FANTASIA 29 (2025)—KOREAN CINEMA: THE WOMAN (2025), FRAGMENT (2025), NOISE (2024)—REVIEWS

Many thanks to Ara Shin of Finecut Co., Ltd. (“Finecut”) for providing streaming links for The Woman (2025), Fragment (2025), and Noise (2024), screening at the 29th edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival (“Fantasia”). Finecut defines itself as “a film company specialized in international sales and marketing, production, financing and acquisition of high-end films, set up in 2008 by Youngjoo Suh, the founder of Cineclick Asia, who has represented many works of the best known Korean filmmakers such as Lee Chang-dong (Poetry), Kim Ki-duk (Pieta), Hong Sangsoo (The Day After), Park Chan-wook (Old Boy), Bong Joon-ho (The Host), Kim Jee-woon (The Age Of Shadows), and Na Hong Jin (The Wailing).”

Finecut’s association with Fantasia is noteworthy in that it exemplifies the diversity of Fantasia’s programming, which embraces several genres past the expected horror and sci-fi entries. Each of these three Korean films eschew monsters and special effects in favor of nuanced psychological character studies of individuals battling the ghosts (i.e., the consequences) of familial traumas. They each satisfy on deep levels. 

As a Fantasia World Premiere, The Woman (2025) directed by Hwang Wook, exhibits high marks on two main fronts: directorial range and calibrated acting. It draws focus onto the directorial dexterity of Hwang Wook whose previous feature Mash Ville (2024), an acclaimed World Premiere at last year’s Fantasia, was a “hysterical, award-winning neo-Western black comedy.” The Woman departs from Mash Ville’s frenetic hilarity to offer a completely different mode of genre: a character-driven psychological thriller set at a brooding pace. This affords the opportunity for Han Hye-ji to deliver a knockout performance as Sun-kyung, an unmoored and otherwise unremarkable young woman who inadvertently answers an ad for a secondhand appliance offered by Young-hwan, a fidgety fellow who becomes increasingly unhinged and begins to stalk her. Not only that, but she becomes convinced that Young-hwan is behind a classmate’s suspicious suicide. In setting out to prove her suspicions, Sun-kyung implicates herself into a sinister cat-and-mouse chase. Her burgeoning awareness that she is in danger viscerally comprises the film’s first half, ramping up tension and engendering suspense. 

It's unfortunate, then, that the film’s second half branches off into narrative tangents that dilute the tension Hwang Wook had effectively achieved in the film’s first half, introducing a thick net of disorienting episodes that seem to invalidate each other as the narrative unfolds. Han Hye-ji’s performance remains consistent and engaging, however, offsetting the unexpected obfuscations, and there’s enough style to Wook’s direction to maintain interest, even if this reviewer found himself scratching his head and wondering if he'd missed something. My final sense was that the nature of Sun-kyung’s rootlessness had to do with a disconcerting tendency she had to attract danger to herself and involve others, while presenting the urgent necessity to escape. As a woman, that’s the woman she is. At its best, The Woman encourages audiences to keep their eye on a director who is learning his chops as he ranges over genres, and an actress whose mastered chops are in full display.

  

Writer / director Kim Sung-yoon’s debut feature Fragment (2025) arrives for its North American premiere at Fantasia lauded with festival prizes from its World Premiere at the Busan International Film Festival in 2024 (where it won three prizes) and another win in Florence in 2025. Of the three Finecut offerings at Fantasia 29, Fragment was my favorite for being profoundly moving and emotionally intricate. 

Child-in-peril narratives are nearly a genre in themselves, if not a subgenre of coming-of-age stories. The monster in Fragment doesn’t have fangs or claws, he’s simply an immoral and black-hearted father sentenced to prison for murder, leaving behind a guilt-ridden son Jun-gang (Oh Ja-hun) to take care of his little sister without money to pay bills or rent. Feeling he has brought their suffering onto himself for having reported his father to the authorities, Jun-gang struggles with trying to return their lives to normalcy. But how can he? The man and woman his father murdered lived (and died) in their neighborhood and their surviving son Gi-su (Moon Seong-hyun) lives alone in his parents’ apartment not that far away from where Jun-gang and his sister are being threatened with eviction. Their lives are inextricably intertwined by circumstantial proximity and shared feelings of guilt and helplessness. As Gi-su becomes aware that the offspring of his parents’ murderer live nearby, he wrestles with wanting to enact vengeance, to inflict harm on them, and on himself. It’s a painful, vicious cycle to witness inflicted on innocent children and director Kim Sung-yoon successfully elicits compassionate performances out of each and every member of the cast, but especially by the three young leads whose course towards redemption is overwhelmingly heartbreaking. I thought about this movie for days afterwards.

