Hilarity is seldom this erotic. Every prurient bone in your body is going to tremble with lust and laughter over Greg Araki’s latest provocation I Want Your Sex (2026). No prospects nebbish and nerdish Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) is hired by Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), a ball-busting artist who gets everything she wants when she wants it how she wants it and what she wants from Elliot is for him to be a humiliated submissive. Infatuated with his unexpected dominatrix, Elliot trains well, and falls into a BDSM trance. When Erika ends up missing and potentially murdered, he’s pulled into a police procedural answering hard questions set to him by two detectives. He’s even got a few hard questions for himself.
Dark habits get lit up by bright colors and the fun is in the details, whether the duo are drinking Spindrifts, or cum is glistening all over Elliot’s t-shirt after jacking himself off, or—speaking of t-shirts—he’s wearing Sonic Youth’s “Washingmachine”. I Want Your Sex is a briskly paced and naughty romp, and a spanking critique of sex, art, and intergenerational attitudes towards both. Plus it’s full of snappy rejoinders. Elliot’s roommate Apple (Chase Sui Wonders) describes Elliot’s glacial girlfriend as “what AI would generate if you said total bitch” and Erika pontificates that “fucking people gives a sense of identity and control.”
Hoffman delivers a nuanced performance as a naïve 23-year-old coming to terms with his own frustrations, desires and satisfaction. His masochism is tinged with sheer sweetness and genuine charm. Wilde goes over-the-top with such deliberate aggression that her vulnerability and insecurity peek through, courting pathos and some empathy for her batshit crazy behavior. Costuming is sexy. Art direction pops. Product placement perfect. The underlying moral? You are what you eat, so to speak.
When I first heard about it, I was incredibly excited about plans to open the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino. It seemed a long overdue acknowledgment and celebration of what Latinos have contributed to the American democratic experiment.
And then along came Trump who—as detailed by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus—has been targeting the Smithsonian Institution and its projects for U.S. Latino history by zeroing out federal construction funding for the development and construction of the planned National Museum of the American Latino, threatening its physical establishment on the National Mall, and attempting to replace a standalone museum with decentralized programming, which would scatter artifacts and programs across other existing museums rather than house them in a standalone facility.
The “resilience” that Senator Alex Padilla opines is characteristic of Latino culture is on full display in an energizing documentary American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez (2026) directed by David Alvarado and set to open theatrically later this week. In the face of the Trump administration’s diminishments, American Pachuco ameliorates those setbacks by emphasizing that Latino history is not going anywhere, no matter the current administration’s efforts to rewrite history.
The film’s celebratory optimism arrives as a grito of celebration and perseverance. Festival audiences have agreed. When American Pachuco premiered at the Sundance Film Festival (under the aegis of PBS American Masters) it won both the Audience Award for U.S. Documentary and the Festival Favorite Award.
The archival footage alone is remarkable. The production worked closely with UC Santa Barbara to rescue, digitize, and 4K-scan over 80,000 feet of deteriorating, unseen 1960s and 1970s film covering El Teatro Campesino and early political skits (actos). This recovered footage contains rare, intimate footage of Cesar Chavez, street performances, unionization movements, and behind-the-scenes material from Valdez's theatrical and film productions. Negotiated through the life and career of Luis Valdez, American Pachuco chronicles his journey from a childhood in California labor camps and migrant farming fields to the creation of guerrilla theater for the United Farm Workers strike, Broadway (Zoot Suit), and Hollywood (La Bamba).
Weaving both archival and contemporary interviews with Valdez and his creative associates (Daniel Valdez, Dolores Huerta, Taylor Hackford, Linda Ronstadt, Cheech Marin, Lou Diamond Phillips), combined with split-screen visuals and narration by Edward James Olmos reprising his role as Zoot Suit’s El Pachuco, American Pachuco demonstrates how writer / playwright / director Valdez illuminated the Mexican American experience on stage and screen and transformed the American cultural landscape. Trump can try but he’s not going to succeed in stifling that seminal transformation. It’s just too powerful and—as stated by Senator Padilla—resilient.
