A Flurry of Reviews From the Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival

Big thanks to Peter Cornellisen for sending in the following review from Amsterdam. Reviews of Sheitan? Frostbiten? Fragile? Yes, please. And even more exciting is that New Zealand vampire picture Perfect Creature has been added to the program ...

The festival is only halfway through, but today I have some free time to write about the movies I’ve seen so far. I selected thirteen films from the program this year which, given the total of 46 features in competition for the ‘silver scream’ award and a few side-programs, is a small number. But I thought it would be an appropriate number for a festival of genre films.

The festival opened with MirrorMask, the feature debut of Dave McKean with a screenplay written by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. Anyone who is familiar with the writings of Neil Gaiman and the comic books he has been doing for years with McKean designing covers (like for the Sandman series) or all the artwork (like Violent Cases), will know how amazing this creative team is and will have to see this. It’s a beautiful looking film. The story is surprisingly enough not that great. It isn’t really bad either but just not very engaging. There are few surprises and I would also have liked to see some more of Gaiman’s wit. This could have been another Neverwhere (a great fantasy television series McKean and Gaiman worked on ten years ago) but it ends up as ‘just’ a beautiful little fairytale.

Frostbiten (Frostbite) is the weakest film I saw thus far. It’s a vampire film, a genre I never get tired of, and the setting is Scandinavian which is also thought to be a plus. Especially when the tagline “One month ‘til dawn” suggests the plot deals with the polar nigh phenomenon and a possible feast for vampires. What the film is instead is just an adolescent comedy with a mixed bag of weak and slightly amusing jokes and a few gory scenes to plant it within the horror genre. The weakest part of it all is the script, which is just dumb, but I still had some fun while watching it.

Sheitan on the other hand is an absolute highlight. Not that the plot was anything new here, but this is pure kinetic cinema. The sound design and camerawork / editing is what this film is all about. It’s sort of a pet project for its main star and producer Vincent Cassel. He clearly has a taste for this kind of cinema. I place Sheitan somewhere in between Dobermann and Irréversible in this regard. Sheitan is nowhere near as shocking as Irréversible, but it has a few bad taste moments and it is very crude on purpose. Provocation is very easy when you drop a multi racial group of big city punks into a town with some very inbred folks in the country. It’s all done very tongue-in-cheek and with a very wide, and a little bit disturbing, grin.

Nuit Noir proved, finally, that a good plot really isn’t necessary to create a captivating movie. There is a plot here, to be sure, but it doesn’t follow the logic of the waking world. Nuit Noir is a dream full of double meanings and double personas. And although there are some nightmare elements in there, when I walked out of the cinema it felt like waking up from a good dream. There isn’t much else to be said about this movie (without getting into too much detail of all the visual story elements) other than that it looks amazingly good despite being shot on digital video.

Fragile is a new horror film from Spanish director Jaume Balagueró. I was amazed by his debut feature Los Sin Nombre (the Nameless) and although the follow up Darkness wasn’t that strong, he still remains one of the great new Spanish horror talents (along with Alejandro Amenabar, Nacho Cerda, Paco Plaza and Alex de la Iglesia). Fragile is another ghost story, but there’s nothing wrong with a good ghost story. And the built up of the premise is good. There is strong atmosphere and also strong acting from Calista Flockhart I might add. Like most other ghost-horror films that have flooded into the cinemas in recent years however, it all falls apart in the end. There is a plotline about a ‘lovers kiss’ that in the end turns out to be, well, very stupid anyway (I don’t want to give away to much for those who still want to see the movie).

I’ll wrap up this recap with Naboer (Next Door), a film by Norwegian director Pål Sletaune.
I never saw any of his previous films, but I remember some good buzz about Junk Mail which he made almost ten years ago (and I still haven’t found the time to see it). This film came highly recommended and didn’t really disappoint; although I had expected a little more. It’s a fast paced (and relatively short) movie about a guy who has broken up with his girlfriend recently and now seems to lose it. The plot takes off from there and then escalades into something very bizarre. It never becomes too fantastical or goes too far however. The whole structure of the story including the execution of the punch line (pun intended for those who have seen it) feels like a short story. I really liked the film and it was very well made and acted, but there is not enough substance that really sticks. It’s a fun (although pretty disturbing in subject matter) feature length short.

Peter Cornelissen

Still to come for me: The Hills Have Eyes, Perfect Creature (replaces Wolf Creek. The festival announced that Fox will release a re-edited version of Perfect Creature in cinemas later this year and that this will be a unique screening of the original cut), Storm, Renaissance, Snuff Movie, Spider Forest and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. The festival also announced that the surprise movie will indeed be the world premiere of the Woods as reported earlier on this website. I am going to miss that, but I guess there will be a few ScreenAnarchy readers there, that might supply us with a review?