   

Noise (2024), directed by first-time director Kim Soo-jin, had its World Premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, and returns to Canada for its North American premiere at Fantasia, where production designer Ko Seung-hyo has been nominated for the New Flesh Competition for Best First Feature. The New Flesh section is now considered one of the world's premier launching pads for new voices in genre cinema. Of the three films offered Fantasia by Finecut, Noise is the most characteristically supernatural and genuinely creepy. 

Ever since Val Lewton introduced the jump scare in Cat People (1942) through hissing air brakes at a bus stop, sound has been used to jangle nerves, fry the mind, and raise the hair on necks. This strategy has been brilliantly effected through Park Yong-ki’s eerie sound design, laminated onto the narrative premise of a young woman with a hearing impediment experiencing mysterious noises throughout her missing sister’s apartment. 

Horror thriller genre is at its best when it reflects social anxieties and Panos Kotzathanasis of Asian Movie Pulse has best determined what anxiety is in force here. “The Korean concept of ‘floor noise’ refers to inter-floor noise, particularly sounds transmitted from upstairs neighbors to downstairs residents in multi-story apartment buildings. It is a major social issue in South Korea, tied to the country’s high-density housing and cultural sensitivity to intense sounds. Because many Korean apartments use hard flooring (not carpets) and concrete slabs that do not fully absorb impact sound, even regular household activities can be heard clearly. The Korean Environment Corporation (KECO) and government bodies receive tens of thousands of complaints annually. Although mediation centers have been established, enforcement remains limited. Kim Soo-jin, in her feature debut, takes this concept as her foundation, adds the element of hearing impairment that recalls Midnight, and delivers a thriller/horror that frequently ventures into J-horror territory.” 

His mention of J-horror is what initially drew me to Noise and what most satisfied me about the film: dread. Give me jump starts, give me dread, and I’m all in.

 

2000 METERS TO ANDRIIVKA (2025)—REVIEW

“There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.”—Ernest Hemingway, 1929. 

 In 2023, Associated Press journalists Mstyslav Chernov and Alex Babenko accompanied the Ukranian 3rd Assault Brigade in their counteroffensive mission to reclaim the Russian-occupied village of Andriivka. To do so, the brigade had to hazard a slow and grueling advance through a mile (i.e., 2000 meters) of a heavily-fortified forest flanked on both sides by mined fields. The stated goal was to liberate Andriivka and plant the Ukranian flag as testament to victory. 

But as Hemingway’s quote suggests above, the liberation consists of names only and the flags raised to proclaim liberation ruffle over sites that have been demolished by bombs and turned into graveyards of smoking ruins and abandoned corpses. After negotiating the 2000 meters to Andriivka, and losing members of the Brigade along the way—some critically wounded, some dead—the Brigade discovers that the village of Andriivka has been razed to the ground. Bombed-out structures are no longer homes that hold memories. So where to raise a flag? The village has been destroyed, all its former inhabitants have been displaced, save for a cat that the Brigade adopts and names Andriivka. The large dimension of small actions is encapsulated in saving this cat and—though it seems that all the effort to reclaim Andriivka, the lives lost, doesn’t seem to justify the initiative of the counteroffensive, for these young men defending their Ukranian homeland, hope demands dreams for the future, albeit imagined, of a village reconstructed, and a peaceful way of life restored. It’s a sad and sobering afternote that Andriivkka and most of the land reclaimed during the 2023 counteroffensive on display in this documentary eventually succumbed to Russian occupation again. By January 2025, Russia would come to control more than 20% of Ukraine, and young Ukranian soldiers were forced to contemplate the possibility that their lives would end in war. 

 2000 Meters to Andriivka was produced and presented by Deri McCrudden of the Associated Press and Raney Aronson-Rath of Frontline PBS, and in solidarity with journalism and public broadcasting under attack by Donald Trump in his continuing effort to convert our democracy into an authoritarian dictatorship, I steeled myself to watch this harrowing and immersive chronicle where the attack against the journalistic record is literal, physical, as in the first scene where Piro, the cameraman recording events, is seriously injured. It’s quite remarkable that all the film’s battle scenes were recorded by members of the 3rd Assault Brigade who felt it important to chronicle their reclamation of Andriivka. 

