brandon ledet

The Overlook Film Festival 2025, Ranked & Reviewed

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Self-described as “a summer camp for genre fans,” The Overlook Film Festival has quickly become the best of New Orleans’s local film fests . . . as long as you’re a total sicko. I consistently catch a wide selection of the year’s most stylish, violent, and memorable horror films & thrillers in the festival’s lineup, many of which don’t otherwise reach local big screens before they get siphoned off to the cultural void of streaming platforms. In recent years, all films programmed have been corralled to the two locations of The Prytania Theatres, which allows you to form a weekend-long bond with fellow movie nerds you continually run into while lining up for the next fucked-up delight. Everyone’s watching too much, sleeping too little, and loving every horrific minute. It really does capture the summer camp or sleepover feeling of staying up all night watching scary movies with your friends after the adults fell asleep and can no longer police what’s playing on the living room TV.

This was the first year of the festival where I made some time in my schedule for a couple repertory screenings: the Corman-Poe classic The Fall of the House of Usher (1960) and a block of David Lynch’s early short films (namely “Sick Men Getting Sick,” “The Grandmother, “The Amputee,” and “Premonitions Following an Evil Deed”). The Vincent Price campiness and costume drama fussiness of House of Usher made for a classically wonderful trip to the Prytania’s original location uptown, but the Lynch shorts made a much more significant impression on me. As a collective, they offered a glimpse into an alternate dimension where Lynch might have stuck to a full career as a Don Hertzfeldt-style outsider animator. More importantly, they also projected most of the scariest images I saw at this year’s festival, especially in the domestic blackbox-theatre artificiality of “The Grandmother.” There’s always something novel about watching challenging art films in a downtown shopping mall like Canal Place, and that Lynch block may have been the most abstract & challenging films ever screened there. It says a lot about Overlook’s sharp, thoughtful curation that they made room for films that academically rigorous alongside feature-length sex-and-fart-joke comedies like Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover (which, I might as well admit, was my favorite of the fest).

I see no point in rating or raking the works of recently fallen legends like Corman & Lynch here, since their contributions to the festival are so deeply engrained in genre cinema history, they’re beyond critique. Instead, I’m listing below the ten new-release feature films I caught at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, ranked in the order that I appreciated them, each with a blurb and a link to a corresponding review. For a more detailed recap of the Swampflix Crew’s festival experience beyond these reviews, check out the most recent episode of The Swampflix Podcast.

Dead Lover

Grace Glowicki follows up her freak-show stoner comedy Tito with a flippantly surreal Hammer Horror throwback, filtering the Frankenstein myth through the Tim & Eric meme machine. Some of the most gorgeous, perverted images you’ll see all year paired with the kind of juvenile prankster humor that punctuates its punchlines with ADR’d fart noises.  If Glowicki’s filmmaking career doesn’t work out, she can always pivot to becoming the world’s first drag king Crispin Glover impersonator, bless her putrid heart.

The Shrouds

Grief has been the major theme in horror for the past decade, while Conspiracy has been the major theme of mainstream political thought.  Only Cronenberg could find a way to eroticize both in a single picture. The king of the perverts continues his reign, despite his reluctance to wear the crown.

Hallow Road

An all-in-a-car, real-time thriller that reimagines 2013’s Locke as a dark fairy tale about irresponsible parenting. Extremely satisfying for anyone who loves to watch Rosamund Pike act her way through a crisis.

Zodiac Killer Project

A self-deprecating meta doc about a true crime dramatization that fell apart in pre-production.  Reminded me of a couple postmodern television series of my youth: Breaking the Magician’s Code – Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed (for spoiling the magic of how the true-crime genre works) and The Soup (for giving a broad enough overview of the genre that I don’t feel like I have to watch any genuine examples of it to Get It).

Cloud

The new Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no not that one, the other one) asks a really scary question: What if online flamewars became physical, literal, and consequential? Turns out they’d still be at least a little bit silly and a lotta bit pathetic.

LifeHack

Screenlife cinema that abandons horror in favor of the heist thriller, following the small-scale, laptop-bound schemes of four teens who steal a Bitcoin fortune from an Elon Musk-type dipshit.  I personally preferred when this still-burgeoning subgenre was fully supernatural, but it’s nice to see a version of it where teens are actually having fun being online (even when in peril).

Predators

A documentary about To Catch a Predator as an aughts-era reality TV phenomenon. Felt like I was going to throw up for the first 40 minutes or so, because I had never seen the show before and wasn’t fully prepared for how deeply evil it is.

Good Boy

You’ve seen a haunted house movie from the POV of a ghost. Now, line up for a haunted house movie kinda-sorta from the POV of a dog! What a time to be alive.

Orang Ikan (Monster Island)

A WWII-set creature feature stranded somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Continues a long tradition of unspoken homoeroticism in wartime dramas, now with a Roger Corman rubber-suited monster as lagniappe.

