Our reviews from this year’s film festival.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
Jane Schoenbrun’s fever dream return to the NZIFF – following 2024’s I Saw The TV Glow – is a masterclass in meta modern film. This sexy-sad horror sees Kris (Hannah Einbinder) set off to recreate a cult favourite horror series Camp Miasma, with studio heads hoping this young queer filmmaker can give this series a new (and woke) lease on life. She’s intent on tracking down Billy Preston (Gillian Anderson) – the final girl from the first Camp Miasma movie – a Norma Desmond-type recluse whom she hopes may reprise her former role.
From there, reality and fantasy fold into one. It’s pretty campy in its delivery, with blood erupting from decapitated victims like the plumes of Pompeii. There’s also the beautifully handpainted winter backdrops, which give the film a very surrealist but delicate feel. Once Kris and Billy cross paths, it’s clear that revitalising the Camp Miasma series isn’t just a dream career move for Kris – it’s a chance for her to confront how her obsession with horror and pop culture has shaped her relationship with romance and sex.
I truly adored this film. There’s so much in it for fans to digest, from the gender dysphoric villain Little Death to the themes it shares with I Saw The TV Glow. It’s funny, devastating and gory, and I’m happy to call it: Teenage Sex and Death is a generational slasher film. Which made for an excellent double feature alongside Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex – two films centering on the ways popular culture has forever fucked up the way we fuck. / Lyric Waiwiri-Smith
I Want Your Sex
It’s Sunset Boulevard for the gooner generation, but queer auteur Gregg Araki’s first film in 10 years may also be his most heterosexual – and tame – yet. For 90 kaleidoscopic minutes, audiences are lathered in lube and wrapped up in the dom-sub relationship between provocative modern artist Erika (Olivia Wilde) and her younger intern Elliott (Cooper Hoffman), a lost 23-year-old whose vague life ambitions include starting a podcast. Cheeks are spread, whips are cracked and your theatre will be echoing with the cries of Elliot calling himself a whore.
The film opens at its end, working its way back through the equal parts hot and toxic dynamic between our leads. After Elliott joins the harem of mindless, gum chewing interns making Erika’s art for her, he quickly falls under his boss’s sexy spell and becomes her boy toy. In the process, he breaks off his relationship with his girlfriend Minerva (Charli XCX), whose main character trait is having essentially no interest in anything Elliott is doing, and butchers his friendship with his roommate Apple (Chase Sui Wonders) following a botched threesome.
The central tension of this film is how the sexless lives of the Zoomers (Elliott) rub up against the sex-positive/crazed millennials (Erika). From a Gen Z perspective: oh God, Araki may be right. Too many of us have lost the art of even being able to flirt thanks to our sheltered, online lives, and perhaps we should be getting way freakier with it. At the same time, there’s that other tension that never quite gets ironed out, of a sexually aggressive boss using her docile employee as her sex toy. But it should be said that Araki’s best reflection of Gen Z’s trademark aloofness is in Apple, who tells Elliott that Minerva “should kill herself, I’ve always said that.”
It’s not as surrealist or acidic as the likes of Nowhere, but that makes it one of Araki’s more accessible films. If what you want out of a cinema experience is laughs, pop art and leather play, you’re in for a treat. / LWS
The Fox
One of Sam Neill’s final performances is as a potty mouthed little shit magpie. And it is glorious. I could sense the entire audience at The Roxy melt at the magpie’s first line, spoken in that warm, familiar voice: “Don’t listen to that bitch!”
The Fox is a darkly funny folktale about dysfunctional relationships and that futile desire to change a person. When big, blokey Nick discovers his fiancé Kori is having an affair with her boss he’s convinced by a cheeky little fox (voiced by Olivia Colman) that it’s possible to change Kori into the woman Nick wants her to be. Nick takes the bait and pushes Kori into a large, apparently magical hole in the middle of a lush and ominous Aussie forest. The premise reminded me of Obsession’s Willow Wish: another play on that timeless, hopeless trope of rejected male seeking a supernatural solution to their problems.
When Kori turns up at the house a few days later, naked and covered in mud stains, the story takes off. She’s definitely different. But who is she really? While the story didn’t quite hang together for me, the film was made by the performances. All the leads were incredibly strong and carried the deadpan comedy perfectly; Sam Neill was a scene stealer as the crafty magpie, and Coleman’s plummy voice was inspired casting for a manky fox scrounging for human prey. Miranda Otto is glorious too as a bogan bartender with a secret.I was enchanted by the animal characters which were all animatronic puppets: deeply nostalgic of 80s movies like The Labyrinth which intensified the fantasy and heightened the magic.
The Fox is 90 minutes of great fun and beautiful cinematography (I didn’t know Australia could be so green!) – and a bittersweet spell for fans of Sam Neill. / Claire Mabey
LittleAmélieor The Character of Rain
I was destroyed by this beautiful film. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. It opens withAméliein the place we are before birth declaring she is a god. The family are Belgian but live in Japan for her dad’s work as a diplomat. Once bornAmélieisn’t like her siblings: her god-like state means it’s difficult to connect with the outside world and emerge from her bubble (depicted literally). Nobody really sees her, understands her, and as a non-verbal, unresponsive baby she’s soon ignored (but not unloved). Everything changes when her grandmother offers her, at age two-and-a-half, a piece of white chocolate: joy bursts forth and language too! Her first words are “vacuum cleaner”. From thereAméliedevelops her relationships and particularly to Nishio-san, the family’s Japanese housekeeper and nanny who adores her right back.
