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A young man is voiceless after an alien abduction leaves him without a mouth. A young woman, mourning the mysterious disappearance of her brother, finds a gooey fungus implanted in her ear that is used as a control mechanism by extraterrestrial forces who inflict sonic pain unless she complies with their wishes. A rural community renounces speech as a sin following a Rapture event that leaves them all behind to fend for themselves in a newly Godforaken land. An American teenager is dragged off to Germany by her father with his new bride and mute stepsister, the latter of which is later revealed to be the host for an ancient creature with the power to disrupt reality through the use of soundwaves. An ageing man exiled to an extraterrestrial penal colony begins to hear the thoughts of past prisoners through an alien mist that descends at night, prompting a confusion of identity that provokes violent tension with a new arrival. A roving cult, harbouring the last dose of vaccine against a zombie virus that has ravaged the land, announces themselves as The Trumpet, heralding the power of proclamation to name the chosen one who will use their immunity to free humanity from the scourge of the undead. And a vampire war machine regains consciousness amidst a nuclear holocaust in the war-torn land of Morgoth and proceeds to obliterate all remaining life and infrastructure in its path with an annihilating Rrröööaaarrr!

This year's Fantasia festival featured a string of entries that put themes of sound, hearing, and voice as central to explorations of human encounters with the non-human realm, terrestrial or otherwise. The term xenophonia popped into my mind as a potentially fruitful umbrella concept for auditory experiences relating to beings external to our species. A little web-searching revealed that the term is already in play for psychiatric conditions that symptomize abberant forms of speech, but I'll flash some artistic license here to expand its possibilities to include extra-human encounters that manifest through the silence of the speechless and the noise of the acutely heard. 

Perhaps the most poignant of the festival's xenophonic films was The Missing, the Phillipines' offical entry for the 96th Academy Awards in 2024 (and the first animated film to be submitted from that country). Eric, working at an animation studio, cannot speak because he has no mouth, an affliction he believes to be the result of an alien abduction when he was a child. The truth surfaces when his mother Rosalinda, with whom Eric has a very close relationship, asks him to check in on his uncle after a period of non-communication. With the help of his co-worker Carlo, who has been working hard to gain Eric's romantic affection, he discovers that the uncle has been dead for several days, a horrific scene that sparks a regression into dark memories of the past. At first these memories present as the return of the aliens who stole his mouth. Shaped like penises whose heads bob in and out of retracting foreskin as they speak, it becomes clear that they are masks for a truth that Eric doesn't want to remember: the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of this very same uncle. The abuser now dead, it is time for Eric to set these memories free. At first he resists violently, which estranges him from Carlo who has grown weary of Eric's erratic behaviour. But the more Eric struggles against the truth, the more he starts to fall apart - literally. An eye pops out at his uncle's funeral; he loses a hand while at work; his ear falls off while failing to hear the pleas of his loved ones. Finally, he digs up his uncle's grave and, upon opening the casket, finds all his severed appendages stored inside. The metaphor is clear: Eric's uncle stole his sense of wholeness, and the longer this goes unacknowledged, the less whole Eric becomes. Facing the issue now head on, Eric pieces himself back together and speaks for the first time since he was a child: "Mom, I've got something to tell you." 

The film is a marvel of understatement, simultaneously horrific and sweet as it interweaves Eric's emotional development across relationships of both family and romance with the realtiy of his past abuse and the terror induced by his hallucinated alien aggressors. The animation style works perfectly to present the metaphor of Eric's lost voice as the visual reality of his missing mouth, presented more like a ghostly veil shrouding the lower part of his face than a physical deformation. The film uses rotoscope techniques to animate live action footage for the scenes in the present, and fully hand-drawn sequences for flashback material. The combination works well to delineate the timelines while, at the same time, allowing for Eric's imagination to become fully entangled with reality as his mind struggles to produce coping mechanisms to mask the source of his trauma. Most notably, the film offers a refreshingly neutral take on its sub-theme of homosexuality, where Eric's budding relationship with Carlo is never treated as an abberation stemming from the sexual abuse he suffered and, instead, is offered as a way of articulating Eric's pathway out of the antisocial behaviour he has exhibited in response to the trauma. Eric's relationship with Carlo becomes a healing bond that is acknowledged as such, without judgment and against sterotype, by his mother. In turn, the mother's acceptance of Eric as he is suggests that she will fully hear him when he reveals the secrets of his past. The Missing is as good a film as I could have hoped to see on the festival's closing day.

