Screens at CIFF: 10/18
Lover of horror that I am, and fascinated as I am with the potential of short films – not being beholden to the rules of narrative features, they can sometimes be more expressive and imagistic than structurally sound “stories” can be – it’s remarkable that I’ve never committed to the Chicago International Film Festival’s various series of after dark genre shorts before now. But things worked in my favor this year, and I was able to check out most of the Shorts: Midnight Mayhem – Night Terrors slate, and I am pleased to share what I have found with all of you now.
Aftermath (Jeremy Robbins, USA)
Winner of the Silver Hugo for Best Student Short
Looks like somebody read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. In the wake of an undefined disaster that has left the world, or at least this corner of it, covered in a wasteland of snow, two brothers (Noah Robbins, Will Rogers) struggle to keep some measure of stability in the face of rapidly depleting resources. The elder approaches this task with unblinking pragmatism that significantly alarms the younger; their feud over tactics is interrupted by a tragedy in which innocence does and so on. Anybody with eyes could tell you that it’s handsomely mounted with a level of production value that far belies what I doubt was a very high budget, and gorgeous dusky cinematography; but the underwritten brothers never click as people who have terribly much affection and need for each other, and this knocks the legs right out from underneath a movie which badly needs a strong human element to flesh out its apocalyptic landscapes. 5/10
Cochemare (Chris Lavis & Maciek Szczerbowski, Canada)
For a good time in there it is, to use one of my absolute least-favorite words to describe any movie “visionary”: we open a forest in some unknown place full of terrifically creative animals being visited by a jet-black nature spirit (Victoria Diamond). At some point the film transitions to a space station where the same animals visit a scientist (Sylvie Moreau); in reality? in dreams? It doesn’t really matter, ultimately, given how thoroughly plotless this is: a college of design, color, and sound, it’s about almost everything a movie can be but storytelling. Up until it jumped into space, I was convinced that the sensory overload I was experiencing was leading up to the best single project of this year’s festival; things tone down after that, but still remain captivating and rewarding, up until a singularly ill-judged finale in which the scientist writhes in orgasmic ecstasy after having been metaphorically ejaculated on by one of the forest creatures. It’s a blandly “the female body is the most exotic thing of all” hyper-male conclusion to a film that has, prior to then, been far more eager with exploding the limits of convention rather than lustily embracing them. 8/10
Perfect Drug (Toon Aerts, Belgium)
A Belgian production with a title in English with dialogue exclusively in Japanese – we are down the international rabbit hole, ain’t we? The real language of Aerts’s film, however, is of extreme, dreamlike horror imagery – first expressed as a POV shot as Misha (Misha Downey) drinks a test-tube full of whatever fluid he and his accomplices have just stolen from a laboratory, than as apparently third-person delusions that are, in general, more delirious and insane than they are “scary”. Still, enough disembodied heads thoughtfully chewing their food, and cars streaming tentacles and glowing beams of light, and spelunking trips through the folds of a fat man’s belly are nough to give any film a blast of weird energy that remains hypnotic in and of itself, even it engenders amused confusion more than any other particular emotion. This is clearly nothing more than a demo reel for Aerts’s warped imagination, but it’s a hell of a good one. 8/10
Reset (Marcus Kryler & Fredrik Åkerström, Sweden)
A magnificent slow-burn until it turns, abruptly, into something else; in fairness, the hints are laid as early as the opening credits that Something Deeper is going on, though it’s still my inalienable right to wish that the Something wasn’t quite as hackneyed a “gotcha!” twist as it proves to be. Still, there’s a whole lot of so right up until then, with a little girl (Wilma Hedberg) in a house with a dead mother, an absent father sending cryptic notes, and a doll barking commands in a dead, electronic voice, all of it presented in a well-lit house whose anchronistic costumes and settings are far creepier in context than any self-consciously spooky old building could have possibly been. By the time it gets to the inevitable “stalked in a basement” climax, it’s genuinely tense and freaky, without doing any of the normal things it takes to get there. 7/10
Unicorn Blood (Alberto Vazquez, Spain)
Winner of the Gold Plaque for Best Experimental Animated Short
There’s something giddily warped about any film which opens with an angry rock song playing over a landscape of fluff white and red trees drawn in the playful pencils of a teenage girl’s notebooks, as a sickeningly cute teddy bear skulks around with a bow and arrow. Thankfully, this doesn’t end up being just a one-joke cartoon, as it seems might be the case at first (teddy bears are savage bastards who suck the blood out of unicorns); it turns in to a rather nasty-spirited contemplation of sibling rivalry and self-loathing, before turning once more into an unexpectedly terrifying apocalyptic fantasia. All in under 10 minutes. You could rightly accuse the film of lacking story logic or focus, and the whole thing never quite emerges out of the “cute drawings + nightmarish content = amazing” mode that is already a bit stretched then even in such a small package. But the simplicity of the medium makes from some incredibly striking, haunting images. 8/10
Hunger (Guclu Aydogdu, Turkey) and
The Lonely Bones (Rosto, Netherlands) and
Sea Pig (Andrew Gilchrist & Jesse Allen) were not screened in advance for critics