With the year almost done, 2025 has shaped up to be quite the amazing year for genre cinema. With films like Obsession, One Battle After Another, Sinners, Exit 8, 28 Years Later, Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, Obex, Dead Lover, Messy Legends, and CAMP, amongst many others, there has been no shortage of weirdo flicks to scratch that itch! Luckily for us, the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma has brought some great genre films to Montreal in its 54th edition. So, the following four films are the highlights of the genre films I was able to catch during the festival.
Move over, Guillermo Del Toro, and move over, Maggie Gyllenhaal, because there’s a new monster in town and this one STINKS (complimentary)! Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover follows a corpse-stinking (Stunk? Stunked? Stinked?) and affection-starved gravedigger who falls in love with a man with very average-sized fingers who is infatuated with her stench. After her newfound lover drowns at sea, the gravedigger must conduct macabre experiments in an attempt to resurrect him. However, things take a looooong turn for the… [insert finger pun here]… as the experiments take on a mind of their own, leading to unlikely love and a need for couples counselling.
Written and led by real-life Canadian film power couple Glowicki and Ben Petrie, Dead Lover quickly secured its spot in my top 3 films of the year as the film’s absurdist sense of humour, set design, and cinematography ooze charm. Following their previous two collaborations, Tito (directed by Glowicki) and The Heirloom (directed by Petrie), the duo complete an absurdist hat trick here, delivering a barrage of hilarious moments that build off the cartoonish nature of Tito, making this film feel like the perfect progression of Glowicki’s style. Although it’s becoming almost cliche to call Canadian films with a sense of humor and style “Winnipegian” (in all fairness, the city that has produced some of the best films in the country), Dead Lover feels like Frankenstein’s monster (Peter Boyle’s portrayal) stitched together from the DNA of Guy Maddin, a handful of Looney Tunes, and whatever is swimming around the Ontario water supply.
The set design and cinematography deserve their own special mention as they recall the aesthetics of silent cinema, while maintaining a modern sense and feeling fresh. Staged similarly to what you would see on a… stage, Dead Lover takes a brilliant approach to its sets through the use of dark shadows and lo-fi aesthetics, allowing for what feels like an endless amount of possibilities as Glowicki and co. deliver a masterclass in low-budget minimalist filmmaking. This smart use of shadows to create space was first introduced likewise through the isolating sequences in Glowicki’s debut, so it is quite nice to see that idea be built upon here for similar, but different purposes.
For a film whose motto is “don’t wash”, Grace Glowicki and team created what I consider to be a very clean masterpiece of indie low-budget minimalist filmmaking. It is the kind of film that you will want to show and watch with all of your friends over and over again because it is such an incredibly good time. I love Canadian film.
Speaking of dead lovers. Gavin Baird’s KLEE is a short film that, if you go into it blind like I did, you will find a rather large surprise that nobody will see cumming! Taking place in a 19th-century Saskatchewan town, KLEE follows an alien who is sent down to earth to neutralize a family of colonizers in a rather peculiar way.
Making full use of its 16mm film stock with beautiful wides of landscapes and concerning close-ups of other things, KLEE plays like the best of Astron-6 mixed with the dry absurdism of Robert Eggers, giving its audience an indigenous alien invasion story that they will never forget. Ridiculous and uncomfortable, Baird’s is just an impossible film to predict. With already six feature films under his belt (according to Letterboxd), Baird has been quietly killing the game. He has multiple features streaming on both Tubi and CBC Gem. I am very eager to see whichever project comes after on as off the wall as this one. TIFF Canadian Top 10 or we RIOT!
Charlie Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project is a hard one to synopsize. It’s a film about a book, but not about a book, about a movie, but not about a movie because it was never made, about a serial killer who was never caught, but definitely not about specific people who tried to catch him. In some ways, this film doesn’t even exist because it is a film about a film that could have been, while remaining a document of itself. Trippy.
This film caught my attention very quickly, as I used to have quite an infatuation with true crime when I was just beginning as a filmmaker. Ever since, I have become rather disgusted with the “subgenre” as a whole (in this case, I am writing about the serial killer and abuse variety and not general crime). Exploitative and nasty. My change in opinion happened after listening to a few live episodes of what was my favourite true crime podcast, helmed by two comedians. In every city where they were performing, the comedians would talk about local murders that took place and general infamous or complex murders that had taken place elsewhere. What I found to be disturbing was not that these stories were being told, but how the audiences were reacting to them. Cheers, excitement, applause, as if they were at some sort of comic con. A fandom surrounding murder and trauma. The interest is acceptable. The reaction is not.
This concept is at the core of Shackleton’s thesis, as he uses the video essay form to completely deconstruct the algorithmic, screen time monopolizing, capitalistic form that the genre has been morphed into. It is important to note that sensationalism has always played a part since the beginning of the phenomenon, but never has it been served so digestibly and consistently. Zodiac Killer Project condemns the exploitation of victims as entertainment by emphasizing how enticing their trauma is to big corporations that are inflicting different brands of hardships on their own workers. Told through voice-over, archival footage, and tactful recreations, Zodiac Killer Project exists as a deconstruction of the homogenized nature of true crime media and a criticism of the lack of ethics surrounding the meteoric rise of a blood-soaked genre built upon the graves of the exploited and victimized.
“You might not have understood the gravity of removing art from public access”.
Kelly Reichardt’s latest foray into the genre world, The Mastermind, follows a lost and unemployed art thief, James, played by Josh O’Connor, as he stumbles his way through what should be the great American museum robbery. However, when his own apathy and lack of commitment from everyone that surrounds him take control, plans quickly fall apart.
With The Mastermind, Reichardt is less concerned with making a high-stakes heist film and more interested in farming the chill vibes as she takes a jab at the failed artist nepo baby epidemic (in this case, a thief whose father is a judge), crafting a heist so lax that it feels like more of an inconvenience than a potentially life-threatening affair. This, of course, is where Reichardt’s patient and empathetic directing style shines as she plays on conventions and stressors afforded to the film by genre association. In an all-out battle with the concept of ‘main character syndrome,’ The Mastermind questions the seemingly aimless motives of its protagonist as he fights for relevance and wines justice against those who he feels wronged him while meandering around a country that is primed to go to war. As his father states, “It seems inconceivable to me that these abstract paintings would be worth the trouble”.
The Mastermind is a welcome addition to the heist genre as it feels like the kind of cozy fall film we could all really use right about now, even if the protagonist is having a terrible time for 110 minutes.
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