Heartland International Film Festival 2022: AFTERSUN, HOLY SPIDER, CAT DADDIES & FOLLOW HER

The 31st Heartland International Film Festival is in full swing, bringing homegrown movies and films from around the world to Indiana. With over 100 films to choose from and programs that include Cannes entries and big stars, the festival continues to show that there’s a big appetite for great films no matter where you are in the country. This report gives you a taste of the festival, with some Cannes at Kan-Kan (a wonderful arthouse cinema in Indianapolis) and heartland horror.

Aftersun (Charlotte Wells)

Nothing lasts forever, be it a peaceful moment, a memory, a relationship, or a life. The inevitability of everything slipping away is one of the hardest things to come to terms with, and it leaves even the most self-assured among us up at night, staring into the darkness.

Capturing this sensation with lurking melancholy is Aftersun, the feature debut of writer/director Charlotte Wells. Ostensibly about a woman, Sophie, looking back on a childhood vacation with her father, the film is really about how she picks moments out of the ether, then picks those into pieces, and keeps going and going until it’s all minutia, a series of loaded glances and impossibly weighted exchanges that she hopes will add up to something she can hold on to.

The framing device of the elder Sophie watching home videos cues you in that not everything you see is fact. Some of the scenes have the unmistakable grain of cassette-era camcorders, and these, one assumes, are glimpses of what really happened on the fateful trip. The rest are wispy and beautiful recreations of memory (with its inevitable faults) and wholly imagined scenes, the demarcations of which are meticulously made by cinematographer Gregory Oke and editor Blair McClendon, both of whom deserve high praise for keeping the meandering film coherent.

Also deserving to be singled out is Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio, the pair of actors who are responsible for the minute details being observed between father and daughter. Mescal, with his star on the rise, will almost certainly (and rightly) get effusive praise for creating a father who is deeply good but deeply flawed. Corio, in her film debut, will likely get more muted attention, but she’s note perfect in a role that asks her to communicate nuanced, grown up emotions.

The film starts off slowly, with the events of the father’s cheaply planned vacation hitting inevitable speed bumps. The pair take these in stride, and for a bit it seems that the joy of time spent together will override whatever problems they may have. Eventually, though, as happens with every vacation, they stop being able to outrun their issues, and the girl begins asking probing questions about her distant father’s life and he begins drinking more and more. As much darker dynamics creep in, Wells leaves the specifics of what’s going on with the troubled father vague enough to apply your own painful memories to. What’s more sharply in focus is the legacy this leaves for Sophie, who’s just old enough on the trip to understand she’s being saddled with things most people don’t have to carry while the adult Sophie has come to understand (fear?) that the burden may not end with her.

This is a tough story that’s presented with beauty and grace, and it respects that not all searches have answers. That truth means it won’t be satisfying to everyone, but if you’re patient through its wanderings, you’ll be rewarded with one of the more thoughtful and emotional films of the year.

Holy Spider (Ali Abbasi)

Every once in a while a crime hits a nerve in society, sending a jolt down its spine and jarring loose our deeply held beliefs about the way people operate. That’s what the deaths of 16 women at the hands of Saeed Hanaei did in Iran, the reverberations of which are still being felt twenty years later as one of the country’s preeminent filmmakers examines the story again.

Why Saeed killed is what shook people to their core, and it’s the primary idea explored in Holy Spider. For part of the film, you see it develop straight from the source through the story of Saeed himself, here played with a notable lack of monstrosity by Mehdi Bajestani. In another thread, you see it reverberated in the obstacles faced by Rahimi (Zar Amir-Ebrahimi), a fictional female journalist who comes to town smelling a story. 

The split focus proves to be a cumbersome structure for co-writer and director Ali Abbasi, who doesn’t get the two sides to bounce off of and interact with the other. Rahimi is investigating Saeed, walking the same streets as he prowls, and yet they feel as if they’re in two different worlds. Saeed moves through the holy city of Mashhad with reverence and mourns the lack of purpose he feels while surrounded by such import. Rahimi does her best to plow through a series of men who belittle and dismiss her as a professional, laser-focused on the story at hand. The contrast between the two is obvious, but the connection, while staring you in the face, isn’t felt.

And really, the connection is the only interesting thing this well made serial killer story has to say. Saeed’s actions are shocking but his motives are banal. He believes he’s on a God-given mission to clean the streets of female sex workers, but there’s also elements of sexual and social gratification in his actions. In real life, when his murders were exposed he gained widespread support from the masses, and what that belies is the way smaller, more everyday aggression towards women is on the same continuum. If you believe women exist for men’s service and pleasure, then you’re not far off condoning or committing their murder if they ‘step out of line’. This isn’t a novel fact. It’s been proven time and again. But whenever you are forced to look it in the face it sends a chill up your spine, because that attitude towards women is pervasive in many, many cultures.