Chernov’s contribution includes editorial voiceover and intimate interviews with individual members of the Brigade. As he gets to know them, we get to know them, and then we feel what he feels when he relays that the soldiers he has interviewed are injured in subsequent counteroffensives five months down the line, succumb to their injuries, and die in hospitals. Such a waste of the lives of young men barely in their twenties. 

Sam Slater’s low, droning and mournful soundtrack accompanies drone footage high overhead capturing the destruction and carnage; bodies on the battlefield. Ukranian bodies, if found, are recovered and removed. Russian bodies left to rot.  

2000 Meters to Andriivka premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival where it won the Directing Award for World Cinema Documentary. It opens at the Rialto Cinemas Elmwood in Berkeley, California on August 1 with Special Q&A Screenings: 

August 2 at The Roxie Theater, San Francisco Q&A with Mstyslav Chernov after 5:45 PM screening 

August 3 at the Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, Berkeley Q&A with Mstyslav Chernov after 2:45PM screening 

August 3 at the Smith Rafael Film Center, San Rafael Q&A with Mstyslav Chernov after 4:30 PM

 screening

FANTASIA 29 (2025)—CURTAINRAISER FOR THE THIRD WAVE

Fucktoys (2025)—At RogerEbert.com, Matt Zoller Seitz writes: “Annapurna Sriram’s feature debut Fucktoys, about a sex worker earning a living while undoing a curse, is farce, psychodrama, theological inquiry, softcore, satire, and tragedy, all at the same time. And in an era when nearly everyone has gone digital, it’s been shot on 16mm color film by Cory Fraiman-Lott (another name film buffs should write down), cropped to CinemaScope dimensions, then seemingly pushed in developing so the colors seem to explode. For viewers tired of the metallic beige-ness of streaming series, this movie will hit like dopamine. And, as the title suggests, it is also, in an increasingly neutered cinema landscape, proudly and often graphically sexual, to the point where it could be described as ‘sticky.’ ” 

Winner of a special jury award at SXSW 2025 praising Sriram’s multihyphenation (director, writer and star), Audience Award winner at the Boston Underground Film Festival for Best Debut Film, and winner of a special jury mention at the Oak Cliff Film Festival, Fucktoys—as Fantasia puts it—is “a glitter-coated, piss-soaked fairytale for the forgotten.”

  

 It Ends (2025)—Siddhant Adlakha’s review at Variety for Alex Ullom’s It Ends extols this “brilliant, existential road thriller” as “a gateway for younger viewers into new forms of thought and self-reflection. The whole thing could be seen as rooted in the anxieties of close-knit friends being forced to separate after college, but also in its terrifying antonym: never being allowed to grow up and face the world.” 

Billing It Ends as a “major genre breakout”, Fantasia synopsizes that “writer/director Alex Ullom and his gifted cast work miracles and offer a compelling, constantly intriguing, and often terrifying road trip into adulthood.”  

Touch Me (2025)—Admittedly, they had me at tentacle sex. Oh yeah!! At Bloody Disgusting, Meagan Navarro characterizes Touch Me as “a psychosexual sci-fi horror movie that draws from retro Japanese horror, exploitation cinema, and perhaps even hentai” while at the same time infusing “its depiction of a toxic friendship curdled by trauma, codependency, and addiction with vibrant style and campy fun.” 

For his sophomore feature, Addison Heinmann (Hypocondriac) provides—as Fantasia puts it—"a singular work that breakdances seamlessly from tentacle sex and practical exploding heads to beautifully touching monologues and heartbreaking reflections on trauma and toxic relationships. Two codependent best friends become addicted to the heroin-like touch of an alien narcissist who may or may not be trying to take over the world.” 

“The aesthetic language of Heimann’s film is a visual and auditory fantasia of Japanese influences, bold neon lighting, deep, vibrating beats and triptychs and diptychs,” Robert Daniels writes at RogerEbert.com. “Heimann’s sense of the corporeal, the pleasure the body enacts, is so perceptive you nearly wish the entire movie was one continuous orgy. The film is also intermittently hilarious….”  

