SIFF’s midnight screenings comprise some of my favorite experiences in a movie theater (usually The Egyptian) over the last two decades. That made looking at the 2021 Fest’s crop of WTF (Weird! Terrifying! Fantastic!) entries a bit of a bittersweet experience.
But glass half full, the WTF selections for SIFF 2021 offered an abject lesson in how much savvy and deep love SIFF’s Curatorial Staff puts into their cult and midnight movie screenings. And all the strange upsides of a virtual festival—exercising complete control of your viewing environment, freedom to pause if needed, being able to watch festival films more than once without having to wait for the second screening—apply, in spades.
Censor (2021 | United Kingdom | 84 minutes| Prano Bailey-Bond)
One movie I’m sure as hell going to watch more than once if possible is Censor, British director Prano Bailey-Bond’s feature film debut. It isn’t just that it cannily mines the 1980s ‘Video Nasties’ witch hunt, one of the strangest, scariest chapters in British film and censorship history. Bailey-Bond’s arresting cinematic eye and confident directorial hand incorporate elements of Argento, Cronenberg, and Polanski into something that pulses with its own strange life. It also indulges a pinch of noted Italian degenerate Ruggero Deodato’s pointed snuff-film aesthetic, to chilling effect. If you need easy exposition and answers in your horror, stay away. Me, I kinda loved it.
Phantasmagorias (2021| Various Countries | 106 minutes | Various Directors)
The chills, and the WTF moments, came in bursts and slow burns alike in Phantasmagorias, SIFF 2021’s WTF Short Film Program. This format’s especially well-suited for home viewing, of course, with most of the shorts clocking in at about 10-15 minutes each. Couple this with the fact that the overall quality was good-to-amazing, and it genuinely felt like an embarrassment of riches.
Amidst an already strong package overall, three Phantasmagorias selections really stood out: Look What You Have Done!, a genuinely unnerving and nightmarish French-language psychological chiller; a gloppy, gory, unabashedly odd bit of body horror out of China called Bubble; Dar-Dar, a visually mesmerizing dark fairy tale from Errementari director Paul Urkijo Alijo; and The Haunted Swordsman, American filmmaker Kevin McTurk’s remarkable Japanese fable dramatized by a cast of detailed marionette puppets.
Get the Hell Out! (2021 | Taiwan | 96 minutes | I-Fan Wang)
The closest thing to a disappointment among the WTF entries was Get the Hell Out!, which played like a jittery sorta-spoof of Train to Busan. This Taiwanese rom-zom-com buzzes along with an infectious sense of fun and a slew of can’t-miss ingredients—some great laughs and throwaway gags, a fun and likable cast, and some hilariously excessive gore and gut-munching. Alas, director I-Fan Wang navigates the shenanigans with the hyperactivity of a sugar-stoked grade schooler, an approach that exhausted the hell out of me, even as it undercut the character development.
Too Late (2021 | USA | 80 minutes | D.W. Thomas)
There’s just something about the metaphoric richness of Faust and its symbolic progeny that endures, and Too Late served up a genuinely funny variation on the oft-told story. Ron Lynch of Bob’s Burgers fame plays Ron Devore, a legendary standup comic/comedy show host who periodically transforms into a grotesque, carnivorous monster. His assistant Violet (Alyssa Limperis) fills in for Faust here, waiting on Devore hand and foot and procuring him the odd standup comic snack in the hopes of furthering her career. Too Late doesn’t bring anything revelatory to the table, but it’s a sometimes hysterical and surprisingly sweet horror-comedy thanks to Limperis’s winning presence and an ensemble brimming with comedy talent (Fred Armisen, SNL alum Brooks Whelan, standup Barbara Gray, etc.).
Strawberry Mansion (2021 | USA | 91 minutes | Albert Birney, Kentucker Audley )
Last but most definitely not least, Strawberry Mansion offered a fanciful, odd, and unashamedly romantic contrast to the gore, darkness, and scares that dominated most of SIFF’s 2021 WTF iteration. Kentucker Audley (who also co-directed with Albert Birney) plays James Preble, a government auditor charged with surveying, and taxing, the dreams of elderly Isabella (Penny Fuller). True to its subject matter, it’s a dreamlike little fable that draws from bits of Kurt Vonnegut, Charlie Kaufman, and Philip K. Dick, with visual style and vivid imagination that transcend its modest indie budget. Films that wear their quirkiness and heart-on-sleeve sentiment with this kind of affecting ease have a way of acquiring fervent cults. Sign me up as a member here—and yes, I’m kinda aching to see it again.
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