Shock, horror ... it’s time for the New Zealand International Film Festival. Jeremy Quinn casts a benign eye over some genre highlights.
After a couple of rough, Covid-impacted, years for the New Zealand International Film Festival, which saw a mostly online lockdown edition in 2020 and a delayed version late last year that bypassed Auckland and Hamilton entirely, it’s encouraging to see it return more or less intact in 2022, albeit in a slightly pared back format.
For Dunedin audiences, this is a mixed blessing. We might not have any screenings at the Regent but we are also not getting the usual stripped-down programme that often excludes many of the more off-the-wall offerings. Basically, with the exception of a few Auckland-only showings to make up for them missing out completely in 2021, every title in the festival this year is playing here at Rialto.
Genre fans are especially well catered for, with a strong selection of horror, thriller, sci-fi and some perhaps more miscellaneous titles, and it will likely be your only chance to see them in cinemas with an appreciative crowd before they are relegated to the black hole of streaming.
It may be a cliche to say the prevalence of these types of films reflects the general unease many of us are feeling right now, but bring it on I say. I mean, what good is a global existential crisis if we cannot get some interesting art out of it?
So, without any further ado, here are my picks of the more unusual films at this year’s fest, beginning with a couple of oddities from the absurdist, surrealist French director Quentin Dupieux.
Both appearing in the Ant Timpson-curated "Incredibly Strange" section, the first of these, Incredible But True, sees Dupieux commenting on our pandemically altered sense of time, as a couple moves into a new house only to find it contains a portal in the basement that de-ages them by three days, while also shunting them 12 hours into the future.
If you have seen any of Dupieux’s previous offerings you will know whether these will appeal or not, but beneath the outlandish premises and comic weirdness is a film-maker who delights in exploring thought-provoking, relevant themes, albeit with a veneer of wackiness.
David Cronenberg’s much-hyped return to body horror really does feel like the summation of his career to date, even if he denies the assertion. It’s hard to watch this and not see the similarities with Videodrome and Crash, to the extent it almost feels like the third part of an unofficial trilogy.
Crimes of the Future is set in a bizarre, stylised, alt-future where pain no longer exists, and surgery is done in public under the guise of performance art. It is obviously not for all tastes, as the infamous walkouts at Cannes will attest, but I kind of loved it. It has an engaging, precise, clinical vibe, and has much to say about where we might be heading as a species in terms of our evolution.
Performance art is also flavour of the day in Peter Strickland’s latest, in which an art collective known as "Elle and the Gastric Ulcers" specialises in sonic catering, a kind of theatre of the absurd in which noises and sounds are produced using food. Strickland’s previous film, In Fabric, was a masterful skewering of the fashion world by way of Dario Argento, and this looks to be in a similar vein, even receiving some welcome comparisons to This Is Spinal Tap in the way it draws out the pretensions of the art scene.
Two European horrors that both appear to carry the Michael Haneke-inspired sense of suburban dread we all know and love. In Speak No Evil, a Danish couple on holiday in Italy make friends with a Dutch couple, who invite the Danes to come and stay at a later date. Not wanting to offend, they take up the offer, but things soon take a severe turn for the worse. Advance buzz on this mostly focuses on a traumatic final sequence that apparently left many audience members at Sundance in a state of PTSD. Needless to say, I can't wait.
Fun for all the family.
Something a bit different to take the edge off — an Afro-futurist, dystopian sci-fi musical from Rwanda featuring neon-drenched visuals, elaborate production numbers and an addictive soundtrack, all centred around an unnamed police state that forces its citizens to work as slaves in the coltan mines to create high-tech consumer electronics for export. Guaranteed to blow your mind.
A couple of American indies from two directors, each with a distinct, idiosyncratic approach. Dual, from Riley Stearns, is a sort of Black Mirror-esque comedy set in the near future, about a woman (Karen Gillan) who, after being diagnosed with a terminal illness, decides to have herself cloned. When it turns out she is not dying, she is ordered by authorities to fight to the death with her double.
Both flicks have a great initial premise so it will be interesting to see if they deliver the goods.
Two more horrors of the more experimental variety, both shot in glorious 4:3, from directors making their feature debuts. The first, You Won’t Be Alone, by Australian-Macedonian film-maker Goran Stolevski, appears like it might sit firmly in the folk tale horror category alongside ex-festival hit The Witch. Indeed, it’s centred around a 19th-century witch who turns a young girl into a shapeshifter, although reviews seem to indicate that it eschews the scares for a more fantastical approach.
Another apt pairing of ’70s-style psychological thrillers, each one name-dropping Polanski’s Repulsion in the promotional materials and centred around a woman being stalked/followed/harassed by an unwelcome male. In Chloe Okuno’s Watcher, also a debut feature, Julia (Maika Monroe) has moved to Bucharest for her husband’s new job, which has him working long hours away and her spending time alone in a city where she doesn’t know the language. She finds herself being watched by a mysterious figure in a nearby building, who soon seems to be following her. Or is it her that is following him? Who is the watcher and who is being watched? This sounds like it takes the Euro-thriller prototype of films such as Don’t Look Now and gives it a modern-day spin.
Finally, a couple of genre efforts that stay firmly rooted in the real world. Emily the Criminal stars the great Aubrey Plaza as an ex-graphic design student with a $70,000 student debt whose job as a delivery driver doesn’t even begin to cover the interest. The clue is in the title here — think Breaking Bad but for a generation denied the certainties of their parents.
In any case, there’s a good chance that almost none of these films will return to the big screen, so see as many as you can, and hopefully the festival will be back again next year in its full, widescreen glory.
The festival
- Dunedin: Whanau Marama The New Zealand International Film Festival opens on Thursday and runs until August 21 at Rialto.
- Gore: St James Theatre, August 18-25.
