Let’s Talk About Death
I had not planned on writing a second look at the horror films I watched at Fantastic Fest. Then I watched four films that, in very different ways, were all about death. Not simply dying, but the choices we make when confronted with death, our reactions to it, and the effects it can have on people long after someone is gone. These films look at grief, guilt, fear, responsibility, and even how a death can affect someone who had little or no connection to the person who died.
All four films are intensely personal. And while they are certainly horror films, they didn’t evoke the usual reactions I expect from horror. Instead, each one left me thinking about death itself and the strange cause-and-effect relationship it can have with the living. Sometimes the horror isn’t the death. It’s what comes afterward.
The Spiral
The Spiral is a dark dive into the consequences of one woman’s choices to protect her family. When faced with tragedy, what extremes might someone go to to save a person they love? And what happens when that decision creates consequences that begin to spiral out of control?
Synopsis
Directed by Paolo Strippoli and written by Strippoli and Salvatore de Chirico, The Spiral stars Jasmine Trinca as Anna, a mother consumed by the anguish of the terrible decisions she has made in the face of life-threatening situations. Romana Maggiora Vergano plays Alice, Anna’s daughter, who gradually discovers what her mother has done to protect their family, and the cost of those choices.
Anna is forced to explain decisions she has made throughout her daughter’s life, choices that have had enormous consequences for their family. She is telling Alice all of this now because Anna has made one final terrible choice, and this time her daughter will have to deal with the consequences.
Discussion
Strippoli has grown as a filmmaker since his previous Fantastic Fest appearance with Holy Boy (2025). Here, both his writing and direction feel more assured. He asks questions I think any of us might confront when faced with the possible death or disfigurement of someone we love. How far would you go? What would you be willing to sacrifice? And after making that first terrible choice, how much easier does the next one become?
Anna is tormented by every decision she makes, yet almost every decision leads directly to another, increasingly desperate one. Hovering over all of this is the Stranger, played with wonderfully creepy menace by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. I simply thought of her as the Devil. She appears to Anna offering solutions to seemingly impossible problems, but every solution comes at a cost, and those costs become grimmer with each new bargain.
The Spiral becomes something of a Newtonian nightmare: every action Anna takes produces a reaction, although rarely the one she hopes for. Well acted, beautifully constructed, and wonderfully written, The Spiral is ultimately a dark examination of the choices we might make when death comes close to the people we love and what we may have to live with afterward.
Pathetic Fallacy
In Adam Egypt Mortimer’s Pathetic Fallacy, we face raw grief. What extremes will a grieving person go to in an attempt to restore someone they love? More importantly, what happens when grief becomes a pursuit of death itself? Starring Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi, Jessica Rothe, Travis Fimmel, and the voice of Natasha Lyonne, Pathetic Fallacy was written by Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari, with original music by Johnny Jewel.
Synopsis
The story follows Asher, a widower struggling with the death of his wife, Iris. The love story between the characters is powerful and moving. In a remarkably short amount of time, Mortimer establishes the tragic romance between them and makes us care about their relationship. When Iris is stricken with terminal cancer, she plans for her death, trying as best she can to prepare her husband for the loss. She has him read a passage from a book about a spirit’s journey from this existence to the next. He reads it to her during her dying moments, and the scene is extremely powerful.
Kid Cudi makes Asher’s grief palpable. It felt as real as any depiction of grief that I have experienced in a film. His love for his wife is evident in everything he does. Rothe does a wonderful job infusing Iris with a great deal of depth and character in the relatively short time she has on screen, so much so that Iris becomes the foundation of the first third of the film. Asher comes to believe that Iris’ soul has moved on to Mount Samdi, so he travels there to find her.
This is where Pathetic Fallacy takes a decidedly psychedelic view of death. The New Age reading leads Asher to Mount Samdi, where he meets Travis Fimmel’s character, a man who has suffered a psychotic break and become a serial killer under the direction of a very un-Charlotte’s Web-like spider being voiced by Natasha Lyonne. Eventually, Asher replaces Fimmel as the spider’s deadly muse, operating under the belief that Iris will be restored to him once he has filled a certain quota. Asher struggles with what he is being asked to do, but his desperate desire to see Iris again keeps him at Mount Samdi.
Discussion
Kid Cudi is fantastic in the role. Jessica Rothe is also much better served here than she was in Beware Boiuna. I cared about these characters. Cudi is so successful at conveying Asher’s grief that I never felt lost in the increasingly strange choices he makes. They may be irrational, but emotionally they make sense because Mortimer has done such a good job establishing the depth of Asher’s loss.
Mortimer hasn’t made a straightforward horror film, either. Pathetic Fallacy is a psychedelic musical horror drama with a healthy dose of black humor thrown in for good measure. In another film, that might be too many genres fighting for attention, but that isn’t the case here. Somehow, the film remains amazingly easy to follow.
The songs written by Johnny Jewel work particularly well in carrying the final third of the film forward and feel like a natural extension of everything that came before them. Lyonne’s Spider is both creepy and funny in a way that only Natasha Lyonne could pull off. Mortimer brings all of these seemingly incompatible components together and makes a really amazing film. Beneath the psychedelic imagery, music, horror, and black humor is something surprisingly simple: a man who loves his wife so much that he cannot accept a world in which she is no longer there.
Pathetic Fallacy is strange, funny, sad, occasionally disturbing, and ultimately a deeply moving look at what grief can make us willing to do. I totally enjoyed the experience.
Death of a Yellow Bird
Death of a Yellow Bird is a film that is about coming to terms with one’s own mortality while confronting a family’s past trauma surrounding an unexpected death. Written and directed by Cody Calahan and starring Ari Millen, this was probably the most introspective of the death-themed films that I watched at Fantastic Fest.