Redux Redux

A sci-fi revenge thriller about a grieving mother who gets addicted to killing her child’s murderer in multiple alternate dimensions. It brings me no pleasure to act as the logic police, but the temporal shenanigans of this one make no sense. It’s like they wrote it as a time-loop movie and subbed in the word “multi-verse” instead at the last minute without cleaning up the implications of how time passes differently in that genre. The violence is effectively nasty, though, and there are a few tense set-pieces that almost distract from the quibbles.

-Brandon Ledet

Americans Under Siege, With and Without Context

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I recently caught a double feature at my local multiplex of high-style, high-tension thrillers about American soldiers under siege in claustrophobic locations. The stories told in Alex Garland’s Warfare & Ryan Coogler’s Sinners are separated by entire genres, decades, and oceans, and yet they both trap American soldiers in tight-space locales by surrounding them with enemy combatants, whittling down their ranks one corpse at a time. That shared Americans-under-siege dynamic puts them in unlikely conversation with each other as two feature films currently in wide release, but what really makes that conversation interesting is the films’ respective relationships with the cultural & historical context around their sieges. Warfare is so hostile to providing context that it borders on experimentation in narrative form, while Sinners is entirely about context, explaining its own supernatural siege’s relation to America’s past, present, and future. Together, they represent the two extremes of contextual explanation in cinematic storytelling, to the point where considering them together is something that would only occur to you if you happen to write movie reviews and catch them both at the same theatre in a single evening.

Assigning Warfare‘s authorship entirely to Alex Garland is a bit misleading, since he shares directorial credit with former U.S. Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza. In fact, the real-time, true-story siege thriller is most interesting for the battle between its two directors: one who wants to honor the soldiers depicted “for always answering the call” (Mendoza) and one who wants to examine them & pluck their limbs off like bugs he caught in a jar (Garland). An opening title card explains that the film’s reenactment of a failed 2006 American military mission during the Iraq War was made “using only the memories” of Mendoza’s platoon, who experienced the violent episode first-hand. After the reenactment concludes, surviving members of that platoon are shown visiting the film’s set mid-production to provide their insight, contextualizing the movie as an honorable commemoration of their service & sacrifice during the harshest conditions of war. Only, that final moment is undercut by inclusion of a portrait of the Iraqi family who were also present that day and whose home was invaded & destroyed to fit the American military’s needs & whims. Earlier, when the surviving American soldiers have safely escaped the real-time gunfight in rescue tanks, the camera then lingers on that family appearing puzzled & shellshocked in the rubble of their home, as if they were just invaded by space aliens and not fellow human beings.

Garland & Mendoza’s choice to reenact this one specific mission without explaining the larger context of the U.S. military’s invasion of Iraq (under false pretenses of seeking weapons of mass destruction) has been hotly debated as a disingenuous, amoral screenwriting choice among the film’s detractors. From the Iraqi family’s perspective, however, that absence of context only makes the unlawful intrusion even more terrifying & cruel. The family is sleeping in their cozy duplex when Americans kick down their doors and sledgehammer their walls in the middle of the night, inviting enemy fire into the home as a makeshift military base while they’re gathered to huddle on a single bed, powerless. There is no warning or preparation for this invasion, nor is their any communication once the fighting ceases. There’s no context whatsoever, neither for that family nor for the audience. All that’s offered is a dramatic reenactment of the gunfight from the surviving American soldiers’ perspective, with the flattering casting of young Hollywood hunks like Charles Melton, Will Poulter, Kit Connor, and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai to help sweeten the deal for those who “answered the call.” The absence of testimony from the Iraqi citizens invaded, shot at, and displaced by those soldiers’ mission becomes glaring by the final credits, though, and the questions that absence raises hang heavy in the air. I like to think that unease was Garland’s main contribution to the picture but, without context, I can only guess.

The political & historical context behind the all-in-one-day siege plot of Sinners is much easier to parse, since Ryan Coogler is much more upfront about what he’s saying through his art. The director’s fifth feature film (all starring career-long collaborator Michael B. Jordan) and his first not adapted from either pre-existing IP or real-life events, Sinners is set in a 1930s Mississippi overrun with bloodsucking vampires. You wouldn’t guess the vampire part in its first hour, though, which is mostly a getting-the-gang-back-together drama about two former soldiers and current booze-runners (twins, both played by Jordan) who return to their hometown to set up a juke joint for Black patrons during Prohibition. After a long stretch of friendly “Look what the cat dragged in” reunions (featuring consistently dependable character actors like Delroy Lindo & Wunmi Mosaku), the juke joint proves to be a communal success, if not a financial one. Unfortunately, the party gets to be a little too lively, which attracts the attention of white, vampiric interlopers (led by the consistently intense Jack O’Connell). The vampires are particularly attracted to the transcendently beautiful blues music played by the juke joint’s youngest employee, Preacher Boy (newcomer Miles Caton), which introduces an unignorable cultural appropriation metaphor to the vampires’ violent desire to be let inside the party. More practically, it also sours the vibe of the evening by trapping the partygoers in a single location, waiting to be drained of their blood and assimilated into the vampire cult.

