Killer kombucha and possessed vacuums: The weirdest films at MIFF this year
A Useful Ghost
In Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke's kooky supernatural film, a woman who has died of dust poisoning returns as a vacuum cleaner from her mother-in-law's factory in the hope of breathing new life (pun intended) into her marriage. However, her husband's family doesn't take kindly to relationships with household appliances, so she attempts to gain their approval by cleaning up the ghosts of former workers residing in the factory's other appliances. This horror-sex-comedy, which won the Critics' Week Grand Prix at Cannes, will pull you in with its silliness and keep you there with its genuinely thoughtful questions around class and social justice.
By Design
Another woman transforms into an inanimate object in Amanda Kramer's By Design. Camille (Juliette Lewis) is so enamoured with a designer chair that she swaps bodies with it, leaving her human frame stiff and motionless. While her rigid human body proves popular with friends and family, her four-legged self ends up with a heartbroken man who might be more in love with the chair's design than the woman trapped inside. The film joins a long list of body-swap films exploring female objectification and self-image. It's narrated by Melanie Griffith (Working Girl) and includes effervescent interpretative dance scenes that somehow manage to steal attention from the body-swapping hoopla.
Beast of War
You'd think a shark would be the least of the dangers facing soldiers during World War II, but Leo and Will have to fend off a great white predator after a Japanese warplane sinks their ship. Inspired by the true story of the sinking of HMAS Armidale in 1942, and directed by Kiah Roache-Turner of Wyrmwood fame, Beast of War combines an emotional war story with a thrilling (and ridiculous) creature feature. Think Jaws meets Dunkirk.
Dead Lover
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From Pet Sematary to Lisa Frankenstein, the resurrection of the dead is hardly new in cinema. But Canadian filmmaker Grace Glowicki's take stands out for its unapologetic bizarreness. A lonely gravedigger is desperate for love, but her smell of decay makes courtship difficult. When she finally finds a man who gets off on her odour, he dies at sea. Only his finger returns, which she uses to revive him. It's peculiar, a little scary, and somehow relatively heartfelt – even if some of the hearts in the film have stopped beating.
One More Shot
Imagine Groundhog Day, but replace the time-loop alarm clock with tequila. In Australian director Nick Clifford's debut feature, Minnie (Emily Browning) slips back in time every time she takes a shot to escape an awkward moment at a Y2K New Year's Eve party attended by the ex-boyfriend she still fancies.
Aside from the stunning mid-century setting, the top-notch local cast includes Sean Keenan (Nitram), Aisha Dee (Sissy), Pallavi Sharda (Lion) and Ashley Zukerman (Succession).
Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass
Those familiar with the Quay brothers' work, such as Street of Crocodiles, may be confounded by this surreal stop-motion animation. Those who aren't will probably feel as if they've entered another dimension.The pair are known for dreamlike, disorienting films that haunt you for days – and their first feature in nearly 20 years is true to form. Based on the work of Polish Jewish writer Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium follows a man visiting his father at an Eastern European sanatorium. The institution, run by a shady six-armed doctor, has entered a time warp, and depending on which dimension the man is in, his father is either dead or alive. Such ambiguity has earned the Quays praise from titans such as Christopher Nolan.
The End
The world has ended, so let's burst into song. This somehow seems logical in The End, a bonkers post-apocalyptic musical by Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing). Twenty-five years after environmental disaster, a former petroleum magnate is living a life of luxury in an opulent doomsday bunker with his friends and family. But the outside world caves in on them when a woman from 'the surface' finds her way inside. The absurdity of Michael Shannon and Tilda Swinton singing Broadway ballads against a backdrop of death and dystopia meets serious commentary on elitism and climate responsibility in this mind-boggling film.