Another of this year's stand-outs was Tilman Singer's Cukoo, the highly anticipated feature film follow-up to his experimental graduate thesis film Luz that blew the lid off the de Seve cinema at Fantasia in 2018. In Luz, a fateful cab ride is re-enacted in a psychiatric therapy session performed as a mock courtroom testimony, brought to life through the creative use of sound elements associated with the actual event mapped onto the staged re-enactment inside the hospital setting. As such, I expected Singer's new film to have a strong sonic component; I was not disappointed. A teenage fish-out-of-water premise morphs into a horror-thriller as lead character Gretschen, played to perfection by Hunter Schafer, discovers that her father is implicated in a bizarre cult conspiring to resurrect a mythical creature from the surrounding woods by allowing his new stepdaughter Alma to become implanted with the creature's egg. Alma is thus the titular cuckoo and, like Eric in The Missing, speaks not a word but hears just fine. At first Gretchen is frustrated with her stepsister, seeing her as partial cause for being dragged away from life with her mother in the United States to a resort in rural Germnay where her father is supposedly assisting with the property's expansion. Gretchen battles boredom by taking a job at the front desk of the resort, but it only takes one forbidden bike ride home after dark to reveal that there's a reason the resort's owner warning: a mysterious hooded woman with sungalsses roams the countryside at night, preceeded by a deafening high-pitched series of sonic waves that bounce around the theatre's surround sound array with a rare elasticity. The woman is the creature whose egg is hosted by Alma, and this sound ripples through the environment like an earthquake with corrollary destabilization on the image track to suggest a full disruption of reality. The cuckoo's call is used sparingly in the first half of the film but grows in frequency and intensity as chase scenes with the hooded woman are compounded with moments where Alma becomes increasingly aware of her own sonic powers as host to the cuckoos egg. The film builds to a climactic standoff where Gretchen rescues Alma from the secret lab at the hear of the resort by holding her hostage while manouevering between gun-toting adversaries: the boss who wants to save Alma and kill Gretchen, and a former cop who wants to kill Alma and save Gretchen. Neither can get a clean shot away as the sisters hold each other close and make their way outside, all while being stalked by the hooded woman amidst her deafening call. Finally, Alma learns to control her powers and is able to enact her own sonic onslaught fierce enough to shut down the opposition and enable their escape to the outside world. Through entanglement with the creature whose offspring she hosts, Alma finds her voice. And with Cuckoo, Singer has demonstrated his ability to take his own experimental voice, that some found difficult to handle in Luz, and map it effectively onto a commercial narrative vehicle. There are moments in Cuckoo where the film seems to exceed its apparatus and manifest within the room of the theatre itself, such is the riveting effect of the formal devices used to bring the cuckoo's supernatural powers to cinematic life. And these moments are woven together by an intriguing sci-fi premise mobilized through the conventions of conspiracy thriller and horror, and put into motion throgh the framework of a teenage comedy grounded by the strength of the lead actor's performance. I'll be waiting impatiently for Singer's next outing. 

Azrael marks yet another film at this year's festival to feature voiceless characters, this time as a choice enacted by many humans left behind following the Rapture. One particular group of survivors came to believe that speech was one of the sins that resulted in their punishment of remaining on Earth while the pure were lifted to heaven, and so they have created a community where vows of silence are enforced through the surgical removal of vocal chords. This isn't a happy place, and it's into this world that Azrael is kidnapped with her companion to be used for ritual sacrifice in the service of unknown ends. Azrael makes good her escape to set the film's chase narrative in motion as she is hunted through the densley forested setting, first by her captors and then by the dreaded Burned Ones, humans charred and deformed amidst the fire and brimstone of God's rapturous wrath. Ultimately, unable to break free of the region, Azrael re-infiltrates the camp to exact her revenge on the kidnappers that killed her boyfriend. In so doing, however, she ends up killing the mother of the newly born infant anti-Christ who then imprints on Azrael as the defacto heir to the cult's seat of power. In one powerful scene she is beset upon by a Burned One and tries with all her might to let out a scream for help, but it is impossible. She has no voice. But when the Burned Ones take Azrael for Satan's mother they back off and bow in worship, wailing as proxies for the voice that was stolen from her as she finally smiles, goat-horned child at her breast, accepting her lot.

