The 23rd annual Boston Underground Film Festival took place at The Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, MA from March 22 to March 26. The genre-blending lineup included premieres, festival favorites, anticipated titles, shorts, and more.
Here’s what I saw at this year’s event…
The Unheard
The festival’s opening night kicked off with the world premiere of The Unheard, which pairs the exciting New England talents of director Jeffrey A. Brown, following up his dynamic debut The Beach House, and writers Michael and Shawn Rasmussen, hot off the success of Alexandre Aja’s Crawl. All three were in attendance for a post-screening Q&A.
Hearing impaired since the age of 8 as a result of meningitis, 20-year-old Chloe Grayden (Lachlan Watson, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) undergoes an experimental gene editing procedure to restore her hearing, which coincides with a homecoming to prepare her family’s empty summer house for sale. She’s the first patient in the clinical trial to show positive results, but it comes at a price. The euphoria of being able to experience everyday sounds again is curtailed by the ominous noises that start to pervade her mind.
Watson — a nonbinary actress portraying a cis woman, hence the use of she/her pronouns when referring to their character — carries the film with a credible performance. Brendan Meyer (The Guest) and Nick Sandow (Orange is the New Black) co-star as Chloe’s neighbor and handyman, respectively, while Michele Hicks (The Shield) and Bill Sage (American Psycho) have small but pivotal roles — the latter only as a voice on the phone — as her parents.
Brown takes a largely psychological approach to the material, which blends supernatural mystery with serial killer thriller. Immersive sound design puts the viewer into the headspace of a hearing impaired individual to great effect. Brown also taps into the inherently unsettling desolation of a summer destination in the off-season and incorporates striking VHS aesthetics.
The Unheard premieres on Shudder on March 31. Its 126-minute runtime is admittedly a tall order and perhaps could have been pared down, but it’s worth the time investment.
Witches have been the subject of movies since the silent era, but 2015’s The Witch restored them to their dark, fabled roots rather than campy Halloween mascots a la Hocus Pocus, The Craft, or Harry Potter. The return to form opened the floodgates for the likes of Pyewacket, Gretel & Hansel, Hagazussa, The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw, and now Nightsiren.
Broken up into seven chapters, the Slovakian film is set in a remote mountain village where medieval superstitions are still considered a way of life. Two decades after accidentally causing the disappearance of her younger sister while running away from an abusive home, Charlotte (Natalia Germani) returns to the village where she grew up to claim her inheritance from her late mother, including a cabin that legend claims is cursed by a local witch, Otilia (Iva Bittová).
Director Tereza Nvotová and co-writer Barbora Namerova devise a timely folk-horror tale that holds a mirror up to the misogyny that women face throughout time and culture. The ignorant villagers are of the mind that those who believe in God are infallible, yet empowered women must be evil. A blacklight-fueled orgy of hallucinations is a visual highlight of the film.
A foreign, feminist, genre film, Nightsiren is the type of movie that would likely fall through the cracks if not for festivals like Boston Underground giving it a platform. Accolades to Breaking Glass Pictures for picking it up for distribution; keep an eye out for it this fall.
Spaghetti Junction
Spaghetti Junction refers to a skein of intersecting highways just outside of Atlanta, Georgia, where the film takes place, but it also doubles as an apt metaphor for the interweaving of lives that occurs in the story. The first act of the 98-minute film is dedicated entirely to character development; an investment that pays dividends. It would have been a compelling family drama had the genre elements never been introduced, but it remains character-driven throughout.
August (Cate Hughes) is an aloof teen grappling with a tragic accident that cost her a foot and her mother. Her father, Dave (Cameron McHarg), struggles as well — with grief, finances, alcoholism, and single parenthood — while her selfish sister, Shiny (Eleanore Miechkowski), only cares about her sketchy, older boyfriend, Antonio (Jesse Gallegos, The Walking Dead: World Beyond). After being drawn to an old drainage tunnel in the woods, August meets a benevolent, otherworldly being (Tyler Rainey). Seeking a sense of purpose, she embarks on a cryptic journey with the wayward traveler.
Hughes makes a strong acting debut, channeling the strife of her real-life disability into the character. McHarg delivers the most nuanced performance, bringing to life a raw, layered human that would have been easy to write-off as a one-dimensional drunk. Similarly, Antonio’s flashy car, gaudy neck tattoo, drug dealing, and constant vaping make him look the part of a stereotypical “bad boy,” but he’s more nurturing to August than her own sister… to a point, at least.
Spaghetti Junction marks the feature debut of writer-director Kirby McClure, one half of the music video directing duo Radical Friend (Skrillex, Yeasayer). His stylized visuals translate well into the feature, beautifully captured by cinematographer Kristian Zuniga and fortified by an ambient score from Health (Grand Theft Auto Online, Max Payne 3). While the ambiguity is likely to frustrate some viewers, others will be captivated by the introspective sci-fi that brings to mind the Starman and Donnie Darko.