The Great History of Western Philosophy
Forget narrative and logic. Mexican filmmaker Aria Covamonas' animation is made entirely of collages of cut-out public-domain images, and its dialogue is intentionally mistranslated Chinese. Everything is out of place, yet somehow exactly where it needs to be. The Central Committee of the People's Republic hires a cosmic animator to create a philosophical film for Mao Zedong. But after infuriating the Chairman, he's sentenced to death. Then the Monkey King gets involved, and all hell breaks loose. Drawing on surrealism, Lacanian theory and Monty Python, Covamonas creates a mystifying visual world in which plot and resolution need not attend.
The Python Hunt
Florida's Everglades has a python problem. To try to deal with the invasive species, the state launched an annual 10-day competition in which participants wade through croc-infested swamps to catch the most (and largest) pythons and win $10,000. Xander Robin's The Python Hunt introduces all kinds of oddball hunters, including 82-year-old widow Anne, who is obsessed with 'pithing' snakes. The documentary reminds us that reality is usually wackier than the made-up stories we see on-screen.
Zombucha!
There has always been something alien about kombucha, which is made using a scoby, a rubbery living culture that looks as if it will slither away at any moment, intent on finding an unwilling host. This fear is brought to life in Zombucha!, an outrageous sci-fi comedy directed by Claudia Dzienny. After losing their jobs on the same day, partners Maddie and Leo decide to steal the scoby of a wealthy kombucha artisan. However, the culture gains deadly sentience after they add some of their neighbour's mysterious garden herbs, beginning what could become an all-out 'zombucha' apocalypse. Starring Emma Leonard – who also wrote the screenplay – it pokes fun at hipster-wannabes and the corruption of the wellness industry ( surely the best things to make fun of).
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Sydney Morning Herald
10 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
All the rage: The shocking new Rose Byrne film that tackles the mother load
Rose Byrne is in every frame of If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, the remarkable, funny, and slightly scandalous movie that opens the Melbourne International Film Festival tonight. The camera sits tight – really tight – on her flawless face, tracking every twitch, grimace, scowl and frown as Linda, a therapist and the mother of a very sick child, descends into a psychological hell from which she can see no escape. It's called motherhood. 'What I wanted to do was something I have never seen before,' says the movie's American writer-director, Mary Bronstein, who is in Australia as a guest of the festival. 'I wanted to make an expressive piece of work about what it's like to be a caretaker in a very serious, high-stakes situation, where you feel like the entire universe is against you.' For most of the film, Linda's husband is nothing more than an angry voice (Christian Slater's, to be precise) on the other end of the phone, offering unwanted advice about how to fix things. The child – heard but not seen – won't or can't eat, and demands almost constant care. Their home has become unlivable because a leak in the apartment above has caused the ceiling to collapse, so mother and child have moved into a motel room, whose tiny space is filled with the beeps and flashing lights of the machine that pumps life-sustaining nutrients into the child. Linda seeks relief in alcohol, drugs, and sly escapes from the nightmarish claustrophobia of her situation. There's nothing heroic or stoic about this long-suffering woman – whose tribulations may be real or may be at least partly manufactured in her mind – but she's absolutely anchored in truth. 'The tiny seed that started the entire movie is a real situation I lived through with my daughter – she's 15 now – when she was seven,' says Bronstein. 'She was very seriously ill.' Bronstein and her husband live in New York City, and the treatment their daughter needed was in San Diego, on the other side of the country. 'So my daughter and I lived together as sort of demented roommates in a small motel room for eight months, and I had a full existential crisis. I was so focused on the situation at hand, which was everything to do with her, that I felt like I was disappearing, literally.' The things that happen in the film, she adds, aren't all drawn from her actual experience, and she isn't interested in detailing what's factual and what's not. 