OPINION | REVIEW: Four more to watch for from SXSW

Cadi (Annes Elwy) is a last-minute replacement assistant brought in to help a politician’s wife prepare a dinner with political implications in “The Feast,” a Welsh horror movie with environmentalist overtones that had its American premiere at the South By Southwest Film Festival.
Cadi (Annes Elwy) is a last-minute replacement assistant brought in to help a politician’s wife prepare a dinner with political implications in “The Feast,” a Welsh horror movie with environmentalist overtones that had its American premiere at the South By Southwest Film Festival.

This year's South By Southwest was entirely virtual, and supremely condensed, such that the whole festival -- films, conferences, talks, VR events -- took place in a scant five days. There was far too much to be able to take in at once, but I did get to see a decent number of films, which ranged in quality from phenomenal to barely watchable. Here's the last batch of capsules, with scores relative to other entries in the festival.

"Alien on Stage" -- As Dave Mitchell, the beleaguered director of an amateur troop of Dorset bus drivers-turned-West-End-performers, says at the cast party after the unlikely success of their performance of "Alien," "That's what comes of being amateurs, we can get away with it."

Just what they get away with is the magic of this joyful documentary from Lucy Harvey and Danielle Kummer. The two directors happened to hit upon the original stage production put on by the Dorset crew, as part of their annual charity performance. At that point, there were plenty of good seats still available -- the locals, used to a steady diet of Christmas productions and family-friendly sing-a-longs, stayed away in droves -- but Harvey and Kummer were so enchanted they started a crowd-sourced campaign to take the show to London, and to stage it in Leicester Square, one of the city's famed West End theaters.

The cash came in, tickets were sold out almost instantly and suddenly this cuddly group of rank amateurs (many of whom still didn't know their lines properly leading up to the curtain opening) were facing the big time. Fortunately, the production had a secret weapon in the inventive set-and-prop-designer Peter Lawford, who somehow created reasonable facsimiles of the eggs, face-hugger, and xenomorph with practically no budget, utilizing whatever materials he could cobble together.

The other factor working largely in their favor: Though the show wasn't intended as a comedy, per se, the unlikeliness of the enterprise and the general lack of seriousness from the cast lent itself to rousing humor. Delirious patrons, those lucky enough to have scored a ticket, flooded social media with approval, many of whom saying it was the all-time favorite theatrical experience of their lifetimes. Needless to say, the doc is a rags-to-riches kind of story, but it's difficult not to get immersed in the infectious camaraderie and good cheer of the production. Long-suffering director Mitchell, for his part, withstands a tremendous amount of pressure, and less-than-confidence-building turns by the cast with the classic stiff upper lip, never despairing despite significant odds. As a lifelong fan of Sir Ridley Scott's original film, knowing each scene as it was coming, it's a rare treat to behold. 7/10

"The Feast" -- Filmed in a gorgeously untouched part of Wales, with dialogue entirely in Welsh, Lee Haven Jones' horror film feels rooted in the natural world, an important synergy considering the theme, which concerns an angry forest spirit who takes human form long enough to violently dispatch a family of well-to-do knaves.

A small, fancy dinner party is being assembled by Delyth (Caroline Berry), on orders from her lout of a husband, Gwyn (Julian Lewis Jones), a politician with a sizable ego, in order to facilitate a mineral rights discussion between Euros (Rhodri Meilir), a slimy-rich prospector, and their more simplistic farmer neighbor, Mair (Lisa Palfrey), whom they want to convince to sell. Needing help to put the dinner together, and not getting any offers from her vile grown sons, Guto (Steffan Cennydd), an addict; and, Gweirydd (Sion Alun Davies), a predatory type, Delyth brings in young Cadi (Annes Elwy), from the nearby village.