Queens of the Dead (2025)—Zombies have become a family tradition, at least among the Romeros. Daughter Tina directs a queered take of the ghoul genre invented by her father. Drag queens and club kids battle zombies craving brains during a zombie outbreak at their drag show in Brooklyn, putting personal conflicts aside to utilize their distinct abilities against the undead threat.” I can only imagine what those “distinct abilities” might be. 

“What sets Queens of the Dead apart from most other zombie flicks,” Carla Hay explains at Culturemix “is how the characters react to the zombies. In true diva fashion, someone in Queens of the Dead is likely to make cutting remarks about a zombie’s decrepit appearance and shout out some makeover advice in the midst of a zombie attack.” 

Whereas George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead “satirized brain-dead mall culture”, Jeffrey Berg recalls at Film-Forward, “Queens skewers social media and phone addiction, with zombies stalking about with their faces stuck in smartphone screens.”  

Queens of the Dead won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature when it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival 2025.  

Redux Redux (2025)—On the basis of previous Fantasia entries Funeral Kings (2012) and The Block Island Sound (2020), I’m all in for Redux Redux, the latest creation by Kevin and Matthew McManus. Desperate to avenge her daughter’s murder, Irene Kelly (Michaela McManus) journeys through parallel dimensions to repeatedly track down and annihilate her daughter’s killer (Jeremy Holm). As she becomes consumed by vengeance, her humanity hangs in the balance, which harkens back to the Confucian adage: "If you seek revenge you should dig two graves.”  

Redux Redux, Brian Tallerico writes at RogerEbert.com, is “a film that takes elements of the serial killer genre, aspects of grief drama, and a splash of multiverse storytelling and mixes them into something that feels fresh and new.”

FANTASIA 29 (2025)—CURTAINRAISER FOR THE SECOND WAVE

Eddington (2025)—In their second wave of announcements, Fantasia International Film Festival (“Fantasia”) situated Ari Aster’s Eddington (2025) as the festival’s official opening night film. This special screening is mere days before the film’s theatrical release so I’m not expecting it to be on the screener list, but—if I were at Fantasia—I’d be in that auditorium because it’s always fun to be the first to have a look at such an anticipated and critically contested film. 

 In May of 2020, during the height of the COVID pandemic, a standoff between a small-town sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and mayor (Pedro Pascal) sparks a powder keg as neighbor is pitted against neighbor in the fictional city of Eddington, New Mexico. With an impressive supporting cast (Austin Butler, Emma Stone, Luke Grimes, Deirdre O'Connell, Michael Ward, and Clifton Collins Jr.), Eddington incorporates the genres of neo-Western and political films with darkly comic elements to depict how the pandemic creates social and political turmoil.  

Eddington premiered at mid-May’s Cannes Film Festival, played in Australia at the Sydney Film Festival mid-June, and at Revelation Perth International Film Festival less than a week ago. Reviews have been mixed with Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian called Eddington a “disappointing dud” that tediously masks drama and mutes its stars, whereas Damon Wise of Deadline finds it “explosive” in “its approach to American politics; from Bitcoin to Pizzagate, TikTok to vaccine denial, Eddington takes aim at all the quirks and absurdities of President Trump’s administration and how its compliant MAGA zealots have radicalized whole generations of a country once known for its compassion.” 

At Slant, Rocco T. Thompson writes: “Eddington is especially pointed in the way that it views our online connectedness as a social cancer rather than an engine for progress. Aster asserts that, even in spite of increasing awareness of social media as a form of self-surveillance, people are behaving worse than ever before, and, in the director’s version of 2020, there are no good faith actors. Everything across the spectrum of politics and rationality, from support for the Black Lives Matter protests to the need to speak out against satanic cabals of child-traffickers, is exposed as coming from a mercenary desire or unresolved trauma rather than stated principles or genuine conviction. Those seeking a political screed that toes the Democratic party line or crusades against the supposed sins of woke culture should look elsewhere.” Fantasia audiences get to decide yay or nay for themselves at this opening night special screening.

   

Juliet & The King (2025)—The first Iranian animated feature to qualify for an Oscar was Ashkan Ragozar’s The Last Fiction (2018), a bloody, mythic fantasy that Ragozar and his team at Hoorakhsh Studio have since set aside to pursue their second feature, a Disney-inspired animated musical comedy, Juliet & The King, with 11 original songs by Iranian songwriter Meysam Yousefi and composer Behnam Jalilian. 

