Fantasia 2018--Aragne: Sign of Vermillion--Saku Sakamoto (2018)

Rin's apartment building is a pretty grim place in Saku Sakamoto's Aragne: Sign of Vermillion (2018)

Full disclosure: I know very little about Japanese anime beyond Hideo Nakata, Osamu Tezuka, and The Ghost in the Shell films.  So to my delight, I discovered that Saku Sakamoto did the digital effects for Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004) and he was presenting the world premiere of his debut feature Aragne: Sign of Vermillion at Fantasia 2018.  The director and producer of the film were there for a Q &A and there even was a translator--who translated Japanese into French.  Heh.  My French is mal, tres mauvais, so I pretty much gleaned little from the film's introduction, other than how happy Sakamoto was to be there.  I was enthusiastic and swayed by the cool trailer.  Giant bugs crawling all over a city!

Rin runs away from a lot of creepy crawly scary s***

My grasp of the narrative is...limited, but I don't think that really matters all that much.  The film is a dread-filled atmospheric fever dream, and its ambiguities are part of its appeal.  Rin, a University student, has moved into a new apartment that is not at all like its been advertised.  Instead of a sunny, well-lit space, the rooms are more like bunker dorms, lined up on dank hallways, the building decrepit and looming.  It's basically a dump, and little wonder it's haunted.  Or is it?  Rin is not sleeping well in her new digs, passing out exhausted in her college classroom, and riddled with very disturbing dreams.  The imagery of the film is infused with a blood red ambiance, and one can never tell whether Rin is actually seeing things, or just hallucinating.  Important, but confusing backstory: medical experimentation was performed on people some 40-odd years ago, where they became delusional, hallucinating wrecks, victims of some weird plague, and this widespread disease, spread by spirit bugs, is consuming the city in present day.  Yeah, I know.  I told you I didn't have a great grasp of the narrative.  Meanwhile, Rin seems to be enamored of this brunette who's always dancing, and she's being chased by some masked serial killer with a portable circular hand saw or some such weapon.  Also, there are "dead soul soldiers" possessed by "spirit bugs" that she must run from over and over again.  Still following?

Scary people/creatures are constantly after Rin

The film deliberately blurs the lines between Rin's dreams and waking life, and the hi-jinks in her building indicate that Rin is what I like to call a "haunted heroine."  Something from her past is causing all these horrific manifestations, and every time she seems to grasp what that might be, it slips away from her (and the audience).  She encounters plenty of people who appear to verify that all this stuff is happening IRL, but is it??  This context is really confusing/fun, and adds something special to the truly marvelous and weird imagery.  Brains with insect legs crawling on top of Rin.  EWWW!  Because she seems to be hallucinating constantly, one wonders if she's contracted this disease people seem to have.  At other moments, nonsensical things happen, and I don't know why.  At one point, I wrote in my notes, "Why is she dragging a dead body?  To prove it's real?"  Yeah, this film isn't about easy, clear answers.  Also, the dancing brunette pops up on occasion to opine, "I wish you'd just die" to poor Rin.  At one point, she's strapped to a giant machine while bugs chew on her.  It's nuts!!

Spirits from Rin's past haunt her in the present

Despite my somewhat incoherent recitation of an incoherent plot, things actually make a lot of sense at the end; indeed, the ending tempts viewers to rewatch the film to see what subtle indicators might have been supplied along the way.  The film actually reminded me a great deal of Eyetan Rockaway's The Abandoned (2015), but I'm not going to say how exactly, so you can experience this twisted little gem all on your own.  The film clocks in at just over an hour, so it never drags, even in its most confusing moments.  Give it a shot!

Zombies as livestock, factory farmed for food, turn on their corporate "farmers" in Shinya Sugai's Walking Meat (2018)

The great thing about Fantasia, is viewers often get to see really fun and innovative short films that are cool, and hard to screen elsewhere.  That's why I highly recommend Shinya Sugai's debut Walking Meat (2018).  The short starts with a commercial for zombie food--that's zombies that humans eat as food, not food for zombies.  It seems that zombies are now considered livestock, kind of like cows, but angrier and far more deadly.  Also, these zombies are not zombie cows, but zombie people.  I'm surprised that someone hasn't thought about this idea already (have they??)  Why waste a good zombie, right?