In fact, the 1981 filmic adaptation of his play Zoot Suit and 1987’s blockbuster La Bamba seared into my cultural sensibility as a firm building block of my identity as a Chicano having been brought up working in the fields of Idaho and Southern California as a boy and participating in the La Raza Movement of the San Francisco Bay Area. After Zoot Suit premiered in Los Angeles, it rolled out to San Francisco in October 1981. I seem to recall it playing the Castro Theater and it timed with my sister Barbara visiting San Francisco. Earlier in the day I had taken her out to Fort Mason where we happened to catch a performance of an Aztec Dance Group from Mexico City. It was the first time I had seen these dancers all decked out with their feather headdresses and their ankle rattles (ayoyote) made from seed pods.
From Fort Mason we went to the Castro Theater to catch Zoot Suit. I was stunned by the sequence depicting the racial violence of the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots where servicemen attack El Pachuco and tear off his zoot suit, stripping him down to near nudity. When he rises he is shown in a loincloth receding into darkness with the sound of the ayoyote around his ankles. Barbara and I looked at each other in amazement. What were the chances of such a coincidence? We both instantly understood this powerful moment of symbolic transformation and cultural survival. By the servicemen tearing off the zoot suit—a badge of pride for Chicano youth of that era—they were attempting to strip him of his humanity and humiliate him; but, instead of being defeated, El Pachuco emerges from the attack in an almost mythical way, reborn with an ancient, regal majesty, evoking the image of his indigenous Aztec ancestors. That indelible cinematic moment connected the modern, urban struggles of 1940s Mexican American pachucos back to a deep, unbroken history of indigenous resistance in Mexico.
Zoot Suit still works to that effect and American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez further serves to connect our current American moment to the resistance of the Chicano Labor Movement of the 1960s and the 1970s. It’s a vital reminder of how strong we are as a culture and no racist autocrat is going to take that away.
The World Premiere of Canadian filmmaker Casey Walker’s strange and engaging Home Bodies (2026) starts you scratching your head straight off when you’re introduced to infant twins—Red (Emma Ho) and Blue (Ian Ho)—who live routine, circumscribed lives at home each day, every day. Ready-to-go Blue always wakes up sleepyhead Red in the morning, they share breakfast in an automated kitchen that gives them everything they need to eat, they watch videotapes of a show called “Barn” cast with farm animals, and occasionally break the monotony of their quotidian existence by celebrating a Christmas-like holiday where they’re bestowed with gifts from “Papa”, a disembodied voice resounding from the other side of a locked door who makes sure that Red and Blue abide house rules, or else.
So what is this house? What is this home? Why so many locked doors to forbidden rooms? Why no windows? Why so many rules? What does it mean that Red and Blue are true “home bodies” who never get to leave their habitat and never seem to want to? Blue, especially, seems content with their ritual repetitions, whereas Red seems to have a gnawing dissatisfaction that something’s not right. Because they are finally “old enough”, Papa sends them the most unusual of holiday gifts: an androgynous humanoid named Pal (eerily played by Ess Hödlmoser) who can’t talk, has to moreorless be led around and positioned, and seems to have been primarily provided to keep Red company, to feed her curiosity, and to initiate her into some of the darker secrets of life. Red, who has shown signs of becoming bored with her roommate Blue, takes a shine to Pal who she assigns a feminine gender, and designates besties. Blue gets jealous and pushes back, causing a disastrous upset of all the twins have ever known or expected to be normal in their home.
The Ho Twins are perfectly cast as Red and Blue and exemplify what Carolyn Mauricette has identified in her Fantasia program capsule as a surreal take on the nature vs. nurture argument. Blue is a creature fashioned from control and eager to conform whereas Red has an agency that thinks outside the box, definitely outside the homefront, which leads her to the film’s “what-the-fuck?” ending where she literally finds herself outside the box.
Unabashedly prurient and just this side of perverse, the World Premiere of Angus Silver’s psychosexual drama Insectasy (2026) starts right off with Sadie (in a fearless turn by Tirion Healy) masturbating and climaxing because of the feel of insect legs on her skin. Tickle tickle spurt. Naturally, the viewer is bound to feel that Sadie’s proclivities are unnatural and yet—by comparison to the boasted sexploits of her social circle—she seems to be the only one who is genuine and authentic about her desires. All her friends sound like their ideas of relationship come half-baked out of made-for-television movie stereotypes. What does it matter if Sadie’s preferences are different than others? At least they’re undeniably her own.