While the film was in production, Ragozar was interviewed by Alex Dudok De Wit of Cartoon Brew, wherein he stated: “Unfortunately, international people are looking at Iran from a political point of view; all the news is bad and toxic. Yes, we have lots of political, social, and economic problems. But Iran is a great and beautiful country with great history and amazing people who have a great culture. I want to note that there are lots of beautiful things that people around the world can learn from and remind each other about.”  

Juliet & The King fancifully fictionalizes Naser-al-Din Shah Qajar’s 1873 visit to Europe (the first Iranian ruler to do so). Reigning for close to 50 years in the second half of the 19th century, Naser-al-Din Shah Qajar was an accomplished painter, poet, and photographer and his passion for the arts and patronage of European culture provides the thematic thrust of a cultural contact between East and West. As synopsized by Fantasia: “The frisky spirit of Shakespeare’s complicated ensemble comedies is ever-present, as are the exquisite delights of classical Persian aesthetics, as Juliet & The King counters the Orientalism in Western animated visions of West Asia and celebrates cross-cultural curiosity with love, laughter, and catchy tunes!”

   

El Llanto / The Wailing (2024)—Pedro Martín-Calero’s debut feature won him the Silver Shell for Best Director at the 72nd San Sebastián International Film Festival, where The Wailing boasted its world premiere. It accrued festival cred at the 57th Sitges Film Festival, the 68th BFI London Film Festival, the 69th Valladolid International Film Festival, and Hong Kong International Film Festival 2025. Billing it as “one of the scariest films of the last year,” Fantasia is giving The Wailing its Canadian premiere.  

Noijeu / Noise (2024)—Noise had its world premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival (“TIFF”) so it seems a bit awkward to say it’s having its Canadian premiere at Fantasia, but chalk that up to a tale of two cities. Regardless, it has been nominated for Fantasia’s New Flesh Competition for Best First Feature. From TIFF, Noise continued its festival run at Sitges, the Kosmorama Trondheim International Film Festival and the Florence Korea Film Festival in—not South Korea—but Florence, Italy. Chalk that one up to the tale of two countries. 

As synopsized by Fantasia: “After the disappearance of her younger sister, a woman with a hearing impediment experiences bizarre happenings and frightening encounters when mysterious noises echo throughout the building. With brilliant sound design and perfectly-dosed jump scares, first time director Kim Soo-jin blends real-life anxieties with stark, supernatural elements to create genuine tension that never lets go.” 

 I was happy to read Panos Kotzathanasis’ assertion at Asian Movie Pulse that Noise “delivers a thriller/horror that frequently ventures into J-horror territory.” Kotzathanasis continues: “Kim Soo-jin places heavy emphasis on sound design to create an atmosphere of disorientation and fear, with sound functioning as a character in its own right. Rhythmic, jarring, often mundane noises are employed to startle and disturb, and although jump scares are present, they are relatively restrained. At the same time, sound becomes a metaphor for trauma, grief, and unresolved tension, with its lurking presence beneath the floors and behind the walls contributing to both the atmosphere and the narrative’s emotional subtext.”

   

Lurker (2025)—Alex Russell’s Lurker premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, continued its festival run at the Berlin International and New Directors / New Films, and is scheduled to be released in the U.S. by MUBI in late August. Before then, however, Lurker gets its Canadian premiere at Fantasia.  

Benjamin Lee of The Guardian calls Lurker “a darkly compelling breakout from Alex Russell, writer for Beef and The Bear”, asserts it is “deviously entertaining”, and describes the film’s plot as “a contemporary pop-culture riff on an obsessive psycho-thriller, the kind we were flooded with in the 90s in which an outlier enters the life of someone who has something they want, recalling Single White Female and The Talented Mr. Ripley as well as something more recent and comedic like Ingrid Goes West. Russell takes this formula and extracts most, if not all, of the heightened genre elements to give us something a little more grounded, dialogue more rooted in reality and a canny realization that murder isn’t always needed to create menace.” 