'What is important to me to get across is that it's all emotionally true.' Bronstein, who started as an actor before making her directing debut 17 years ago with Yeast (in which she co-starred alongside Barbie writer-director Greta Gerwig), has a small role in this movie, as the doctor in charge of the sick child's care. And her view of Linda is not a particularly kind one. Doctor Spring represents, Bronstein concedes, the 'self-hatred' she felt at the time. 'But in a more general sense, it is a judgement of mothers who are not being perfect all the time, who are having their problems, who are struggling, who maybe are faced with something they can't handle and need help [with]. You know, there's a lot of helpers in the film, and there's a lot of listeners, or potential listeners, but Linda feels as if she's screaming into the wind and the void and nobody is hearing or helping.' There is a lot of very dark humour in the film, alongside a deep sense of frustration and confusion. Above all, it's about a side of motherhood that rarely gets addressed in cinema. Loading 'I want it to spark a conversation about female rage, and why that makes people so uncomfortable,' Bronstein says. 'It makes women uncomfortable too, not just men. It makes everybody uncomfortable, the idea of female rage, because it feels bottomless.' The love for If I Had Legs I'd Kick You has been almost bottomless too. Since its debut at Sundance in January, it has garnered rave reviews, and earned Rose Byrne the best actress prize at Berlin the following month. But there's a special burden that comes with being the opening-night film at MIFF, one of the biggest film festivals on the planet – namely, that it should spark chatter at the after-party without killing the vibe. There's every chance it will succeed on both scores. But exactly what sort of chatter are you hoping for, Mary Bronstein? 'I hope electric, that's the word I'm going to use,' she says. 'Curious, with people excited at seeing something they haven't seen before.' And, she adds, she hopes for 'a lot of car conversations on the way home. That's my goal.'
The Age
10 hours ago
- The Age
All the rage: The shocking new Rose Byrne film that tackles the mother load
Rose Byrne is in every frame of If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, the remarkable, funny, and slightly scandalous movie that opens the Melbourne International Film Festival tonight. The camera sits tight – really tight – on her flawless face, tracking every twitch, grimace, scowl and frown as Linda, a therapist and the mother of a very sick child, descends into a psychological hell from which she can see no escape. It's called motherhood. 'What I wanted to do was something I have never seen before,' says the movie's American writer-director, Mary Bronstein, who is in Australia as a guest of the festival. 'I wanted to make an expressive piece of work about what it's like to be a caretaker in a very serious, high-stakes situation, where you feel like the entire universe is against you.' For most of the film, Linda's husband is nothing more than an angry voice (Christian Slater's, to be precise) on the other end of the phone, offering unwanted advice about how to fix things. The child – heard but not seen – won't or can't eat, and demands almost constant care. Their home has become unlivable because a leak in the apartment above has caused the ceiling to collapse, so mother and child have moved into a motel room, whose tiny space is filled with the beeps and flashing lights of the machine that pumps life-sustaining nutrients into the child. Linda seeks relief in alcohol, drugs, and sly escapes from the nightmarish claustrophobia of her situation. There's nothing heroic or stoic about this long-suffering woman – whose tribulations may be real or may be at least partly manufactured in her mind – but she's absolutely anchored in truth. 'The tiny seed that started the entire movie is a real situation I lived through with my daughter – she's 15 now – when she was seven,' says Bronstein. 'She was very seriously ill.' Bronstein and her husband live in New York City, and the treatment their daughter needed was in San Diego, on the other side of the country. 'So my daughter and I lived together as sort of demented roommates in a small motel room for eight months, and I had a full existential crisis. I was so focused on the situation at hand, which was everything to do with her, that I felt like I was disappearing, literally.' The things that happen in the film, she adds, aren't all drawn from her actual experience, and she isn't interested in detailing what's factual and what's not. 