by “Doc” Hunter Bush, Staff Writer and Podcast Czar

My first exposure to The Fantasia International Film Festival was in 2020 where I saw a half dozen tremendous films that I would otherwise probably not have been exposed to (I’ve only encountered two of them on streaming services in the years since). This is the strength of all film festivals, but especially ones like Fantasia which gather movies, documentaries and shorts from around the world - essentially each year I excitedly open the festival preview emails whispering “Yes… expand my cinematic horizons, daddy.”

I try to take in as many films as I am given access to, not just for my own enjoyment, but yours reading this as well. While I won’t be going into deep detail on any of the films below, maybe one of them sounds like your kind of jam. Then the impetus is on you to seek it out, and I hope you like what you find.

Stay Online
Directed by Eva Strelnikova
Written by Anton Skrypets, Eva Strelnikova
Starring Elizaveta Zaitseva, Oleksandr Rudynskyy, Ekaterina Kisten

Stay Online wasn’t something that I was champing at the bit to see, but it pleasantly surprised me with its creativity and ability to keep its numerous simultaneous plot lines engaging. Stay Online is what’s being called a screenlife film–a film told entirely through a computer or smartphone screen via text windows, video messaging, and surfing the ‘net–set in the Ukraine during Russia’s invasion (which is still ongoing btw). Katya (Elizaveta Zaitseva) checks in with her brother Vitya (Oleksandr Rudynskyy) on the front line, her American friend Ryan (Anton Skrypets) a volunteer helping refugees get to safe zones, and keeps her & Vitya’s mother up to date on Vitya’s status, while also finding time to secure and ship a Spider-Man costume for a young boy whose parents may not have gotten safely out of a war zone. That’s in between sheltering in the bathroom when the air raid sirens go off.

Like I said: It’s a lot of threads, all mingling through Katya and her donated laptop, but Stay Online uses some very clever tricks to maintain the illusion that it’s all happening in real time. It keeps the tension dialed up, builds emotional connection to flawed, complicated characters, and attempts to communicate a fraction of the overwhelming dread that existing in a war zone feels like.

Lovely, Dark, and Deep
Written and directed by Teresa Sutherland
Starring Georgina Campbell, Nick Blood, Wai Ching Ho

Lovely, Dark, and Deep focuses on one of my favorite spooky topics: the volume of unexplained disappearances that take place in our National Parks. The first feature from writer Teresa Sutherland (Midnight Mass, The Wind), Lovely, Dark, and Deep is loaded with strange happenings, eerie details, and the inherent alienness of nature experienced in solitude. Lennon (Georgina Campbell) is competent and dedicated to her job as a new park ranger, but has an ulterior motive: investigating the disappearance of her sister when they were children. She sets out for days at a time to chart the various areas of the park all alone, but there are dangerous things in the wilderness, and they know she’s looking for them.

This has some top tier scares in it and sets the spooky mood with surety and finesse. In a movie that tackles these kinds of themes, everything hinges on the payoff; is the explanation of events satisfying or does it feel like the filmmakers have skirted the responsibility of an answer? Lovely, Dark, and Deep, despite budgetary constraints, hits just the right forlorn, eerie, existentially chilling tone that I think audiences will respond to.

White Noise
Directed by Tamara Scherbak
\Written by Christina Saliba, Tamara Scherbak
Starring Bahia Watson, Ryan Hollyman, Guifre Bantjes-Rafols

Short films have comparatively little time and resources with which to draw an audience in, but White Noise from director Tamara Scherbak does an admirable job. Taking a real life aural disorder, misophonia–an aversion to sounds–and a real life oddity–an anechoic chamber–and crafting a tidy little scenario that builds tension to an unsettling finale.

The performances are mostly brief, with the exception of leading lady Ava (Bahia Watson), and uniformly solid, but the real star of White Noise is the sound mixing and effects. Once Ava is left for her session in the sound-canceling room, the blanketing silence is slowly replaced by increasingly unsettling biological sounds: her heartbeat, the blood in her veins, her joints creaking, and on and on, becoming an oppressive cacophony. It’s deeply unnerving and, if you’ll pardon the pun, disquieting.

Restore Point
Directed by Robert Hloz
Written by Tomislav Cecka, Zdenek Jecelin
Starring Andrea Mohylová, Matej Hádek, Milan Ondrík

Restore Point has much more going on than just its ‘a future where a service exists allowing people to be brought back to life after an unnatural death’ setting. The world is nuanced and detailed, and the details matter: the fact that the RP must be backed up every 48 hours is a neat point that actually has significance.

But the overall story is what really shines here: a noir-adjacent thriller with cyberpunk undertones where a cop (Andrea Mohylová) must team up with a recently deceased scientist (Matej Hádek) to track a terrorist group trying to bring down the entire RP system on the eve of its privatization. The characters are flawed, desperate, and almost always just a step behind where they need to be, and that makes for a riveting watch.