Austin’s genre showcase, Fantastic Fest, kicked off its 2023 edition on Thursday September 21st. Running through next Thursday the 28th, this year’s edition announces over 100 shorts, features, and secret screenings (that as of this writing, Saltburn just screened as the first) programmed to delight, disgust, and enthrall. I mean where else would you find the mashup of lost international horror films like Door (1988)- whose oblique claim to fame is the great Kiyoshi Kurosawa directed one of its sequels!!- to a modern remake of the Toxic Avenger…. a film whose VHS cover box gave this 12-year-old nightmares all the time. Add to the agenda the unspooling of a 3 hour “ultimate cut” of Caligula (1980) plus the array of tense thrillers, slashers, ‘burnt ends”, and weirdo exploits the festival proudly unearths each year, and the 2023 edition promises to be, well, fantastic again.
Fairly removed from any of the above cinematic descriptors, Jamie Childs’ Jackdaw is one way to ease into the daunting festival schedule… inasmuch as it’s a fairly straightforward crime thriller whose feet are planted firmly in the ground of drug dealers, couriers, and all-girl motorcycle gangs. Lit mostly by the sickly amber streams of streetlights and the fluorescent haze of convenience store interiors and pulsating strobe lights, Jackdaw is a lean but accomplished journey through the criminal hinterlands of England where every location seethes with danger and images like a man on a horse with a shotgun hunting a man on a motorbike feels like something that happens here every day.
Taking as its central theme the drug-deal-gone-bad angle, the film follows mid-level courier Jack (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) as he’s hired to pick up a package in the North Sea. Naturally, something goes wrong, and not only is Jack forced to evade several mysterious groups seeking the same package, but he returns home to find his brother has been kidnapped.
Descending further and further into a netherworld of old criminal associates and rival gang members in the hopes of finding his brother, Jackdaw assuredly blends some kinetic imagery (such as a well-planned single take escape from a riot busting police squad) with some brutally efficient gun play. The film also looks amazing… as if writer-director Childs and cinematographer Will Baldy story boarded their film around the various lens flares and streaky light displays their cameras could capture. Jackdaw is an atmospheric film to say the least.
If there’s one fault with the film, it comes in its reach to be a grandiose treatise on the morally corrupt family. It rings of David Michod’s masterpiece Animal Kingdom (2010), especially in a scene stealing performance by Rory Mccann (from Game of Thrones fame) as someone from Jack’s past whose sown the oats of evil into his Motocross bike obsessed psyche. Ultimately, Jackdaw doesn’t have the epic gravitas of other films that mine this type of slow rot, but it certainly has lots of bloody, tense fun trying to get there.
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While we here in the States have to deal with escalating real estate, bloodthirsty landlords, and Air BnB malfeasance, the Spanish have endured a long history of fiefdom that crushes the soul just the same. The sheer amount of agricultural land on the continent lends itself to generations of bloodlust. F. Javier Gutierrez’s La espera (The Wait) could be read as a satanic parable about landowners literally sucking the life out of those charged with caregiving their estates.
And that’s where we find Eladio (Victor Clavijo), a field worker who takes a job overseeing the hunting estate of the shadowy Don Francisco. It may not be the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1980), but this won’t be the last nod to Kubrick in Gutierrez’s sun-drenched ode to alienated madness.
Moving onto the property with his wife (Ruth Diaz) and ten-year-old son (also sound familiar?), tragedy soon strikes and sends Eladio down a three-year rabbit hole of paranoia and guttural sorrow.
The ultimate slow-burn horror film, La Espera teases the viewer with portents of evil. Just why does the landowner subtly bribe Eladio to expand the hunting grounds to 13 stands (that horrible unlucky number) instead of ten. What’s with all the pieces of clothing buried in the ground? All of these questions receive oblique answers, but they’re actually less interesting than the underlying metaphor of a caste system that literally crushes someone for being lower on the ladder. While La espera may be rote in some aspects of its genre storytelling, the ideas behind its horror are much more compelling.
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I suppose Caye Casas’ La Mesita del Comedor (aka The Coffee Table) fits its title of black comedy like no other. It goes to some horribly dark places, never shies away from reveling in some bothersome personalities, and ends up in a place of ironic nihilism all because a man (Eduardo Antuna) buys a crass coffee table over the objections of his wife (Estefania de los Santos). Think of this as the extreme version of a Christmas leg lamp where the coffee table wins.
Without going into plot details (mostly because its shock value is pretty much the only thing going for it), The Coffee Table could also be seen as a dark examination of the pitfalls of fatherhood as the couple have just welcomed their son to the family. The relationship between husband and wife is clearly sour while in the opening scene, they toil back and forth about the purchase of a glass table.
The husband wins out, only to get it home and find out a screw is missing, making it an incomplete mess in their living room. Add to his stress the thirteen year old neighbor girl threatening to tell everyone about his advances towards her on the elevator and The Coffee Table expands into suburban surrealism like something akin to Luis Bunuel. But that’s where the film’s nudges of surrealism ends. From that point on, it becomes a sweaty, anxious tale of suspended dread.
Featuring committed performances, The Coffee Table gets points for going into territory I’ve never quite seen before, but it ultimately struck me as a chilly exercise more than anything else. It is the type of film that’s just perfect for the festival though.
Dallas Film Now. 