There's a new horny car movie, and it's the perfect way to open the Fantasia Film Festival

Take away the glitz and glamour of a film festival, replace the wheels up of an airplane with the powering up of a streaming device, and what do you get? The nougat core of festival-going: the thrill of discovery. We’ve talked about the mechanics and logistics of a virtual festival a lot over the past year and a half, in our coverage of Sundance, SXSW, and TIFF. So we won’t litigate it any further as we enter into a second year of remotely covering Fantasia, North America’s longest-running genre film festival. (We can all navigate a streaming platform by now, right?) Fantasia doesn’t have an app like the one Sundance rolled out for 2021, but what it loses in having to connect your laptop to the TV it gains in sheer breadth and depth of programming.

At Fantasia this year, you could watch a gentle South Korean romance about a lonely paraplegic woman who falls in love with her live-in companion. Or you could watch King Car, a movie that starts out feeling like a Brazilian version of forgettable studio pap like A.X.L. before transforming into an incoherent mix of horny performance art, a breakdancing ninja cult that worships machines, and—most bizarre of all—agricultural collectivism. At its core, this is “a boy and his car” movie, following Uno (Luciano Pedro Jr.), the son of a taxi driver who rejects his father’s lifelong pressure to inherit the family fleet and runs off to a socialist commune to study agriculture instead. But motor oil is in his blood (not literally, although you’d be forgiven for thinking that given how bizarre this movie gets) and soon he’s drawn back to the junkyard where his uncle Ze (Matheus Nachtergaele) turns old junkers into blinged-out Knight Rider ripoffs.

What follows blends John Carpenter’s Christine, the Japanese sci-fi mind bender Tetsuo The Iron Man, the recent objectum sexuality drama Jumbo, and a little bit of the Transformers franchise, combined with some surprisingly front-facing radical politics. (“No car will bring independence to the working class, Uno,” goes one snorter of a line.) In other words, it’s exactly the type of left-field surprise you’d like to see kick off a genre festival, even if it leaves the viewer with more of a loose collection of eccentric elements than anything resembling a meaningful artistic statement—or a satisfying plot arc, for that matter. Regardless, it’ll make for a wild double feature with Raw director Julia Ducournau’s new film, the Cannes-winning Titane, when the two hit Fantastic Fest in Austin at the end of September.

Also heading to Fantastic Fest is Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes, an inventive Japanese sci-fi comedy that shares a gimmicky premise with another recent festival hit, One Cut Of The Dead. Like that film, Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes transcends modest production value through a headline-worthy schtick—namely, the pretense that the entire movie was shot in one take. In this case, however, there’s no rationale for the technique provided within the film itself, and even those who aren’t especially camera-savvy will be able to spot several moments where the filmmakers could “cheat” it with invisible cuts. But while the one-shot gimmickry gets viewers in the door (or to click “play now,” as the case may be), it’s the other quality Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes shares with One Cut that makes it memorable: God help us, this little movie has heart.

It also has a mathematical sense of precision, painstakingly mapping out the action that begins rippling outward when café owner Kato (Kazunori Tosa) realizes that the CCTV camera that monitors his restaurant has turned into an interdimensional time mirror with a two-minute delay. Structurally, director Junta Yamaguchi and writer Makoto Ueda have pulled off a small miracle here, and the execution of a sequence where two monitors are placed across from one another, allowing the characters to communicate between infinite pasts and futures—a dramatization of the so-called Droste Effect—is particularly impressive. And although the “boy meets girl,” “boy asks girl out and gets shot down,” “girl feels bad for being rude and goes into boy’s cafe to apologize, only to get sucked into a mind-boggling sci-fi adventure” plot can be a little cutesy, it does get points for snatching the wheel of romantic comedy tropes and veering off into the unknown. Combined with an enthusiastic young cast and a trim 70-minute running time, it’s a light and charming lark of a film that’s never weighed down by its demanding premise.

Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes marks Yamaguchi’s feature debut. Another first feature playing the fest is Voice Of Silence, a buzzy South Korean crime dramedy from writer-director Hong Eui-jeong. Hong’s worked as a cinematographer and camera operator on a number of short films, and directed two of her own. But she has a striking command of this movie’s singular tone, which one might imperfectly describe as Raising Arizona with a weepy sentimental streak. Voice Of Silence stars Yoo Ah-in, who A.V. Club readers may remember as the lead in our best film of 2018, Burning. Here, he plays a similarly unblemished soul, Tae-in, a mute young man tasked with raising his younger sister in a remote Korean farmhouse with no running water. He pays for their meager living expenses by assisting a local egg farmer named Chang-bok (Yoo Jae-Myung) with his fledgling crime-scene cleanup business, which specializes in discreetly dealing with the aftermath of gangland violence.

Tae-in and Chang-bok are so discreet, in fact, that a local heavy “asks” them (they can’t really say no) for help with a special project: babysitting an 11-year-old hostage whose father is haggling over her ransom. Voice Of Silence takes place in an amoral world of greed, where renting out a spare room as a holding pen for kidnapped children is considered a mundane way to supplement a family’s income. Dedicated Christian Chang-bok lectures Tae-in about morality while they’re digging makeshift graves for murdered henchmen, and a scene where Tae-in rescues the girl in his care from being poisoned and dumped into a ditch is played for slapstick comedy. Hong further emphasizes the contrast between civilized facade and depraved truth with a cheery color palette, which feels like a sick joke at times. Somehow, it works, even when the film takes a turn for the maudlin in its second half.

When Hong films a glowing bucolic tableau of two girls playing in a field, the audience knowing full well that one of them is a kidnap victim, she’s being earnest. We think. Regardless, the ambiguity marks Voice Of Silence as a distinctive entry in the ever-growing canon of South Korean films about corruption and moral rot—certainly more memorable than The Devil’s Deal, the new film from The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil director Lee Won-tae. Documenting a fictional political scandal in Busan circa 1992, The Devil’s Deal is well- shot and acted, but it plays like an airport-paperback thriller, sprinting from compromising situation to grisly aftermath without much to say about either.

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American viewers will have to wait to catch Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes, Voice Of Silence, and King Car, as Fantasia’s virtual offerings are geoblocked. If you’re in Canada, however, you can watch them anytime from now through August 25 as part of the festival’s on-demand programming. These are combined with timed virtual screenings, which included a presentation of The A.V. Club’s favorite film from this year’s Sundance, We’re All Going To The World’s Fair, on August 8. Among the American festival offerings making their Canadian bow at Fantasia this month are the documentary Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliche, which we called “a revelation and an inspiration, particularly for women of color searching for role models in the blindingly white story of punk,” at this year’s SXSW. Also available is Prisoners Of The Ghostland, the genre-bending Sion Sono/Nicolas Cage collaboration that debuted at Sundance in January. Our review of that film was more mixed, but if King Car hasn’t satiated your appetite for unbridled “WTF?”-ery, it’s a solid choice.

More strangeness is almost certainly at hand as Fantasia eases into its usual nearly month-long run—an easier time commitment in the virtual format, which doesn’t entail dragging your body out to multiple movie screenings for several weeks. This year’s fest doesn’t come with a side of smoked meat and the Brutalist architecture we’ve waxed poetic about in dispatches past, but we’ll make do. The movies should be diversion enough.

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We’ll be back later this week with more unique visions from Montreal, including a trio of projects from American outsider filmmakers Mickey Reece, Richard Bates, Jr., and the Adams family. (No relation.)