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
2 days ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘So cool': Stranger Things star finds his happy place among the Ochi
Having grown up on our screens as the golden-hearted schoolboy Mike Wheeler in Stranger Things, Finn Wolfhard is used to inhabiting an otherworldly has spent the past 10 years – almost half his life – heading off attacks from the alien forces of the Upside Down dimension. Mostly, he has confronted the unknown on greenscreen: blank sets where the work of computer animators will round out the action. 'They are amazing artists in their own way,' he says. 'But as an actor, you are reacting off nothing.' What attracted him to making fantasy film The Legend of Ochi, he says, was its hand-made quality. Isaiah Saxon's film, which is screening at MIFF, is also a fantasy about a clash between humans and bizarre creatures, but it is a very different beast. Most of it was shot on location. It is set in the Carpathian Mountains – Count Dracula's old haunt – where the villages, save for the occasional passing car, look very much as they always have, surrounded by mountains covered in thick forest. Here, the foolhardy explorer may encounter the Ochi, which are like large apes with an alien tweak. The smaller Ochi are played by puppets; the larger ones are actors in furry suits. 'I didn't want to go too far from nature,' says Saxon. 'I wanted the audience to see the Ochi as real animals living in a real place.' For Wolfhard, all this was fantastically old-school. 'I loved the idea of working with animatronics and puppets,' he says, speaking over Zoom along with German actress Helena Zengel, who plays the film's heroine, Yuri. The puppets, he says, required people to operate them; one person's entire job might be operating a key Ochi's ears. 'This was an opportunity to really have this kind of amazing experience which not a lot of people get to have these days,' says Wolfhard, who has been in our lounge rooms as Mike since he was 12, but is still only 22. 'There was a whole team of people piloting the Ochi. And there was something so cool about that because, as they were controlling the puppets, they were the real actors.' Zengel is 17, but her character is just emerging from childhood, torn between loyalty to her embittered father Maxim (Willem Dafoe) and longing for her mother Dasha (Emily Watson), a mythic figure who left the family under an impenetrable cloud years before. Maxim regularly takes the local boys – his proxy sons, handed over by their fathers for Maxim to toughen up – out on raiding parties. They try to kill any Ochi they can find, then come home for a revivifying wrestle; it's a sort of genocidal version of Scouts. Wolfhard plays Petro, a hesitant orphan whom Maxim has taken into his home. Petro is repelled by this bloodlust but is too timid to say so; it is Yuri who is the good shot, keen to hold her own among the boys. Until, the day after one of these night raids, she finds a wounded baby Ochi in the woods. The little Ochi looks like a cross between Yoda and a bush baby. Miserable Yuri feels an immediate affinity for it; more remarkably, she discovers she can trill its musical language. She takes it home, bandages it, sings to it. Loading 'I wanted to centre a kid who felt that her ability to express herself had withered or died,' says Saxon. 'Yuri is shut down and her only outlet is listening to screaming black metal. Then she sees an animal that is an antidote to everything humans are: direct, intuitive, instinctual. What would happen to that kid if that Ochi energy was in her life?' As it happens – and happenstance proves unusually obliging here, even by the standards of fairytale – she rediscovers her mother, Dasha, now a shepherd high in the hills. You can't befriend an Ochi,' says Dasha. You shouldn't try. 'Look at what we did to wolves,' she spits. 'Turned them into lapdogs!' This is Saxon's first feature, but he has already carved out a significant career as an inspired music video director, working with artists including Björk and Grizzly Bear; Wolfhard, who recently released his first album, was drawn to the project initially because he was a fan of those clips. 'I have this discomfort with our reliance on language as the primary communication format as human,' Saxon says. The Ochi communicate by merging their emotions through their voices, which are produced by mixing a mockingbird's call and something called a throat whistle. Saxon discovered the throat whistle and its great exponent, Paul Manalatos, when he was trawling the internet. There was Manalatos, warbling into his webcam. Somehow, that's very much in the spirit of the film. Zengel started acting even earlier than Wolfhard. She was 10 years old when she was lauded as revelatory in the tough 2019 German drama System Crasher, about a frighteningly volatile ward of the state who is passed from one agency to another, all her carers soon admitting she is beyond them. 'I was super young, you know,' she says. 'Back then, obviously I had fun saying these bad words! It was a cool time; I was able to do anything that kids shouldn't do. But I understood what was going on, I understood the topic and I took it seriously.' Loading The Legend of Ochi, as a family movie culminating in a clutch of benign messages about tolerance, diversity and the environment, is ostensibly that film's polar opposite, but Zengel notes that it doesn't condescend to younger audiences. Very young children might have eyes only for the baby Ochi, but there is a darkness at the heart of the story that could provoke uncomfortable questions for viewers of any age. 