This week we’ll be highlighting three films that premiered at Fantastic Fest, to give you all a bit of an idea of what the prominent Austin-based film festival is all about. Those three films are There Will Be Blood, Let the Right One In, and I Saw the Devil. Each of these films represents some aspect or another of what makes Fantastic Fest so weird and unique.
In 2007, Paul Thomas Anderson surprised the festival with the world premiere of his latest film, There Will Be Blood. This American epic is one of the most ambitious, bold, stunning achievements in modern filmmaking, and that hasn’t changed a bit in the last seven years. Following the life of an oil tycoon named Daniel Plainview, the film marked a major stylistic and tonal shift in Anderson’s career. Up until that point, the American auteur had been defined by his reverential aping of Altman and Scorsese, crafting ambitious ensemble pieces about the worlds people inhabit.
But now, it seems like Anderson would rather be Kubrick, from the wordless opening 20 minutes to the screeching string score. There Will Be Blood has far more in common with the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange than anything else, taking us deep into the psyche of an ambitious sociopath fueled only by desire to dominate his world. Driven by Robert Elswit’s breathtaking cinematography and Jonny Greenwood’s harrowing score, the film finds its anchor in Daniel Day Lewis’ towering performance, the best ever in a career defined by greatness. It’s a monumental film that highlights the kind of ambitious, strange dramas likely to be found at Fantastic Fest, down to the film being shot just down the road in Marfa, Texas.
A year later, Thomas Alfredson’s icy vampire fable, Let the Right One In found its way to Austin, shocking and moving the crowd in a way no one saw coming. Set in the desolate winter of Sweden, the film follows the journey of a young boy who comes face to face with a monster: a vampire in the form of a little girl. They bond, simply because while he has respect for her power, he doesn’t fear and disgust her. Instead, his affections lean more towards curiosity and friendship. The film serves as a masterful metaphor for how we treat those who are different from us, and that hate is learned, not born. After all, children feel none of it in their hearts. It’s the kind of film that sounds like a run of the mill monster film on paper, but a great example of how Fantastic Fest can truly surprise you with something you’ve never seen before.
Finally, we come to Kim Jee-Woon’s brutal thriller, I Saw the Devil. After his wife is brutally murdered at the hands of a serial killer, a man goes on a hunt for the psychopath, opting to continuously torture him in small doses rather than killing him at once. It’s a classic revenge thriller wrapped in a “hunter becomes the hunted” package, but the psychological journey of the characters unfolds in the most unexpected manner imaginable. Imagine if Batman were chasing the Joker, but instead of bringing him back to Arkham immediately, he decided just to knock his ass out, then vanish, over and over again. That sounds thin on paper, but rest assured, the grotesque underbelly of murderers and psychopaths lurking in the world of this film will leave you shaken and devastated. After all, how does one fight evil without becoming evil itself? Typical of Fantastic Fest’s penchant for violent Asian cinema, it’s also indicative of that genre’s ability to be so much more than the gore and shock value.