Sinners is a truly American horror story, a beer & blues-fueled gangsters vs ghouls battle set against endless fields of cotton and all the commodified evil they represent. Every detail of the story that isn’t character-based drama registers as commentary on American identity: the illusion of freedom, the fixation on money, the compulsory Christianity, the lingering infrastructures of slavery & The Klan. The only positive touchstones of American culture are, in fact, Black culture, as represented in a fish-fry dance party that offers a Mississippi farming community a few hours to cut loose before returning to a life of poverty & backbreaking labor . . . until the party attracts vampiric outsiders who want to claim that culture as their own. In one standout sequence, Coogler extrapolates on this idea to visually & aurally lay out how the Delta blues that Preacher Boy is playing in the juke joint is foundational for all fundamentally American music & pop culture, illustrating its connections to funk, rock, hip-hop, bounce, and beyond in a physical, impossible embodiment of the story’s context. It’s a moment that not only accomplishes everything Baz Lurhman’s Elvis picture failed to do across 150 extra minutes of runtime, but it also positions Sinners as one of the most distinctly American vampire stories ever told on screen (among which I suppose its closest competition is Katherine Bigelow’s Near Dark).

The only dramatic context Warfare provides before kicking off its real-time siege sequence is a brief moment where all soldiers involved are watching a pop music video on a shared laptop, laughing at its over-the-top sexuality & pelvic thrusts. There’s just enough time allowed to that scene for the audience to discern a few key soldiers’ personalities through body language & facial expressions, before they’re immediately shown breaking into and destroying a sleeping family’s home. In contrast, Sinners spends the first half of its 140min runtime getting to know the gangsters, players, and partiers it eventually puts under vampiric siege, so that they feel like real people instead of walking, talking metaphors. It’s through that sprawling attention to context that we learn that the booze-running twins who open the Mississippi juke joint were WWI soldiers before they became gangster contemporaries of Al Capone in Prohibition-era Chicago. Even after the siege story is officially over, Coogler can’t help but pile on more context about cultural vampires & the blues, dragging the setting into contemporary times with a surprise guest appearance by blues legend Buddy Guy. Normally, I would say less is more when it comes to a movie explaining its own themes & context, but Coogler overcommits to those explanations to the point of academic scholarship, while still managing to deliver a fun & sexy vampire movie in the process. Meanwhile, Warfare‘s deliberate aversion to context threatens to implode the entire project, with only a few stray shots of Americans viewed from an outsider’s perspective affording it any sense of artistic or political purpose.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Junk Head (2017)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Takahide Hori’s stop-motion-animated nightmare comedy Junk Head (2017).

00:00 Welcome

03:55 Vampire Hunter D (1985)
07:07 Casino (1995)
15:31 Deadwood – The Movie (2019)
22:30 The Fall of the House of Usher (1960)
38:17 The Conformist (1970)
42:32 Times Square (1980)
48:56 Devil Fetus (1982)
55:38 Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

1:01:21 Junk Head (2017)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

The True-Crime Horrors of The Overlook Film Festival

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The scariest films I saw at this year’s Overlook Film Festival featured none of the ghouls, ghosts, goblins, demons, and vampires that typically populate the screen at the horror-leaning genre fest. I was mostly scared by the dark-sided media consumption habits of my fellow human beings, some of whom were in the audience of the very same theater as me. Personally, I can watch supernatural evil illustrated on the screen all day without being emotionally affected by the darkness & cruelty depicted, but when it comes to turning true-crime documentation of real-world evil into passive, consumptive entertainment, my heart sinks in my chest. True crime documentaries have recently become a hugely popular micro-industry, with a massive audience second-screening 10-hour miniseries about heinous murder sprees while eating dinner & folding laundry, as if they were half-listening to episodes of The Office or Friends. Something about that passive, disaffected viewing habit is even more disturbing than the crimes being dramatized for mass entertainment (and for easy, routine streaming-service profit). So, it’s appropriate that two of the documentary selections at this year’s Overlook focused on general audiences’ insatiable true-crime appetite from a critical distance, asking how, exactly, did we allow our formulaic background entertainment to get this fucked up?

Sometimes, you need a little distance to recognize just how rotted things have gotten. David Osit’s documentary Predators profiles the aughts-era true crime series To Catch a Predator as a reality-TV phenomenon in which Dateline NBC anchor Chris Hansen baited online child-molesters from behind their keyboards to stage sensational on-camera confrontations in the meat space, to great financial success. Deploying “decoy” actors who pretended to be underage, the show would then interview the titular predators in the lowest moment of their lives, watching them to beg for mercy & therapy before promptly being arrested by local cops. I remember finding this premise and the show’s success too grotesque to stomach as a teenager when it first aired, so I spent the first 40 minutes or so of Predators fighting back the urge to vomit, confronted with how deeply evil it was in practice after only being aware of it in the abstract. No one in the To Catch a Predator production—Chris Hansen included—cared about the children they were supposedly protecting by luring these men to a bait house. The show is a seasons-long ratings stunt meant to hook & shock an audience by tapping into our animalistic impulses for violent vengeance. Its legacy is not in making the streets safer; it’s in prompting one of its targets to commit suicide during a taping and in inspiring dipshit influencers to stage their own D.I.Y. versions of the show on YouTube & TikTok, each with their own brand-conscious catchphrases & subscription models. Osit eventually wrestles with his personal connection to the show and how his young mind was shaped by it while it initially aired, but I mostly walked away disgusted with the broader, mainstream audience that made it a hit in the first place.