Remember that exchange in David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly (1986) where Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) says to his girlfriend Veronica (Geena Davis): “Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects don't have politics. They're very brutal. No compassion, no compromise.” Silver’s Insectasy explores the same theme of brutal nature by pivoting the theme on the fulcrum of pleasure. Is pleasure the act of doing something because it feels good? Or is it an act that—by not doing it—will make you feel bad? Or—if one is being brutally honest (since brutality is the point)—does sexual behavior really have anything to do with either pleasure or pain? Or is it a smaller function in a larger collective design or functional dream?
Sadie’s sexual interactions with others on both sides of the fence—nebbish chainsmoker Theo (Emmett Roiko) and sapphically aggressive Honey (Lyndall Huber)—edge her closer to understanding what is truly erotic for her and is underscored even further when she meets fellow entomophile Julius (Jan Roeth) whose “are you into bugs?” come-on is undeniably sexy and offers Sadie a chance to make her fantasies come true. The money shot in Insecstasy is worth the price of admission.
Naturalistic dialogue and performances insure that the Fantasia World Premiere of Harrison Atkins’s Sour Minnows (2026) takes viewers on a narrative trajectory both desultory and dread-inducing. Ricky (David Brown) and his roommate Tepper (Chase Williamson) are walking home from grocery shopping, bags in hand, opining on movies they’ve seen, when they turn a corner and encounter a group of men down on the ground licking the asphalt.
Next thing they know they’re back in their apartment trying to put together what they just witnessed but, oddly, their recollections are uneven and don’t quite align. Ricky doesn’t even remember dropping the groceries and running. In the days that follow so much doesn’t quite fit together to make sense. Have they just sat down to watch a film or have they already watched it and was it shorter than they expected or was it four hours long? As Vincenzo Nappi describes it in his Fantasia program capsule: “time stretches and bends … memories morph into lies, reality becomes malleable, and Ricky finds himself at the mercy of ‘The Yellow Thing,’ an entity that wears people like costumes.”
Nappi further characterizes Sour Minnows as an “experimental reworking of the hangout film”, whose relateability is exactly what makes this movie so satisfying. This isn’t just mumblecore naturalism because, first of all, the sound design is crystal clear so that the viewer catches each halting nuance of conversation—the way words overlap each other eliciting genuine bewilderment, confusion, and doubt—and these aren’t just slacker performances killing time on screen. The performances by the entire ensemble are flawlessly delivered, each pause pregnant with mystery, and understated to maximum effect. Their doubletakes peer into uncertain futures.
I’m ordinarily not fond of irresolute endings but Sour Minnows has me just fine with unanswered questions, implausible perspectives, and the wonderful chaotic possibility that wandering through hallways at a cineplex might lead me to peek out my bedroom closet door in doppelganger excess. I fully accept that watching life from impossible angles might mean the angles are watching back. So far, one of my top five from this year’s Fantasia!
Remember back in 1992 when American psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés published Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype that spent 145 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list for over a three-year span? Well lope forward 34 years to the Fantasia World Premiere of Eriko Katagiri’s When You Open the Door (2026), a debut feature that could easily be entitled Women Who Do Interpretive Dance With the Wolves.
Miki (Motola Serena) is a 27-year old woman working for an architectural firm who believes she has been bitten by a wolf during her lunch hour. Wolves, of course, have been extinct in Japan for over 120 years and she has no visible bite marks so her work mates remain appropriately skeptical, even as Miki begins to experience a series of dream memories that transform her self-image and cause her to question reality.
For her Fantasia program capsule Justine Smith writes: “The film has a languid numbness; a strange rhythm that’s both uncomfortable and infectious. Viewers who allow themselves to be carried into Miki’s mind will soon find themselves pulled into one of the most unique werewolf stories ever put to the big screen.” But there you have it. Viewers who allow themselves to be languidly numbed by When You Open the Door have to also be willing to suspend their disbelief and that’s a heavy lift for this anemic fare.
