Our favorite Asian films from Fantasia Film Festival
From a time-traveling samurai, to a feline spirit animal with a gambling problem, we've got a little something for everyone
From left, Karin (voiced by Noa Gotô) and Anzu (voiced by Mirai Moriyama) in "Ghost Cat Anzu."
Still frame from "Ghost Cat Anzu"
Words by Andy Crump
What sadist thought to give Austin, Texas’ Fantastic Fest and Montreal, Quebec’s Fantasia International Film Festival similar nomenclature while also scheduling them so close together on the calendar year? No matter. Fantastic Fest, where genre cinema meets dry-rubbed, slow-smoked anarchy, has a very different vibe from Fantasia, where genre cinema meets cobblestone cafe crawls; differentiating them on the surface isn’t difficult, and gets even easier when diving into their programs. In short, Fantasia’s goes bigger. After all: It’s international.
Fantasia’s 2024 edition makes good on the promise of its global scope, though the scope itself skews away from Asia’s biggest film industry drivers. Going by the data, for instance, either China or India is the continent’s largest film market; going by Fantasia’s program, those honors go either to Japan or South Korea, both of whom occupy significantly greater real estate throughout the festival compared to other Asian countries, accounting for both feature films and shorts. Why that’s the case is a question mark. (The answer could quite possibly come down to something as non-fantastical as geopolitics.) Shove concerns about disparate representation aside. Instead, marvel at the imagination displayed by Fantasia’s Asian offerings: Black comic morality tales, macabre supernatural horror, indefinable existential treatises, and cautionary stories about distilling your own spirits.
A Samurai in Time
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Distribution: TBD
We’ve seen plenty of “fish out of water” time travel movies where some poor schmuck from modern days gets zapped back to antiquity: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Hot Tub Time Machine, Black Knight, Midnight in Paris, Army of Darkness. There aren’t as many movies that go in the opposite direction, as in Enchanted or Just Visiting. A Samurai in Time falls under the latter category, with master swordsman Shinzaemon Kosaka (Makiya Yamaguchi) finding himself lost in 2010s-era Japan when lightning strikes in the middle of a fateful duel. Most people would lose their sanity to the strain of these events. Shinzaemon keeps his wits about him and gets work as a kirareyaku—the background actors paid to die crossing katanas with the hero in jidaigeki films, and look awesome doing it. A Samurai in Time could be taken solely as homage to jidaigeki, and in fairness, that’s likely writer-director Jun'ichi Yasuda’s intention. The film is a love letter to one of Japan’s most celebrated genres. At the same time, it’s a sharp piece of film criticism unto itself, remarking on the cultural tragedy of Japan’s movie market leaving jidaigeki more or less behind.
Dead Dead Full Dead
Country: India
Language: Hindi
Distribution: TBD
Against assumptions and contradicting the meaning of the word, there are lots of ways a person can be dead: Clinically dead, brain dead, and mostly dead, which is slightly alive. Pratul Gaikwad’s Dead Dead Full Dead adds yet another way to be dead, baked right into the title and expressed through a “whodunit” structure where Hinduism collides with police ineptitude; imagine the Coen brothers directing a script by Douglas Adams, and you’ll find yourself on the film’s wavelength. Wannabe astrologer and pain-in-the-ass influencer Era (Swastika Mukherjee) lies prone on the floor, murdered by her husband, Rahul (Ashwin Mushran), or so it seems; enter bumbling cop couple Balram (Yug Italiya) and Zubi (Monica Chaudhary), intermittently indulging a spat over kiss emojis Zubi sent to a guy friend. Also, they’re both trying to keep the death of their superior’s pet baby goat a secret. The key to Dead Dead Full Dead is the cast’s joint commitment to the bit, being the apparently unconscious agreement among them all that Era is, in fact, annoying as hell, and that maybe she had it coming, as dramatized in the film’s flashback investigation scenes. It’s a loose production, which does, admittedly, lead to a bit of a sag in the third act before the climax, but Gaikwad’s work is so uniquely zany that the space to take a break from snickering and raising one’s eyebrows is a kind of mercy.