And so Azrael spins another variation on the voiceless character, here a product of choice for some and violent enforcement for others. To choose silence as a response to surviving an apocalypse is a bit perplexing, although one can read a parallel with Eric's silence in The Missing as post-traumatic stress response. Yet there is clearly a religious motivation in play here, and one valid critique of the film is that it's lack of dialogue also ensures minimal plot exhibition to answer the many "why" questions that arise across its runtime. It can be frustrating not to fully understand what is motivating people in this Hell on Earth, but it also renders the action all the more disorienting, well-suited to the many displays of Azrael's bloody self-sufficiency under cover of night. One burning question is whether or not Azrael COULD have screamed if she had found the fortitutde to do so, as it is unclear whether or not she was subjected to the vocal chord removal by her captors. As a reminder that not all humans follow the path of silence, Azrael briefly hitches a ride with a man who still has access to a car and speaks out loud - though in nonsensical gibberish. Are his vocalizations meant to be presented from the auditory perspective of Azraeal who has, perhaps, forgotten (or never learned) how to process language? Or is this man himself a product of a language-free world and, in the absence of any training, but without having taken a vow of silence, simply emits utterances with no meaning? This scene sits at the nexus point of the film's unanswered questions about the relationship between voice, culture, and belief that frames the narrative events. The questions raised by this mysterious speaking man are never answered as he is quickly dispatched by Azrael's hunters and she must flee once again into the forest from whence she came. Clearly, the filmmakers are trading on the success of recent films like A Quiet Place that hang their suspense on the need for characters to refrain from speaking. Azrael's relative success on that level is open to debate, but it's a well-executed foray into a hellscape beyond immediate comprehension. 

Meanwhile on Earth (Pendant ce temps sur Terre) also features a heroine ploughing her way through the forest. This entry from France charts a young woman's grief over the disappearance of her brother through a potentially non-metaphorical narrative of alien abduction. Elsa's brother, Franck, is an astronaut who went missing on his first space mission. One day Elsa receives what she believes to be a message from Franck, in which he assures her that he'll be home soon. His voice comes by way of a glowing fungal slime that produces a mushroom whose cap functions as an earpiece for extraterrestiral communication. However, Elsa soon learns that, once placed in the ear, the mushroom cannot be extracted, its mycelial roots becoming entangled with her neural network. She begins receiving instructions to clear a path through a particular location in the forest in preparation for her brother's return. The task requires the felling of trees and their replacement by humans to become inhabited by alien beings, Body Snatchers style. If she resists these instructions, the earpiece emits painful soundwaves that effectively force her into compliance. She needs to deliver a set number of bodies to be granted the wish of her brother's return. And so Elsa becomes a reluctant serial killer with a conscience, hunting for victims whose demise she can justify in some way Dexter style. The film has many hallmarks of France's cinéma du corps cycle with director Jérémy Clapin's emphasis on the physicality of Elsa's pain under the influence of the alien fungus, and weighty bursts of extreme violence as when Elsa gets the better of a logger come rapist whose chainsaw becomes the tool of his own demise. A victim such as this would seem ideal for sacrifice to the invaders; trouble is, they need to be alive for the inhabitation to take hold. As the deadline ticks down, Elsa becomes increasingly desperate, mining lonely street dwellers and hapless seniors in a desperate bid to meet her quota on time. But is any of this real? Or has she been possessed by an inconsolable grief that sends her down the path of psychosis, like so many others who have invented experiences of alien encounters as cover for traumatic experience?