That is, if you really want this to be a werewolf movie. Then again, belief or disbelief might not have anything to do with it. Maybe this film should simply be accepted as werewolf-lite, a unique interpretation of the genre that borrows some of the tropes—hairy transformation, blackouts, howling at the moon—and imagines them differently than expected? Filtering them through a lens of feminine isolation? And resulting in as kitty-like a werewolf as Dee Wallace’s transformation at the end of The Howling (1981), cute and fuzzy, eating lit-up heart-shaped hearts. Believability ends up not really being the focus after all as the film’s final lip-licking wink conclusively asserts. Less for gore fans, this film is dedicated to all the furries out there with struggling identity issues.
The film’s most interesting thread revolves around Japan’s deep history of female shamans, seers, and spirit mediums known as itako or orgamisama in northern folk traditions. To become mediums women are trained in caves, essentially animal graveyards, where they undergo fasting, sleep deprivation, and are beaten with reeds to achieve trance states. Once trained, they are initiated in a god-possession ritual where the old women surround the novice and chant. Though these traditions aren’t directly associated with wolves, there is a canine connection that Katagiri incorporates into her narrative: that of a secret box called a gehōbako which contains magical items.
At Fantasia there is no shortage of dystopian visions of the future, often the near-future, tracking the dark consequences of socio-political forces currently at play—autocracies that repress individual freedoms, technologies that slander humanity—and among these imaginative and cautionary narratives, it’s heartening to see included what might be considered the most frightening genre of all: the cinema vérité documentary.
Fear and hope co-mingle in The Seoul Guardians (2026)[official website], the collective project of Jong-Woo Kim, Shin-Wan Kim, and Chul-Young Cho that documents six tense hours in and out of the National Assembly in Seoul, after the sudden declaration of martial law by the South Korean President on December 3, 2024. With a logline of “Everyone speaks of democracy, but is it truly an attainable dream?”, The Seoul Guardians chronicles the dream being put to the test; a dream that could conceivably be put to the test right here in the United States in the very near future with the midterms mere months away.
Cross-cutting footage of the December 2024 events with archival footage of the Gwangju Democratic Uprising 45 years earlier—one of the deepest traumas in South Korea’s history—a question is raised regarding the famous aphorism coined by philosopher George Santayana in his 1905 book The Life of Reason: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Emphasizing that ignoring past mistakes will inevitably lead to their being made again, one can’t help but ask: can the past save the present and, by extension, can the present save the future?
It’s a question that Americans have to ask as we witness the intense national polarization, deep fights over racial and social equality, and the widespread use of political fear and demonization that once characterized both the Reconstruction Era and the McCarthy Era of American politics. The contemporary parallels are chilling. It’s to be expected, I guess, that human nature will again and again arrive to these existential crises, these all-too-familiar moral conflicts, but the hope is that knowing our history will help us identify and negotiate swifter outcomes; that we will resolve our conflicts through the evidence of history. Then again, filmmakers Kim, Kim and Cho question the democratic viability of the word “we.”
From its opening sequences, the two “tribes” of thought—those wishing to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol and those who are anti-impeachment—are shown in strident opposition to each other, with valid critiques flying both ways. Resisting the assault on the National Assembly by soldiers ordered by the President to "drag the legislators out of the building" so they can’t vote on ending martial law seems like a no-brainer in terms of defending democracy, and the subsequent impeachment of President Yoon Suk Yeol and his replacement by President Lee Jae Myung was hailed by global media as a victory for democracy. But South Korea’s political polarization has only deepened, and hatred between the opposing camps continues to grow. The filmmakers raise an attendant question: In a world where political polarization and animosity toward the other side have become routine—"where society remains suspended between relief and anxiety”—can the past truly save the present? And what kind of present must be remembered by the future?
Fortunately, other than the social anxiety and property damage of the December 2024 conflict, the death toll of the Gwangju Uprising (estimated by some as high as the thousands) was avoided, partly because of the relatively passive efforts of the military to follow their orders, arguably because they knew how the military was judged for the violence visited upon civilians in the Gwangju Uprising, they didn’t wish the same for themselves. If only ICE could share that shame and concern.