At Slant, Marshall Shaffer writes: “The democratization of celebrity in the 21st century has accelerated the process of audience capture: Tell fans what they want to hear and reap the rewards. Lurker portrays an even more contemporary permutation of this feedback loop by dismantling the presumed hierarchy of its participants. The artist and audience member are coequal—and codependent—in this perceptive drama about a parasocial relationship that enters the realm of reality.” Fantasia synopsizes: “When a twenty-something retail clerk (Théodore Pellerin, Nino) encounters a rising pop star (Archie Madekwe, Saltburn), he takes the opportunity to edge his way into the in-crowd. But as the line between friend and fan blurs beyond recognition, access and proximity become a matter of life and death. A stunning feature debut, at once unsettling and entertaining, tense and captivating, Lurker is a brilliant deconstruction of fame and need in Instagram-driven times.”

 

FANTASIA 29 (2025)—CURTAINRAISER FOR THE FIRST WAVE

The Fantasia International Film Festival (“Fantasia”) will celebrate its upcoming 29th edition with an electrifying program of screenings, workshops, and launch events running from July 16 through August 3, 2025, returning to the Concordia Hall and J.A. de Sève cinemas, with additional screenings and events at Montreal’s Cinéma du Musée. 

Fantasia’s film line-up has been announced in three waves and—as a curtain raiser—I’m focusing on five films from each wave. Although I’m not able to attend the festival this year, I’m grateful to have been granted remote press privileges. Remote coverage of an exciting film festival like Fantasia is tempered completely by whatever is offered on screeners, which doesn’t always comport with what I hope to see from the roster of films available at the festival proper. But on the basis of sheer desire, here are five picks from each of the waves that I hope will be made available for my remote coverage.

 FIRST WAVE  

Soy Frankelda / I Am Frankelda (2025)—As stated in Fantasia’s program note: “The task of crafting Mexico’s very first stop-motion animated feature film could not have fallen to four more worthy hands than those of Rodolfo and Arturo Ambriz.” Los Hermanos Ambriz, proteges of Guillermo del Toro, first gained widespread recognition with the short film Revoltoso (Fantasia 2016), available for streaming on YouTube.

  

Mexico’s zoomorphic alebrijes achieved voice and characterization in Revoltoso (which translates as “rebellious”) “demonstrating daring ideas and a bedeviled attention to detail” (again, Fantasia). The band Altermutz who scored the short received a Certificate of Outstanding Achievement for Best Original Score at the Brooklyn Film Festival. That score is available on Spotify. Rebellion abounds in Revoltoso, which features a “revolting” three-eyed boar named Jabalito who is on the scene of one of the first filmed wars in history: the Mexican Revolution. 

Los Hermanos Ambriz followed up with Frankelda’s Book of Spooks (2021), a five-episode miniseries on Cartoon Network Latin America and HBO Max, introducing the phantom “ghostwriter” Frankelda and her companion Herneval, a grumpy enchanted book, both trapped in a sentient haunted house. Eager to tell her handful of spooky stories, Frankelda addresses stories of children not wanting to be themselves and the danger that wishes come true, not free. The series ended on a disappointing cliffhanger and so I Am Frankelda remedies that by fleshing out Frankelda’s origin story. “It turns out that the most astonishing tale the two have to tell is their own!” Fantasia asserts. “The dazzling I Am Frankelda explores the challenging childhood of Francisca Imelda, and how she came to befriend Herneval, prince of the realm that lies on the other side of our dreams.”  

I am Frankelda, a North American premiere in Fantasia’s Animation Plus section, would be a “must see” if I were attending the festival proper and I can only mantengo mis dedos cruzados that it will show up on the screener list.  

Ot / Burning (2024)—Another North American premiere at Fantasia, Burning adopts a Rashomon approach to the cause of a fire that has engulfed a family home, already suffering the recent loss of a firstborn child. “Was it black magic, a woman’s madness, or a man crushed by life?” Fantasia asks. “Listen closely,” they advise, “sift through the lies, and decide for yourself: Who really started the fire?” Three conflicting narratives cast wife, husband and mother-in-law in alternating roles of victim and perpetrator. 

Reviewing Burning for Asian Movie Pulse when it screened at the Bishkek International Film Festival, Panos Kotzathanasis comments: “This triptych structure is especially compelling due to the commentary embedded within each narrative. The overarching theme, tying all three together, concerns how small communities function, driven by superstition, gossip, and a general lack of reliable information. Notably, the three accounts are attributed to the family’s neighbors, each claiming firsthand knowledge and contradicting one another. This cleverly critiques the formation of public opinion and the instability of memory and rumor.” 