Charlie Shackleton’s self-deprecating meta documentary Zodiac Killer Project is much more current and much more conceptual in its own examination of true-crime cinema’s popularity. Shackleton’s original pitch was to adapt a book about an unprovable theory on the identity of the titular serial killer into a generic true-crime miniseries, but the rights for the adaptation were pulled at the last minute before production, so he couldn’t legally complete it. Instead, he’s made a movie about what he would have done if he had maintained those rights, breaking down the tropes, rhythms, and attention-grabbing tactics of a formulaic true-crime documentary as he outlines the incomplete project. He illustrates this game plan through four rigidly segmented visual approaches that afford the film a kind of academic distance from the typical straight-to-streaming docs it satirizes. In one approach, he narrates the scenes he cannot legally film over celluloid images of empty Californian landscapes, slowly zooming in on minor background details whenever he gets wrapped up in the heat of the story. In another, he illustrates individual images from that story with “evocative B-roll” in a purposefully artificial sound stage environment, mimicking Errol Morris’s pioneering true-crime doc The Thin Blue Line as it’s been diluted through countless reiterations. He’s also often shown in the recording booth as he’s being interviewed by an off-screen collaborator, making all of this observation & deconstruction of the true crime genre sound casually improvised, as if it’s occurring to him in real time. In the most important approach, he proves his point by inserting scenes from the made-for-Netflix true crime docs he’s describing in a YouTube video essay presentation, demonstrating that he clearly knows what he’s talking about as a self-critical fan of the genre.

Zodiac Killer Project reminded me of a couple post-modern television series I did watch in the early 2000s, while avoiding the amoral cultural rot of shows like To Catch a Predator. I’m thinking of Breaking the Magician’s Code: Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed—for how it spoils the magic of how the true crime genre works its audience—and The Soup, for giving a broad enough overview of the genre that I don’t feel like I have to watch any genuine examples of it to get it. Even when breaking down the laziest & evilest aspects of the genre in real time, however, you get the sense that Charlie Shackleton is still a little bummed that he didn’t get to complete his formulaic streaming-service doc as originally conceived. His mourning the loss of that work is even tied to his realization that so many fewer people are going to watch this artful, academic documentary than the audience that would have auto-played his formulaic Netflix slop, if completed. Indeed, only a miniscule fraction of the audience who watched To Catch a Predator as it originally aired are going to reckon with the moral implications of that mass-entertainment character blemish as examined in its post-mortem doc Predators. Hell, I’m sure David Osit would even settle for a fraction of the still-watching audience commanded by micro YouTube celebrity Skeet Hansen, who lamely punctuates his Chris Hansen-impersonating predator exposures with the catchphrase “You’ve just been Skeeted.” The scariest aspect of all of this is how little anyone gives a shit about the exploitation of real-life violence, suffering, and abuse that provides the background noise to our absent-minded chores & scrolling; it’s all comfort watching. The monsters are the audience.

-Brandon Ledet

Parental Hell at The Overlook Film Festival

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When I think of how the horrors of parenting are usually represented in genre cinema, I picture cruel, demonic children. In most horrors & thrillers that prompt you to think twice about having kids, the prompt is a warning that the kids themselves can be absolute nightmares, typified by titles like The Bad Seed, The Omen, Orphan, and We Need to Talk About Kevin. I was treated to an entirely different flavor of parental Hell at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, however, one that torments parents even when their kids are total angels. Both of the high-concept thrillers Redux Redux & Hallow Road ask what if the true horror of parenting is your own potential for failure? What if you fail to keep your children alive or, worse yet, fail to prepare them to keep themselves alive once your part of the job is done? The lifelong responsibility to raise, protect, and prepare another human being for the Hell of everyday living leaves parents incredibly vulnerable to the heightened pain of genre storytelling. It’s just unusual for the source of that pain to be a long, hard look in the mirror.

In Redux Redux, the major failure of the mother figure played by Michaela McManus (sister of co-directors Kevin & Matthew McManus) has already happened before the story begins. We meet her nursing her grief over the loss of her daughter with a weak cup of coffee in a roadside diner. She wordlessly trails the diner’s short-order cook back to his shitty apartment, then stabs him to death in his bedroom. Then, the scenario repeats: the same diner, the same doomed cook, the same violent end. The only thing that changes is the color of the coffee mug. Redux Redux is a revenge-thriller version of the television program Sliders, wherein our grieving-mother antihero jumps from alternate universe to alternate universe to murder her daughter’s killer in thousands of temporarily satisfying ways. Of course, these empty acts of revenge do nothing to bring her daughter back to life; it’s more of a multiversal addiction story than anything, where she hides from her pain by violently acting out against a convenient effigy of the man who ruined everything. The main tension of the movie is whether she can break this violent pattern of addiction to do better by her new, reluctantly adopted daughter figure: a street-smart wiseass teen (Stella Marcus) who’s in danger of becoming the spitting image of her worst self. The horrors of parenting are apparently inescapable, even when you have a magic microwave coffin that allows you to slide into an alternate dimension at a moment’s notice.