Having already garnered several awards on its robust festival run, Fantasia offers The Seoul Guardians as a Quebec premiere, allowing Montreal audiences to be immersed in the power of political agitation.
Fantasia never fails to offer up exciting action flicks knowing this is what their audiences crave. The World Premiere of Bob Colaers’s Attack On Paradise (2026) more than whets the appetite. Lead actor and co-writer Saïd Boumazoughe teams up as recently-released convict Suleyman with rookie cop Yasmine (Clara Cleymans) to maneuver bullet ballets and kinetically choreographed one-on-one combats floor by floor as they aim to take down drug lord Prince Hamza (Achmed Akkabi) who, of course, is sheltered high up in the penthouse.
Taking care of an elderly parent is hard enough but Suleyman doesn’t realize just how hard until he returns home to visit his mother after being locked away for several years. His committed mother-love makes vulnerable and humanizes his invincible rough guy reputation, such that you’re rooting for him to hug mama even though a multi-story apartment building full of criminal types keep getting in his way. What can he do but bring them down?
It’s a sentimental plot nested in a kick-ass narrative, successfully rendered, and just plain fun to watch. Fully identifying with Suleyman’s undeniably likeable character meant by film’s end I could barely walk! Ouch! The bruises!! The muscle aches!!
Real-life action flicks face off with animated ones in the North American premiere of Avid Liongoren’s ZsaZsa Zaturnnah [vs the Amazonistas of Planet X] (2026). Offsetting Attack On Paradise’s testosterone-fueled mayhem with cosmic estrogen power, ZsaZsa Zaturnnah charges forward with a fearless LGBTQ+ powerhouse punch. Adapted from Filipino graphic designer and illustrator Carlo Vergara’s Zsazsa “komiks”, and having been previously adapted as a stage musical and a live-action film in 2006, Vergara’s high-camp parodies of iconic Filipina superheroine Darna have earned prestigious awards and enormous popularity among the queer community of the Philippines.
I’ll crib the synopsis from Rupert Bottenberg’s Fantasia program capsule because I couldn’t possibly do it any better: “Ada is a shy, gay hairdresser living in a small village, running a salon with the help of his boisterous assistant Didi. A history of heartbreak and harsh judgement has left Ada resigned to a life without love—despite a powerful crush on Dodong, the handsome storekeeper across the street. Everything changes for Ada when a pink meteorite punches a hole in his roof one night. At Didi’s insistence, Ada consumes the space rock and utters the mystical word inscribed on it—Zaturnnah! Didi’s ludicrous conviction that Ada will be transformed into a superhero proves to be correct. Ada now has incredible strength, speed, resilience—and a spectacular, Olympian woman’s body! These new powers prove immediately necessary, as the village is beset by giant mutant animals, wretched zombies from the local graveyard, and anything else that can be thrown at her by the militantly misandrist extraterrestrial invader Queen Feminah Suarestellar Baroux and the Amazonistas from Planet X. Can Zsazsa win against these fearsome foes? And, can Ada win Dodong’s heart?”
How’s that for a plot device? As outlandishly colorful and vibrant as ZsaZsa Zaturnnah is on its surface, I detect subtle undercurrents. Despite Ada being a stereotyped effeminate outcast hairdresser infatuated with the hunky bodybuilder across the street, he has no real interest in being a woman. He’s gay but he wants to be a guy. That swallowing a pink meteorite turns him into an Amazonian woman generates its own clutch of issues. Will he be loved for being the woman he’s actually not and never accepted as the gay man he is? A tinge of the political dynamite of transgender women in sports hovers over a provocative narrative that eschews heavy-handedness to deliver a sentimental tale where—despite who others think he is—Ada is ultimately loved for being exactly who he wants to be.
So while Saga is trying to cope with her newborn, Elyse (Morgan Holstrom)—the protagonist of Tim Riedel’s debut feature Ancestral Beasts (2026)—is trying to cope with ancestors long gone living underneath the floorboards of the family home. “The curses we inherit are not our fault,” the film’s poster attests, “what they become is our responsibility.” Which, of course, is easier said than done when it comes to family where so much past damage is coursing through the bloodlines and where, as Fantasia points out, grief arrives as an unwanted houseguest.
