Kicking off on Thursday, September 19th and running through next week, Austin’s Fantastic Fest is back for another year chock full of horror, fantasy, science-fiction, animation, and even Oscar hopefuls in its screening of Sean Baker’s much lauded Cannes winner Anora. I love this festival and am privileged to be covering it again this year.
The Draft!
The latest school of thought for any horror film attempting to stand out from the pack is either to be the grossest one yet, or to turn meta. Yusron Fuadi’s Indonesian film, The Draft!, takes the second option and goes very self-referential as a group of five people begin a weekend at a jungle villa and end up fighting for their lives.
This is the type of film where unbelievable things begin happening from the outset. They see ghostly figures at first, followed by being murdered one by one, only to be resurrected, alive and none the wiser, the next minute. Slowly, the group begin to understand (and fight back) against the otherworldly finger of fate.
Hurdling through an array of horror film cliches from the tendencies of a slasher flick to a frenzied zombie attack, The Draft! clearly hypes itself as a low-budget heave-ho where the filmmaker wants to burst all their creativity onto the screen before it’s taken from them. And there is a reason for all the schizophrenic genre shifting, I’m just not sure the film is as creative as it wants to be. Suffering from a lack of strong character connection and a risible visual style that wants to be excused simply because of the metaphysical hoops the film uses as a narrative justification isn’t enough to satisfy. Low budget is one thing, but the DV mini-cam textures of The Draft! is something no amount of reflexive commentary can save.
Witte Wieven (aka Heresy)
A film that does have the visual chops to convey its atmospheric tale of evil forestry and scant medieval belief system about motherhood, Didier Konings’ Witte Wieven is bewitching. From its opening scene of natural sunlight slowly intruding on the sleeping face of young Freida (Anneke Sluiters) to the obscured, shadowy darkness of its finale, the film understands how intriguing shallow focus can be in a story where facing one’s demons (both literally and figuratively) is damning.
Married to Hikko (Len Leo Vincent) but struggling to get pregnant, Freida is slowly ostracized by her Dutch village and finds herself drawn more and more to the dissociated sounds emanating from the nearby woods. And it’s not hard to understand why any woman would want to flee this religiously zealot and constrictively patriarchal home, especially when rape and belief in anything but doubting God is accepted. The conception of Dark Age belief is brilliantly illuminated when Fredia makes the mistake of calling their childless existence “their” problem, causing husband Hikko to explode and seek the need for familial lineage in the arms of another woman.
Tackling themes of feminine mythology intercut with some nightmarishly conceived bloodshed, Witte Wieven is also a timely examination where “childless” women are berated and anyone who doesn’t fall in line with the conservative, god-fearing anthems of the time are immediately cast in a divisive light. Or perhaps I’m reading too much into it. Bottom line, Witte Wieven is succinct (running at just over an hour) and evocative, and a worthy addition to the now coined “folk horror” genre. It also features one of the best acid-washed insemination sequences in a long time.
Touched By Eternity
Marcis Lacis’ Touched by Eternity works best as an odd comedy, turning the lore of the undead into a group of people who love roller-skating, throwing raves, and swiping through Tik-Tok during their meetings. I suppose eternal life forces one to find enjoyment wherever they can.
But that’s not the only thing on their mind as they seek to convert cryptocurrency investor and trailer-bum Fatso (Andris Keiss) into one of them, seeing him as some sort of ‘chosen one’. The assignment lands in the laps of Egons (Ivars Krasts) and Carlo (Edgars Samitis), who find the task more challenging than originally thought.
Confined to a couple of settings- mostly the tacky inside and overgrown yard of fatso’s trailer and a barn that hosts a bleeding ‘tree of life’- Touched by Eternity manages to comment on some larger topics about the cost of eternal life while detouring into some uneven avenues. There’s a television show host who chatters about everything from the Chilean soccer team air disaster to some untested science about the value of yeast to life longevity…. and how he eventually ties into the plot of Fatso’s nervous step into his chosen role is interesting. However, far more entertaining than this main idea about reluctant vampirism are the vampires themselves. Often bathed in deep red lighting and backed by slow-motion techno needle drops that tend to serve as the ebullient soundtrack to their nocturnal parties, Touched by Eternity gets more crackling mileage here than anywhere else.
However, those moments are fleeting before the film returns to the somnambulistic character of Fatso as he tries to understand the changes around him, which brings the energy down a notch. I could have watched a free-form, faux documentary about these vampires all day. Instead, it’s less successful and entertaining when it focuses on plot over mood.
Fantastic Fest runs through Thursday September 26th in Austin, Texas. Check out https://www.fantasticfest.com/ for tickets and details. Stay tuned for continuing coverage.
Dallas Film Now. 