The best new horror movies from Sundance 2018 | Little White Lies

Festivals

The best new hor­ror movies from Sun­dance 2018

01 Feb 2018

Words by Ed Gibbs

A woman with long hair wielding a rifle in a desert landscape with rocky hills in the background.
A woman with long hair wielding a rifle in a desert landscape with rocky hills in the background.
This year’s fes­ti­val offered plen­ty of dev­il­ish­ly dark delights with­in its rau­cous Mid­night strand.

It is hard­ly sur­pris­ing that the biggest win­ner, mon­ey-wise at least, was Sam Levinson’s wild, female-led revenge romp Assas­si­na­tion Nation. With a feisty cast led by Odessa Young, Hari Nef, Abra and Suki Water­house, this brazen social media-dri­ven chiller tapped into con­tem­po­rary fears of cyber bul­ly­ing and online sham­ing, going down a storm in ear­ly screenings.

Cue the prince­ly sum of $10 mil­lion being laid down for rights for its world­wide release. Although the film wore its mes­sage heav­i­ly on its sleeve, expect to hear plen­ty more about this badass response to #MeToo in the months ahead.

Less fresh but just as time­ly is the apt­ly titled Revenge, from French direc­tor Coralie Fargeat, who gives the famil­iar rape-revenge thriller a new zing of life and sense of empow­er­ment (think I Spit on Your Grave amped up to 11). Matil­da Lutz puts in a spir­it­ed turn for our times as the assault vic­tim turned avenger, in scenes that feel espe­cial­ly per­ti­nent in the wake of the Har­vey Wein­stein scandal.

Sum­mer of 84 attempts to mine an alto­geth­er dif­fer­ent kind of famil­iar­i­ty, with its unapolo­getic Stranger Things-esque pas­tiche of 1980s nos­tal­gia. It strug­gles to deliv­er on its well-trod­den premise though, and the pre­dictable twist arrives too late to real­ly fire. Still, Mon­tréal triple threat col­lec­tive RKSS’s fol­low-up to Tur­bo Kid pro­duced an enjoy­ably daft take on the dark under­bel­ly of sub­ur­bia that car­ried a sem­blance of truth for pop cul­ture nerds.

A man with a beard wearing dark clothing and glasses using a tool to create sparks from a metal object.

Sun­dance always offers oppor­tu­ni­ties for rebirth. This year, it was Nico­las Cage’s turn, as he gave anoth­er poten­tial come­back per­for­mance in the bloody drug-hazed hor­ror Mandy, in which he wreaks hell and fury on a cult that kid­naps and abus­es his wife, played by Andrea Rise­bor­ough. Direc­tor Panos Cos­matos con­jures a vis­cer­al world of sub­stance-abuse bar­bar­i­ty that screamed heavy met­al (in a nod to the heav­ier side of 80s life), with sex­u­al mis­con­duct a key theme to make this blood-soaked trip feel top­i­cal, icky and trippy.

Even more effec­tive­ly, Lords of Chaos pitch­es the idea of met­al heads los­ing their minds, in a black com­e­dy hor­ror where Swedish direc­tor Jonas Aker­lund embraces his met­al roots (a for­mer met­al band mem­ber him­self, before becom­ing an-demand music video direc­tor and accom­plished film­mak­er). A great cast (with some famil­iar faces) guid­ed by some intense, intel­li­gent direc­tion and flair makes this a bona fide Mid­night high­light. It rocked. Hard.

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