Philadelphia Unnamed Film Festival Day One: Nias, Lampir, and Sincerely Saul

Philadelphia Unnamed Film Festival Day One: Nias, Lampir, and Sincerely Saul

For nine years and counting our wonderful city has been the home of PUFF — The Philadelphia Unnamed Film Festival! Each year the festival boasts a healing helping of genre delights, from hard-to-find features to international shorts to bizarre music videos to locally-shot shorts. The programming is non-stop, allowing breaks only for insightful Q&As, an awards ceremony, and even brunch. When it comes to DIY festival realness, no one serves unique cinematic treats quite like PUFF. It’s been a few years since I was last able to attend, but I’m happy to have my ass firmly parked in a seat for the 2024 edition. PUFF never disappoints, and #PUFF9 is no exception. 

Here are the features I caught on day one:

Nias (dir. Baptiste Rambaud)
While not a found footage flick per se, Nias utilizes the tools of the subgenre to great effect by telling a low-key heist story from the point of view of a cat carrier box. There’s no camera canonically attached to said carrier, but every single shot in the film exists as if there were, giving the viewer a unique perspective on the action — one that is almost always very close to the ground. 

The film follows Noémie, a cat-sitter who, upon seeing what she considers an egregious wound on Nias, a cat in her care, decides to take the furry little guy away from its home, much to the dismay of the family — especially that of the violent, rambunctious young daughter. 

Nias is a film that gets a lot of mileage out of its ambiguities. We never see the alleged wound, nor do we get a full picture of any of the lead characters’ mental states. As such, allegiances switch regularly and shocking moments are often undercut by even more shocking moments, leading to a deeply unsettling (and also quite ambiguous) ending. I would like to see it a second time in order to parse out some of the finer details, and Nias is a film that lends itself to such a thing. There might not be a single “good guy” in the entire film…

What I can confirm is this: if anyone on this planet tries to harm my cat in any way, it will be their death. Don’t try me.  

 

Lampir: The Immortal Witch (dir. Kenny Gulardi)
Indonesian cinema is having a moment right now, especially in the realm of supernatural horror. But for every Joko Anwar who finds success in the American market, there are a handful of other filmmakers whose names haven’t quite found their way to our shores. 

Enter Kenny Gulardi, whose Lampir is a take on the “young people in a haunted cabin” movie, only instead of a cabin it’s a beautiful vacation home, and instead of a crew of college kids, it’s a wedding party letting off some steam and grabbing some photos before the big day. It’s a little bit The Evil Dead, a little bit Burnt Offerings, and a whole lot of any of those early-aughts ensemble flicks where everyone’s head is floating on the box art. 

While the visuals are occasionally flat and the story takes a bit too much time to get going, the characters are a blast to be around, and the script finds myriad ways in which to split them up, swap them around, and motivate them to mistrust one another. Once the film finally lets it rip, it’s a scare-a-minute affair until the credits roll. There are instances when the limited budget dulls the teeth of the material, which can be frustrating. At other times, these same limitations are cleverly utilized by the resourceful filmmakers. In a better world, Gulardi and his team would have the means to let this material breathe a little more. With a bigger budget, Lampir could have a fair amount of crossover appeal. As is, it will surely find a home and an audience on one of the many horror streamers out there that I already pay too much for but can’t bring myself to get rid of. 

 

Sincerely Saul (dir. Ian Tripp)

Shot in grainy black & white, this lo-fi freakout flick tells the story of the titular Saul, a lonely young man who is stuck caring for his bedridden, ungrateful grandmother. Granted, Saul is his own worst enemy, and he’s currently stuck going to group therapy on account of having quite publicly declared that he’d take his own life if he’s still a virgin come the time of his 27th birthday. 

It would be sad to watch if it weren’t so squirm-inducingly funny. Saul (played by a deeply committed Ryan Schafer) is not a pleasant man to be around, nor is it surprising that he’s never had sex before. He’s pitiable only to a point and his suicidal threats don’t play as empty woe-is-me provocations. 

As a portrait of an increasingly common type of young man, Tripp’s film is as alarming as it is enlightening. As a comedy, well, I don’t know who to recommend it to, but if you’re the type to get this sort of thing you’ll surely giggle as much as I did. But where Sincerely Saul is most successful is as a visually discordant cinematic experiment. The program for PUFF touts Eraserhead vibes which, despite being a common misdiagnosis in film circles, could not be more accurate. If Eraserhead is about the anxieties of familial responsibility, Sincerely Saul is about the anxieties of wanting any sort of functioning family at all. 

Shout out to Brendan Cahalan, whose Verne makes for a great mirror image to Saul. He’s in a similar social boat, but he has a much sunnier outlook. Although he is admittedly not nearly as good as Saul at crank phone calls.