Body swaps, timewarps and other fresh hell – the Sitges film festival 2023
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, Ireland 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.
In Blackout, low-budget indie auteur Larry Fessenden adds a werewolf movie to his previous idiosyncratic takes on vampires (Habit) and
Frankenstein (Depraved), though his finest hour this year was as an actor in Ted Geoghegan’s tight huis clos, Brooklyn 45, convincing fellow survivors of the second world war to hold a seance so he can contact his late wife – with gruesome results! Meanwhile, anyone thinking that werewolves are deja vu could revive their jaded palate with the weretiger of Tiger Stripes, a refreshing debut from Malay director Amanda Nell Eu, in which an 11-year old girl’s menarche along with Carrie-type bullying at school trigger the ability to scamper up trees and sprout extra-long fingernails sharp enough to swipe off a human head.
If Poor Things leads the way in the kind of sex scenes and copious nudity that have lately been absent from mainstream cinema, there is also an invigorating absence of prudishness in Joe Lynch’s Suitable Flesh. Since the screenwriter is Dennis Paoli of Re-Animator and From Beyond fame, there’s a whiff of Lovecraft in this body swap yarn in which an ancient entity takes over the body of comely therapist Heather Graham (who hasn’t aged a day since Boogie Nights), with gloriously genderfluid results. Meanwhile, Best Regards to All combines body horror with crazy family hanky-panky when a young woman visiting her grandparents unearths a ghastly secret she has been suppressing since childhood. Comparisons in the programme to Kiyoshi Kurosawa were pushing it, but Yûta Shimotsu’s directing debut maps out its own uncanny territory. Also featured is an unnatural pregnancy, a theme taken to insane new heights in Paul Duane’s hallucinatory trip into Irish folk-horror, All You Need Is Death. While travelling around Ireland in search of rare ballads, a young couple stumbles across an ancient song containing dangerous properties, leading to a surreal outbreak of body horror and non-binary transformation. Duane, already an established documentarian, has made the sort of fiction debut that will haunt your nightmares.
There’s yet another unorthodox pregnancy in Embryo Larva Butterfly, a lyrical sci-fi delicacy from New Greek Wave director Kyros Papavassiliou. It’s set in a world where time is non-linear, so the characters wake up each morning trying to work out whether they’re in the past, present or future, with a Ministry of Lost Time on hand to help them keep track. But for laughout-loud temporal shenanigans you can’t beat River, written by Makoto Ueda and directed by Junta Yamaguchi, who scored a big festival hit in 2021 with their no-budget brain-scrambler Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes. River is slicker, but essentially more of the same, with staff and guests at a traditional Japanese inn trying to find a way to escape the two-minute time loop in which they’re trapped. At 86 minutes the film never outstays its welcome, yet finds just enough time to pause for a visual haiku or two.