Director Radik Eshimov, an emerging Kyrgyz talent known for blending sharp social commentary with humor in hits like the television series El Emne Deit (2016-2019), leans towards suspense and horror with Burning, yet retains his skill for social commentary. As reviewed by Basil Baradaran for The Asian Cinema Critic: “What Eshimov creates, other than a pretty decent horror film, is a strong feminist message about grief, abuse, and taking a stand when the men are making up stories about how the women in town are either demon-possessed or straight up monsters. It’s a film about women being silenced, about being told what to do, and being painted in unflattering, horrible lights. And, more than jinns or witches or curses, is the real horror here.” 

My remaining three wishes out of Fantasia’s First Wave are all world premieres so, at best, I can only emphasize anticipation and quote the program capsules directly, with a reason why the films have caught my attention.  

The Bearded Girl (2025)—"Jody Wilson captures the charm of a fairy tale with a Western sensibility in The Bearded Girl. Cleo is ready to spread her wings and, tired of tradition and feeling like an oddball, she leaves her sheltered carnival life to find love and adventure. Starring Anwen O’Driscoll of Bet and You Can Live Forever as the next generation of sword-swallowing bearded women and Mad Men’s Jessica Paré as her overbearing mother, Wilson takes her personal experience growing up in western Canada as a nonconformist to create a confident first feature that highlights queer themes with dry humor and sensitivity.” 

The Bearded Girl, screening in Fantasia’s Septentrion Shadows section, plays into my fascination with dark carnivals, the horrors of normality in contrast to what is considered freakish, and the longstanding meld between the horror genre and queer themes.  

The Well (2025)—"For his narrative feature debut, the Oscar-nominated documentarian Hubert Davis (Hardwood, Black Ice) looks to the future with a bleak prediction of environmental collapse. As the world’s resources dwindle and a deadly virus keeps people apart, a family protects their fresh water source from outsiders. When a young, injured man disrupts their solitude, and their daughter’s defiance threatens to reveal their precious well to another camp led by a charismatic but steely matriarch, danger brings the two factions together in a thrilling ride. The Well sets up a chilling scenario of what could happen in our very near future and is executive-produced by Clement Virgo (Brother) and Damon D’Oliveira (Wildhood); and stars Arnold Pinnock (The Porter), Shailyn Pierre-Dixon (The Book of Negros), Idrissa Sanogo (Robin Hood), and Canadian screen and stage royalty Sheila McCarthy (Women Talking) as the matriarch Gabriel.” 

“As a father,” Davis told Zac Ntim of Deadline, “my own fear and anxieties for my kids’ futures inspired The Well. I want to shelter them from chaos, but watching their journey to pursue full lives opened my eyes to what our continued existence hinges on community. The Well challenges us to expand our imagination on what and who we need to let in to rebuild after the end of the world.” 

Also screening in Fantasia’s Septentrion Shadows section, The Well intrigues me because the worst dystopian nightmare I can think of is not mutants or radioactivity or any of that; it’s what ordinary people will resort to in an effort to survive in a near-future world of diminishing resources. This is a theme that has been strong in my mind ever since 1961 when I watched “The Shelter” episode from The Twilight Zone. “The Shelter” directly addressed distrust and a breakdown of civility in the immediate aftermath of a potential nuclear bomb. Having skirted the threat of nuclear war, humankind now threatens itself with environmental collapse.  

The Woman (2025)—"An innocent exchange of strawberries and a secondhand appliance takes a very dark turn for Sun-kyung when it precedes her classmate’s suspicious suicide, and puts her on the trail of a mysterious, sinister stranger. Hwang Wook, the director of the hysterical, award-winning neo-Western black comedy Mash Ville, an acclaimed World Premiere at last year’s Fantasia, returns to the festival with a new film in a completely different genre. The Woman is a riveting, character-driven psychological thriller, filled with non-stop tension and suspense, thanks to its eerie musical score and stunning cinematography, and boasting an outstanding lead performance by Han Hye-ji. The Woman is yet another excellent slice of independent Korean filmmaking, by a director who needs to be on your radar.” 

As national cinemas go, Korean cinema ranks high on my list ever since Memories of Murder (2003) dazzled me with its nuanced characterizations and exceptional cinematography. I’ve watched many Korean films since then and they have maintained a visual excellence that always keeps me coming back for more.