downside, the film’s climax does take a momentary turn for the cheesy. However, this downturn is almost immediately offset by a solid, simple ending that exemplifies the kind of sorrow and loss one might expect from the long-established genre. And while you might guess the solution to the central mystery early on, there’s still no shortage of ghostly visages and eerie forewarnings along the way to keep you plenty interested and unsettled. Grade: B-plus —James Rosario
The latest Screenlife film in which all of the action takes place on phone and computer screens, #BLUE_WHALE is the unofficial series’ first installment set in producer/innovator Timur Bekmambetov’s native Russia. The bilingual dialogue and international setting add additional layers of mystery to the story of teenager Dana (Anna Potebnya) and her quest to expose a deadly online game that claimed her younger sister’s life, mixing the dedicated investigation of Searching with the high-stakes youth dares of Henry Joost’s and Ariel Schulman’s Nerve. Though director Anna Zaytseva frequently builds thick tension as Dana’s journey grows thornier, the film is plagued by more plausibility issues than the non-Unfriended Screenlife features, namely characters involved in dangerous situations while still holding their phones at an angle that cleanly captures the action. An easily-guessed twist further dilutes the experience, but the thrills and chills are steady enough to warrant recommendation. Grade: B-minus —Edwin Arnaudin
King Car is a story about wealth inequality, sustainability, and modernism told in the worst possible way. Imagine a world where cars are sentient and can communicate with humans, but instead of KITT, we get a horny dictator who wants to bring about the car apocalypse. While that sounds like a lot of fun, co-writer/director Renata Pinheiro just can’t make this bonkers plot coherent and the end result crumbles under the weight of its pretentiousness. Long, drawn-out scenes and inconsequential character moments lead to frequent boredom, and the surplus of ideas turn a would-be amusing allegorical tale into a confusing and downright senseless mess. The few saving graces are its gorgeous photography and driving synth score, but even they are marred by this obvious attempt at ostentatiousness. Grade: D-minus —Joel Winstead
Yakuza Princess opens 20 years ago with an entire family getting massacred at a large gathering — including a young boy who gets shot in the face for "shock value.” However, one tiny girl manages to get rescued amidst the chaos. Fast forward to present-day Sao Paolo, Brazil, and an unidentified man (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) wakes up in a hospital bed with severe cuts all over his face and amnesia, a blatant attempt to make his character compelling.
It doesn't work — almost nothing in the film does.
The main character Akemi is played by first-time actress MASUMI, a Japanese singer/songwriter who should really stick to music. An initially cool blue/green neon color palette, extreme closeups, and a POV shot of a training exercise from the inside of a mask get the film off to a promising start and evoke a graphic novel aesthetic — the film is indeed based on one — but it squanders any goodwill with a convoluted origin plot and a performance by MASUMI so wooden that it gave me splinters just from watching it. Akemi silently broods throughout, and, once in a while, she's in a stiffly choreographed action scene that’s edited to pieces with CGI blood splatter thrown at the screen. It all becomes a chore to sit through.
While Meyers runs around the city, carrying a soul-stealing katana and trying to jump-start his memory, he meets up with Akemi, who’s trying to find out who she is and where she's from — and, throughout the film, she meets people who tell her different truths about her origin. The fatal flaw is that the movie wants us not to trust any of the characters or believe any of the conflicting dialogue being said, but the filmmakers also don't give us a reason to root for Akemi in the first place or give us any compelling action to tide us over while she's on the hunt for answers. The result is a movie with multiple character introductions, a few dull fight scenes, and a mythical katana. What is this, Suicide Squad? No, that film at least tried to have fun. Grade: D-minus —Cisco Scartozzi
(Photos courtesy of Fantasia International Film Festival)
