Fantastic Fest 2026: Best Of The Rest Of The Fest
If you're going to tout yourself as one of "the biggest genre film festivals in the world," then you'd better bring the goods. Luckily, Fantastic Fest does that year in and year out, for over a quarter of a century now. Five rounds daily. Multiple films playing every round. Spread out over the course of eight days. There's a reason people schedule time off from work after the fest. You need a decent breather, at the very least.
Even if you were to pace yourself and take a couple of rounds off for events at the fest or scoping out the local bars and cuisine of Austin, you can easily walk away still seeing nearly 30 films. Maybe five of those are face-meltingly amazing, and five are stinkers. What about the other 20 or so odd films? Where do they fit, and are they deserving of other people's attention? Glad you asked, as we humbly present "Best of the Rest: Fantastic Fest Edition."
The idea here is simple: there are always movies that are really good or almost great that get left off people's "Best of" lists. This is our way of counteracting that, letting you know about a few other movies to jot down for whenever they get a release. And strap in, because a few of these might just end up as one of your favorite films when you do get to see them.
Image courtesy of Essential Film Group/Screen Ireland
KUNG FU DEADLY
Lots of the time, charm is all a movie needs to get by. A decent amount of heart and charm can go a long way. It's also what makes a smaller project like KUNG FU DEADLY really shine.
Equal parts SHAUN OF THE DEAD, BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, and a sprinkling of MR. VAMPIRE, the film follows Danny (Steven He), a failed exterminator in Dublin, Ireland, who shares a flat with his best friend, Francis (Michael Tient). Their lives both get upended when an ancient evil is unleashed in the city, and Danny finds out he may be the key to saving everyone.
That is, if he can focus for two minutes on what the badass Lien (Gemma Tau-Cen) has to teach him.
While a lot of KUNG FU DEADLY straddles the line between the dumb and the absurd, it still fully commits to the story. In the process, it matches the spirit that lots of old Chinese supernatural martial arts films were founded upon. There's a good amount of laughs, some solid fight scenes, and enough decent construction for the film to come off as just a sweet and entertaining 90 minutes.
It's not trying to do anything radically different other than provide a good time. Honestly, in an era when there's so much dreck filling up the streaming space, decent is very good.
Image courtesy of Blue Finch Films Releasing
ATTACK ON PARADISE
Every few years, there's a fad in the film landscape that feels overwhelming. As if a large contingent of independent filmmakers got it into their heads that audiences only wanted one kind of action film and one film only. At this year's Fantastic Fest, that was readily apparent, as there were a handful of movies that were just variations on the first THE RAID. Out of all of them, ATTACK ON PARADISE is the slightest and silliest of the bunch, though it still lacks a wallop in the action department.
The story here follows Suleyman (Säid Boumazoughe), a Muslim kickboxer who was sent to prison after two cops harassed him to the point of fighting back. Seven years later, he returns to the home he left, an apartment tower that's now controlled by the crime lord Prince (Achmed Akkabi). As it happens, Suleyman's luck is terrible, and police storm the building shortly after his arrival. Meaning he must traverse both cops and thugs to get to his ailing mother's apartment.
ATTACK ON PARADISE wastes no time setting things up, allowing it to invest its energy solely in action and story. As entertaining as THE RAID or DREDD are, their leads are largely blank slates. Whereas Suleyman feels more complete, wrestling with how violence affected his life in the past and might be his saving grace now. And when he does unleash his skills, it's a sight to behold, as things take on a video game-type quality. Each new floor in the complex gives way to a new cadre of villains and deadly weapons to wield, which goes a long way toward keeping this from being boring.
However, the film has one major hurdle that threatens to sink it: digital blood. Not a little, mind you, but big arterial sprays and squib fabrications. It chips away at the overall impact of certain fights when it does crop up, taking this from a "great" to "very good" recommendation.
That aside, it's still worth your time—especially if you enjoy inventive kills. (There's a moment with a credit card that is absolutely genius.)
Image courtesy of Heretic/Film Stockholm
ADULT SUPERVISION
Spend just a little bit of time watching the news, and you can easily get a sense that the kids aren't alright these days. Whatever schools thought they were doing to squash bullying, in fact, has only made it stronger. At least, that's the opinion put forth by ADULT SUPERVISION, in which three fathers willingly offer to oversee a class school trip, even though they have every indication the trip will be anything but easy.
