Catalonia’s annual celebration of strange screen tales included a murderous birthmark, weretigers and a therapist overcome with ancient evil
At this year’s International Fantastic film festival of Catalonia, I got bitten all over. Not by vampires or werewolves, alas, but by mosquitoes, which took advantage of the unseasonably hot temperatures on Spain’s Costa del Garraf to transform my body into a throbbing, misshapen mass, rather like William Hurt in Altered States. Still, this helped me feel a kinship with the protagonists of this year’s exercises in body horror, many of them bearing the imprint of Shudder, a streaming service available in the UK and Germany but not elsewhere in Europe. But it was one of their titles – Argentinian director Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks – that became the first Latin American movie in the festival’s 56-year history to win the Sitges award for best feature film.
While audiences in the town’s big air-conditioned cinema lapped up major releases such as Yorgos Lanthimos’s bewitching Poor Things and Stéphan Castang’s thrilling, scary Vincent Must Die, the main action for genre fans was playing out down the hill, in the beautiful old-town auditorium. In Anna Zlocovic’s Appendage, a fashion designer keeps scratching the itchy birthmark on her abdomen until it erupts into an autonomous twin that develops from a Basket Case lookalike into a full-on evil doppelganger, making my own mosquito bites seem like small beer. And somehow I managed to resist clawing my own flesh like the heroine of Robert Morgan’s Stopmotion. Aisling Franciosi (from The Nightingale) plays Ella, the latest in a burgeoning subgenre of disintegrating women (Censor, Saint Maud, Relic), who is so obsessed with completing her animated film she resorts to meat puppetry so gnarly there was a a loud thump behind me as one luckless viewer fainted clean away.
Continue reading...
from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/PFvsWrQ
via
IFTTT
Comments
Post a Comment