Only, Cadi doesn't quite seem herself: She barely talks, for one thing, and seems easily distracted -- a trip to change her shirt in Delyth's closet leads to a sustained session of her trying on jewelry and giggling at herself in the mirror. It's also increasingly clear that she brings menace to the household. (Gwyn keeps hearing high-pitched wailing in his ears when she gets near him; she takes the jonesing Guto to the forest to snatch mushrooms for him to inject; she retches into one of the dishes before popping it into the oven.) After Mair reminds Delyth of the warnings they always heard as children not to climb the rise for fear of angering "her," it becomes more clear that the avarice and lack of environmental care of Gwyn and his family -- living, as they do, in a brand new, ultramodern mansion with materials imported from all over the world -- has awakened a vengefully violent retribution. Cadi, for her part, systematically dismantles the family members, either by her own hand or by having them turn on one another. Its environmental message is perhaps made a bit too clear by the end -- Jones' inspired atmospherics and haunting visual style work better in more shaded bands of esoterica -- but a well-crafted and disturbing effort nonetheless. 8/10

"The Fallout" -- The shots come out of nowhere. One second, high-schooler Vada (an excellent Jenna Ortega), having begged out of class to attend the concerns of her kid sister, Amelia (Lumi Pollack), on the phone, is in the bathroom, chatting up instagram maven Mia (Maddie Ziegler). Next, the two of them are huddled in a bathroom stall, terrified out of their minds, the echoing blasts of a shotgun ringing out from the school hallway.

Soon, Quinton (Niles Fitch), another terrified student, joins them in the cramped stall, his dying brother's blood all over his shirt. The three of them share this moment of horror, and it marks them through the rest of Megan Park's arresting drama. We never see the shooter, nor hear much about him, other than the body count he left in his wake. Initially, Vada suffers from nightmares, but she can't talk to her well-meaning parents for fear of scaring them further.

With nowhere else to go, save the therapist (Shailene Woodley) her mom makes her visit, and with her best friend Nick (Will Ropp), now a dedicated, politically activated media figure, Vada turns to Mia, living by herself while her fathers are out of the country, and Quinton, whom she develops feelings for, but, it becomes clear she is running out of control. In order to withstand returning to school, she takes a hit of MDMA and ends up sprawled along a set of stairs until Nick swoops her up; she gets drunk with Mia, and the two have a tryst; she makes a romantic pass at Quinton until he politely reminds her he and his family are going through a lot at the moment.

In short, she tries every method of avoiding the feelings she's unable to process until, at last, she seems to come to the realization that she no longer has a choice. Park's film is astonishingly well-honed and made with care and depth. As the faltering Vada, Ortega is a whirlwind: funny, absorbing, loving, and ultimately unable to escape the velocity of misery with which she has been swept away. As an interesting companion piece to Fran Kranz' "Mass," another film from an actor-turned-director concerned with the aftermath of a school shooting, the film offers a glimpse into the intricacies of a PTSD horror far too many American high school students have been forced to endure. Hope might come a bit easier to Vada, with her loving, supportive parents and genial relationships, but even so it's not without a miserably heavy price. 9/10

"Islands" -- Loneliness takes many hostages; it can also turn people into living zombies, unable to see how their calcification has cut them off from the rest of the world.

Martin Edralin's fantastic drama poses a 50-year-old man named Joshua (Rogelio Balagtas) as its protagonist; he's living in Ontario with his elderly parents, Reynoldo (Esteban Comilang), and Alma (Vangie Alcasid), acting as their live-in caretaker while working a dead-end janitorial job. In his native Philippines, Joshua was a dentist, but since immigrating with his family some years back, he has been seemingly content as a one-man caretaker to his parents. His vastly more successful younger brother, Paolo (Pablo S.J. Quiogue) -- who has married a Canadian woman (Bianca Yambanis) and has two sweet-faced kids -- mocks him for his shyness, offering him a sex toy as a gag birthday gift: one that the religious Joshua nevertheless takes to heart.

When his mother unexpectedly dies, leaving Joshua and his grieving father alone, things take a turn for the worse and more depressing: two older men winding down their lives together.

However, after a younger cousin, Marisol (Sheila Lotuaco) arrives in Ontario -- initially to attend the funeral of Alma -- Joshua, in desperation, invites her to stay at his house to help take care of his ailing father. This she does, bringing a spark back to Renaldo and Joshua himself, who starts developing feelings for her, family ties or no. Edralin's style may trade in realism -- the precision of his emotional pacing and eye for quiet detail recalls the work of Ira Sachs -- but the film's small emotional beats are extremely evocative. Joshua isn't a creep; he's terrified of opening up to the world and being rejected -- a feeling of anxiety only heightened, one imagines, by traveling to a completely different culture halfway across the world -- and that fear, coupled with feelings of devotion to his parents and his religion, has locked him into an unwinnable situation. By the end, while sticking to its emotional honesty, Edralin does find a way to end on a more hopeful note. No promises, but a sense that poor Joshua has finally at least returned to the world of the living. 9/10

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