In Hallow Road, there’s still plenty of time to do the right thing, but the parents fail anyway. Rosamund Pike & Matthew Rhys star as a middle-aged yuppie couple who are woken in the middle of the night by a panicked phone-call from their college-age daughter. It seems that after a passionate fight with her parents, she decided to go do some drugs in the woods about it, and accidentally struck a stranger with her car on the drive back home. Panicked, the couple start racing to their daughter in their own vehicle, where most of the film is confined for the remainder of the runtime. With only their voices & wisdom to guide their child through this life-changing (and life-ending crisis), they find themselves at a moral crossroads. Do they instruct her to alert the authorities of the accident and face jailtime, potentially saving her stoned-driving victim’s life, or do they help her escape responsibility for her actions, taking a blame for the hit & run themselves to preserve her post-collegiate future? The resulting story is an all-in-a-car, real-time thriller that reimagines 2013’s Locke as a dark fairy tale about irresponsible parenting. The further the couple drive into the woods to “rescue” (i.e., corrupt) their child, the more illogical and darkly magical the rules of their world become, and the the entire film functions as a kind of artificial stage-play examination of parents’ most harmful, regrettable impulses.

Personally, I was much more pleased with the genre payoffs of Hallow Road than I was with Redux Redux, mostly because its internal logic felt more purposeful & thoroughly considered. Because Hallow Road opens itself up to Old World supernatural magic, it’s a lot easier to accept its high-concept premise than the more grounded, sci-fi theorizing of Redux Redux. It brings me no pleasure to act as the screenwriting logic police, but the temporal shenanigans of Redux Redux made no sense to me, especially once I started counting up the untold thousands of weeks the mother figure claims to have been murdering her daughter’s killer for and noticed that she is not, in fact, 100 years old. It’s like the McManus family started writing it as a time-loop movie and subbed in the word “multi-verse” instead at the last minute without cleaning up the implications of how time passes differently in that genre. Meanwhile, director Babak Anvari is in total control of just how much information to reveal to the audience about the logic of his hermetic, supernatural world to keep us on the hook — very little. While Redux Redux plays like an audition for a bigger-budget Hollywood actioner for the McManus clan (if you squint hard enough, you can see Betty Gilpin & Jenny Ortega headlining this one as the makeshift mother-daughter avenger duo), Hallow Road is more realistic about what it can achieve on its car-bound scale, using its confinement & limited resources to increase the attention, rather than distracting from them. Its local premiere at this year’s Overlook was also a nice kind of homecoming for Anvari, whose previous picture Wounds is one of the best New Orleans-set horror movies in recent memory (despite what its general critical response will tell you).

Speaking even more personally, I will never know the full horrors of parental failure illustrated here, because I will never be a parent myself. Maybe the unthinkable nightmare of having lost a child and the resulting addictive, self-destructive coping mechanisms that inevitably follow that kind of tragedy stir up powerful enough emotions in a parental audience that the basic temporal logic of its conceit doesn’t matter much. The violence is effectively nasty at least, and there are a few tense set-pieces that almost distract from the conceptual quibbles (and from the nagging feeling that you’re watching the DTV version of Midnight Special). Meanwhile, the violence of Hallow Road is more verbal & conceptual, as the entire narrative is teased out over the course of a feature-length phone call. I still found it to be the more rattling picture of the two, thanks to the aural jump scares of the sound design and the bigger, crueler questions it asks about what it means to truly be a Good Parent. In either case, I’m happy to have my suspicions that being a parent is a nonstop nightmare confirmed, even if it’s not the kids themselves who are the terror. Apparently, it’s the personal responsibilities & shortcomings that really haunt you.

-Brandon Ledet

The Shrouds (2025)

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Grief has been the major theme of horror cinema for the past decade, while Conspiracy has been the major theme of mainstream political thought.  Only David Cronenberg could find a way to eroticize both in a single picture. The king of the perverts continues his reign, despite his reluctance to wear the crown.
Vincent Cassel stars in The Shrouds as a David Cronenberg type: a silver-haired Torontonian millionaire named Karsh, whose grief over the recent passing of his wife has made it impossible to enjoy his life’s refinement & luxury. Only, that onscreen avatar has fully given into the modern evils that have tormented Cronenberg’s consciousness throughout his career as a public figure: the menacing intersection of technology & sex. Karsh drives around a near-future Toronto in his Tesla-brand electric car, enjoying the occasional indulgence in fine-dining extravagance while mostly spending his alone time obsessing over digital images of his dead wife. His most intimate relationship is with a cartoon A.I. assistant named Honey, and he’s struggling to suppress his sexual desire for his wife’s surviving sister — both of whom are played by Diane Kruger, the same actor who represents his wife in memories & photographs. If I were to therapize what the director is doing with Cassel’s aimlessly selfish protagonist, I’d say he’s confronting the worst-faith version of himself as a way of processing the real-life loss of his own wife. None of that is really my or anybody else’s business, though, and it’s just as likely he’s satirizing a societal malady as he is expressing a personal one.