Baby Assassins: Nice Days
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Distribution: Sept. 27 (Japan)
Nothing in a Yugo Sakamoto film is ever what meets the eye. A bloodthirsty cult makes a rural, cloistered hamlet their sacrificial chamber (Yellow Dragon’s Village); a ruthless hitman flies under the radar as a high school custodian (A Janitor). The dichotomy typically leans toward the unadvertised truth, but in the Baby Assassin films, Sakamoto takes a both/and approach. Lovable BFFs Chisato (Akari Takaishi) and Mahiro (Saori Izawa) are inveterate Gen Z slackers and preternaturally gifted killers. That contrast gives structure to these films, leading into Baby Assassins: Nice Days, where the pair’s beach vacation in Miyazaki is interrupted by what else but work. Seems that rival killer Kaede Fuyumura (Sôsuke Ikematsu) has the same target as the girls in his sights, a bad double-booking made worse by Kaede’s exhausting dedication to his career. If Sakamoto has used the previous Baby Assassin movies as vehicles for critiques of gig capitalism, then Baby Assassins: Nice Days treats Kaede as its final boss: A 30-something so invested in “work” that he has no persona or drives outside of it. Meanwhile, Chisato and Mahiro just want to eat barbeque. (Priorities.) Baby Assassins: Nice Days features stupendous work from its cast, with Takaishi and Izawa mining new depth of heart from their relationship as Ikematsu brings bug-eyed intensity to Kaede’s violence as well as his social incompetence; the true star is actually be action director Kensuke Sonomura, upping the ante with each fight no matter how big or small, how impactful or trivial.
FAQ
Country: South Korea
Language: Korean
Distribution: TBD
If Jang Joon-hwan’s terrific but traumatic science fiction film Save the Green Planet! has haunted your heart for the last 20 years, leap on Kim Da-min’s FAQ as an accidental tacit apology for its colorful nihilism. FAQ is cute. It might even be precious. It’s also constitutionally South Korean, an outre genre synthesis where the woes of the country’s youth hold the center; visitations from imaginary friends and urgent messages burbled in Morse code by a bottle of rice wine act like a nutty candy shell for a disdainful critique of crippling cultural exceptionalism. Dong-chun (Park Na-eun) carries the unwanted burden of Too Much Enrichment, a well-meaning but wearying status inflicted on her by her mom, Hye-jin (Park Hyo-ju). Hye-jin just wants Dong-chun to have a bright, secure future. Dong-chun just wants to be a kid. Then she happens upon that bottle of rice wine during a school overnight, and suddenly she’s receiving messages from outer space. To what end? The answer becomes clear once the movie’s short fermentation period ends.
This Man
Country: Japan
Language: Japan
Distribution: TBD
If American DIY gross-out auteur Damien Leone remade David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, it might look like Tomojirô Amano’s This Man. Amano’s other influences are pronounced: Contemporary J-horror classics like The Ring, of course, with a dash of Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario, where Nicolas Cage stars as the literal man of everyone’s dreams. But This Man leans into jaw-dropping sicko indulgences enough to evoke Leone’s Terrifier films, too. Here, Japan’s populace is plagued by dreams of a grimy, heavily eyebrowed man; people die horribly not long after seeing him. Happily married couple Hana (Arisa Deguchi) and Yoshio (Minehiro Kinomoto) end up cursed themselves, and desperately seek a cure for their imminent peril. This Man rejects polish for handmade craftsmanship that emphasizes Amano’s seedier, nastier creative choices. The film plays like a toothpaste commercial to start, chipper and sanitized. In time that aesthetic’s purpose crystalizes: It pushes the horror of This Man out of the frame the same way that Hana pushes the thought of the man out of her mind. It’s a clever ruse Amano sets up, with an appropriately rattling and nauseating payoff.
The Umbrella Fairy
Country: China
Language: Mandarin
Distribution: TBD
Two merits in particular signify The Umbrella Fairy’s emotional heft: The animation itself, liquid and hypnotic but respectfully contained by clean lines, and the idea that objects, the stuff people amass throughout their lives, preserves their memory once they pass. A departed loved one’s keepsakes are more than meets the eye. They function as a sort of connective tissue to the dead, and as such, they can give the living comfort when comfort is needed; they also provide free housing for fairies, the most ubiquitous figures in director Jie Shen’s narrative. The umbrella fairy of the title, Qingdai (Nie Xiying), charged with custodianship over Wanggui (Liu Xiaoyu), undertakes the perilous task of retrieving her and bringing her back to their home, lest she spark a war; the stakes are considerable, but Shen and co-writer Li Youcoung’s screenplay consistently funnels them down to the relationship between these two royal spirits, and thus the relationship between peace and war, compassion and violence.