The studious girl, the social media maven, and the incompetent geek boy all show up for their first day at work

The set-up is three obvious millennials show up for a corporate training session their first day on the job.  Of course, things get pretty hairy when the system malfunctions, and the zombies get loose.  Mayhem ensues!  Plenty of jokes litter what feels like a web series, with little pauses inserted and held occasionally, before the film moves on to the next zombie set piece.  The pace is frenetic and fun, and the film is really quite accomplished, with a great deal of tension, and a lot of slash 'em action too.  Really terrific and worth looking for once it emerges online.

The Abandoned--Eytan Rockaway (2015)

Julia/Streak's journey is rather harrowing in The Abandoned (Eytan Rockaway, 2015)

Why is it that so many creepy haunted spaces were formerly the home/burial ground for an insane asylum?  Julia (Louisa Krause) stumbles upon one in the majestically set "haunted heroine" film The Abandoned (Eytan Rockaway, 2015), encountering the gamut of well-preserved children's drawings, rickety beds covered in mysterious stains, and voices calling to her from every corridor and dank, dark hallway--all the ingredients for some derivative, but unsettling scares.  The film opens with Julia taking a cab to her new job as a night security guard at some gigantic, ornate, and sinister abandoned apartment building.  Spectators learn that she's a "haunted heroine" almost immediately, as she chats with her Mom on her phone; we find out that 1) she has a kid, and 2) she's gotten into some trouble, and this job is her "last chance," and 3) that she has to take her "medication."  Of course.  So, from the film's first moments we should not trust Julia's potentially crazy POV, as we go on this subjective journey with her.

Jason Patric is her curmudgeonly paraplegic co-worker Cooper

The first horror that Julia encounters is the grumpy as f*** Cooper (Jason Patric), who has been working as a security guard for quite some time, ruling over a set of surveillance cameras and chasing his coworkers away with rampant hostility.  Yes, he cannot use his legs, which makes him a curious candidate for guard duty, but hey, the film has to make him unhelpful in order to put Julia in serious peril.  The use of a head-cam as Julia walks around gives the film some really unnecessary surveillance footage--making the film even more derivative than it needs to be.  At least Julia isn't a secret ghost hunter, although that fact doesn't make the narrative any less ridiculous.

This mysterious abandoned apartment building looks suspiciously similar to Grand Central Station

The opulent setting of the film's abandoned apartment complex is what makes The Abandoned worth the watch--supposedly it was shot at the Prince George Ballroom in NYC, and some of the sets are pretty breathtaking.  Still, most of the film is shot in dank hallways and boiler rooms barely lit by a flashlight.  Now I love a good, scary hallway, but one really wonders why Julia, on her first night on the job, would decide to break the lock in a forbidden area of the building and go exploring.  Ah, to forward the plot, obviously.

A Heroine isn't truly "Haunted" without malevolent kid ghosts in the mix

As I mentioned earlier, seems that the apartment complex was actually an asylum housing the strangest menagerie of kids with issues, and they really don't like adults.  Mix in some weird poisoned water, neglectful caretakers, and angry ghosts abound.  One silly, but kind of fun scene has Cooper losing control of his wheelchair, as it speeds down the hallway by some kind of "force."  Just when you are truly wondering how Julia and Cooper will get out of this mess, the film switches gears and the ending MAKES NO SENSE.  It garnered a "wait...what?"  As per many desperate horror films, the twist makes you question everything that came before, and then the film SWITCHES BACK, making viewers question the previous ending.  While I can usually posit some type of interpretation (as an expert, natch), this film left me utterly puzzled--as if the filmmakers couldn't decide on an ending either, so let's have two contradictory ones!  The Abandoned is currently streaming on Netflix, and I'm on the fence whether to recommend it or not.  Like The Forest, I would say that there are some really great moments, but they don't make up for a film that really takes a header rather than nailing the landing.  Ooof.