Voidcaller (dir. Nils Alatalo)
Nothing says “good morning, get your brain ready for a whole day of movies” quite the way a complete head trip like Voidcaller does. Shot in stark black and white, this heady freakout tells the tale of a young woman suffering from amnesia who seeks out a specialized treatment to try and reconstitute her lost memories. She soon finds that others are suffering from a similar malady, and that their collective experience may be connected to something bigger and moe ethereal than our physical reality can contain.
This film’s high-sci-fi is a lot to ask an audience to engage with so early in the day, but the overall vibe is hypnotizing, placing viewers in a trance that allows the film to explore big ideas in surreal ways. As the answers to our protagonists questions start to clarify, the film itself descends into a state of cosmic terror that makes effective use of the meme-like imagery and sleepy audio.
Any single image in Voidcaller would feel right at home in a modern art gallery, yet the film never loses its narrative thrust in exchange for surface-level pleasures. I was admittedly sleepy when the film began, and by the end, had I not been eating delicious snacks, I could have been convinced that I’d fallen into the void myself (this is a compliment).
Carnage for Christmas (dir. Alice Maio Mackay)
I wanted to like this moody crime thriller/slasher flick more than I did, but even so, there’s a lot to appreciate here. Mackay is a talented and prolific filmmaker (take a look at her filmography to see how much work she puts out at a clip), but the level of filmmaking craft rises way above the material here. Yes, there’s a fair amount of intentional camp, but the film’s serious tone betrays the goodwill that said camp typically affords. Even so, you have to root for a movie that’s attempting to do so much with so little.
Lola (Jeremy Moineau) is a true crime podcaster who is visiting her hometown for the first time since undergoing gender transition. Her arrival is met with what seems to be the reappearance of a long dead murderer. Could it be that his ghost remains an active killer?
There are few things on this planet more aesthetically pleasing than Christmas horror, and Mackay lays it on thick (the killer wears a Santa suit —delightful), creating a chilly vibe that does wonders to pave over the limitations of the script. One area where the said script excels, however, is in integrating the social difficulties of Lola’s reintroduction post-transition into a place that, if the world were kind, would be seen as her home. At a time when so many trans narratives are about suffering, Lola is a no-nonsense, tough as nails protagonist who exhibits her identity with a contagious verve. Her attitude gives some of the less organic dialgoue a fun edge, even if it occasionally feels like it was torn from the pages of a Law & Order spin-off.
Párvulos (dir. Isaac Ezban)
Again and again we reach a point where it seems like nothing new can be done within the post-apocalyptic zombie genre, and while that rings true for the bulk of low-budget horror output, occasionally something unique squeezes through and delivers something innovative, moving, and scary. Párvulos is that movie.
The reason why this Mexican thriller works so well and feels so fresh is that the zombie material is not its central focus. This is primarily a drama about three brothers doing their best to stay sane and alive in a world that no longer views them as essential. Much in the way the original A Quiet Place focused on family rather than the aliens that have functionally ended the world, Párvulos compels in its quieter, more human moments (don’t worry, it delivers on the horror goods as well).
The visuals adhere to a sepia tone that features only slight amounts of color. It’s easy to start thinking of it as black and white until a notable bit of color suddenly pops relative to everything else in the frame. It gives the story an appropriately quaint feel that is regularly punctuated by reminders that it’s a contemporary story.
Mateo Ortega Casillas, Leonardo Cervantes, and Farid Escalante Correa give three of the best performances of the year. They feel like real brothers, and the dynamic between them uses their differing ages and physicalities to incredible emotional effect. When the film’s big secret (just what is in the basement?) is revealed, it becomes clear how nuanced and thoughtful each individual performance is, while recontextualizing everything that came before. Párvulos is a film that I would have admittedly dismissed as a Redboxer upon a surface assessment, and I’d have been dead wrong to do so.
Jeffrey’s Hell (dir. Aaron Irons)
The outright scariest movie of PUFF goes to Jeffrey’s Hell, a found footage feature that will make you wonder why anyone would ever spend even a second exploring a cave. Fuck caves. I don’t even like to share a bench with anyone on account of feeling boxed in. There is no amount of money you could pay me to scooch on my belly through the tiny twists and turns of an unmapped cave.
And let’s be real, I’m not going through a mapped cave either.
Jeffrey’s Hell is a sequel to Irons’ previous film The Chest, but it doesn’t require its predecessor in order to work. This is because it’s a sort of meta sequel. Instead of directly continuing the story of the first film, Hell steps outside of the canonical narrative and tells a story about the filmmaker himself, who has decided to further explore the terrain that inspired the first film. Following a set of coordinates from a mysterious source, he enters a region called, you guessed it, Jeffrey’s Hell. Per the surrounding lore, Irons was never seen again, and what we’re watching are the recordings of his final hours.
Irons captures the innards of the cave with a beauty matched only by the feeling of oppressive isolation that these images generate. This leads to an experience that is terrifying long before anything explicitly supernatural happens. Much like The Descent, the cave itself is scary enough…and then shit gets crazy.
Low-budget found footagers are a risky undertaking, especially if the form is used as a cost-cutting measure rather than a storytelling tool, but in the case of Jeffrey’s Hell the framing device is employed organically and adhered to flawlessly, placing it well above many films of its ilk. Credit to the producers of PUFF for screening this one late at night and killing ALL of the lights in the venue. It was remarkably transportive. You could’ve heard a pin drop in the theater.
Scratch that — you could hear the dripping of nervous sweat in the theater.
