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Fantasia Fest 2025 Wrap-up: A Journey in Surreal Solitude

By. Professor Horror

                                                                                 

 

The 29th Fantasia International Film Festival unfolded in Montreal from July 16 to August 3, 2025, offering a 19‑day celebration of adventurous genre cinema. With its signature blend of international voices, bold formal experiments, and thematic richness, Fantasia once again proved why it’s a cornerstone of the global horror and genre circuit. The festival showcased hundreds of features, shorts, animations, documentaries, and underground gems across programming strands like Cheval Noir, New Flesh, Animation Plus, and Fantasia Underground. Among the most distinctive offerings were I AM FRANKELDA, CIELO, THE LAST WOMAN ON EARTH, CONTACT LENS, and A GRAND MOCKERY. All of these are films that carved a unique path through the festival’s landscape of strangeness and emotion.

Though wildly different in tone and form, these five titles shared a haunting thematic thread: surreal introspection and boundary-pushing isolation. Whether through Gothic fantasy, cosmic longing, an uneasy partnership, sensory overload, or psychological decay, each film examined the emotional and existential limits of its characters. Collectively, they represent what Fantasia does best: champion stories that defy formula, embrace emotional and remind audiences why genre cinema remains one of the most vital spaces for artistic risk.

                                                                          

I AM FRANKELDA

A reclusive children’s horror author battles personal demons and haunting memories as her fictional world begins to bleed into reality through a stop-motion fever dream. I AM FRANKELDA, Mexico’s first-ever stop‑motion feature and presented in Animation Plus, charmed the festival with a lush, nightmarish fable of creativity and escape set in dual realms of reality and fantasy. The film earned a Special Jury Mention in the Satoshi Kon Award for Achievement in Animation, and additionally took home the L’Écran Fantastique Audience Award for Best Animated Feature (Silver), demonstrating its appeal to both critics and audiences. Crafted by the Ambriz brothers, the movie’s painstaking puppetry, bold Mexican folk‑art-inspired design, and baroque environments build a sensual, spiritual dreamscape. The narrative explores grief, creativity, and identity, and not just through its heroine’s pen name transformation but through the very architecture of imagination. Its lingering cliffhangers and dense, dialogue‑heavy pacing may challenge conventional animation rhythms, but they emphasize FRANKELDA a’s commitment to mythic depth and emotional texture.

                                                                                     

CIELO

A young girl in Bolivia embarks on a metaphysical journey through grief and wonder as she searches for her place in the universe under an ever-changing sky. CIELO, in the Cheval Noir competition, illuminated cosmic longing with poetic visual mastery, earning Best Cinematography for Alex Metcalfe. Directed by Alberto Sciamma (UK/Bolivia), the film transforms ordinary settings into ethereal spaces through luminous play of light, expansive skies, and sensory mood. It marries earthly landscapes with transcendent emotions, which suggests spiritual quests that feel both wide‑open and deeply internal. The cinematography turns nature into a character and guides viewers into silent epiphanies and inner rifts. Though not a loud blockbuster, CIELO resonates precisely because of its quiet intensity and visual poetry, offering a contemplative counterpoint to the Festival’s more radical fare.

                                                                                     

THE LAST WOMAN ON EARTH

A spirited female film student teams up with her misogynistic male classmate to create a wildly imaginative movie during a film workshop, leading to a quirky and meta exploration of gender, creativity, and cinematic storytelling. In the New Flesh competition, THE LAST WOMAN ON EARTH, directed by Yeum Moon-kyoung and Lee Jong-min, presented a female-centered exploration of genre and the film industry in general. What begins as a combative exchange in a classroom (her sci-fi revenge premise about the extinction of all women dismissed as “misandry”) turns into an uneasy partnership when her loudest critic admits his own work lacks a female perspective. As they collaborate, the film bounces between sharp banter, sly jabs at industry sexism, and gloriously odd “film-within-a-film” detours that leap between genres with B-movie glee. Beneath the comedy, it shares the thematic through-line of Fantasia’s most distinctive titles: surreal introspection and boundary-pushing isolation, here reframed as the awkward, often hilarious process of creating art with someone whose worldview collides with your own.

                                                                         

CONTACT LENS

A woman’s reality distorts after she begins wearing experimental contact lenses, triggering a descent into sensory confusion, paranoia, and body horror.  China’s CONTACT LENS featured in Fantasia Underground, treats viewers to a sensory assault of perception and disorientation as it takes us into an experimental dive into how we see and how we process what we see. Though it did not earn an award, its selection signals admiration for fearless formal innovation. With immersive sound design and distorted visuals, it collapses the boundary between viewer and subject, reflecting the Festival’s commitment to boundary‑pushing cinema. It may unsettle, provoke, and confound, but it never lets one look away, typifying Fantasia’s celebration of radical filmmaking.

                                                                                    

A GRAND MOCKERY

A GRAND MOCKERY is the kind of movie you feel in your bones before you can even explain it: a liminal, grimy, Lynch-meets-Cronenberg fever dream that oozes Brisbane authenticity. Co-directors Briggs and Dixon turn the repetitive grind of a lonely cinema worker’s life into something fractured and disorienting, where each loop through his day grows stranger, fouler, and funnier. Shot on raw, grainy Super 8, it’s equal parts midnight-movie oddity, piss-soaked gross-out comedy, and existential hangover, capturing the city’s working-class art scene with both affection and rot. There’s a hallucinatory rhythm here because you’re never sure if Josie is descending into madness, becoming one with the voice in his head, or just very very drunk on goon…and the film leans into that uncertainty with a psychedelic, self-aware style that refuses to give you a clean release. It’s too weird to be just an aesthetic exercise, too heartfelt to be pure provocation, and exactly the kind of uncompromising, experimental cinema Fantasia loves to slip into its Underground strand.