Feature - Fantastic Film Festival Australia 2024 Program Launch/Immaculate
Images courtesy of Rialto Distribution.
Fans of bizarre, esoteric and extreme films, who live around Melbourne and Sydney can rejoice, because it's that time of year - Fantastic Film Festival Australia is back once again. Promising yet another program filled with “cinema beyond restraints”, FFFA 2024 looks primed to be the home of exciting films both new and old across Hawthorn’s Lido, Randwick’s Ritz, and the newly-added Thornbury Picture House, each playing host to a selection of carefully curated independent, cult and arthouse features and shorts.
Kicking off the fest’s opening night is a neat little Aussie horror flick that I've personally had on my radar for a while now, Kiah Roache-Turner’s Sting. Following a young girl as she befriends a pet spider (an arachnid which Letterboxd describes as “unnervingly talented”), only for it to grow rapidly and wreak havoc on the unsuspecting tenants of her apartment building, the Wyrmwood director’s third feature looks set to disgust and delight. Then we have the biopunk-infused tech noir Divinity, a film that seems predestined for cult status. Produced by Steven Soderbergh and starring Scott Bakula, Stephen Dorff, and Bella Thorne, Divinity looks to be a crazy, horny, and uber-stylized ride through an apocalyptic hellscape. There's also showings of the long unfinished stop-motion/adventure/sci-fi The Primevals, with Charles Band and the crew at Full Moon Pictures having completed the film's visuals over 50 years after it entered production, and a 4K restoration of The Raid.
But that's not to say that FFFA is only out to offer hedonistic thrills, with films like The Brazen and New Life also part of the line-up, opting to go for the more psychological and character-driven side of things, while Mars Express, Pandemonium, and Once Within a Time (directed by Koyaanisqatsi’s Godfrey Reggio) look set to explore worlds beyond our own. Likewise, there's plenty of soul to be found amidst the action, gore, and weirdness, with more spiritualistic offerings like Hood Witch, Mami Wata, and Monisme - one of my personal picks due to its acclaimed mix of documentary and horror filmmaking - rounding out the line-up. Last, but certainly not least, are retrospective screenings of Aussie drama/thriller Metal Skin, starring a young Ben Mendehlson, The Naked Gun, in a session that asks festival attendees to take the naked part literally, and Gaspar Noé’s seminal psychedelic melodrama, Enter the Void, which closes out the fest accompanied by a live score from Sydney-based electronic and ambient musician, Corin.
But of course, you can't have a program without the inaugural FFFA program launch, and you can't have the inaugural program launch without a little film to go along with it. You know, as a treat.
This year's selection was Immaculate, a.k.a. the Sydney Sweeney nun movie. Michael Mohan's follow-up to his erotic thriller The Voyeurs (which also starred Sweeney) sees the Euphoria star don the rosary and head off to a prestigious convent in Italy, only to find out that she appears to have fallen pregnant despite her vow of chastity, diving headfirst into a rabbit hole of deceit and religious conspiracy. When in Rome, I guess. This quaint setup immediately called to mind three major homages for me - Dario Argento’s Suspiria, Ken Russell's The Devils, and a director who shall not be named here’s Rosemary’s Baby. I don't mind these films being so egregiously gestured towards, as well as the wider genre of nunsploitation, but it's more that Immaculate does much to foreshadow its arc and little to maximise enjoyment for audience members who might already be in on the joke.
Despite this potentially off-the-walls framing, much of the film's 90 minute runtime is spent delicately tip-toeing around the subject matter at hand, instead giving us multiple scenes of nuns floating in hot tubs, engaged in some kind of religious wet t-shirt contest (I swear I'm only exaggerating a little bit). There’s more than a bit of dead air, and while I wouldn't mind this if it were for the sake of that signature bone-chilling atmosphere that typically comes with “elevated” horror, what we have here is a somewhat muddled mix of contemporary arthouse sensibilities, self-dignified schlock, and your more standard popcorn-munching jumpscares (albeit executed well, I did in fact jump a few times towards the start). Immaculate wants to be remembered for its campy, over-the-top third act, where a certain revelation sees the film add in a dash of Michael Crichton for flavour, aspiring to such lofty heights on the scale of trash that I almost forgave it for its sins.
Thankfully it does stick the landing mostly, once Sweeney gets her chance to really shine, as she dispatches the Catholic cultists with gleeful abandon. There's a certain “God damn it” that got a decent chuckle out of the audience, and the violence is blunt, but effective, and I'm not just talking about the scene where a nun gets beaten over the head with a cross. I still wish it indulged further in its doses of bad taste, or that the film was split more evenly in its ascension to grace/descent into madness structure, because where it stands, it's just conventional enough to get butts into seats but also a tad too provocative for your average cinemagoer (or, if comments on the facebook ads I've seen are to be believed, middle-aged wine mums commenting things along the lines of “we should go Karen, this one looks spooky 👻😱”).
For all my woes, I must say, I still had a pretty good time. Maybe it was the effervescent FFFA crowd, or maybe it was the complimentary singular beer that came with the ticket, but either way the result is still a recommendation on my part, even if it is somewhat lukewarm. The concept and climax just beg to be discussed excitedly among friends, and that alone is worth the price of admission in my book. Immaculate may be far from perfect, but it's still more creative than a plethora of horror films out there, even as it stands in the shadows of the greats.
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Immaculate screened for the 2024 Fantastic Film Festival Australia program launch. The festival runs from the 17th of April to the 10th of May, check out the festival website for tickets and more info here.