I watched twelve feature films in total (I walked out on one of them because it was getting very late and I was worrying I might miss my last train as it was a week day), nineteen short films, of which three were animated and three stop motion. Let's see which ones I saw and my personal winners of this year's Fantasy Filmfest (There is an official winner of the festival you can find on their website when they are through with every city on their program.)
My first ever opening film at the Fantasy Filmfest (in the beautiful and huge Saal 1 which can take up to 800 people!) is an indie flick which follows the point of view of a dog in a haunted house story. The dog, named Indy, was adorable really, unfortunately that's the only asset the film can rely upon. The story in itself is a quite standard ghost story which becomes appealing (and worth paying money for) only due to the cuteness of its star. Interesting was the behind the scenes chatter of director Ben Leonberg about the difficulties of working with his dog whom he owns in real life, and that the scenes Indy seemed in concentration on some otherworldly presence, his attention was in fact being kept by food and treats.
Odyssey (UK 2025)
For me personally one of the weaker movies of this year's FFF, Odyssey follows a hip real estate agent in London getting involved with
some mafia type of guys, and getting karma return to her for selling shitty
homes to unassuming people. Odyssey may have been too "action"y for my taste, although I was happily surprised to see Mikael Persbrandt in the role of the "Viking", because to me he is always Gunvald from the television series Komissar Beck, which I am a fan of.
Roqia (Algeria 2025)
My winner of this year's festival! This amazing film is told in three parts: First we have an older religious man, maybe an imam, and his younger assistant who profess exorcisms together. The older guy gets increasingly confused and weird; he loses his Qoran, his assistant finds then loose pages of it floating around and he starts speaking in tongues.
In the second part, in the past, a family father has his face completely bandaged after an accident, and his family finds it hard to recognize him. Supposedly his best friend, with whom he has served as a soldier in Afghanistan, can illuminate the secrets and the nature of the accident he had.
In the third part these two stories come together to build a top tier religious horror, it was amazing, quite frankly, I loved it. It was the first time I watched an Algerian film too.
When her sister goes missing, Eve suspects she has been kidnapped by three guys they met on a night out. As a biologist she has the means to work out the perfect plan as she drugs and ties them up in one of her lab spaces onto the ground, above super fast growing bamboo. As the bamboo grows the guys get pierced and injured and hopefully start talking.
Listen, I love to suspend my disbelief in order to make room for fantastical stories. But when there's pseudo-science I am a little bit more demanding, the super fast growing bamboo, plus a series of stupid choices and events happening in this film made it feel forced. Plus, it was after 10 pm that they started the screening, so I just walked out to be able to relax at home a little bit.
DFFB und Filmuniversität Babelsberg Go Fantasy Filmfest
To screen student projects is apparently something the FFF did in the past, not that I personally was aware of this, but they announced the tradition is being revived this year. My highlights were two short films, coincidentally both made by women. The first one is Fructus Fliegus by Emilia Zieser, a stop motion film about a person who suspects a fruit fly has entered their eye and reached their brain, and asks another person to go ahead and have a look. The second one is Love Only Works in Fiction, Please Don’t Try at Home, made by Magdalena Jacob, which, with a clown in an existential crisis leaving Earth, a giant toilet seat flying in inner space and a show program of a psychedelic sort, was a whole trip on itself. The tickets were only 6 Euro, so there's no excuse not to support young filmmakers for that price.
The movie touches on themes like exclusion for ethnic background, the fetishization of blonde in popular culture, and especially internalized racism and how toxic and hurtful it can be. And how ridiculous but also scary it all is at the end of the day. This totally struck a chord with me.
Man Finds Tape (USA 2025)
L'accident de piano (France, 2025)
An influencer who is unable to feel pain makes painful stunts in front of the camera, like burning or injuring herself, to stay famous. After being seriously injured under a falling piano she takes some time off to retreat into a cabin in the mountains, but is blackmailed by a journalist who wants to explore the psychology of someone who does what she does. I'm enjoying the movies of Quentin Dupieux, this one was fun and also emotional, sad really. Actress Adèle Exarchopoulos gave an excellent performance oscillating between awkward and creepy.
