Movies
Fantasia 2025 Capsule Reviews: The Girls Are Not Alright in ‘The Serpent’s Skin’, ‘Foreigner’ & ‘Lucid’
Several films screening at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival explore the idea that teen girls are not alright, including The Serpent’s Skin, Foreigner, and Lucid.
Read on for my capsule reviews of all three films.
The Serpent’s Skin
Scripted by Alice Maio Mackay and co-writer Benjamin Pahl Robinson, The Serpent’s Skin follows trans girl Anna (Alexander McVicker) as she moves to the big city. There she meets weird, but decent Danny (Jordan Dulieu) and goth tattoo artist Gen (Avalon Fast), sleeping with and befriending both as a dark, serpentine power begins attacking people. Think The Craft meets Scanners.
Mackay’s bold colour scheme, elliptical editing, and counter culture attitude are all present in The Serpent’s Skin, but the narrative moves at a more deliberate pace than her previous films, which allows the characters time to breathe between set pieces.
Featuring genuine chemistry between McVicker and Fast, the return of The People’s Joker Vera Drew as editor, and good special effects make-up by Dom Keeley, The Serpent’s Skin is another solid entry in Mackay’s rapidly expanding filmography.
Lucid
Directors Deanna Milligan and Ramsey Fendall expand their short of the same name, which features Caitlin Acken Taylor as Mia, an artist struggling to find her voice. After taking too much of an experimental drug, Mia begins to remember repressed memories that may hold the key to her artistic block. The only issue? She doesn’t realize that there may have been a reason why she clamped down on the past in the first place.
The punk film was shot on 35 and 16mm film and feels bold, experimental and refreshing. It’s a big swing kind of film that features plenty of hallucinatory imagery, albeit occasionally at the expense of its storytelling. It’s a quintessential example of a “throw things at the wall to see what sticks” kind of film.
Still, Lucid feels daring for what it is attempting to do and the film is never boring. Taylor, in particular, delivers a raw and vulnerable performance as the character who undergoes a journey that even she may not fully be prepared for. Lucid undoubtedly qualifies as a woman on the verge film.
Foreigner
Ava Maria Safai‘s debut feature finds Iranian teenager Yasamin (Rose Deghan) struggling to adapt to life in Canada. She’s been working on her English by parroting soaps, but her father Ali (Ashkan Nejati) and grandmother (Maryam Sadeghi) don’t understand the social pressure she feels to fit in.
Almost immediately Yasi is taken under the wing of predatory “Queen Bee” Rachel (Chloë MacLeod) and her doppelganger followers, but their micro-aggressions suggest a nefarious intent. Are they truly interested in what makes Yasi different or is this merely an attempt to indoctrinate her and force Yasi to conform to the dominant (read: blonde) culture?
Foreigner traffics in familiar tropes when it comes to both its YA and immigrant components, but the film’s depiction of racism and peer pressure is surprisingly subdued. There’s also a culturally specific demonic entity in the mix, but Safai’s screenplay is disappointingly uninterested in exploring both the mythology and the bullying. The movie infers that both the supernatural elements and the high school politics are equally dangerous, but the film is reticent to fully interrogate that argument.
The result is a mildly defanged film, complete with ambiguous ending that feels like a cop-out. Foreigner has promise, but the film needed to push it further.
The Serpent’s Skin, Lucid, and Foreigner all played at the Fantasia International Film Festival. Release info on all three films is TBD.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
You must be logged in to post a comment.