Fantasia 2025: Snake skin, well, softness | Festivals and awards

Our next dispatch from the Fantasia 2025 International Film Festival turns their eyes to the fate of young women who arrive at maturity – a variety of gender disorders, from ecological apocalypes to parasocial obsession with thorny complications of emerging transfer.

First, of course, we have to talk about “Snake skin”, “ The latest “transgender film” (as credits proudly restore) of the Australian Trans Promenade Alice Maio Mackay, who, at the age of twenty, has already made six feature films. (These include “T blockers” and “Carnage for Christmas”, which were both presented in previous fantasia). Mackay’s works have all had the charming aesthetic DIY of an Ed Wood, a film student who just wants to make fun films with his friends; But as she continues to Itatrier, her works become more assured in their profession, their concentration and (above all) their use of gender to explore the difficult experience of transgration.

Here, in Mackay’s most assured work to date, she builds a kind of “scanners” for dolls, while a young trans named Anna (Alexandre McVicker) moves with her sister Dakota (Charlotte Carimes) to start again in a new place to find herself with new amazing mental capacities. They come, of course, after having sex with the hottie in their building, Danny (Jordan Dulieu), whose fuckoi smolder is reinforced by the tattoo “Fuck Trump” on his arm and the relaxed and warm acceptance when Anna warns him that “I am trans”.

It is not a connection of love, however, because Anna quickly entered the orbit of Gen (Avalon Lux), a cool and dissatisfied tattoo artist who feels the nascent powers that Anna holds. She too has mental powers, which both allow them to play with people’s minds and “jump” their brain cells if they try something funny. The two fall into a swirling romance, while Gen teaches Anna how to master his powers and the pair is struggling to navigate in the complicated relational dynamics of their group of friends (like so many Queer gen z circles, it is a disorderly mixture of exes and beggians and jealousy). But their love and possessiveness trigger a demon who infects Danny, letting them understand how to save their community from friends.

Like Jane Schoenbrun, Mackay apparently brings the influence of gender television from the 90s on her sleeve; “I saw the Glow TV” and “Serpent’s Skin” feels debt at the teenage thriller camp in Save and Mistuux like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “The Craft”. But it filters these stories from across the front and resilience through a trans lens; The central metaphor, a tattoo of a hemoboros that activates the powers of our characters, echoes the skin loss that occurs, whether physically or figured, in transition. Under the presentation of Mackay’s Lo-Fi (the special effects carry their own charm to low rent), she demonstrates a remarkable feeling of rhythm and crafts for someone her age, whether in the store conversations of patient patients or the care and heat of Anna’s meetings with one of her lovers throughout the film. In the midst of all the sapphic delights of the Goth girl of “the skin of the snake”, there is a call to the community and its importance for queer, disorderly and imperfect too.

But sometimes, all that a girl has to worry is the end of the world, where Hubert Davis’ “The well” finds its central conflict. His opening titles, which contrast images of young girls who swim on the exposure of information from the humanity water crisis, make us in a “last of us” / “Walking dead” is post-apocalypse, but an ecological disaster and a drought rather than zombies. However, vanity remains familiar: a very united family, seen through the objective of the young Sarah (Shailyn Pierre-Dixon) shakes on their family plot in the middle of the woods, tending to their garden and their animals, and (especially) the well which offers them invigorating water in a world where it is extremely rare. But their peace is threatened by the presence of an injured young man named Jamie (Idrissa Sanogo), who meets their camp and discovers their secret. However, what starts as a crisis becomes an opportunity, because the well itself needs a replacement filter, and its camp could be able to help. So against the wishes of her parents, Sarah fled with Jamie to meet her group, led by the leader Mercurial Gabriel (the Canadian legend of the Sheila McCarthy screen).

From there, “The Well” embarks on a patient – perhaps too patient – Journey of Discovery, because Sarah spends a little time with the Gabriel group, which makes her feel updated in a way that her human life has no longer done it. How risky would it be to bring them back to benefit from their well? Does this take advantage of you, when the world has closed, to continue to treat your human colleagues as a community rather than threats? Davis tries to weave these questions through all interactions, but there is an introduction to the point in the script and the rhythm that leave these somewhat insufficient concerns. The performances are universally asleep, with only McCarthy being able to exploit a kind of silent depth of his besieged chief. And the conflicts themselves rarely come to a head; It is a dilemma delivered with too much euphemism to be really effective. There is hope at the end of the tunnel, but “the well” is unfortunately dry long before.

Obsession tales are nothing new, but at least Emma Higgins’ “Candy” Play the blows with a remarkable style and an acidic language. If “the snake skin” is Gen-Z “The Craft”, “Sweetness” is the “misery” of Generation, according to a 16-year-old clumsy girl named Rylee (Kate Hallett), who burst the miseries of the school and the new girlfriend of her father with her eternal love to adler Pop / Rock Idoles Payton Adler (Herman Tømmaera) SO-SO-SO-BRIDRITY in pioneer interviews. She has a sanctuary of him erected in his room, and even practices what she would say if she has ever been able to meet and seduce.

But when she and her best friend, Sidney (Aya Furukawa), go to a concert to see her group, Floorplan, Fate collide Rylee and Payton together when she discovers that he is always addicted and overdosed. One thing leads another, and Payton ends up handling the Rylee bed to become sober. But for Rylee, it becomes clear that this bad night has broader implications for her, because she takes her Savior complex at dangerous, even fatal levels.

More than “misery”, the “sweetness” also reminded me of the third disastrous and disastrous act of the weekend film just as miserable “Hurch up Tomoring”, in which a crazy fan is linked him to a bed and requires that he is answering for his songs. But “sweetness” manages this scenario with much more care, especially because it gives room for the two complicated and friendly characters in its center. Rylee does a good part of horrible things in pursuing the sobriety, confidence and affection of Payton, but Hallett goes beyond these things with the kind of despair that has just really believed that you are doing the right thing for someone. Tømmentaas, with his Robert Pattinson cheekbones and his despair with wild eyes, also manages to complicate our sympathies with his own average sequence and a proof of non-stop pressure from celebrities and drug addiction. (His songs, graciousness of the Canadian composer trio Blitz // Berlin, adequately sell the catchy banality of his ballads, with the kind of words that fall on the deaf ears to adults but are catnip to emotionally vulnerable teenagers like Rylee.)

While bad circumstances accumulate and Rylee’s struggle to control its spiral situation is becoming more and more desperate, Higgins continues to go up the tension dial to unbearable volumes. And his last moments offer a last sinister thumb in the eyes of anyone expects a kind of justice or responsibility. But it’s life, and it’s “sweetness”. And it’s very, very effective.