Film Features | www.jaredmobarak.com

FANTASIA19 REVIEW: The Deeper You Dig [2019]

2019/07/162020/03/26 Jared Mobarak

Every gift is its own twisted curse. It’s funny where the mind can go when you only know a few details at first. That John Adams and Toby Poser‘s latest family-fueled film The Deeper You Dig is horror was enough to convince me that a line spoken by Ivy’s (Poser) daughter Echo (the filmmakers’ own child and co-director, Zelda Adams) about going hunting meant their game was humans. Was it a wild leap of my imagination? Sure. But here’s a woman dabbling in the occult who tells her goth kid…

FANTASIA19 REVIEW: DreadOut [2019]

2019/07/152020/03/26 Jared Mobarak

Don’t you dare say those words. Malignant forces within Catholic tales of evil generally seek to create Hell on Earth by finding a host willing to read the ancient words serving as their key. It’s therefore rare to receive scenes of demonic possession wherein a writhing body with black fluid spewing from its mouth screams for a portal not to be opened. But that’s exactly how writer/director Kimo Stamboel opens his cinematic adaptation of DreadOut—an indie survival horror videogame from Indonesia. He introduces a group of men holding the demon…

FANTASIA19 REVIEW: 메기 [Maggie] [2019]

2019/07/132020/03/26 Jared Mobarak

Let’s believe in people from now on. How would a movie narrated by a catfish feel? While the animal probably has a good view of what’s going on, would it understand? And when people use it as a stand-in for their conscience—knowing (yet not wanting to accept) the voice responding was still his/her own—would it retain the context of what it had heard? This fish would be an objective third party observer trying to parse the world around it through those few kind souls that pay it the time of…

FANTASIA19 REVIEW: Astronaut [2019]

2019/07/122020/03/26 Jared Mobarak

To see where we belong. It’s the beginning of the end for Angus Stewart (Richard Dreyfuss). His wife recently passed after a difficult and costly bout with dementia, his heart isn’t what it used to be, and his family is unsure about what to do to help him adjust. While his daughter Molly (Krista Bridges) and grandson Barney (Richie Lawrence) want him to move in, his son-in-law Jim (Lyriq Bent) can’t help wondering if enduring the strain of another aging parent on a daily basis isn’t good for his wife’s…

FANTASIA19 REVIEW: Away [2019]

2019/07/122020/03/26 Jared Mobarak

A one-man show on-screen and behind it, Gints Zilbalodis‘ Away is an obvious labor of love. Opening like a videogame wherein our lead is found dangling by parachute from a tree, we haven’t a clue about his surroundings and neither does he. Before he can release himself and begin a search for answers, however, there arrives a lumbering behemoth on the horizon with dead eyes laser-focused upon him. Maybe it’s a friend or maybe it’s his end—the curiosity and hope for the better allowing the boy to remain still despite…

FANTASIA19 REVIEW: Jade’s Asylum [2019]

2019/07/112020/03/26 Jared Mobarak

You’re the one who brought sand to the beach. We don’t get our bearings as far as locale and characters go until a little ways into Alexandre Carrière‘s Jade’s Asylum. While we’ve already met Jade (Morgan Kohan) and her boyfriend Toby (Kjartan Hewitt) in the midst of a fight wherein he blames his infidelity on her need for a therapist (if his infidelity can be believed along with anything that occurs on-screen), it’s two police officers engaged in an illicit affair (Mauricio Morales‘ Alvares and Diana Marcela Aguilar Chavez‘s Vasquez)…

FANTASIA19 REVIEW: The Art of Self-Defense [2019]

2019/07/092020/03/26 Jared Mobarak

I want to be what intimidates me. There was definite trepidation upon learning writer/director Riley Stearns‘ follow-up to Faults would be a comedy. That’s not to say his debut wasn’t funny, however. It was. But where its humor arrived from the matter-of-fact nature of the characterizations he utilized to turn his tale of cult deprogramming upside down, it remained a darkly suspenseful nightmare flirting with the supernatural in ways that forced our laughter to cease by lending those disquieting moments conviction beyond their inherent absurdity. I therefore worried billing The…

FANTASIA19 REVIEW: Sadako [2019]

2019/07/082020/03/26 Jared Mobarak

That new girl is creepy. Director Hideo Nakata brought novelist Kôji Suzuki‘s Ring series to the big screen two decades ago and spawned a laundry list of sequels, American remakes (one of which he helmed), comics, and television remakes that each put their own unique spin on central “monster” Sadako Yamamura’s history until fluidity of mythology became a veritable franchise hallmark. Things got muddled fast too as the initial follow-up to Ringu fared so poorly (with a different creative team at the lead to release the same year) that it…

HOTDOCS19 REVIEW: Mr. Toilet: The World’s #2 Man [2019]

2019/04/262020/03/28 Jared Mobarak

Turning poop culture into pop culture. This statistic says it all: 40% of citizens on Earth don’t have toilets. A big part of that number is India and China, but it’s still insane to comprehend as someone from a country that won’t allow homes or businesses to be built without one. It’s the type of problem you’d assume tops every nation’s to-do list and yet most cases have it found at the very bottom. Why? Because change isn’t easy. If your family has practiced open-air defecation for generations, why stop?…

HOTDOCS19 REVIEW: Willie [2019]

2019/04/242020/03/28 Jared Mobarak

I’m not done. It was 2003 before a Black hockey player had the honor of being inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. That player was Grant Fuhr, the Stanley Cup winning goalie of the Edmonton Oilers and multiple other teams (including a short stint with my hometown Buffalo Sabres). Because he was far from the first Black player in the league, however, you wouldn’t be faulted for wondering why the man with that unique distinction hadn’t already been enshrined. The reason was simple: Willie O’Ree only played forty-five games…

INTERVIEW: Keith Behrman, writer/director of Giant Little Ones

2019/03/012020/03/21 Jared Mobarak

One of my favorite things about going to the Toronto International Film Festival is finding the time to see the smaller movies that aren’t on everyone’s must-see lists. While the gamble sometimes turns out to be a dud, the risk is easily justified when you’re able to discover a work as genuinely memorable as Keith Behrman‘s Giant Little Ones in the process. A film about adolescence that isn’t afraid to delve into sexuality’s ever-broadening landscape of experimentation and fluidity with still violent repercussions, this story of two best friends falling…