Montreal-based Fantasia Festival has become a beacon of sorts for me, a landmark event that gives shape, and oftentimes purpose, to the rest of my summer. Even though I cover the fest remotely, it still provides me with much excitement; getting through a day knowing I have a bank of wonderful, edgy, scintillating genre films to move through is a heavenly feeling, like coming home to a warm, sumptuous meal.
The thing about Fantasia is that it never disappoints, just by virtue of its premise and breadth. With a focus on genre films from around the world, the festival is able to pedestal films that wouldn’t land on many people’s radars through traditional channels and mainstream festivals. And because these films come, for the most part, from the borders of the mainstream, they offer ways of seeing the world — ways of understanding the verboten or the terrifying — that challenge, upset, thrill, and satisfy.
Though I wasn’t able to experience the full gamut of films the festival showcased this year, I did watch a handful that made me consider and reconsider our place within the world, ponder a return to nature, and interrogate the binds of civility and civilization.
Here are some quick thoughts on a few of my favourite watches at Fantasia 2026!
NIGHTBORN: This film, written by Hanna Bergholm and Ilja Rautsi, and directed by Bergholm, blurs the line between goodness and badness — specifically when it comes to femininity and motherhood — in a way that will stay with you a long while. Saga (Seidi Haarla) and Jon (Rupert Grint) are a newlywed couple absolutely ecstatic about starting a family of at least three kids together. They move into Saga’s family home in the Finnish countryside — a property on the edge of a lush, sighing, eerily alive and watchful forest that’s littered with cold iron — and waste no time in getting pregnant. But the arrival of their firstborn brings with it changes in Saga and challenges for Jon that neither expected.
References to Rosemary’s Baby abound, but Bergholm and Rausti do a good job of moulding their inspiration for their own purposes. As Saga struggles to look after her baby, we see the titanic psychological and physical work involved in caring for a child, and just how contorting it can be. This film devilishly plays not only with perceived and preconceived notions of what a mother ought to be like, but also skewers a certain tone-deafness when it comes to modern and mainstream iterations of feminism. Jon is at once helpful and overbearing as he fulfills his duties as a father, and Saga is at once difficult to be around and justified in her wrath. There is no right way to be a mother, and having a baby is a great strain on a relationship; this we know. But Nightborn’s gift lies in its depiction of the various societal elements — impossible obligations to put on a brave face, to be social, to take a lot of photos of her baby — that pull at a new mother, alongside its portrayal of how women tend to become “unlikeable” under pressure. This film doesn’t pass judgement on Saga so much as it presents her in her complexity as a woman pulled by societal expectations, a yearning for a wild life, and the demands of her long-abiding personality. Nightborn is meaty and complex and well worth your time.
NO REST FOR THE WICKED: It’s not often that a film so swiftly sweeps me off my feet. Following a young fisherman (Egor Venned) who falls irrevocably in love with a mysterious whaler (Pilou Asbæk), this film feels like a spiritual sibling to Portrait of a Lady on Fire for the way it lingers in the space between gazes, meanders through the soft contours of smiles that wrinkle around the eyes, hums with desire, and throbs with love. Director Kasper Kalle’s hand is deliberate and intricate as he explores waves of passion — how it can be ignited at first glance, and how it leads, through touch and shared breath, to undying love, the kind that keeps the soul aflame long after the body has passed away. Endlessly romantic and draped in the lace of an aged folklore, No Rest for the Wicked was my favourite Fantasia watch this year.
THE FATED HOUR: This short film, directed by Peter Hengl, feels like a dream. Based on a German ghost story from the early nineteenth century, The Fated Hour is about a young woman on the night before her wedding, watching as she reckons with the psychic predictions made by her deceased sister. As the clock ticks closer to that fated hour that will unravel Florentine’s (Alina Schaller) life, she recalls her beloved sister Seraphine (Fanny Altenburger), who was touched by the angels and died young. All gossamer and soft light, The Fated Hour is a precious trinket of a film, and watching it feels like remembering stories told in hushed voices by candlelight in a long-ago yet cherished childhood.
HOME BODIES: One of the most compelling sci-fi thrillers I have seen in recent years, Casey Walker’s Home Bodies follows teenaged twins Blue and Red, played by real-life twins Ian Ho and Emma Ho, respectively. They have spent their lives within a small home that is powered by a benign, paternalistic entity, similar to the AI being that keeps the house functioning in Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains.” The twins’ peaceable and ordered life is disturbed by the appearance of an androgynous humanoid being who slowly but surely prods the kids toward individuation, whatever that may look like for each of them. Home Bodies’ premise is brilliantly simple, and the rules that govern the little world it paints are straightforward. It is this deft simplicity that allows for the film to work so well as a parable, allegory, or metaphor — that is, it is able, with titanic strength, to support whatever reading you might find in it as a viewer. It can be a story about coming of age; a consideration of the meaning of parenthood; a criticism of the surveillance state, technology’s impact on nature, or its ability to use the husks of our old communities to power the new. Whatever meaning you find in it, what is undeniable is that Home Bodies is sharp, intelligent, and impeccably carried by its young cast.