As Carolyn Mauricette writes in her Fantasia program capsule, Ancestral Beasts is “a haunted-house narrative mixed with character-driven commentary on how intergenerational trauma can reach beyond the grave and hold our hearts in its cold hands.”
Configuring that trauma as a centipede-like creature (think The Tingler) is truly novel, intriguing, and creepy; but, by film’s end I was worn out with all the family dysfunction—sisters unloading on each other—and the heavy-handed treatment of mental illness in indigenous communities (not to say that isn’t extremely important). The World Premiere of Ancestral Beasts is a noteworthy if uneven first endeavor and I look forward to watching Riedel and his indigenous cast and crew develop their chops in future films.
Who actually are the “wicked” in Kasper Kalle’s sophomore feature No Rest For the Wicked (2026), boasting its World Premiere at this year’s edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival? That’s an ascription that the LGBTQ+ community have been wrestling with for … well … quite a long time, stretching back at least to 1885 when Karl Heinrich Ulrichs—now considered a pioneering LGBTQ+ activist—published his supernatural short story “Manor.”
Between 1864 and 1869, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs wrote a series of pamphlets advocating decriminalization of sex acts between men, in which he was candid about his own homosexuality. As noted by Liam Stack in his posthumous obituary of Ulrichs for The New York Times: “By the time the lawyer and writer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs took the podium at a meeting of the Association of German Jurists in 1867, rumors about his same-sex love affairs—and the subsequent threat of arrest and prosecution—had already cost him his legal career and forced him to flee his homeland. Standing in Munich before more than 500 lawyers, officials and academics—many of whom jeered as he spoke—Ulrichs argued for the repeal of sodomy laws that criminalized sex between men in several of the German-speaking kingdoms and duchies that existed in the years before the creation of a unified German state. …His speech was also deeply unwelcome at the 1867 meeting, where the audience erupted in shouts of ‘Stop!’ and ‘Crucify!’ that ultimately forced Ulrichs off the stage.”
His remarks helped inspire the rise of the world’s first gay rights movement, 30 years later in Berlin and preceded by more than 100 years the Stonewall riots in New York in 1969 (which are widely seen as the start of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement).
Historian Robert Beachy has said of Ulrichs, "I think it is reasonable to describe [Ulrichs] as the first gay person to publicly out himself.” But it came at a significant personal cost. Not only did he lose his career but was banished from his homeland. He published one final pamphlet in 1879 and then crossed the Alps by foot and settled in Italy, where his public advocacy for homosexuality ceased. He spent his remaining years editing a small Latin-language literary journal.
In 1885, ten years before his death at the age of 69, Ulrichs published “Manor”. Set in the remote Faroe Islands, it tells the story of Har, who is saved from drowning by a young sailor named Manor. After Manor dies at sea, he returns as a vampire revenant to visit Har each night in a tragic, romantic tale of devotion. Ulrichs notably utilized the vampire trope as an early allegorical metaphor to explore homosexuality and societal rejection in Western literature.
Danish filmmaker Kasper Kalle competently adapts Ulrichs’s short story into an expanded full-length feature film, renaming Har as Baldur and Manor as Helge, but maintaining the story’s central dark romance, draping it in gothic trappings, and using the natural beauty of the Faroe islands to emphasize the isolation Baldur feels growing up as a fatherless fisherman. Egor Venned portrays Baldur as a taciturn yet sensually magnetic young man, who draws the attention of the slightly-older whaler Helge, flirtatiously enacted by Pilou Asbæk (known by most for his portrayal of the swashbuckling Euron Greyjoy in HBO’s Game of Thrones). Their affair builds slowly, shrouded—as Kat Ellinger describes in her program capsule for Fantasia—in “necessary secrecy, Baldur’s duty to family and community, and the oppressive atmosphere of devout Christianity that governs daily life” on the island, along with Helge’s unquestionable love for adventures at sea where Baldur longs to join him. When that opportunity arises he is held back by his mother Alsa (Sofia Nolsøe Mikkelsen) who guilt trips him into staying home to take care of her. Helge sails off and is drowned at sea, washing up on the shore of the island.