Conceptually, The Shrouds is designed to question the fetishism & alien rituals of how we grieve our loved ones, calling attention to them in the same way that the sensation of our tongues being housed inside our own mouths doesn’t feel bizarre until the moment their presence is singled out. If it’s socially acceptable for Karsh to eroticize and mourn the loss of his wife’s physical body, how specific is he allowed to be?  If it’s romantic to miss touching his favorite of her breasts, then what is so strange about eroticizing & mourning her teeth? Would it be any stranger for him to browse .jpegs of his wife’s dental scans than it would to occasionally flip through her nude Polaroids? If all he has to remember her by is images of her body while she was still alive, would it be so strange to extend that keepsake collection to images of her body in death? Neither set of images represents her, exactly. They’re just records of the physical traits that housed her essence, which left the flesh as soon as she passed. And what of the ritual where a surviving spouse plans & purchases their funeral-lot burial directly next to their deceased lover for whenever they happen to die themselves? Why wait until death to join your spouse in your shared marital cemetery bed? What if you could stay with them every minute until your own body expires, through the portable convenience of a smartphone app?

Cassel’s Karsh is a tech-bro innovator who has disrupted the funeral service game by investing in technology that allows you to connect with your deceased loved one’s grave at any time, via app. You no longer have to fight the impulse to jump into the coffin to be buried with them, not since there are live 3D images of their corpse rotting in real time, thanks to the visual sensors of the titular future-tech shrouds. That lingering impulse to stick by his wife after her body expires commands what’s left of his erotic life: his growing tensions with the wife’s conspiracy-theorist sister, his uncomfortably flirtatious relationship with his A.I. digital assistant, and his nightly visits from the ghostly memory of his wife in declining health, which he remembers as a series of experimental surgeries he considers a form of medical adultery. Cut off from physical access to his wife’s body, he looks for its closest surviving substitutes and finds only terror, alienation, and betrayal in the pursuit. Meanwhile, the proof-of-concept graveyard showroom for his shrouds tech is vandalized, while international protestors threaten to take down his entire personal empire in a far-reaching conspiracy of circular logic & capitalist sin.

There’s no dramatic resolution or clarifying statement that ties all of these cold, alienating concepts together. Expressing unease with how technology & sex are integrated into the grief process is the entire point of the project, so it would be self-defeating to alleviate any of it. Instead, Karsh becomes increasingly paranoid & isolated in his quest to reclaim his wife’s body as a physical presence in his life, despite the impossibility of that happening, as she is dead & buried before the movie begins. The seemingly conspiratorial efforts to keep him separated from that body are their own source of erotic terror rather than a source of narrative structure, which makes for just about the strangest way this story could possibly be told. It’s a cold, philosophical rumination on the inhumanity of modern living — one that prompts you to laugh at the deadpan absurdity of its delivery before you realize just how chilling you find the implications of its bigger-picture ideas. In other words, it’s a David Cronenberg film.

-Brandon Ledet

Dead Lover (2025)

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Grace Glowicki’s directorial career debuted in the genderfucked stoner-comedy freak show Tito, which might very well have been the world’s first Crispin Glover drag king act. The fuckery continues in her sophomore film Dead Lover, which locally premiered at this year’s Overlook Film Festival (and, to my eye, was the best of the fest). Dead Lover perfectly exemplifies the Overlook brand of horror-themed genre films that skew more artsy than scary, delivering a flippantly surreal Hammer Horror throwback that filters the Frankenstein myth through the Tim & Eric meme machine. Glowicki has focused her eye in the years since Tito, crafting some of cinema’s most gorgeous, perverted images in recent memory. Her sense of humor has remained decidedly prankish & juvenile, though, punctuating punchlines with ADR’d fart noises and ejaculations of vomit. It’s a masterclass lesson in the refinement of bad taste.

Glowicki stars as a 19th Century gravedigger who has become lonely in her continuation of the family business, as she stinks too badly of rotting corpses for any other locals to socialize with her. Her pursuit of sexual partners despite that putrid stench does eventually prove fruitful, drawing the eye (and nose) of a nearby wealthy pervert who’s grieving the loss of his sister but still makes time to fetishize the gravedigger’s offense to the senses. They fall in love and bone like mad, but tragedy soon strikes when, as the title promises, her long-awaited lover dies by sea. She refuses to give up on her one shot at genuine romance, though, so she attempts to reconstitute her dead lover using the one remaining body part that was recovered from the shipwreck (his severed finger) . . . with a little help from the stockpile of corpses that happen to be buried around the cemetery where she works & lives.