'What is important to me to get across is that it's all emotionally true.' Bronstein, who started as an actor before making her directing debut 17 years ago with Yeast (in which she co-starred alongside Barbie writer-director Greta Gerwig), has a small role in this movie, as the doctor in charge of the sick child's care. And her view of Linda is not a particularly kind one. Doctor Spring represents, Bronstein concedes, the 'self-hatred' she felt at the time. 'But in a more general sense, it is a judgement of mothers who are not being perfect all the time, who are having their problems, who are struggling, who maybe are faced with something they can't handle and need help [with]. You know, there's a lot of helpers in the film, and there's a lot of listeners, or potential listeners, but Linda feels as if she's screaming into the wind and the void and nobody is hearing or helping.' There is a lot of very dark humour in the film, alongside a deep sense of frustration and confusion. Above all, it's about a side of motherhood that rarely gets addressed in cinema. Loading 'I want it to spark a conversation about female rage, and why that makes people so uncomfortable,' Bronstein says. 'It makes women uncomfortable too, not just men. It makes everybody uncomfortable, the idea of female rage, because it feels bottomless.' The love for If I Had Legs I'd Kick You has been almost bottomless too. Since its debut at Sundance in January, it has garnered rave reviews, and earned Rose Byrne the best actress prize at Berlin the following month. But there's a special burden that comes with being the opening-night film at MIFF, one of the biggest film festivals on the planet – namely, that it should spark chatter at the after-party without killing the vibe. There's every chance it will succeed on both scores. But exactly what sort of chatter are you hoping for, Mary Bronstein? 'I hope electric, that's the word I'm going to use,' she says. 'Curious, with people excited at seeing something they haven't seen before.' And, she adds, she hopes for 'a lot of car conversations on the way home. That's my goal.'
Sydney Morning Herald
20 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
MIFF made easy: 15 films that should be on your viewing list
The Melbourne International Film Festival kicks off on August 7 with a packed program that includes everything from premiere features to documentaries and rarely seen classics. If you're struggling to decide what to see, these highlights from our resident film experts are a good place to start. ONCE UPON A TIME IN GAZA A film in two parts, about how life is and isn't like the movies. Part one, set in 2007, is a buddy movie about a burly, affable restaurateur (Majd Eid), his student employee (Nader Abd Alhay) and their adventures in the drug trade. Part two takes place two years on, when the student is cast in a low-budget film about a militant leader. This entertainment with serious intentions was written and directed by Arab and Tarzan Nasser, Palestinian twins based in Jordan. What has become of their homeland in the past couple of years is addressed only obliquely – but speaking of fantasy and reality, it's not for nothing an opening title card cites Donald Trump's vision of Gaza's future as the 'Riviera of the Middle East'. August 14 and 23. JW HARVEST Athina Rachel Tsangari, a leading light in the so-called 'weird wave' of Greek cinema in the 2000s, shifts focus here to a remote Scottish village during the Clearances, where cut-throat capitalism is about to overturn a social order grounded in myth, tradition and the seasons. Caleb Landry Jones, so memorable in Nitram, is the village's acceptable outsider; his childhood bond with their benign laird forever sets him apart from the other peasants, but he is a strong worker, devoted to this living land. Tsangari's interest has always been on power, bullying and submission; in this savage story, the dispossession of a community is given horns and muddy hoofs to become a new sort of folk tale, pulsating with violence. August 18 and 22. SB KONTINENTAL '25 The Romanian satirist Radu Jude (Bad Luck Banging) may be cynical about everything to do with institutions, but he seems quite fond of people, especially his overworked, morally compromised heroines such as Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), a bailiff who blames herself for the suicide of a homeless man she helped evict from a basement. While her sense of guilt is no laughing matter, her quest to come to terms with it propels her in some unexpected directions. This isn't as busy as some of Jude's other films, but there's still a lot to take in, from animatronic dinosaurs to Zen parables to sidelights on the history of Cluj, the Transylvanian city Orsolya drives around in circles as if