Our 5 Most Anticipated Movies of Fantasia 2022

With Montreal’s revered genre film festival Fantasia right around the corner, the growing slate of selected titles might be difficult to navigate. As ever, Fantasia offers up offbeat midnight fare, restored deep cuts and a motley of short films, documentaries and animation.

The festival’s feature films and spotlights include: House of Psychotic Women: 10th Anniversary, Korean Animation and Queer Genre Films. The program will also include restorations of The Deadly Spawn (1983), Dr. Lamb (1992), I Like Bats (1986), Shriek of the Mutilated (1974), What’s Up Connection (1990), Blue Sunshine (1977) and more.

Here are five standout features from this year’s program we’re looking forward to watching:

1. Rani Rani Rani (dir. Rajaram Rajendran)

A new contribution to the time-warp cinematic canon, Rajaram Rajendran’s Rani Rani Rani sees a caretaker at an abandoned factory test out a mystery device for a group of opportunists and a potential buyer. Lured into the scheme for some quick cash, the woman is soon faced with a Sisyphean nightmare and copies of herself.

2. Lynch/Oz (dir. Alexandre O. Philippe)

This documentary surveys the influence of Victor Fleming’s beloved The Wizard of Oz (1939) on the work of David Lynch. With Lynch being one of the most singular American auteurs, whose films absorb bizarre, opaque (Lynchian!) themes, it’ll be fascinating to unspool the through lines between Fleming’s musical fantasies and his labyrinthine dreamscapes.

3. Polaris (dir. Kirsten Carthew)

Brought up by polar bears—an impossibly cool premise already—a young girl tries to survive in the arctic, encountering vicious combatants and elemental threats along the way. Half Mowgli story, half Mad Max, Polaris combines throat-ripping barbarity and eco-feminism in its teaser alone. Not to mention Agee, the professional acting polar bear who plays the cozy, though fearsome adoptive mother.

4. Dark Glasses (dir. Dario Argento)

Dario Argento’s first cinematic effort in a decade, Dark Glasses, appears to represent a return to the giallo genre he helped pioneer. The film follows a sex worker blinded in an automobile accident as she attempts to outrun the psychopath who willfully caused the collision, all the while towing around a child she rescued. It’s a similar premise to Argento’s ‘70s fare, though one can’t help but wonder what else Argento has spent the last ten years cooking up.

5. Bodies Bodies Bodies (dir. Halina Reijn)

Closing the festival, quite fittingly, is Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies, a Gen-Z slasher which follows four young women, one Pete Davidson and one Lee Pace as they play a lethal party game at a remote mansion. One of them is a killer, and the rest are scarpering around the house in a panic as the body count swells. All with blood, Xanax, and glowsticks to boot.

Saffron Maeve is a Toronto-based writer and critic who once had to be talked out of getting a Sy Ableman tattoo. Her work has appeared at Little White Lies, MUBI Notebook, Screen Slate, and Girls on Tops, among other corners of the internet. You can unfortunately find her on Twitter.