In Our Blood (dir. Pedro Kos)
“She’s not a bad person. She just made a lot of bad choices. And hurt a lot of people.”
Filmmaker Emily Wyland (Brittany O’Grady, THE WHITE LOTUS, STAR) is making a documentary about reconnecting with her estranged mother, Sam (Alanna Ubach, EUPHORIA) after a long decade of distance. A distance that began at the age of 13, when authorities forcibly removed her from their home due to her mother’s struggles with addiction. Now, Sam has reached out. She’s clean. She terribly wants to be back in Emily’s life. With her cinematographer Danny (E. J. Bonilla, THE OLD MAN, THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER) by her side, Emily heads to her hometown of Las Cruces, New Mexico, braced for anything that might come with the reopening of old wounds. They meet at Sam’s home. She seems to be doing better. She has so much to share. The following day, she disappears without a trace, and Emily and Danny soon learn that Las Cruces has become a place where vulnerable people regularly go missing. They desperately try to piece together a mounting multitude of disturbing clues before it may be too late.
Leave it to an award-winning documentary filmmaker to do found-footage horror right. A perfectly calculated, slow-burn nightmare that opens with the feel of an indie doc and gradually evolves into something uniquely sinister, IN OUR BLOOD is the narrative feature debut of Oscar-nominated documentarian Pedro Kos (REBEL HEARTS, LEAD ME HOME). Employing the arsenal of techniques that he’s honed through documentary filmmaking, Kos has crafted a found-footage styled mystery horror that lands with chilling authenticity, further grounding the piece by casting a number of people from Las Cruces’ unhoused community who embed the film’s DNA with haunting layers of grief. With a tremendous performance from O’Grady at its centre, IN OUR BLOOD deftly uses themes of addiction and recovery, and the intersecting vulnerabilities that come with the isolation that addicts often experience, to build a profound horror narrative. Sad, scary, and unshakably convincing, it will linger like the ghosts of stolen futures.
Rita (dir. Jayro Bustamante)
Thirteen-year-old Rita (Giuliana Santa Cruz) finds herself incarcerated in an all-girls protective custody facility, after fleeing a horrendously abusive home life to seek freedom in the city. The girls in her overcrowded section tell of a prophecy, that a warrior angel will arrive to free them all from a life of destitution, incarceration, and enforced prostitution. When she’s handed a pair of wings of her own, which all the girls in her quarters wear too, it’s up to Rita to work out whether she will fulfil the prophecy, and if so, how far she’s prepared to go to let the outside world know what’s really going on at the facility.
Following up on the international success of LA LLORONA (2019), director Jayro Bustamante fuses notes of mythical fantasy with themes of childhood innocence and female friendship, and the potent emotional register of a story based on a harrowing real-life event, where 41 young women horrifically burned to death inside a Guatemalan orphanage in 2017, in the midst of a protest about inhumane conditions.
Much like the early work of Guillermo Del Toro, RITA employs a fantastical mood, and oftentimes whimsical imagery, to dig into a core of grim real-life themes. At the heart of the piece is the powerful performance of Guiliana Santa Cruz, who speaks for all the young women who suffered at the orphanage—those who lost their lives, the survivors, and those who still have to endure such difficult circumstances. As a result, the story speaks much to the power of female anger, and yet, not once does the director lose sense of the fact that at its heart, Rita’s tale is one of girlhood, of dreams, of an innocence lost and regained within the bosom of female solidarity.
Shelby Oaks (dir. Chris Stuckmann)
Who took Riley Brennan? That’s the question asked by millions of devoted, even obsessed fans of the popular YouTube series Paranormal Paranoids, which ceased production when Brennan and her three co-hosts disappeared near the deserted town of Shelby Oaks, Ohio in 2008. Conspiracy theories have run rampant over the years, but none are more determined to get to the truth than Riley’s sister, Mia (Camille Sullivan), who has finally agreed to telling Riley’s story to a documentary film crew (Emily Bennett and Rob Grant) in the hopes of finding closure. Closure, however, refuses to be found as a series of shocking events opens the door to a deeper mystery surrounding Riley, one that leads Mia to follow her ghost-hunting sister’s footsteps down a path to confront demons of the past and get answers that can only be found somewhere within the darkness of Shelby Oaks.
This is it! After a successful Kickstarter campaign (which raised over five times the original goal, breaking all records on the platform) and two years of waiting, the debut feature from esteemed YouTube creator Chris Stuckmann is finally here and ready to scare the pants off Fantasia audiences. SHELBY OAKS delivers in all departments, as a creepy supernatural shocker, as a character-oriented horror film with strong performances, and as a well-crafted debut feature. Helped along by veteran producers Aaron B. Koontz (THE ARTIFICE GIRL), Ashleigh Snead (THE RANGER), along with the great Mike Flanagan coming on board as an executive producer, Stuckmann proves that he’s been paying close attention to all those movies he’s reviewed over the years, as the results are impressively moody and deftly scripted throughout. Anchored by a strong performance from Sullivan with solid support from Michael Beach (AQUAMAN) and genre vet Keith David (THEY LIVE), SHELBY OAKS has finally been found and it’s going to put Chris Stuckmann on the map in a very big way.