Amélie’s inner world is intense and complex; her thoughts audacious and beautiful and at times, terribly dangerous. The animation style is without lines: so every person, object, thing is composed in layers of colour which makes for a dreamy, explosively colourful world that mirrorsAmélie’sintensity of feeling. I loved the language so much I searched for a script and learned the film is in fact based on a 2000 novel byAmélieNorthomb. I can’t wait to read it and see how directors Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han translated the book into this magnificent, surreal portrait of a child’s most fundamental years on this earth. / CM
Saccharine
With the Ozempic era in full force and celebrities wasting away before our very eyes, I was hugely excited about Saccharine, a new body horror taking aim at our toxic weight-loss culture and the endless pursuit of smallness. Directed and written by Australian horror savant Natalie Erika James (Relic), Saccharine joins a proud tradition of The Substance, Grafted, Shell and other such campy, beauty-at-a-price explorations of The Shit Women Go Through.
It follows a Hana (Midori Francis), a medical student prone to junk food binges who is also hellbent on losing weight, which may or may not have something to do with the willowy gym instructor that keeps catching her eye. But after meeting up with an old friend who has undergone a dramatic body transformation, Hana finds a quicker solution than stair-climbs: a mysterious pill called “The Grey” which sheds mega-pounds within a matter of days.
But as in all these films, and indeed often in real life, this magic bullet medicine always comes at a price. Without giving too much away, the macabre origins of “The Grey” unlock a tormented spirit which unleashes hell on Hana. Despite her never looking better, her life soon becomes a living nightmare of blackouts and hauntings, all while she takes to increasingly dramatic measures to keep her weight loss tracking downwards in her bullet-journal.
There are oodles of stomach-turning special effects, but I was ultimately left a little confused about what Saccharine was actually trying to say. While the social media sequences effectively capture our modern hellscape (I had to Google whether the fictional “potato masher challenge” was real or not), there’s also a strange subplot about Hana’s morbidly obese, housebound father which felt cruel and unnecessary. A lot to chew over, but ultimately left me hungry. / Alex Casey
The History of Concrete
At various points during John Wilson’s debut feature documentary I wondered: is anyone here because they were interested to learn about the history of concrete? From the gentle chuckles elicited by Wilson’s signature visual puns and inspired juxtapositions it seemed most were familiar with or at least aware of his HBO series How To with John Wilson. But you never know with film fest audiences.
If anybody was there purely for the concrete this was probably the flop of the fest. But as a Wilson admirer hoping to enjoy a feature-length bonus episode of his TV show it was everything I could have hoped for, though also maybe proof that you can have too much of a good thing.
Basically the video diary of an out-of-work filmmaker, it starts with him attending a Hallmark movie workshop during the writers’ strike and then attempting to use the lessons to make and sell the very documentary we’re watching. There are, of course, endless diversions – some funny, some bleak, often both, like when he’s randomly invited to attend a ceremony where Kim Kardashian is awarded GQ’s Man of the Year.
I could watch John Wilson wander into weird situations with weird people for hours, but ultimately The History of Concrete convinced me the 25-minute episode is probably the ideal format for his style of video essay. If you haven’t seen How To yet, you should definitely start there. / Calum Henderson
Nuisance Bear
The joke is on me for booking this film based on the image and title alone, fully expecting a light-hearted Bears Do the Darnedest Things-style romp. Filmed in the icy tundra town of Churchill in Canada, the documentary untangles a much more complicated and profoundly devastating situation, as the desperate, hungry polar bears in the area encroach further into the community against a backdrop of colonisation and climate catastrophe.
There are so many surreal, beautiful images throughout Nuisance Bear that sum up the bizarre, precarious situation locals have found themselves in, from the buses of hokey tourists pretending to be Caribou with their arms in the air, to a tranquilised polar bear with a Survivor buff over his eyes, soaring through the skies as he is choppered to his new remote home. There’s even bear dream sequences imagining life under the rapidly-decreasing sea ice.
Anchored by Inuit narrator Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons, the documentary grounds itself in indigenous knowledge which only further highlights how fractured the modern relationship with nature has become, and just how quickly it has broken down. While there are a few cherished moments of cute bears, the film is largely an indictment on humanity, and an urgent reminder of what is really at stake. As Gibbons says himself: this is not about the bears, this is about us. / AC
Big Girls Don’t Cry
I was shook by this film. As the credits rolled all I could think of was my own young self embroiled in the messiness of trying to survive the inbetween of child and adult worlds. Big Girls Don’t Cry is almost painfully evocative of the 90s: from the MSN chats to the particularly aggressive tone of the old brick Nokia phones, to the sinister atmosphere of predation that was ubiquitous back then before such ideas as consent and bodily autonomy and queer joy became part of our common language. The cinematography was exquisite: beach to river to home to party at the rich people’s holiday home. The sound, too, was exceptional: the way magpie warbles would build into soundtrack and lawnmower into heartbeat, every sense connected, every feeling amplified.
Writer and director Paloma Schneideman has crafted an Aotearoa classic: a film that speaks directly to the universal experience of being an adolescent by being idiosyncratic and faithful to the individual point of view and the Aotearoa landscape that shaped them. My only complaint was that nearly an hour of speeches in the pre-film build up was too long! It was wonderful to hear from everyone but brevity is best!! / CM
