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| FANTASIA 2025 JURIED AWARDS |
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Reflection in a Dead Diamond
In Reflection in a Dead Diamond, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani don’t just riff on Eurospy aesthetics—they incinerate them, crafting a lush cinematic hallucination where pulp nostalgia combusts into pop-art delirium. This is genre as fever dream: dazzling, deliciously perverse, and defiantly untethered from narrative orthodoxy. Fabio Testi, the aging spy whose past flickers in celluloid shards, lends gravitas to a film that revels in fragmentation. His face, carved by time and regret, anchors an opulent storm of leather, chrome, and bloodied fishhooks. If memory is the true enemy, then Serpentik—his latex-clad nemesis—is its avatar, slicing through reverie with cobra’s-kiss cruelty. Cattet and Forzani evoke Diabolik and Danger: Diabolik, but detour into something bolder: a spy thriller as death-haunted collage, a fugue of eroticized violence and vanishing identities. Narrative coherence is abandoned, but in its place: obsession, texture, and the giddy freedom of pure, unrepentant cinema. A breath of warped, intoxicating air. I LOVED IT!
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The Forbidden City
Gabriele Mainetti’s The Forbidden City detonates like a firecracker in the cobbled heart of Rome, a kinetic, genre-defying marvel that fuses operatic Italian melodrama with razor-sharp martial arts bravura. It begins in rural China, but it’s Piazza Vittorio—a real, beating, immigrant Rome—that becomes the unlikely crucible for a story of betrayal, resilience, and cultural collision. In Yaxi Liu’s Mei, we find a heroine as unyielding as she is haunted: a sister, a fighter, a force. Liu, in a breakout performance that rivals Michelle Yeoh’s finest hours, crackles with purpose, improvising weapons from cutlery and flower stalls, dismembering patriarchy one roundhouse at a time.
Yet The Forbidden City is not merely action spectacle. Enrico Borello’s Marcello is soulful, wounded, and wonderfully understated, and Paolo Carnera’s cinematography lends the city a bruised romanticism. Mainetti directs with symphonic flair, delivering a crowd-pleasing knockout that lingers in the heart—and in the gut. WE LOVED IT!
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The Woman
Hwang Wook’s The Woman begins with something as innocuous as a secondhand vacuum cleaner and ends in the fog of existential dread. This eerie, tightly-coiled psychological thriller—having its world premiere at Fantasia—unfurls like a bad dream remembered too vividly, each detail laced with the uncanny. Han Hye-ji delivers a staggering performance as Sun-kyung, a woman whose ordinary gesture—a box of strawberries to thank a stranger—spirals into a queasy investigation of grief, guilt, and suspicion. Wook, whose genre-hopping audacity thrilled audiences with Mash Ville, trades black comedy for creeping unease, constructing a narrative that feels both tactile and disorienting. He builds dread not with jump scares but with poisoned vitamin drinks, clumps of hair, and a stranger’s sticky fingers shoving berries into his mouth. Reality buckles under the weight of dreams and paranoia. Kurosawa-esque in tone yet defiantly its own, The Woman is a triumph of mood, ambiguity, and fractured truth. CRAZY
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The Girl Who Stole Time
In The Girl Who Stole Time, writer-directors Yu Ao and Zhou Tienan craft a kaleidoscopic elegy to fleeting moments and impossible dreams. This animated fantasy, lush with 1930s Shanghai-inspired grandeur, marries time-travel spectacle with aching human tenderness. Qian Xiao, a wide-eyed stowaway armed with a magical timepiece, dances between paused seconds and high-speed escapades—but the heart of the film beats in her unlikely bond with Seventeen, a fastidious assassin thawed by her luminous spirit. While early plot turns feel familiar, the film’s emotional undercurrent—rooted in personal grief—swells into something quietly devastating. Gorgeous CG vistas and balletic fight sequences dazzle, but it’s in small, fragile pauses that the story glows. A cinephile’s ode to memory, love, and the desire to freeze joy, The Girl Who Stole Time reminds us that while time slips away, the moments we steal back—through laughter, through love, through film—are what make us human. A BIG SCREEN MUST SEE!
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Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy
In Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy, director Kim Byung-woo translates the apocalyptic chaos of a beloved webtoon into a breathless cinematic battleground—equal parts creature feature, gamer odyssey, and existential satire. The premise is ingenious: a meek salaryman finds his mundane subway ride hijacked by a reality-bending invasion that eerily mirrors the online novel he's devoted a decade to reading. As laser-eyed dokkaebi demand blood and a leviathan rises from the Han River, Hahn Hyo-seop’s Dok-ja becomes an unlikely savior, navigating a gamified world with encyclopedic foresight and aching humanity.
While the film falters in narrative clarity—struggling to choose between metafictional commentary and straight genre thrills—it pulses with visual flair, buoyed by Jun Hey-jin’s kinetic lensing and Mowg’s thunderous score. This is spectacle with soul, a maximalist homage to Battle Royale and The Host, yes—but also a mirror held to the lonely reader, dreaming of agency in a world that rarely offers it. It deserves a crowd. COMING SOON TO MUBI
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Like a Bosch nightmare filtered through Baltic black comedy and set ablaze by clerical lust, Dog of God is a pagan scream from the mud-soaked subconscious of 17th-century Livonia. The Abele brothers' animated debut is a pungent, operatically grotesque fable—part scatological burlesque, part moral reckoning—that charts the spiritual decay of a village ruled by gluttonous power and repressed desire. Anchored by uncanny rotoscoping that evokes both The Spine of Night and Bakshi’s darkest visions, the film lurches between gallows humor and apocalyptic satire with unnerving ease. Religious hypocrisy, sexual cruelty, and mythic animalism intertwine when a ragged werewolf prophet lopes into town bearing the Devil’s severed manhood as a catalyst for chaos and revelation. Visually ravishing in its ugliness and sonically unsettling with Lauris Abele’s pulsing score, Dog of God is no gentle parable but a transgressive, mordantly funny exorcism of piety and power—cult cinema in its most heretical, electrifying form. YIKES!
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