Enys Men
An experimental tone poem, Enys Men stars Mary Woodvine — daughter of An American Werewolf in London actor John Woodvine, who also has a small role in the picture — as a volunteer stationed on a remote British island to chronicle the wildlife. As she records aberrations in the flowers and drops rocks into a mysterious hole, she observes changes in herself as her grip on reality loosens.
An auteur wearing too many hats can often spread themselves too thin, but multi-hyphenate Mark Jenkin manages to both impress and show remarkable restraint with each one of his roles: director, writer, cinematographer, editor, composer, and sound designer. Shooting on 16mm film using a vintage camera and post-sync sound not only sells the 1973 setting but also gives the movie an almost ethereal quality in the modern age of digital photography.
With minimal dialogue, the film manages to tap into the spiraling madness of The Shining, the coastal isolation of The Lighthouse, and the folk-horror of The Wicker Man. The slow-burn borders on brilliant, if challenging, but it ultimately fails to deliver a satisfactory payoff. The enigmatic conclusion is likely to leave some viewers with a frustration similar to It Comes at Night.
Enys Men will be released in select theaters on March 31 via NEON. Although it didn’t fully land for me, its textured visuals and mesmeric sound design are worth experiencing on the big screen.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Much like how director Daniel Goldhaber offered a timely interpretation of sex work and online culture with Cam, his sophomore outing, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, is a similarly of-the-moment effort, this time looking at the passion for activism ingnited in young people. The film combines an Oceans 11-esque ensemble heist narrative with the explosive intensity of Uncut Gems through the lens of a radical manifesto that blurs the lines between revolution and terrorism.
A group of activists — Chicago college students Xochitl (Ariela Barer, Runaways) and Shawn (Marcus Scribner, Black-ish), Texas new father Dwayne (Jake Weary, It Follows), Oregon anarchist couple Logan (Lukas Gage, You) and Rowan (Kristine Froseth, The Society), California leukemia patient Theo (Sasha Lane, Loki) and her reluctant girlfriend Alisha (Jayme Lawson, The Batman), and North Dakota amateur explosives expert Michael (Forrest Goodluck, The Revenant) — gather in west Texas with a common goal: to disrupt the oil industry in the name of climate activism.
Based on Andreas Malm’s 2021 nonfiction book of the same name, Goldhaber, Barer, and Jordan Sjol craft an urgent script while averting didacticism. The 104-minute film efficiently cuts back and forth between the big caper and the characters’ disparate backstories, with motivations ranging from personal to posterity. Tension is ratcheted with the aid of dynamic Steadicam work that immerses the viewer in the plot, coupled with a propulsive score by Gavin Brivik (Cam).
How to Blow Up a Pipeline opens on April 7 via NEON.
The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster
A modern, urban retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster centers on Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes, The Equalizer), who developed a fascination with death after losing her mother to gun violence at a young age. When her brother Chirs (Edem Atsu-Swanzy) suffers a similar fate, the teen’s preoccupation becomes an obsession.
Vicaria’s hypothesis — “If death is a disease then there’s a cure, and I’m gonna find it” — proves to be correct, as she’s able to reanimate Chris’ remains, cobbled together with body parts from other recently deceased individuals in a makeshift science lab. She wants to clean up the gang bangers and drug pushers that took her family and plague her neighborhood, but, as you can probably guess, things don’t go according to plan when the shadowy creature is on the loose.
Writer-director Bomani J. Story, making his feature directorial debut, uses the horror genre to make his commentary on the Black experience. The film is at its most powerful as a character drama, with Chad L. Coleman (The Walking Dead) giving a standout performance as Vicaria’s struggling single father. Unfortunately, it falters as a monster movie. Despite efforts to make it scary, Story plays into the familiar tropes rather than subverting them in any meaningful way.
The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster is due out in select theaters on June 9 via RLJE Films before streaming on Shudder and ALLBLK later in the year.
The Watcher
I was lucky to have a short film I co-wrote and co-directed, Reverberance, play as part of BUFF’s Dunwhich Horrors block of locally-produced shorts. I didn’t intend to formally cover any shorts, but I was so enamored with one that I had to mention it. While Skin & Bone — an impressive effort starring A-lister Amanda Seyfried and husband Thomas Sadoski (The Newsroom), written and directed by Seyfried’s former assistant, Eli Powers — had the most post-screening buzz, it was The Watcher that stuck with me.
A chilling take on religious cults, The Watcher brings to mind The Witch not only in its examination of the stronghold religion can have on zealots but also in the precision of the New England production, from Kubrickian shot composition to meticulous production design. To say more would spoil the 9-minute short, but suffice to say I will be eagerly awaiting writer-director Nathan Sellers’ inevitable jump to features.
This content was originally published here.
