Anton Bitel is a regular attendee at Fantasporto we both served in the jury last year. He, this year, juries the film from the Directors week.

He writes a lot about fantasy and horror and has a spectacular platform https://projectedfigures.com/ where he publishes his reviews, here below a few excerpts on those gathered at Fantasporto.

Entangled (2019)

Entangled sets out its stall early, with a voiceover from Loretta (Paloma Kwiatkowski) about the multiverse which we have all heard about from sci-fi and comic books, and the likelihood that if someone in one universe is attempting to make contact with another, someone else in a parallel, near-identical universe will inevitably be trying to do the same. Science prodigy Loretta, is conducting just such an experiment with her boyfriend Danny (Robert Naylor), and their friends Amy (Sandra Mae Frank) and Gerry (Munro Chambers) when an unexpected result leads them out on a rushed field trip to the nearby lake, and to a road collision in which Loretta is killed.

All this is held together by genre material drawn from the doppelgänger thriller, as one character, who regards this parallel world as a “3D playground”, sets about eliminating all likenesses in order to realise the darkest of dreams. Indeed, Entangled is playing with the same box of ideas that recently produced James Ward Byrkit’s Coherence (2013), John V. Soto’s The Gateway (2018) and Isaac Ezban’s Parallel (2018). 

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Infection (Infección) (2019)

A novel strain of bat-derived rabies spreads rapidly, transforming its victims into ravenous, bite-happy zombies, and leading a small band of survivors to struggle for their very lives against increasingly overwhelming odds. We have been here before: after all, the only thing that proliferates faster than a contagious disease is the sheer number of films (and TV shows, games, novels, etc.) concerned with the undead apocalypse. Yet while these vary greatly in quality as they shuffle – or in this case run – through their well-worn tropes, there is the sense that a country must release a local version of this global film type in order to rewrite its place on the cinematic map. So even if Flavio Pedota’s Infection (Infección) is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the first film of its kind, it is, certainly and categorically. Venezuela‘s first zombie film – and the novelty of this setting alone ensures that the film represents a variant strain on an otherwise familiar subgenre.

Unsurprisingly, Infection has been banned in its native Venezuela, and not, one suspects, for its visual horror (which is relatively restrained). The film’s final scenes, showing an exodus of Venezuelans in search of a better life across the border, intercuts fake vox pops about the stigma of Venezuela’s disease with real footage of migrants marching en masse. This further serves to break down any distinction between art and life. For in this feature film infected with reality, the ravages of ideology are the true plague.

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Precarious (2020)

Precarious is a film of tight spots. When we first meet its hero Henry (Andrey Pfening), he is injured, unconscious and handcuffed, in a small bedroom crammed with police officers watching closely over his bed. Thereafter his mysterious escapades will take him from secret crawlspace to locked supply room to phone booth to mobile library to treehouse to tent to mine shaft to sunken room to chimney – all narrow settings which hem him in and impede his ability to take action (not that he ever stops trying). Meanwhile Henry is also a prisoner of his own wounded body as it undergoes a peculiar, painful metamorphosis that increasingly roots him to the ground. All Henry wants is the missing motorbike that he designed and built himself, and the missing key that will enable it (and him) to ride on the open road once more – but instead his mobility is repeatedly kept in check. Yet in this feature debut from writer/director/editor/cinematagrapher Weston Terray, collaborating closely with art designer Louise Franco, the one thing that comes entirely unconstrained is the imaginativeness of both the film’s narrative trajectory and its visual landscape.

UnTrue (2019)

So says Mara (Cristine Reyes) of her missing husband as she is interviewed by a police officer at the beginning of writer/director Sigrid Andrea Bernardo’s UnTrue – and before she even launches into her story of a marriage marred by unstable behaviour and domestic violence, the horrific bruising across her face already tells its own tale. Mara will narrate her meet-cute with wine dealer Joachim (Xian Lim), the relationship that blossoms between these two Filipino exiles in Georgia, and the emerging signs that an undisclosed past dogs Joachim’s conscience, occasionally bringing episodes of paranoid delusion and psychotic aggression. Mara’s story, shown in flashback, is a loving romance that gets tied up in a tragedy of madness.

UnTrue is concerned with irreconcilable differences and the unity of opposites, both in its principal relationship and in its divided narrative. Forming the film’s centrepiece is the famous statue of Kartlis Deda in Tbilisi, a miniature reproduction of which sits on the policeman’s desk. The ‘Mother of Georgia’ carries a bowl of grapes in one hand for her friends, and a sword in the other for her enemies – and as such, she not only symbolises the duality of the Georgian character, but also embodies the binary nature of love and hate which drives the film.  The question is which of these characters holds the grapes, and which wields the sword – and the answer may well just be that, like the statue, these two complex, contradictory characters can handle both items, as they engage in a dialectic of male and female, past and present, wrath and forgiveness.

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