'I think there are adults who might take life lessons from it,' she says. 'It has beautiful side stories that it tells and things that you can project on today's society and today's life. So I think it's a very complex film.' Wolfhard agrees. 'I loved the script for just that reason. That, yes, kids could watch it, but it wasn't explicitly for children. I think movies made for kids in the last 15 years really try to spoon-feed children and assume they can't take in more nuanced themes.' Think of a great movie for children: almost everyone goes straight for The Wizard of Oz. 'I watched that as a kid and there's a lot of scary stuff in that movie. But life is scary!' says Wolfhard. 'Oh yes! I was traumatised by The Wizard of Oz!' enthuses Zengel. 'I like when children even at a young age see films or talk about things that are more serious.' Obviously, the Ochi are standing in for all the real animals that have been hunted or crowded out by humans – wolves, whales, tigers – at the same time as pushing a plea for peaceful co-existence that children readily understand. Closer to home, however, is the film's frankness about families' failings. Loading When Yuri runs away, mad Maxim dons some armour that could date back to Vlad the Impaler, gathers his boys and prepares to run his daughter to ground with a rifle. Dafoe's Maxim is ultimately a pathetically vulnerable man, but he's dangerous with it; Emily Watson, as the bolter, is hardly a cosy mother figure. They compare poorly with Ochi parents, who enfold their young in their fur, singing. The film is also prepared to face the unhappiness of children. As someone who grew up in front of millions of people, Wolfhard has spoken with feeling about how he was unable to explain to anyone, including himself, that he was not enjoying his Stranger Things fame in the way that everyone around him assumed he was. 'When people ask a kid, 'Are you OK?' they'll say, 'yes'. And that means nothing,' he told Cosmopolitan. 'Kids don't want to disappoint anyone. They don't even know if they're OK.' All these kids are unhappy. In the great tradition of children's literature, however, they will find a way out through having their own adventures, away from adult meddling. And, in Yuri's case, with a secret furry friend.
The Age
2 days ago
- The Age
MIFF 2025: Stranger Things star finds his happy place in The Legend of Ochi
, register or subscribe to save articles for later. Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Having grown up on our screens as the golden-hearted schoolboy Mike Wheeler in Stranger Things , Finn Wolfhard is used to inhabiting an otherworldly has spent the past 10 years – almost half his life – heading off attacks from the alien forces of the Upside Down dimension. Mostly, he has confronted the unknown on greenscreen: blank sets where the work of computer animators will round out the action. 'They are amazing artists in their own way,' he says. 'But as an actor, you are reacting off nothing.' What attracted him to making fantasy film The Legend of Ochi , he says, was its hand-made quality. Isaiah Saxon's film, which is screening at MIFF, is also a fantasy about a clash between humans and bizarre creatures, but it is a very different beast. Most of it was shot on location. It is set in the Carpathian Mountains – Count Dracula's old haunt – where the villages, save for the occasional passing car, look very much as they always have, surrounded by mountains covered in thick forest. Here, the foolhardy explorer may encounter the Ochi, which are like large apes with an alien tweak. The smaller Ochi are played by puppets; the larger ones are actors in furry suits. 'I didn't want to go too far from nature,' says Saxon. 'I wanted the audience to see the Ochi as real animals living in a real place.' Helena Zengel as Yuri, with her baby Ochi. Credit: Madman Films For Wolfhard, all this was fantastically old-school. 'I loved the idea of working with animatronics and puppets,' he says, speaking over Zoom along with German actress Helena Zengel, who plays the film's heroine, Yuri. The puppets, he says, required people to operate them; one person's entire job might be operating a key Ochi's ears. 'This was an opportunity to really have this kind of amazing experience which not a lot of people get to have these days,' says Wolfhard, who has been in our lounge rooms as Mike since he was 12, but is still only 22. 'There was a whole team of people piloting the Ochi. And there was something so cool about that because, as they were controlling the puppets, they were the real actors.' Zengel is 17, but her character is just emerging from childhood, torn between loyalty to her embittered father Maxim (Willem Dafoe) and longing for her mother Dasha (Emily Watson), a mythic figure who left the family under an impenetrable cloud years before. Maxim regularly takes the local boys – his proxy sons, handed over by their fathers for Maxim to toughen up – out on raiding parties. They try to kill any Ochi they can find, then come home for a revivifying wrestle; it's a sort of genocidal version of Scouts. Finn Wolfhard with Willem Dafoe in The Legend of Ochi. Credit: Madman Films Wolfhard plays Petro, a hesitant orphan whom Maxim has taken into his home. Petro is repelled by this bloodlust but is too timid to say so; it is Yuri who is the good shot, keen to hold her own among the boys. Until, the day after one of these night raids, she finds a wounded baby Ochi in the woods. The little Ochi looks like a cross between Yoda and a bush baby. Miserable Yuri feels an immediate affinity for it; more remarkably, she discovers she can trill its musical language. She takes it home, bandages it, sings to it. Loading 'I wanted to centre a kid who felt that her ability to express herself had withered or died,' says Saxon. 