Elsa experiences the voice of her brother as an agent of extraterrestrial communication because he was last seen in outer space. But the fact that this communication is facilitated by a fungal entity suggests the potentail for a terrestrial origin. A hallucinogenic mushroom, possibly? Even if not, the directives for forest management provide an intriguing link to the realties of interspecies entanglement here on Earth. There has been a wealth of research recently into the relationship between mycelial networks underground and the vegetation that grows above, the roots of the forest entangled with fungal strands to form a symbiosis known as the mychorrhiza. Communication with the mychorrhiza is the premise of Ben Wheatley's In the Earth, and in her book The Mushroom at the End of the World Anna Tsing imagines the fungal dominance of a post-human future. Perhaps Elsa is as harbinger of inevitable fungal takeover; there are already species of Cordyceps fungus that can overrun the minds of wasps and force them to do their bidding, and the size of some mychorrhizal networks identified as a single living being suggest that there are massive lifeforms here on Earth that could be waiting for their moment to rise up from the soil and move more freely across the surface of the Earth. Perhaps we humans are already merely serving these fungal masters in ways we have not yet learned to recognize. Or maybe Elsa just really, really wants her brother back. At the end of the day, she is allowed a timeless moment of peace in Franck's presence once again. Real or imagined, the image resonates with the visualization of that which has been only a voice in her ear for so long. 

Where all of the films discussed so far feature otherworldly co-habitations that could be traced to terrestrial origins, The Silent Planet makes the most of a sci-fi premise that requires belief in the diegetic reality of its extra-terrestrial setting. Elias Koteas plays Theodore, an ageing convict sentenced to a life of hard labour on a distant planet serving as isolated penal colony. Not so much a colony as it is solitary confinement, intended to house only one prisoner at a time. Alone and lost in his mind, his life back on Earth becomes a haze as much informed by his imagination as by reality. When he learns he is terminally ill, he removes the implant used to track his movements and vital signs, prompting the authorities back home to believe he has died. Enter new arrival Niyya (Briana Middleton), who discovers he is still alive as she begins her own life sentence. And so the two eventually meet, make cautious acquaintance, and then gradually reveal more of their lives to each other. Why are they there? She is a sympathizer to the plight of Earth's robot population who, for fear of an artifical intelligence takeover, where banished by humankind. Nyaa was adopted and raised by robot parents, who were killed by military forces led by an officer named Nathan. This revelation sparks Theodore to begin remembering things long forgotten about his own life, which begin to suggest that he could be this Nathan. Niyaa's belief is compounded by her exposure to a mysterious alien mist that descends at night to record and play back the thoughts of anyone caught in its midst. I'm reminded here of Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphogenetic fields, which argues for understanding human consciousness as existing outside the mind in fields that bind living things together through a shared network of experience. Niyaa hears Theodore's voice in the mist, apparently admitting to the murders. What she doesn't realize, however, is that the mist creates feedback loops in which the voices of some articulate the thoughts of others as an accumulation of all that is recorded and replayed to those inside. So it's impossible to track whose thoughts are being articulated through whose voice, a situation further muddled by Theodore's diminishing capacities in the face of age, isolation, and willful repression of his own regettable past as murderer of his own wife. Things get tense as Niyya plots her revenge, but a last minute discovery shows that Theodore is not the culprit and she aborts the mission. While her catharsis is disrupted, her engagement with Theodore has been mutually benefical in allowing each of them to confront and deal with aspects of their past that have been manifesting unpleasantly in the present, just in time for Theodore to make some peace with himself before passing to the next realm. 

The silence suggested by the film's title is a double-edged sword. On one level it is a reference to the isolation intended as part of the punishment for prisoners banished to the planet. Early in the film, Theodore tells Nyaa, "I like to make up nonsensical poetry. Keeps the mind busy. Otherwise the silence will crush you." To which Niyaa responds, "I've heard worse than silence." This response points to the other edge of the sword: silence as reprieve from the horrors the noisy world she left behind. The two characters thus occupy different positions in relation to the silent planet: one battles the silence; the other welcomes it. For both, however, the planet's "silence" contains a multitude of voices heard with the mind rather than the ear, and it is in this alien silence that the film's drama plays out. The film is a slow burn, Canadian style, maximizing the production values of its shooting locations on the red soils of St. John's harbour and in abandoned mines and WWII munitions bunkers. The visual luxury allows the characters to reveal themselves slowly, which, in turn, maximizes audience immersion within the story's intellectual dimension as we ponder the porous boundaries between past, present and future and across identities that mingle in shared space beyond the borders of the human form. 