hopelessly seeking a way out. August 9 and 13. JW BLUE MOON Loading The nighthawk world of '50s Broadway bars is evoked in Richard Linklater's chamber drama about the disintegration of one of the great musical theatre partnerships, Rodgers and Hart. Ethan Hawke may be an odd fit for lyricist Lorenz Hart, whose short stature was a torment to him, but he brings real pathos to his portrait of a one-time talent, raddled by booze, who sees his era passing in front of his eyes. Andrew Scott as Richard Rodgers, who has ditched Hart for the much slicker Oscar Hammerstein, is entirely justified but still makes your flesh crawl; Margaret Qualley is Hart's utterly inappropriate young crush. Linklater, never an obtrusive director, goes with the story's theatrical flow, pulling back the curtain on a vanished era. August 9, 16 and 24. SB WE BURY THE DEAD When a high-tech weapons test kills off the entire population of Tasmania, there's not much anyone from the mainland can do except get on with the grim task of body disposal. Except that some of the corpses are said to be coming back to life, a tantalising rumour for volunteers such as Ava (Daisy Ridley) who can't let go of the memory of her dead husband. In his 2013 film These Final Hours, Australian writer-director Zak Hilditch showed us what the end of the world might look like from the vantage point of Perth. This companion piece offers another contained vision of apocalypse, taking advantage of the versatility of the zombie genre to tell a story that is solemn, blackly funny and grisly by turns. August 13 and 15. JW THE MASTERMIND Josh O'Connor is initially unrecognisable as beardy slacker JB, an art school drop-out who regularly wanders his quiet, leafy town's art gallery with his family on weekends. Here he gets the idea for his grand gesture: getting some of his stoner friends together, putting stockings on their heads and stealing the museum's Arthur Dove collection. It is the '70s, before security cameras; the guards are always half-asleep; his dad's status as a conservative judge (Bill Camp, also terrific) should lift him beyond suspicion: what could go wrong? Everything, of course. Independent spirit Kelly Reichardt, whose low-key Americana includes reworkings of the western and the road movie, deconstructs the heist movie with typically bleak wit, skewering the likes of feckless JB in the process. August 8 and 16. SB THE ICE TOWER This eerie riff on The Snow Queen updates Hans Christian Andersen's classic fairytale to the 1970s – but as in Lucile Hadzihalilovic's other films, the rules of the real world barely apply. The heroine is a teenage runaway (Clara Pacini), who finds her way onto a film set where they're shooting an adaptation of the Andersen story, starring a diva (Marion Cotillard) who proves to be the same kind of chilly tyrant as the character she's playing. There isn't much plot: the drama is in how the two women look at each other, and in Hadzihalilovic's gift for charged, paradoxical images, such as an ice rink viewed from a distance that is made to resemble both a bare stage and a warm, glowing haven. August 16 and 23. JW SOUND OF FALLING Loading A family farm in northern Germany, seen in various eras, in various states of repair and through the eyes of four girls at different times, is the creaking heart of Mascha Schilinski's extraordinary film, the greatest discovery of this year's Cannes Film Festival. Erika amuses herself walking on crutches belonging to her uncle, who has lost his leg in the Great War; Alma is given a funereal black dress to wear to a party around 1900; Angelika lives with the strange, pinched chill of the Cold War. We slip between different eras, which echo and mirror each other, in this haunting meditation on death and the persistence of memory; meanwhile, the girls struggle against the confines of their different lives. August 20, 22 and 24. SB CLOUD Kiyoshi Kurosawa might be called the M. Night Shyamalan of Japan, although he's been telling uncanny, twisty suspense stories for a good deal longer. There's nothing openly supernatural in this tale of a young man (Masaki Suda) who embarks on a career reselling fake designer goods online, a get-rich-quick scheme that eventually brings catastrophe on virtually everyone around him. But the atmosphere is closer to a horror film than a conventional thriller, with the hero's need to control his environment spreading to the other characters like a disease. Kurosawa is something of a control freak in his own right – and his cool, deliberate style, based largely on emptied-out long shots, is ideal for picturing a world where nothing but profit counts. August 17 and 21. JW ENZO The