And that’s where the wickedness begins.
Appearing first in dense fog, then at his bedside, where Helge’s lips—as described in Ulrichs’s story—begins “looking for the gently swelling hill above the heart, which moves through the throbbing”; i.e., sucking blood from Baldur’s nipple. As Baldur begins to weaken from losing blood each night, his mother Alsa realizes what’s happening and convinces the local priest to stake the heart of Helge in his grave. Baldur, realizing he is about to die, pleads with his mother to have her bury him next to Helge, which of course she refuses to do when he does finally succumb.
Now here’s why I ask where the wickedness actually lies. Though it’s insinuated that the wickedness lies in Helge’s inability to relinquish his love for Baldur, isn’t it actually in the lack of compassion exhibited by the villagers and his own mother in not honoring his request? By not doing so, they unleash a watery revenge upon themselves, disturbing their communal rest. No rest for the wicked, indeed.
No Rest For the Wicked is a lovely, atmospheric, folkloric expression of vampiric lore, compellingly enacted, and as stated earlier, an immensely important reclamation of LGBTQ+ history. It startles me that in decades of uncovering queer history, I have never heard of Ulrichs and his story “Manor.” It’s a heartening experience to see it on cinematic display. Kudos to Kalle for this brave reclamation and strong contender for Fantasia’s Cheval Noir prize. It has my vote.
In a remarkable reversal of perspective, Chuyen Bui Thac’s Tunnels: Sun In the Dark (2025) honors and celebrates the Vietnamese resistance guerillas who fought the American occupation of Vietnam, a “forever war” that lasted from 1955 to 1975. In the early 1990s filmmaker Mickey Grant documented the topic in The Cu Chi Tunnels (1991), but Thac’s film is a well-produced fictionalized historical epic. Lauded on its festival run with awards for Best Cinematography and Best Music Score at the 2025 Vietnam Film Festival and the Mulberry Award for Best Screenplay at the 2026 Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy, Tunnels: Sun In the Dark emerged as a major box office hit when released theatrically in Vietnam.
The tunnels of Củ Chi are an immense network of connecting tunnels located in the Củ Chi District of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam, and are part of a much larger network of tunnels that underlie much of the country. During the war, the Củ Chi tunnels were one of the critical intel hubs for the H63 strategic intelligence network, a highly successful North Vietnamese strategic espionage group operating in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. It was most famous for deeply infiltrating the American and South Vietnamese military and political commands to provide critical intelligence.
Used by Viet Cong soldiers as hiding spots during combat, the Củ Chi tunnels likewise served as communication and supply routes, hospitals, food and weapon caches and living quarters for numerous North Vietnamese fighters. The tunnel systems were of great importance to the Viet Cong in their resistance to American and ARVN forces and helped to counter the growing American military presence.
The tunnels played a colossal part in securing the final win on April 30, 1975, sealing the end of Vietnam’s brutal 21-year fight for freedom. Tunnels: Sun In the Dark, however, is set a little under a decade earlier on January 8, 1966 during the U.S. military campaign named Operation Crimp when B-52 bombers dropped 30-ton loads of high explosive onto the region of Củ Chi, effectively turning the once lush jungle into a pockmarked moonscape. When Americans started the raid more than 3000 officers were stuck at Phu My Hung and An Phu, having to hide in the tunnels. Despite their carpet bombing (the Americans dropped all types of bombs—timed bombs, airburst bombs, and ground-impact bombs) and their “destroy all, burn all, kill all” policy, the operation did not bring about the desired success, though it revealed for the first time the immense military significance of the tunnels. The failure of Operation Crimp resulted in the expanded operation dubbed Operation Cedar Falls.
Without making the American forces strictly evil, Tunnels: Sun In the Dark admirably presents the inhumanity of war and its impact on both sides of the war. As Rupert Bottenberg assesses in his program capsule for Fantasia, “Cinematic ruminations on the Vietnam War have long come mainly from the United States, and while films like Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, and Platoon hardly glorified the massive military misadventure in southeast Asia, they offered only the American perspective.” Tunnels: Sun In the Dark “tells the other side of the tale with a powerful war film that’s intelligent, empathic, convincing, and intense.”