The tension between Dead Lover‘s high-art visual style and low-trash sense of humor is also echoed in its bifurcated tone, which alternates between the extremities of camp & sincerity in erratic mood swings. Much of the gravedigger’s dialogue is addressed to a gigantic arts-and-crafts rendering of the moon, recalling the operatic poetry of Kenneth Anger’s experimental short “Rabbit’s Moon.” She confesses all of her most vulnerable yearnings to Mr. Moon, but those thoughts are frequently interrupted by hissing, selfish jags of animalistic horniness & greed. Combined with her insultingly inaccurate Cockney accent, this internal romantic/vicious struggle estimates what it might be like if Lily Sullivan’s unhinged impersonation of Bridgette Jones on Comedy Bang Bang suffered the same fate as Gollum from Lord of the Rings. My apologies if that CBB reference means nothing to you, but it really is the only accurate point of comparison.

There’s a sound-stage artificiality to Dead Lover that recalls both the perverted visual poetry of Stephen Sayadian’s Dr. Caligari and the low-budget carelessness of the graveyard set in Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space. It’s a picture overflowing with bad wigs and even worse accents, as its four main players alternate through multiple sets of characters with the ramshackle energy of a sketch comedy revue. Still, there’s a lot of heart to its romantic yearning in which characters love one another for their quirks & stench rather than in spite of it. It also has surprisingly provocative ideas about the physical embodiment of gender, as the gravedigger rebuilds her male lover with indiscriminate concern for whether the corpses she sources spare parts from are male or female (or, even more strangely, whether they are related to her lover by blood). All she cares about is still being able to orgasm by the thrust of his finger; how romantic.

I was greatly amused by the strangeness of Glowicki’s debut, but this follow-up exceeded my expectations even so. In my mind, she’s now joined an elite class of high-style, low-budget filmmakers who are pushing the outer limits of how sex, gender, and desire can be represented on screen while also just goofing off with their friends: namely Cole Escola, Amanda Kramer, and Betrand Mandico. At times, it really does feel like some of the most exciting, immediate art being made right now, even though it’s an outdated genre throwback featuring a severed finger that stretches to the length of a broomstick and a potential suitor professing his love by declaring he wants to eat one of the gravedigger’s turds longways, “like a banana.”

-Brandon Ledet

Orang Ikan (Monster Island, 2025)

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I can’t remember the last time I saw a rubber-suit monster movie at the theater.  The modern monster movie has fully outsourced its creature effects to animatronics & computer graphics nerds, so that the traditional guy-in-a-suit Roger Corman creature feature is effectively an antique relic (outside the occasional tongue-in-cheek throwback like Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You!).  There’s something refreshingly sincere about the new straight-to-Shudder monster picture Orang Ikan, then, which recently had its local theatrical premiere at The Overlook Film Festival.  It’s a fully traditional rubber-suit Corman creeper, even padding out its 80-minute runtime with a plot-recapping clip show to help it crawl into feature length — a classic Corman tactic.

The Western-market title Monster Island sets expectations for kaiju-scale creatures here, as does the early-40s WWII setting.  Two soldiers from opposing sides of the Japanese-British divide are shipwrecked together on a mysterious island in the Pacific Ocean, suddenly dependent on each other for survival instead of working towards each other’s destruction.  The search for food, shelter, and dry cigarettes is alone enough to make their time on the island lethally miserable, but then they also have to contend with the island’s native inhabitants: a creature from The Black Lagoon, or at least that famous monster’s distant relative.  In the earliest creature attacks, the monster is obscured in dark shadows, quick edits, and up-close angles that threaten to hide all of the money shots out of embarrassment for the production’s scale & budget.  Thankfully, the creature is soon displayed in a full-body wide shot in beachside daylight, proudly showing off all its classic rubber-suited glory.

If there’s any thematic justification behind importing a rubber-suited monster into what’s effectively a battlefield drama, it’s in how war transforms enemy combatants into The Other.  An international co-production, Orang Ikan is evenly split between Japanese & English dialogue, with its two stranded, chained-together soldiers attempting to find common ground despite the language barrier and their opposing military orders.  Likewise, when the creature first appears on the island, it’s likened to the instinctual violence of a territorial crocodile hunting for its next meal.  Then, the humanoid monster fights that croc to the death in a desperate bid for its own survival, mirroring the soldiers’ struggle with the local elements.  When the soldiers inevitably have to kill the monster anyway, there’s a tinge of sadness to the act, with the camera lingering on the death of the creature’s unborn fetus on a cave-room floor.  War makes monsters of us all, and so on, and so forth.