Finally, we come to the tale of a vampire war machine that regains consciousness amidst a nuclear holocaust in the war-torn land of Morgoth and proceeds to annihilate all remaining life and infrastructure in its path. The premise for another of Fantasia’s signature sci-fi entries this year? No. In fact it is the founding mythology for Quebec metal legends Voïvod, providing the conceptual framework for lyrics and art design spanning four decades of progressive thrashing covered in great detail in the new documentary We Are Connected. Fittingly for this festival, we learn that the band’s name was inspired by Bram Stoker’s use of the term Voivode in Dracula, indicating the rank of military governor once held by Vlad the Impaler before his turn. Drummer Michel Langevin (aka Away) adapted and adopted the term as the name for the battle robot whose likeness has become the band's signature visual marker throughout their lengthy discography across several different personnel configurations, detailed thoroughly in the documentary. 

The film does loving justice to the full history of the band, with a special emphasis on their origins in the small northern Quebec town of Jonquière where Away lived, as he describes it, in the last house on the left side of a street that ends where the northern wilderness begins. There was literally nothing past his house, and the town was framed by the looming industrial presence of North America’s largest aluminum extraction facility, where most of the town's workers were employed. Away describes one particular day in which he became aware that a train passes behind the aluminum plant, calling his attention, for the first time, to the fact that there is a world beyond the edges of his town. He rushed out to find out where the train goes, only to be stopped and stabbed by a local gang boy who warned him not to occupy their part of the street without authorization. And so the conditions for the formation of Voïvod’s brutal early thrash is well established. And from there the band’s transformations across albums, line-ups, and decades is presented in exhaustive detail with interviews from all members and a wide variety of others who have worked with or been influenced by them. Former Metallica bassist Jason Newstead provides particularly astute analysis of the stylistic particularities of several albums and the band's progression through different eras. He speaks as an original fan who has no trouble admitting to Metallica's own influence by the band, and also as an insider who played with Voïvod in one of its line-ups following the near-fatal injury of previous bassist and singer E-Force in a car crash en route to the Wacken metal festival in Germany. E-Force explains his disappointment around his forced exit from the band during a long recovery, then remembers the supportive words imparted to him by a friend: "Dude, you're THE MAN! It took the bassist from Metallica and the return of the band's original singer to replace you!!" Along the way they also lost original guitarist Piggy to cancer, and the current line-up now features Away and OG singer Snake along with new arrivals Chewy and Rocky on guitar and bass respectively. These final four were in attendance at the screening and were on hand for questions afterwards. And the following day, Away held court at Gallery 88 for the Rebel Robots exhibition of original artwork and some memorobila (including Piggy's famous Nasa guitar). Some merch was on hand, including a few copies of Away's long out of print book Worlds Away featuring a fine selection of art and comic strips created by the drummer over the years. He kindly signed my copy.

We Are Connected is a veritable love letter to fans of the band, providing access to detail and a level of emotional depth that would surely be appreciated by even the most jaded of metal nerds. Voïvod was in regular rotation, along with the usual suspects, during my teenage metal days out in mid-1980s Vancouver, a testimony to the band's influence well beyond provincial borders even in their earliest days. I'm not even sure I knew they were Canadian at the time; they were just badass. And it was the art and iconography that struck me as much as the music. Here the documentary also excels, filling the screen with Away's fantastical hellscapes at opportune moments, animator Jaan Silmberg bringing the drummer's stills to moving life to transition between segments, adorn the borders of still photos and title cards, and even morph the faces of interviewees into living manifestations of the myriad characters that blur the boundaries between terrestrial and extra-terrestrial, ancient and futuristic, real and imagined. 

At the end of the Q+A, Away mentioned the band's next project: a pair of live performances with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra at the end of January. I attended the second night, which offered a new pathway into the band's material that emphasized the scale of their compositions and the worldbuilding of their lyrics and visual symbolism. As fitting a start to 2025 as I could hope for.

Volume 29, Issue 6 / June 2025 documentary   fantasia international film festival   heavy metal   science-fiction   voïvod