The short films curated by the FFF are usually of very high quality, and they were so this year too. I have a couple of favorites, here they are:
Puzzle (France 2024)
A puzzle-influencer discovers a very mysterious and hard to build puzzle project which just may be cursed. Sébastien Roignant's short film is a fast forwarded account told only in two minutes, but is all the more hilarious because of it.
Made by Stéphanie Lansaqu and François Leroy, this short focuses on environmental themes told by means of folk horror. Really nice.
On the Monday I went to see Nightmare Bug, I actually hadn't planned on seeing any movies, but spontaneously decided to go anyway, and it was great I did! Not the least because Nightmare Bugs, a Japanese anime about a girl who is trying to get to the bottom of the weird stuff going on in the apartment complex she just moved in was a visual feast! I can't say I completely understood the subject matter, because there seems to be two different storylines, but it was a delight to watch.
Welcome Home Baby (Austria 2025)
The director Andreas Prochaska recommended in his interview before the movie to turn the volume up, and I see why he did it, as the film was full of very loud jump scares. Maybe too many. If you ever had to deal with panic attacks in your life, you possibly had to go through an intense information phase on the effects of fear on your body, because it's the first step a therapist will give to you to work with in your healing process. And you will know that once the fear process starts, it will never last forever, the maximum capacity of your body being able to stay in that state is about 20 minutes. After that you need some time to collect strength to be able to fear again because it is something that draws lots of energy. If you have a movie that spends too much of your fear, which Welcome Home Baby does, you won't be able to react properly to the punchline, because you have been distracted and burned out by everything coming before. So, it wasn't clever, you have to place the fears cleverly not overload the movie with them. Then there's the question of the originality, or the lack thereof, as the movie only relies on the re-telling of a story in an Austrian setting, which is fine, you can do that, but a good, authentic story is actually preferable.
I thought this is a horror film in the range of decent to good, it comes with a twist ending but there are some minor plot holes and inconsistencies that would be spoilerous in a quick pitch like this, still, it is worth the watch.
My final film of this year's Fantasy Filmfest is a film adapted from my friend Mats Strandberg's book focusing on the horrors that reveal in a home for older people. We follow Joel who returns to his childhood house (it is worth marking how often the starting point of horror movies are returning to childhood homes, possibly alluding to the real horrors being buried in our childhoods) to help his mother move to a care home after a stroke. After her stroke she changed in scary ways; she knows the secrets of the people she interacts with, she bullies people, and apparently repeatedly bangs her head on the headside of her bed, leaving brain fluid, blood and hair where she does so.
I really liked watching this, I love that Scandinavian horror-feeling in movies, they're so realistic and dark, what's not to love? I also like the fact that it was in Swedish! Apart from the fact that there were so many US films at the festival this year, it was kind of a shame that film makers from various countries made the choice of shooting their movies in English, and although I'm fine with that, I think it takes away from the atmosphere. So it was great this one was in its original language. Plus, it's Mats' book, who, by the way, couldn't be here because they are apparently working on the serialization of Blood Cruise, so I'll be anticipating that too.
Well, it's over and now it's time to return to real life, alas! The next movie event will probably be on Halloween in various cinemas and by the Final Girls Berlin. Until then, it looks kind of quiet with good movies like The Conjuring 4 and The Long Walk (which I think I won't be seeing in cinema, as the book is one of the few books where I started crying on the first page and cried with increasing intensity until the last, I am kind of a masochist, but even that has its limits) already in cinemas, and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple and Osgood Perkins' new film Keeper winking at us from the future. The Creepy Crypt does a Toxic Avenger double feature on two separate days with the original movie showing on September 19 and the re-make with Peter Dinklage showing on September 20th, both at 10.30 pm at the Rollberg Kino.
Have a great time until then!
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