There seems to be something about aquatic creatures in particular that have made them the last refuge for the practical-effects monster movie.  Between the fish-men of The Shape of Water & Cold Skin, the killer mermaids of The Lure, and the aquatic goofballs of Lake Michigan Monster & Riverbeast!, they’re keeping the humanoid monster dream alive & wet.  In that context, I suppose that if Orang Ikan had gone full kaiju-scale “suitmation” in its rubber-suit monster mayhem, it might have registered as a more daring genre outlier, but I’m happy with the classic Roger Corman creature feature payoffs as delivered.  Funnily enough, the most daring aspect of the film was likely unintentional, as its push for wordless male bonding between its stranded soldiers reads as electrically homoerotic in moments.  It’s not like the soldiers smooch or anything, but they do lovingly call out each other’s names and light each other’s cigarettes. Of course, unspoken homoeroticism in wartime dramas is its own long-running cinematic tradition; it’s just one that usually doesn’t make room for a crocodile-murdering fish beast in the frame.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #236: Good Boy (2025) & The Overlook Film Festival

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Welcome to Episode #236 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Hanna discuss a selection of genre films that screened at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, starting with Good Boy (2025), a haunted house story as seen from a dog’s POV.

00:00 Welcome

04:36 Good Boy
17:00 The Ugly Stepsister
30:00 It Ends
36:26 Predators
49:43 Zodiac Killer Project
1:00:53 Dead Lover
1:05:00 The Shrouds
1:16:05 LifeHack
1:20:20 Cloud
1:38:17 Hallow Road

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

LifeHack (2025)

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There was a moment during the local premiere of the cyber-heist thriller LifeHack at this year’s Overlook Film Festival when the Canal Place shopping mall’s fire alarm was pulled, disrupting the movie with flashing lights & wailing warnings of a non-existent emergency. In a touch of serendipity, this occurred just when the film’s teenage-gamers-turned-hardened-criminals have invaded the corporate offices of their target, seconds before triggering their own in-film fire alarm to avoid arrest. It wasn’t until that real-life intrusion on the preposterous third-act heist that I realized just how much tension I was feeling as the fictional heat closed in. So much of the movie is guided by teens goofing off online via innocent memes, insults, and flirtations that the audience hardly notices just how high the stakes have become until their crime scheme spectacularly falls apart — despite the story opening with their ringleader being interviewed from prison post-heist.

That carefree flippancy is exactly LifeHack‘s greatest strength as the latest addition to the “screenlife” subgenre (a term coined by its own producer, Timur Bekmambetov). It follows in the footsteps of larger scale screen-capture thrillers like the Unfriended & Missing series (both also produced by Bekmambetov), simulating the user interface of a laptop as its drama unfolds in the free-floating windows of various computer programs, and introducing the audience to a small friend group of video-chatting teens before putting them in peril. Only, most entries in the genre have been, understandably, miserable in tone. The teens in most screenlife thrillers have a nightmare of a time online, hounded by hackers, kidnappers, and ghosts through the screen’s glowing window into their bedrooms. In contrast, the teens of LifeHack are having a grand old time online, constantly joking & pranking their way through what turns out to be a fairly severe, high-profile crime. Even when reacting to the immense danger they find themselves in, their descriptors never escalate beyond inane phrases like “cringe” and “not chill.” It’s just not that serious to them, which in its own way is a unique source of tension for the genre.

It’s difficult to nail down exactly why LifeHack is set in 2018. The references to pop culture iconography like Salad Fingers and the OMC hit “How Bizarre” suggest that director Ronan Corrigan is a little too old to be nostalgic for the late 2010s as his teen years, so it’s possible that the hyperkinetic editing of the film’s dozens of whiz-bang computer programs just took that long to assemble into narrative coherence. The only reason its setting matters, really, is that the four amateur-hacker teens’ cyber-heist is committed against the personal Bitcoin fortune of a right-wing tech bro dipshit who starts to eerily resemble Elon Musk’s public persona the longer the movie dwells on his fake-press details. There are enough Andrew Tates, Peter Thiels, and Jordan Petersons out there that the resemblance to Musk’s real-life persona as the king of the dipshits doesn’t matter much, but the happenstance of the resemblance becomes unignorable by the time the movie’s villain is wielding a flamethrower in press photos with the exact juvenile carelessness that Musk recently wielded a chainsaw. It’s easy to root for the kids to rob him blind.

The mechanics of how they steal his blockchain money, how they get caught, and how they negotiate their way out of the direst consequences of the haywire heist are worth discovering in the film itself rather than in a review. It is a thriller, after all. The only thing you really need to know is that the kids are a delight and their online target is an Alpha Grifter avatar for all modern youth-culture evils, so we’re always rooting for them to wriggle their way out of handcuffs. Personally, I do miss when early screenlife thrillers leaned into the digital, intangible ambiguity of human existence online, so that full-on horror movies like Host & Unfriended could unashamedly deal in the supernatural without limiting themselves to real-world computer logic. However, it is refreshing to see a version of this genre that acknowledges that kids still have fun online, gaming & goofing off with friends they don’t always have the chance to share physical space with. LifeHack is the breeziest, least grim screenlife thriller I can name, and it still manages to spike your heartrate when it needs to.

-Brandon Ledet