Frightfest 2022 day 4: "Mastemah", "Incredible but True", "H4Z4RD", "The Ghost Writer," "The Price We Pay"

Mastemah

Director: Didier D. Daarwin.

With: Camille Razat, Olivier Barthelemy, Feodor Atkine, Bruno Debrandt.

France 2022. 100 mins.

After tragedy, a psychiatrist moves and starts a practice in a small town. But tragedy seems to follow and the presence of a threat in a troubled patient. 

A questioning of psychiatry succumbs to the supernatural. There’s a point where all the style and formal tricks become overkill whilst waiting for the answers. It is nicely made and performed but a shorter runtime would have minimised the treading water which leaves the ideas and potential stranded. By the end, it is a bit too standard, for all its visual flare and/or excess.

Incredible but True

Director: Quentin Dupieux.
With: Alain Chabat, Léa Drucker,
Benoît Magimel, Anaïs Demoustier.

France 2022. 74 mins

Accessible Duprieux comes in a satire of magic realism that doesn’t feel the need to go further than a limited time portal in your house and an iDick to illustrate human absurdity. In this case, how people will go to extraordinary lengths and delusions to keep up gender constructs of youth and desirability. Light, easy and surreal, this is not quite the divisive film I anticipated as it's fun with a little cruelty to spice things up. 

H4Z4RD

Director: Jonas Govaerts.
With: Tom Vermeir, Jennifer Heylen,
Frank Lammars, Dimitri ‘Vegas’ Thivaios,

Tim Mielants.

Belgium 2022. 88 mins.

Filmed totally from within a car, this is a fun and furious thriller that is perhaps ultimately not a quite as goofy as expected from the first half. One of those “One Bad Day” plots where the bad luck just piles on for our petty-crime adjacent protagonist. He and his car must take punishment upon humiliation until he learns his lesson (well,we can assume he does). 

The formal fun and pounding soundtrack and some off-colour gags make this entertaining, a memorable entry in the lowlife farce sub genre.

The Ghost Writer

Director: Paul Wilkins

Stars: Luke Mably, Laura Ashcroft, Andrea Deck

2022, UK

A malcontent writer goes to his late father’s cottage to find his muse. She turns out to be one of those constantly/annoyingly vamping femme fatales with a violent boyfriend and a murder mystery. There’s much mileage to be gained from Mably’s antisocial character, and the scenery, but there’s nothing that spooky to this haunting. And it doesn’t help that the muse is just made of regular stock types, indicating that this writer works from staid tropes. There could have been a commentary on his the tropes speak to deeper complexity, but the writing that is meant to be so great, which we hear in narration, isn’t very good. But it does gather decent isolated cottage atmosphere.

The Price We Pay

Director: Ryuhei Kitamura.

With: Emile Hirsch, Stephen Dorff,

Vernon Wells, Gigi Zumbado.

USA 2022. 85 mins.

Another tale from Kitamura of characters that think they're in a crime thriller but then discover they are actually in the splatter genre. And even the typical screw-loose member of the botched robbery team isn't safe. Such mash-ups aren't to everyone's taste, but I like a little sleight-of-hand. Doesn't waste time on much backstory, but just gets on with the criming, a little set-up and then the gore. It kind of lets the side down by pausing for a little villain exposition, but mostly it just speeds along. With some death scenes designed to get the horror crowd laughing and applauding, this is fun for those with strong stomachs.