late French director Laurent Cantet, best known for his Palme D'Or winner The Class, was obliged by his worsening cancer to hand over direction of Enzo to his co-writer, Robin Campillo. Campillo, whose own style in films such as BPM is frantic and festive, here maintains Cantet's stately seriousness in a profile of Enzo (terrific newcomer Eloy Pohu), who has defied his professional parents by taking a job as an apprentice builder. He is terrible at his job; what holds him is the hope of defining himself as a man and his secret crush on Vlad, one of two Ukrainian builders wrestling with the call of duty. Under the ferocious Mediterranean sun, Enzo's romantic yearnings rise like new sap. August 16, 20 and 23. SB CHAIN REACTIONS Marking the 50th anniversary of Tobe Hooper's horror classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Alexandre O. Philippe's documentary is an admirably serious and respectful piece of work, letting us hear at length from five high-profile fans who come at the film from different angles but agree on viewing it as some kind of masterpiece. The line-up includes Stephen King, filmmakers Takashi Miike and Karyn Kasuma, comedian Patton Oswalt – and most delightfully, the Australian horror scholar Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, who begins her segment by discussing her childhood memories of Picnic at Hanging Rock. If shock and revulsion aren't what you crave from cinema, you might learn something here about why others feel differently, even if you need to look away from the more gruesome clips. August 9, 12 and 16. JW APRIL Against the majesty and fertility of eastern Georgia's rural landscape, a stoic obstetrician races between patients, trying to deliver babies safely by day and, after hours, giving kitchen abortions to women and girls already overburdened by poverty and patriarchy. First-trimester abortion is legal, but effectively proscribed in a country haunted by priests and monsters. Everyone knows that Nina is an abortionist; many know that she picks up men on the road, the only kind of intimacy that fits into her work schedule. When she delivers a stillborn baby, the authorities seize the opportunity to rid themselves of this doctor for whom the old ways are not good enough. Dea Kulumbegashvili's film is shattering, but also profoundly human. August 19, 21 and 23. SB MAYA, GIVE ME A TITLE A mother who loses an arm while chopping vegetables, a ketchup spill that floods the seas of the world, a 'fake prison' carted off to a prison for fake prisons: these are among the many disconcerting images in this series of whimsical vignettes that director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) devised and animated for his four-year-old daughter Maya, using paper cutouts and an app on his phone. This is screening as part of MIFF's Schools Program, but the bright colours and casual absurdity could appeal especially to viewers around Maya's age, who may not be too worried if they can't read subtitles or understand French, and who will probably take the anxious images of disaster in their stride. August 13, 19 and 23. JW LATE SHIFT With the pace of a thriller and the serious clout of a documentary, Petra Volpe's account of a night in the life of a Swiss nurse is, quite simply, one of the year's most brilliant films. Leonie Benesch, so good in The Teachers' Lounge and as a translator for the US press in September 5, interned in a cancer ward for months to master nurse Floria's skilled ministrations, heavy walk – to carry her for eight hours – and perpetual emotional availability. We watch her deal with a runaway elderly man, with a wild accusation of negligence from three suddenly bereaved young men, and a private patient whining about his tea: everybody is terrified, so nobody is reasonable. August 13, 19 and 24. SB BRAND NEW LANDSCAPE The 26-year-old Japanese writer-director Yuiga Danzuka has described this promising first feature as directly autobiographical. But you wouldn't necessarily guess that from his approach, which is all about emotional restraint. Set in Tokyo, the minimal plot follows three members of an estranged family: a workaholic landscape architect (Kenichi Endo), his daughter (Mai Kiryu), who's starting to have mixed feelings about her forthcoming marriage, and his younger son (Kodai Kurosaki) who keeps to himself when not working for a florist as a delivery driver. The unspoken emotion is in the way Danzuka films motorways, shopping centres, cafeterias, waiting rooms, offices and construction sites: impersonal spaces that could be found in any modern city, but are imbued here with a particular sense of loss. August 14 and 23. JW Loading
