FANTASTIC FEST 2024 – Apartment 7A, Short Films
Fantastic Fest 2024 is off to a BIG start this year with audiences losing their minds over Terrifier 3 and loving secret screenings like Saturday Night and the Sebastian Stan film The Apprentice. I have been able to catch a few things virtually, so let’s break down what I’ve caught so far!
APARTMENT 7A
There have been a few remakes and attempts at telling a new side of Ira Levin’s classic novel “Rosemary’s Baby.” Roman Polanski’s hit film has been a horror masterpiece that has long stood the test of time, so there has naturally been a few films attempt that same success. Writer/director Natalie Erika James takes a new crack at this world by taking the prequel approach. If you remember the film, you may remember Rosemary meeting Terry Gionoffrio down in the laundry room at the Bramford apartment. Terry was taken in by Minnie and Roman Castavet due to falling on hard times. In Apartment 7A, she’s now played by Emmy winner Julia Garner which tells her side of story. Terry was an aspiring actress and dancer hoping to make it big in New York City. It’s 1965 and she needs that next paying gig to pay that rent. That all comes to a halt when she falls in rehearsal and breaks her ankle. It’s a bad injury, but she’s willing to do whatever it takes to keep working. Ruth Gordon won the Oscar for playing Minnie Castavet in Rosemary’s Baby, and now Dianne Wiest plays the enigmatic neighbor. Minnie and her husband, Roman (Kevin McNally), offer up a room at the Bramford so Terry can get back on her feet. There’s something off about them, but Terry trusts them and sees this as a new opportunity to gain her life back. That is until she gets unexpectedly pregnant. She questions whether this means the end of her career. Her friendly new neighbors become a little too friendly when they find out she’s expecting.
Prequels to horror films rarely work, as it’s hard to recapture the magic of the original as you either demystify the unknown unexplainable horror elements or you’re attempting a carbon copy of the source material. Apartment 7A falls into that second trap. It’s audience will be Rosemary’s Baby fans who are familiar with this territory surrounding the Castavets and their devil-worshipping neighbors in the Bramford. Apartment7A doesn’t attempt to give them a new backstory to the Castavets or dive into their world, but plucks out another one of their victims. Terry Gionoffrio is a familiar character, so fans going into this will already know how this films ends. I hate to say that as a spoiler, but rather to bring up the fact there’s a lack of horror or mystery involved here. Julia Garner is a strong actress who is playing a very different type of character here than what we know from her work on Ozark. She makes Terry a strong young woman, not afraid to stand up to her sleazy theater director or take drastic measures in dealing with the Castavets. Dianne Wiest takes a very different approach at Minnie Castavet. She’s not trying to replicate Ruth Gordon’s portrayal, but still gives her that larger than life personality letting her voice flourish and move all over the scale. She sounds like she’s doing a Carol Kane impression. She’s chewing up the scenery and having a grand time.
Apartment 7A falls flat across the board proving that most horror prequels are unnecessary, especially when they came decades after the original film. That films still continues to shock audiences all these years later.
Look for my full review soon!
SHORTS WITH LEGS
The “Shorts with Legs” block contained a few short films I watched that veer on the horror and futuristic side.
I went into writer/director Rachel Mclean’s Duck completely blind and was instantly bombarded with what looked like bad CGI of Sean Connery’s James Bond interacting with Marilyn Monroe. A TV commercial plays with the phrase “If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck…” Imagine my horror as the rest of the James Bond actors appear all interacting with Ms. Monroe. You hear what sounds like the voices of Pierce Brosnan, Daniel Craig on top of really terrible animation of them. I questioned what I was watching and the legitimacy of using their characters’ likeness. Low and behold, Mclean is purposefully using Deepfake AI to create her 17-minute short. She makes this a cautionary tale of what its like to use Deepfake AI and what that means for the industry who wants to create new films in established franchises with fake AI scripts and more. We’ve already seen repurposed audio and images used in movies like Alien: Romulus, so it’s only a matter of time unless we take active measures to prevent it. It’s a clever short, but the audience should know what they’re watching first.
Priscilla Galvez’s A Fermenting Woman is from Canada and is a sick and twisted tale of a chef seeking revenge. If you’ve seen The Menu, you’ll appreciate this film. Sook-Yin Lee plays Marielle, a meticulous chef who is worried about her future at the restaurant she works at as it’s under new owners. She’s feeling the need to prove herself. She’s tired, lonely, and spends her spare time fermenting vegetables and collects her menstrual blood in a jar. You can probably guess what happens next, as Marielle makes her tasting menu one her new bosses will never forget. Sook-Yin Lee carries this film with ease, as there’s little dialogue used. It’s over the top, bloody, and a mouth-watering good time.
FANTASTIC SHORTS
I also watched a few films in the “Fantastic Shorts” block.
Birdy Wei-Ting Hung is a San Francisco State University grad student who shot A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers on 16mm film. The 12-minute short features Ming, who loves making watermelon slushies and going to the movies. It’s a hot summer day in the 1980s, and she attempts to cool down with her favorite beverage. The movies provide that mental escape as we see Ming fantasize about herself as a Hollywood star posing for a photo shoot, sleeping with a gorgeous man, and getting revenge. It’s another short with minimal dialogue but one that as Birdy Wei-Ting Hung engaging in all the sense for her short. It should make you run to the kitchen to make your own watermelon slushy hoping for the same results as Ming.
The last short I watched was Check Please, which happens to be my favorite so far from Fantastic Fest. It’s a fun and clever little homage to martial arts films but set in a restaurant. Director Shane Chung presents a work dinner between two colleagues, one Korean and one Korean American. They’re both young men who disagree over who should pay the bill. What transpires is a classic fight scene in the style of martial arts films as they use whatever props and kitchen utensils they encounter to take the other one down. The sound design is specific in its ode to the genre. It plays out like the wild imaginations we have where we see real life situations and wish they’d break out into a larger than life fight sequence where we become the martial arts expert.
