Fantastic celebration 2025: camp, bad haircut, the theater is dead | Festivals and awards

My last dispatch of the genus Fest annual known as Fantastic Fest highlights three young filmmakers, a reminder of how much this event seeks to amplify new talents. It is also a remarkable showcase for inclusiveness, because the programming team research and raises the kind of voice that the Hollywood system often ignores, including the filmmakers and artists of LGTBQ of the world regions which are not sufficiently highlighted on the streaming services of the manufacturing of culture. The three films of this distribution are a mixed quality bag, but I admire the courage and the passion that it took to give them to life and cannot think of a better place so that they had their debut than Fantastic Fest.

The best of three is Avalon Fast “CAMP,” Who also won the Next Wave Award, a jurié prize, during this year’s event, making his filmmaker one of the youngest recipients of this prize at this prize at only 25 years old. Fast is an undeniable talent, a filmmaker who knows how to exploit repressed emotions and how to reflect the simmerical impact of cinematographic trauma. She made a film of witches for very unusual adolescents who first feels as if it could be a modern variation of something like “The Craft”, but what works best in this project, is the way he feels more concerned with transmitting something true emotionally than anything else. It is a story to overcome sorrow and forgive yourself, guided both by a vulnerable performance by Zola Grimmer and the confident sense of Fast of his tone and space.

Grimmer plays Emily, whom we testify suffer from a horrible tragedy at the start of the film when her friend overdose in front of her, after having made drugs from Emily. Blish for death, she becomes an advisor in a summer camp for adolescents in difficulty, without realizing before arriving that it is a religious institution. However, Emily discovers shortly after her arrival that there is a group of female advisers shaking their own path through life and faith, becoming listening to both the natural world around them and emotional truths in them.

“Camp” sometimes feels as if it was rushed towards a traditional story – a story of the age of age about a teenage girl forgiving with the help of her new friends in love with witchcraft – but what separates is not only the tonal adhesion of Fast all along, but her will to turn a left when you expect you to the right. Instead of offering PAT resolutions, the last act of “camp” becomes more tripp, capturing how forgiveness often takes a kind of natural treatment which cannot simply be put into words. It becomes something more like “virgin suicides”, using amorphous elements such as sorrow and mourning as narrative tools instead of easy responses. And if Fast continues to do it, she can become a filmmaker as interesting as the beloved director of this film.

A very different film, Kyle Misak “Bad haircut” is also a promising genre film, a strange horror / comedy which is a little harsh on the edges but contains enough intelligent narration to see it transform into a cult hit on the midnight cinema circuit. Sorry to be also direct, but this haircut needs a garnish – there is 15 to 20 minutes that could go and the fat around the edges holds it back to really work – but an intrepid performance by Frankie Ray and an unpredictable plot mainly maintain it.

Spencer H. Levin is effective as a shy kid Billy, convinced by his two best friends he needs a makeover, including a new hairstyle cup, an eccentric named Mick. Played by Frankie Ray, who looks a bit like Steven Tyler of Aerosmith was a hairdresser, Mick is one of those guys who are valid between entertaining and disturbing. When he insists that Billy’s friends tell him that they love him is strangely charming or simply strange? He calls his scissors “M. Snips “and will not take more than $ 7 for a cut, no authorized advice. It’s a strange duck, but probably harmless, right?

Of course not. Billy soon discovers that Mick has a very dark secret in his basement, triggering a series of events that mainly rotate “bad haircut” of a comedy for adolescents to a thriller. Even when we learn that he has made the unthinkable, Ray puts on a needle in which we find Mick interesting enough for us to just want to see him defeated. He is one of those foreigners of life who has become so tired of being the curious solid that he did something unforgivable to be a solo act.

Misak avoids a few opportunities to do something deeper and more and more rich with his characters in favor of a few stabs with a repetitive humor for too long, but it is really almost almost, a film with enough things for his players to continue to grow in future projects.

The same can be said for Katherine Dudas’ “The theater is dead”, A film that this theater child finds fun in theory even if the adult critic in me has found it too frustrating and amateur. A Faustian study in theatrical ambition, it too often looks like an approximate copy which required some additional passes in all production phases to be more polite. And yet, this roughness is what attracted others to Austin. The people involved in production are incredibly easy to tell, big examples of the Burnt Ends program with Fantastic Fest which amplifies the productions of micro-budgets, but that does not mean that it could not have been better.

Willow (Decker Sadowski) is in a little crisis in a quarter of life, wondering what she really wants to do with her life. Her father was an actor, and she decided to follow her traces, hearing for a role in an original play in the neighboring theater, managed by a mysterious figure named Matthew (Shane West). From the start, it is clear that Matthew has a dark secret, but Dudas avoids frustrating the horror elements of his production until she is forced to do so in the final act.

For too long, “Theater Is Dead” is really only a love letter to Smalltown productions, places where ambitious souls come together to play improvisation games and work on themselves while they work on their characters. The love of the Dudas for the theater takes place in these first scenes, but it almost seems that it never really wanted to make a horror film, and the film collapses roughly when it is forced to do it, rushing through revelations and coming in a frustrating and half -cooked way. If “Theater is dead” concerns how far people will go to become famous, Dudas is nothing new to add to this idea and it is a little strange that her heroine is a newcomer when he seems that it is the story of a veteran who reaches his last blow. Everyone clearly has fun in what is ultimately a pretty stupid film, but I would like to see Dudas make a real theater comedy then and leave all these dead things behind.