Kyle Milner
It’s hard to believe, but another year has rolled around since the last Fantasia Festival. While Canada is unfortunately a tad far away to attend their in-cinema screenings, we’re pleased to have the opportunity to cover the 2022 festival remotely (and by that, we mean the couch).
Taking place between July 14 – August 3, Fantasia Film Festival 2022 has a wonderful range of film screenings, special events and guests to enjoy whether you’re attending in-person or online.
There’s far too many interesting selections from this year’s line-up to mention them all here, but we’ve narrowed down seven films from the Fantasia Fest 2022 roster that are far too intriguing for us to pass up. Let us know if any of these grab your interest, and what you’re looking forward to checking out if you’re taking part in the festival yourself!
The full line-up of films, guests and events can be found at the official Fantasia Festival website.
All Jacked Up and Full of Worms
It’ll have some stiff competition, but Alex Phillips’ debut feature “All Jacked Up and Full of Worms” has the potential to be the most viscerally disturbing film of this year’s Fantasia. Naturally, that means we want to see it.
The micro-budget body horror flick stars Betsy Brown, who previously conjured up superbly manic and stomach-churning energy in Dasha Nekrasova’s “The Scary of Sixty-First”, and is described by the festival as “a coiled-up, drug-induced creature-feature nightmare” in which psychedelic worms cause all sorts of mayhem.
Call us sickos, but that sounds like glowing, writhing praise.
Bodies Bodies Bodies
One of the most high-profile films on this year’s Fantasia roster is “Bodies Bodies Bodies”, the English directorial debut from Dutch actor-turned-director Halina Reijn.
This whodunit slasher for the terminally-online age boasts an incredibly on-point cast, including Amandla Stenberg (“The Hate U Give”), Pete Davison (“Saturday Night Live”), Maria Bakalova (“Borat 2”), Myha’la Herrold (“Plan B”), Chase Sui Wonders (“Generation”), Rachel Sennott (“Shiva Baby”), Lee Pace (“Foundation”) and Connor O’Malley (“I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson”).
The abrasive group of young adults throw a house party at David’s (Pete Davison) uncle’s mansion during a hurricane, only to find themselves being violently picked off one-by-one by a killer who might be within their own ranks.
Lynch/Oz
For fans of David Lynch, connections to “The Wizard of Oz” in the director’s works have always been a point of speculation and intrigue. But as fans of “Mulholland Drive” and “Inland Empire” will attest, Lynch is famously reticent in regards to giving a cross-section of his films: “the film is the talking!”.
In “Lynch/Oz”, documentary filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe takes a deep-dive into those connections in experimental form, using split-screen comparison and interviews with artists including John Waters, Karyn Kusama and David Lowery to explore how the Technicolor classic has informed some of Lynch’s greatest works.
Shin Ultraman
After 2016’s “Shin Godzilla”, it’s clear that few filmmakers are more qualified to reboot a beloved tokukatsu franchise like Ultraman than the duo of Shinji Higuchi and Hideaki Anno, who most famously collaborated on anime masterpiece “Neon Genesis Evangelion”.
In the second of the pair’s “Shin” trilogy of reboots (with “Shin Kamen Rider” to follow), the giant alien hero ‘Ultraman’ takes on the appearance of a young man after accidentally killing him while protecting the Earth from a colossal monster. If it’s even half as good as “Shin Godzilla”, fans are in for a hell of a time.
Special Delivery
“Parasite” fan-favorite Park So-Dam stars as the lead in this high-octane action flick, which follows an expert driver famed for her ability to transport illicit goods.
She’s the best at what she does, but when her latest delivery is a young boy wanted by gangsters, the stakes go from dangerous to deadly. It looks a little bit like South Korea’s answer to “The Transporter”, and with such a charismatic lead, it should be one of the biggest and most fun adrenaline rushes of the festival.
The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future
Truth be told, it’s the fantastic title that landed this film on our radar. But the premise of Chilean director Francisca Alegría’s directorial debut is just as intriguing: a young woman (Mia Maestro) who previously ended her own life in a lake downstream from a pollutant-spewing cellulose plant returns from the murky depths, physically unchanged but bearing a haunting and timely warning to her now-grown family.
It received incredibly promising feedback following its screening at Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and will likely make a big impact once it hits a larger audience.
The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra
It’s a good time to be a fan of body horror cinema, with phenomenal titles like Julia Ducournau’s “Titane” and David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future” recently making big waves.
This 62-minute South Korean feature explores the reverberations of human heartbreak and loneliness when the mold left behind in a recently-split couple’s mattress begins to grow into new life, feeding on the vertebrae of its subsequent owners.
Rather than a purely gross-out body horror flick (not that there’s anything wrong with that), “The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra” seems to be more interested in peeling back the complexities of human emotion and how it impacts the external as much as the internal. We can’t wait to see where this one goes.
Stay tuned for film reviews and interviews from us throughout Fantasia Festival 2022!