Ghost Cat Anzu
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Distribution: GKids, TBD
Some kids are lucky—they befriend a kami like Totoro. Other kids aren’t as lucky; their animal spirit chum is a layabout with a gambling problem and no qualms about being a dick to kids. Yôko Kuno and Nobuhiro Yamashita’s Ghost Cat Anzu’s inevitable comparison to Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro isn’t unjust; they’re companion pieces of a sort, though Ghost Cat Anzu’s audience likely comprises people who wake up the morning after a party and toss back stale unfinished drinks while cleaning up. When Tetsuya (Munetaka Aoki) sends his 11-year-old daughter Karin (Noa Gotô) to live with her monk granddad (Keiichi Suzuki) at the Sousei-Ji temple, granddad entrusts the temple’s cat, Anzu (Mirai Moriyama), with her partial supervision. Anzu, of course, is no mere cat. He’s Jeff Lebowski’s feline counterpart. Even using Japanese folklore as a framework for making sense of Anzu, he still doesn’t make a ton of sense. This is a feature, though, not a bug. Anzu has a good heart beneath his slovenly exterior, a figure whose layers reflect Kuno and Yamashita’s animation technique applied: The film was first shot in live action, then rotoscoped based on that footage, all the better to capture Anzu’s warts-and-all humanity amid the narrative’s wealth of otherworldly wonders.
Mash Ville
Country: South Korea
Language: Korean
Distribution: TBD
A booze comedy, a religious cult thriller, a neo-Western, a ghost story: Four things that work great on their own and somehow also work great together in the capable hands of director Hwang Wook’s third feature. South Korea’s cinema is genre-fluid. Start a movie in one mode, and it’ll likely swap to another entirely, and then another, and then back to the first, before it’s even halfway through, without poking holes in the atmosphere. Mash Ville’s various parts don’t jibe well on paper; three brothers race across town lines to retrieve a bad batch of their bootleg whiskey, collide with a beleaguered production coordinator carrying a dead body in the trunk of her wrecked car, then, on arriving at their destination, run afoul of murder-happy cultists gunning down villagers to use as component parts of a bizarre ritual. But the movie holds these competing plot threads as well as it holds its liquor, wringing gallows humor out of every scene while each of its 120 minutes fly by. Mash Ville is a dizzying picture, enough that second viewings may be mandatory, but what a pleasure to spend time carousing in Hwang’s bronze-tinged, moonshine-soaked adventure.
Penalty Loop
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Distribution: TBD
Junta Yamaguchi’s River would make a superb double feature with Shinji Araki’s equally superb Penalty Loop: They’re both structured around time loops, and follow that basic concept to surprising, insightful conclusions while remaining wholly unpredictable along the way. Penalty Loop starts out as a bloody Groundhog Day riff, where Jun (Ryûya Wakaba) wakes up in the morning, heads to his job at a hydroponic plant, then savagely executes his coworker, Mizoguchi (Yûsuke Iseya), in revenge for the murder of his girlfriend, Yui (Malyka Ali). Then he wakes up the next morning, which is the same morning as the last morning, and lather, rinse, repeat. How many ways can one man kill another? How many ways can an editor shoot the same scenes, can an actor play the same scenes, can Araki write the same scenes? Penalty Loop sticks dutifully to the cycle of violence without recycling itself. Each iteration of the loop feels brand new, and, as the film begins to reveal its secrets, even startling. Revenge is a hamster wheel. Penalty Loop goes for a spin before finding an emotional escape hatch.
Not Friends
Country: Thailand
Language: Thai
Distribution: TBD
A two-hour comedy? Did somebody let Judd Apatow submit a movie to Fantasia? The length of Atta Hemwadee’s Not Friends presents something of a conundrum, being both the film’s Achilles’ heel and one of its most startling merits. The last half hour comes together as a series of revolving climaxes, which as structure goes is kind of like hiking a loop-de-loop; at the same time, the ending—the ultimate, real, actual ending—pays off the preceding 120 minutes so well that even the ones that sag are worth sitting through. Hemwadee generates tons of earnest goodwill in this high school teen cringe comedy about an unscrupulous student with dim post-grad prospects faking a deep friendship with a recently departed classmate, intending to get out of final exams by making a short film about the young man’s life. Put Not Friends in a neighborhood adjacent to Bobcat Goldthwait’s World’s Greatest Dad: They share a zip code, but don’t occupy the same block. Goldthwait’s film isn’t without grace, but leans into ruthlessness, while Hemwadee favors the former by a wide margin. Not Friends isn’t interested in inflicting the consequences of dishonesty on its main characters. Instead, it’s interested in how confronting their dishonesty changes them, with the unifying, reflective power of cinema itself coming in a close second as a theme near and dear to its heart.
Published on August 21, 2024
Words by Andy Crump
Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers movies, beer, music, fatherhood, and way too many other subjects for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours: Paste Magazine, Inverse, The New York Times, Hop Culture, Polygon, and Men's Health, plus more. You can follow him on Bluesky and find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65 percent craft beer.