It may only be April, but the race for the film hairstyle of the year is over: In 2024, no one will be able to ignore the mullet variation that Ed Harris wears in “Love Lies Bleeding” (bald at the front, matte at the back). . Harris’ film daughter Kristen Stewart falls in love with an aspiring bodybuilder (Katy O’Brian) in this wild female revenge thriller, triggering a hurricane of violence, including bruised macho egos, shattered jaws and stag beetles eaten alive.
“Love Lies Bleeding” was screened at the Berlinale in February, and now the film by British director Rose Glass is opening the Fantasy Filmfest Nights: At this offshoot of the popular genre film festival, which takes place every spring, 17 feature films are shown over four days, from countries such as Turkey, France, South Korea, Estonia or the USA. This is the venue Munich city cinemaaudiences can expect neo-noir thrillers, horror movies, action dramas, scifi parodies or kung fu films.
Bruno Dumont’s highly idiosyncratic science fiction film “The Empire” was also shown at this year’s Berlinale, and was even awarded the Jury Prize. The Frenchman tells of the battle between extraterrestrial powers that takes place in, of all places, a fishing village in northern France. The film refuses any genre conventions; you can see it as a “Star Wars” joke or enjoy the spaceships in the shape of Notre-Dame or the Palace of Versailles.
Not every film shown will make it into the regular cinema program, so weird animated works like “The Weird Kidz” or children’s films for adults (“Riddle of Fire”) can also be viewed as a kind of unique opportunity. Other films such as the spider horror thriller “Sting” will soon be released in cinemas nationwide – or want to use the festival to find a German distributor: The Irish horror film “Oddity”, for example, tells of a woman who spends the night alone on a lonely country estate. When there is a knock on the door and an unknown man asks to be let in, things get uncomfortable.
The action thriller “Boy Kills World” is bloody in the Frankfurt-born Moritz Mohr’s feature film debut: Bill Skarsgård plays a deaf-mute man who wants to overthrow a powerful woman who once had his family killed. The Swedish actor, who became world famous as the horror clown Pennywise in the “It” films, shows a completely different side in this film: as a muscle-bound one-man fighting machine.
Fantasy Film Festival NightsThursday, April 25th to Sunday, April 28th, City, Sonnenstraße 12a