Synopsis
Millen plays an unnamed Man dying from late-stage cancer. He has returned to his family’s lakeside home, a place filled with wonderful childhood memories until the tragic death of his younger brother, Danny, changed everything. The Man is trying to come to terms with his own mortality. How does he leave behind something meaningful for his young son to remember him by? How has Danny’s death affected the course of his own life? And how do you prepare your child for the fact that his father is going to die?
Ari Millen completely helped me understand and sympathize with his character’s state of mind and the struggle he is having with what he will leave behind. While visiting his old family home, he discovers that it is haunted by the spirit of his long-deceased younger brother. He begins trying to uncover exactly what happened on the day Danny tragically died.
In the process of investigating his brother’s death, the Man begins to come to terms with his own impending fate. He realizes that what he really wants to leave behind isn’t some grand legacy. He wants his son to know how much he is loved as well as to understand that his father’s love for him will remain even after his death.
Discussion
I loved the introspection of the Man in this film. It feels real. His struggles feel real. What he wants, other than the miraculous cure he knows isn’t coming, is understandable and heartfelt. So much of Death of a Yellow Bird relies on Ari Millen’s performance, and he does a fantastic job conveying his character’s state of mind. You feel his intense drive to discover what happened to Danny, but underneath that mystery is the much more painful reality that he must come to terms with leaving his own family behind.
The film is beautifully photographed in winter, which only adds to the feelings of loneliness, isolation, and remoteness that I associate with the story’s view of death. The writing also feels extremely personal and heartfelt.
Of the films in this group, Death of a Yellow Bird is probably the least like a traditional horror movie. There is a ghost story that needs to be resolved, but the supernatural mystery also gives the Man the distraction he needs to work through his own thoughts and feelings about dying. In trying to understand the death that shaped his childhood, he begins to understand how he wants to approach his own.
Death of a Yellow Bird is a slow film. However, I was never underwhelmed by its pacing. The movie takes the time it needs to sit with this character and allow us to experience what he is going through. I look forward to watching it again. Of all the films I’ve seen at Fantastic Fest for this piece, this one may have the most human understanding of what it means to reach the end of life, not simply the fear of dying, but the fear of leaving behind the people you love.
Posthumous
Unrequited grief. How does someone experience the loss of a parent they never really knew? How do you mourn someone whose absence has affected your entire life, even though you have no actual memories of them?
Synopsis
Directed by Josh Tanner and written by Tanner, Jade van der Lei, and Gabriel Bergmoser, Posthumous introduces us to Zoe on her 30th birthday. She has returned to her father’s home while taking a break from her relationship with her boyfriend, Alex. Zoe has always struggled with relationships. Whether with her father, Neil, who raised her as a single parent and has never really come to terms with losing his wife. Or with Alex, who loves Zoe despite her inability to commit to their relationship fully.
Zoe’s mother, Joanne, died giving birth to her while also dying from cancer. Before her death, however, Joanne recorded a series of birthday messages for her daughter, offering age-appropriate advice as Zoe grows older. It’s a very touching and effective device that allows Zoe to “know” the mother she never had the opportunity to meet.
Before Joanne’s death, she and Neil sought some relief from her cancer through their New Age neighbors, Brenda and Rohan. Rohan had devised a decidedly sketchy process involving mathematics and physics that uses a parallel dimension to help relieve people of life’s burdens. There was nothing particularly nefarious about what they were attempting to do. Unfortunately, while trying to help Joanne, they inadvertently allowed an evil being from another dimension into our world. And this being wants Zoe.
Discussion
While much of the film deals with this evil spirit, Tanner does an excellent job exploring the feelings Zoe, Neil, and their surviving neighbor, Brenda. They still carry over the deaths of Joanne and Rohan and the disastrous consequences of those experiments. David Roberts is particularly believable as Neil, a man who has spent 30 years feeling guilty that he didn’t do more to save his wife. His long-term sadness and complete lack of closure demonstrate what unresolved grief can do to someone’s soul when it is allowed to sit there year after year. Neil hasn’t simply mourned Joanne. In many ways, he has allowed her death to prevent him from fully living.
There is more overt horror in Posthumous than in some of the other films in this group, but it never takes too much attention away from the more important part of the story. At its heart, this is a movie about love and acceptance and appreciating the people who are still around us without forgetting those who are no longer here or diminishing what they meant to us.
Further Analysis
I also really liked the darkness that exists throughout the film. The physical condition of the two homes reflects the states of mind of the people living inside them. Their unresolved grief has almost become tangible, spreading into the environments around them. These aren’t simply haunted houses. They are homes inhabited by people who have never figured out how to move beyond the deaths that occurred there.
Ultimately, Posthumous allows its characters to confront decades of grief and finally begin moving forward. Zoe can never have a relationship with the mother she lost at birth. And Neil can never change what happened to his wife. What they can do is recognize that continuing to live does not mean forgetting the dead. The film understands that sometimes accepting death isn’t about letting someone go. It’s about learning how to carry their memory with you without allowing that memory to keep you from living.
Conclusion
While these four films take very different approaches to death, they all maintain a place somewhere along the horror spectrum. More importantly, all four succeed not only in conveying horror. But in examining death in ways that make us sympathize with and understand the people experiencing it.
Whether dealing with the fear of death, the inability to accept it, coming to terms with your own mortality, or living with the loss of someone you barely knew, each film finds something deeply human within the horror. There is a sense of reality to the grief in these stories that I don’t often experience in horror films.
Maybe that’s what surprised me most about these four movies. I went into them expecting horror. I came out of them thinking about death, grief, the people we leave behind, and the people who have left us. Sometimes the most effective horror isn’t about being afraid of death. It’s about understanding what death does to the living.