Once everyone is on an island, things quickly start going LORD OF THE FLIES. What initially looks like one group of kids bullying a student morphs into something more. The parents try to discipline the kids with different methods, but the kids push back. Their tenacity and cruelty grow with each passing hour. It's bleak, but harrowingly effective in its presentation.
What helps make ADULT SUPERVISION watchable, besides the students being the absolute worst, is that it has a Skarsgård in the lead role. Gustav Skarsgård's Bill is a complex figure, desperate to connect with his teenage daughter, stop bullying, and protect the one kid everyone hates. He is also juggling dealing with the two other fathers who begin to act more and more like children themselves.
Let's be clear: this isn't a feel-good movie. It's not supposed to be. In fact, that should be the tagline. Instead, it exposes (or re-exposes) the dangerous nature of bullying, while also showing how its effects can ripple into adulthood. The fact that it's a relatively straightforward tale speaks to how seriously it takes the subject matter. As a fictionalized meme version of Michael Jordan so succinctly put it: "fuck them kids."
Image courtesy of Zentropa International Sweden/Volya Films
THE SQUIRREL
Whenever most filmmakers dive into the world of tomorrow, they often do so from the point of a dystopian future. Possibly because cracks in the foundation and a variety of regions and tribes are easier to write. Yet the argument could be made that utopian futures are the ones riper for exploration, largely because it means tapping into the human element or looking at society as a whole and how simple things can cause a systemic change. That latter bit is challenged in Markus Lehmusruusu's excellent THE SQUIRREL, where some rather big ideas are explored on a smaller scale.
In an unnamed future, society is intrinsically tied together in a delicate dance. An AI is attached to every person's bracelet, which notifies them when their emotions, hormones, or thoughts cause an imbalance. This has led to the outlawing of sex, relics of the before times being discarded, and has largely erased every creature and insect from that period. Which is strange when you consider that lead character Pasi's (Miro Lopperi) job is with a company specially contracted to make personal companions based on a little foo-foo dog.
One night, while heading home from work, he sees something scurry in the trash, which triggers an anomaly agent to be deployed (think future corrections cops). When the agent, Emilia (Mimosa Willamo), meets Pasi, there's an instant connection, though such fraternizing is frowned upon. Yet her curiosity piques, and she finds reasons to check in on him. Something that gets further complicated when Pasi learns the scurrying was from a squirrel—a creature that shouldn't exist, but he wants to save nevertheless.
What follows is a stunning portrait of what it means to give yourself over to emotions, the connections people have with animals, as well as the thirst for knowledge of the past. It's a simple and well-acted film that's heightened by its almost sterilized production design and costumes, meticulously woven to provide stark contrast to the harried situation that's developing.
Even though simple is a good description for THE SQUIRREL, a better word might be effortless. This is the kind of movie that succeeds by a meticulous hand steadying the ship. This is an unassuming movie that creeps upon you, as you can't help but smile from ear to ear for the film's awkward but earned final 10 minutes.
Image courtesy of Pan Distribution
TOO MANY BEASTS
There's no way of avoiding the police procedural. No matter the format, there's a new tale in that vein every few months. Sarah Arnold's TOO MANY BEASTS understands this and finds numerous different ways to make the times it zigs instead of zags, both wild swings and deviations, attempts more filmmakers should try.
The film opens the way any good procedural does: by showing you a murder. Here, while you see everything, it feels like a mystery. Then, Fulda (Alexis Manenti) walks into the scene. He's a cop, but he's the definition of a loose cannon, having beaten people up and set a house on fire in the past. He drinks too much and has a self-destructive streak that threatens to take everyone down. The thing is, he's perceptive. Maybe not an ace due to the alcohol, but he can sense things going on behind the scenes and tries to unravel a conspiracy, aided by the equally complex and jaded station psychiatrist, Stéphane (Ella Rumpf).
The best way to describe the tone of TOO MANY BEASTS is that it's something like HOT FUZZ, with the seriousness turned up several notches higher. The villagers are odd. Everyone hides a secret, and instead of a swan, there are hordes of boar suddenly roaming the countryside and destroying all the farmers' crops. Not to mention the little LGBTQ bar where Fulda wanders and becomes the king of one very long night.
The reason for the HOT FUZZ comparison isn't just in the slight similarities, but in how unapologetically funny it is. As serious as the subject matter can be, and regardless of how deep into the case the mismatched duo gets, it keeps the comedy going. That might be what makes TOO MANY BEASTS so special. It isn't perfect. It's a shaggy-dog story filled with complex and strange characters who might be heightened, but are also endearing, making this a weird world worth visiting.