'Yuri is shut down and her only outlet is listening to screaming black metal. Then she sees an animal that is an antidote to everything humans are: direct, intuitive, instinctual. What would happen to that kid if that Ochi energy was in her life?' As it happens – and happenstance proves unusually obliging here, even by the standards of fairytale – she rediscovers her mother, Dasha, now a shepherd high in the hills. You can't befriend an Ochi,' says Dasha. You shouldn't try. 'Look at what we did to wolves,' she spits. 'Turned them into lapdogs!' This is Saxon's first feature, but he has already carved out a significant career as an inspired music video director, working with artists including Björk and Grizzly Bear; Wolfhard, who recently released his first album, was drawn to the project initially because he was a fan of those clips. 'I have this discomfort with our reliance on language as the primary communication format as human,' Saxon says. The Ochi communicate by merging their emotions through their voices, which are produced by mixing a mockingbird's call and something called a throat whistle. Saxon discovered the throat whistle and its great exponent, Paul Manalatos, when he was trawling the internet. There was Manalatos, warbling into his webcam. Somehow, that's very much in the spirit of the film. The discovery of a wounded baby Ochi changes everything for Helena Zengel's Yuri. Credit: Madman Films Zengel started acting even earlier than Wolfhard. She was 10 years old when she was lauded as revelatory in the tough 2019 German drama System Crasher , about a frighteningly volatile ward of the state who is passed from one agency to another, all her carers soon admitting she is beyond them. 'I was super young, you know,' she says. 'Back then, obviously I had fun saying these bad words! It was a cool time; I was able to do anything that kids shouldn't do. But I understood what was going on, I understood the topic and I took it seriously.' Loading The Legend of Ochi , as a family movie culminating in a clutch of benign messages about tolerance, diversity and the environment, is ostensibly that film's polar opposite, but Zengel notes that it doesn't condescend to younger audiences. Very young children might have eyes only for the baby Ochi, but there is a darkness at the heart of the story that could provoke uncomfortable questions for viewers of any age. 'I think there are adults who might take life lessons from it,' she says. 'It has beautiful side stories that it tells and things that you can project on today's society and today's life. So I think it's a very complex film.' Wolfhard agrees. 'I loved the script for just that reason. That, yes, kids could watch it, but it wasn't explicitly for children. I think movies made for kids in the last 15 years really try to spoon-feed children and assume they can't take in more nuanced themes.' Think of a great movie for children: almost everyone goes straight for The Wizard of Oz . 'I watched that as a kid and there's a lot of scary stuff in that movie. But life is scary!' says Wolfhard. 'Oh yes! I was traumatised by The Wizard of Oz !' enthuses Zengel. 'I like when children even at a young age see films or talk about things that are more serious.' A mother Ochi leaves her human counterpart in the shade in The Legend of Ochi. Credit: Madman Films Obviously, the Ochi are standing in for all the real animals that have been hunted or crowded out by humans – wolves, whales, tigers – at the same time as pushing a plea for peaceful co-existence that children readily understand. Closer to home, however, is the film's frankness about families' failings. Loading When Yuri runs away, mad Maxim dons some armour that could date back to Vlad the Impaler, gathers his boys and prepares to run his daughter to ground with a rifle. Dafoe's Maxim is ultimately a pathetically vulnerable man, but he's dangerous with it; Emily Watson, as the bolter, is hardly a cosy mother figure. They compare poorly with Ochi parents, who enfold their young in their fur, singing.
Sydney Morning Herald
25-07-2025
- Sydney Morning Herald
Killer kombucha and possessed vacuums: The weirdest films at MIFF this year
The Melbourne International Film Festival is known for showcasing the best of cinema, from lauded arthouse darlings to buzzy prestige pictures. But its most offbeat gems are usually hidden in the nooks and crannies of the program. Running between August 7 and 24, the festival is packed with cinematic oddities that aim to bewilder, provoke and surprise in a way conventional film often can't. From features about zombie kombucha to bizarre post-apocalyptic musicals, here are some of MIFF's weirdest offerings 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 Loading 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 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). Loading