Chuyen Bui Thac who directed, wrote, and executive produced Tunnels: Sun In the Dark built his script on documented practices of the Củ Chi tunnels. Each hamlet had its own tunnel entrance. If an outsider wandered in, they would blindfold him, and lead him outside, releasing him far from the entrance. Such is the case with Tu Dap (Quang Tuan) who serves the tunnel community by dismantling and studying recovered bombs in order to teach himself mine-building. Though forced to live outside of the tunnels, Tu Dap nonetheless becomes romantically involved with Ba Huong (Thu Anh Ho), as impossible as that might seem in a world explosively ravaged 24/7. The ensemble is large and the breadth and depth of interactions noteworthy, such that this viewer felt for them and their plight. Many of them were so young with no chance of leading a normal life.
There’s a palpable haunt to Tunnels: Sun In the Dark. By acknowledging and elevating the resilience and perseverance of the guerillas under the onslaught of American military power, using the tunnel system to develop ingenious ways to fight back, their determination to hold out effected the sad truth that the United States did not “win” the Vietnam War. One would hope we would have learned the lesson that bombing a country to destruction does not mean you win a war. And yet, in another chilling example of the unbridled use of military might by the United States of Amnesia, the Trump regime has led us into another misguided war of choice in Iran, which to date has no clear way out. I feel not only for the Americans at home who do not want this war and are anxious over it, but Tunnels: Sun In the Dark provides a sense of the hell we are visiting on the Iranian people and the tenacity with which they will harrow it. I can predict that we’re not going to win that war either, if it hasn’t already been lost.
Christianity, particularly in its Roman Catholic expression, is well-known to be rife with potential horror, ranging from Rosemary’s Baby to The Exorcist and The Conjuring franchises. There’s something about the trappings of the Catholic faith that often feel like … well … a trap; a terribly ritualized and consecrated trap! Possession and the subsequent need for exorcism is a familiar trope, but the perils of indoctrination are equally frightening, especially when configured as evident child abuse.
And so it begins with the World Premiere of Mark H. Rapaport’s sophomore feature Godhead (2026)—what Justine Smith characterizes in her Fantasia program capsule as an “electrically weird coming-of-age film.” It’s also extremely original and lustrously shot in black and white by cinematographer William Babcock, allegedly in homage to Alfred Hitchcock and vintage “Twilight Zone” television episodes, though its gossamer infrared ghostliness approximates spirituality more than anything Hitch ever endeavored.
A child is left in a basket on the steps of a small country church. The hem of a priest’s robe is seen discovering the infant. Years later the priest “Father” (Al Warren, delivering his lines with a colloquial salt-of-the-earth twang) guides his ward “Boy” (Luke Speakman) through prayer, teaching him about the seven days of creation, and eventually about the eighth day when God abandons mankind for being so selfish and sinful. Father warns Boy about the dangers outside the church, explaining that this is why he keeps Boy locked up inside and why Father must wear a gas mask to forage for supplies. The minute Father steps outside, however, he rips off his gasmask exposing his dark and perverse deceit. Again, indoctrination as child abuse.
Enter two characters in white jumpsuits—“Firstborn” (Sarah Coffey) and “Secondborn” (Kimball Farley)—professing to both be candidates for the assignment of Holy Spirit and needing Father to decide which one of them belongs in the Godhead of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. It’s a task that would make any priest question his faith, especially when a threatening Smith and Wesson becomes involved, and deeply disturbing secrets begin to surface the more Father resists what he believes to be delusions but which the twins insist are divinely proclaimed and real.
The film is lovely to watch, a visual feast, and the performances are strange and hypnotic, buttressing a script that seems grounded in traditional religiosity only to spin off into something questionably unholy. Or is it? Is it really? Only the film’s scriptural ambiguity knows for sure. Audiences will have to pray to fully understand what the film’s ending means; but the questioning and the doubt and the unsurety feel ultimately satisfying.
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