Fantastic Fest 2024: The Fall, The Birthday, Wake in Fright

Restorations are a notable portion of the Fantastic Fest program, giving movie lovers a chance to see a handful of films on the big screen for the first time in years, or ever. This year’s restoration titles were a remarkable bunch of flicks that really speak to the array of offerings at this event. It’s been sometimes characterized as a horror fest, and there’s an abundance of scary stuff, but it’s a broader umbrella than that, one that also encompasses comedy, sci-fi, animation, fantasy, and more. While I regretted being unable to get to restorations of Johnnie To’s “The Mission” and Adam Wingard’s “The Guest,” I did get to screen a trio of very different movies that don’t feel like they’d be highlighted together anywhere but Fantastic Fest.

The best of the three, and maybe the best experience I’ve had in theaters this year, is the 4K restoration of Tarsem’s “The Fall,” a breathtaking, beautiful, singular piece of filmmaking that I now believe stands among the best of the new century. (Well, I guess it’s not that new anymore.) After years of falling into that gap between physical and streaming media, the wonderful folk at Mubi have restored “The Fall” for release on their platform this Friday, September 27^th. I’m also hoping a physical release follows because this is a movie I want to own. Everyone should.

It takes place in 1915, although there’s a purposeful timelessness to this tale, one that unfolds more like a fable, even in its non-fantasy material. In that, we meet a stuntman named Roy Walker (Lee Pace), who has been gravely injured after a bridge stunt on his latest film. The injury and the pain in his heart over a lost love has brought Roy down so far that he contemplates taking his own life. When he befriends a young girl at the hospital named Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), he manipulates her into giving him the morphine he needs to end his days, but he does so by telling her an elaborate fable about five heroes battling an evil dictator named Governor Odious.

Half of “The Fall” unfolds in this fantasy world, shot with striking grace and beauty by Colin Watkinson. My memory had made “The Fall” into something of a portrait picture—studiously, elaborately framed shots of undeniably beauty—but what I was so struck by on this viewing was the fluidity on display. These are not static images as Tarsem and Watkinson are constantly sliding their camera across these gorgeous landscapes, giving it a richer, third dimension. It has been called a beautiful film, and it is undeniably that, but words like that almost don’t do the visual language of this film justice. There are images here that could be frozen to hang on your wall, but it’s also a movie that never loses its pulse. In fact, its beating heart is its greatest strength.

There are so many things to love about “The Fall” that I may go longer on it later. I’d love to get into the organic choices made by Pace and Untaru, and how it’s really about how telling stories, and, by extension, making art like this can save your life. For now, just embrace the fact that you can soon watch this movie again. And again. And again.

A very different restoration unfolds in Eugenio Mira’s “The Birthday,” which premiered at the Sitges Film Festival in 2004 before being buried for almost two decades, becoming something of a cult item that would be passed around by the right people. Two of those people were Elijah Wood and Jordan Peele, who heralded Mira’s work as a lost masterpiece that demanded to be seen. I wouldn’t go that far, but I have to admit that I came to “The Birthday” expecting some sort of so-bad-it’s-good experience a la “Birdemic,” and this is not that movie. Yes, some of it is amateur, especially in the supporting cast, but it’s downright criminal that this movie got as buried as it did. One wonders what might have happened to the career of its star if it hadn’t.

Said star is Corey Feldman, doing easily the best work of his adult acting career as a milquetoast dude named Norman Forrester. Feldman goes very broad, giving Norman speech and physical affects that are undeniably exaggerated, but also fit this character and film. I think it’s a fascinating performance, one that’s consistently engaged with what’s happening around it. What’s happening happens to be the potential end of the world. Set in 1987, “The Birthday” is about a guy who goes to a hotel for the birthday party of his girlfriend’s father only to stumble on a doomsday cult trying to bring forth the end of the world.

Sorta. It’s more surreal and harder to pin down than that description, swinging wildly from broad comedy to relationship drama to cult horror. It plays like a nightmare about masculine responsibility, one in which a dismissive father-in-law can bring about the end of days. Again, there are undeniably unpolished stretches of “The Birthday,” but it’s two hours and it’s never boring, spinning in and out of tones in a way that’s riveting in its recklessness.

A very different recklessness, and a much bleaker tone, seeps into every frame of Ted Kotcheff’s “Wake in Fright,” back at Fantastic Fest this year in a new 4K restoration that was also the loudest screening I’ve been at in years. I think the intention of this truly hot sound mix is to replicate the smothering nature of the film, one that wants you to feel as trapped as its protagonist, a man stuck in a place where there’s nothing to do but drink, gamble, fight, and kill. “Wake in Fright” is an oppressively despairing film, one that reaches a disturbing peak in a kangaroo hunt scene that’s as terrifying as anything I saw at Fantastic Fest this year, or anywhere else really. The relentlessness of “Wake in Fright” can lead to some stretches that drag, but there’s a reason this has been deemed an important chapter in the Australian New Wave.

Based on the 1961 novel of the same name, “Wake in Fright” is the tale of an attractive English schoolteacher named John Grant (Gary Bond) who gambles away the cash he was going to use to get to Sydney while in a very small town deep in the Outback. With no money to even leave town, he spends his days and nights drinking heavily, drawn into the abusive sphere of a man named “Doc” Tydon (Donald Pleasance), a doctor who seems to share John’s disdain for the worthless populous of his home. The future “Halloween” star is phenomenal, conveying how even an intellectual, successful man can get sucked into the moral quicksand of this place. The movie doesn’t work without his role and how deftly Pleasance navigates it.

Controversy around the film’s release, including the too-real kangaroo scene, led to “Wake in Fright” being buried, largely unavailable for about three decades after its release. In 2004, editor Anthony Buckley discovered original film and sound elements, leading to a restoration that played in Cannes in 2009, and the film has become pretty widely beloved since then, often appearing in revival showings and at fests like FF. It may not be the bolt of lightning that “The Fall” was for me this year, or even the cultural oddity that is “The Birthday,” but I’m almost happy I waited all this time to see it because there’s no better place to do so than Fantastic Fest.