And that’s the point Holy Spider attempts to make with this unpleasant story. It wants to take the infuriating and well-observed aggression from hotel workers, police, and fellow journalists that Rahimi experiences and link it to the casual cruelty of Saeed, and while both pieces of the puzzle are captured clearly, they never fully snap into place. Saeed’s story only gets the depth of a Law & Order episode while Rahimi’s becomes a laundry list of complications women navigate. It’s not until late in the film that a tenuous connection between the two is made, making the film a handsomely mounted, disjointed tale of two people who never intersect as they should.

Cat Daddies (Mye Hoang)

There’s all sorts of assumptions and stereotypes about people who love cats, from being quiet and neurotic to living as a full-blown crazy cat lady. The idea is that it takes a certain kind of person to love the aloof, finicky animals, and most of the time people think that kind of person should be female. Allegedly, it’s antithetical to have manly love for cats, and it’s precisely this notion that the documentary Cat Daddies attempts to dispel.

In the film, director Mye Hoang takes a kaleidoscope survey of men and their cats, ranging from jacked dude bros like a stunt performer and a group of firefighters to more gentle men like an advertiser who donates his free time to a spay/neuter nonprofit and an unhoused person holding on to life with his beloved companion.

The latter, a man named David, takes up much of the documentary’s time, as his journey takes him from begging in the streets to the safety of a housing program to the precariousness of getting medical treatment for a serious illness while the pandemic rages. He’s a soft-spoken man who’s been worn down by a hard life, and his future often looks bleak. But he’s effusive about Lucky, a beaten-up stray he tenderly nursed back to health. This affection is what Hoang finds in all her human subjects, shattering the idea that making space in your life for obstinate fuzzballs is an unmanly acquiescence, even when her subjects fight the notion. “He don’t act like a cat whatsoever” says a firefighter about Flame, the cat his department adopted, which Hoang cheekily follows up with a montage of Flame being very much a cat. 

These moments with the cats are where the film truly finds its soul, because outside of David, the human subjects come and go too fast to get a real sense of them. The cats, though, are what anyone coming to a documentary called Cat Daddies are here for, and in capturing the bread and butter of what cat lovers want to see (slow winks, haughty struts, and personal space-defying snuggles), it delivers precisely what feline fans want.

Full disclosure: I’m something of a cat dad myself, and I’ve got the instagram account (@fancy_mr_whiskers) and coffee mug to prove it. I’ll happily watch cats being cats for an hour and a half, and I’ll get choked up at even the suggestion of the cross-species bond we share. So while Cat Daddies may not have the structural finesse and paws on the ground perspective of a great cat documentary like Kedi, it has enough genuine adoration for its subjects, both feline and the men who love them, to satiate the cat people who seek it out.

Follow Her (Sylvia Caminer)

Following your dreams can be a rough undertaking in today’s world. There’s lots of ways to make money and even more ways that promise money, if only a little bit trickles in. It’s even worse if you’re chasing fame as well since that can be had in all sorts of legitimate and illegitimate ways, and one can lose themselves going down many of those avenues.

That’s what Jess is flirting with in Follow Her, a twisty little horror film that scratches out lots of tension from a relatively simple premise. In the film, Jess has fallen into chasing subscribers through livestreaming, where the money only comes from hitting it big. Her schtick is combing through classified ads and going along with whatever the person wants, which usually involves kinks and oddities that have nothing to do with the original ad. The exposé style has gotten her tantalizing close to the big time, but each meeting comes with great personal risk. She does her best to play it smart and set up relatively safe encounters, but it all goes sideways when she responds to an ad for a screenwriting gig far away from her usual stomping grounds.

Tom, the guy who placed the ad, takes her back to his renovated barn in the middle of nowhere, and while Jess’s alarms ring, they don’t stop her . From there, the film settles into its single location cat-and-mouse game, where it thrives in the simplicity of two people testing each other.

Unfortunately, it had taken too long to get there, with Jess’s life being too fleshed out with money, ambition, and family troubles. Especially when trying to make a lean and mean horror film, it’s best to keep things contained, and her hectic life doesn’t give much time to build mood or tension.

Tom’s barn, on the other hand, is all red flags and suspense. Strange decor and an elaborate system of doors, lights, and music give away that he’s hidden a wealthy background behind the artist persona, and while this doesn’t exactly surprise Jess, it gets her guard up. But remember, she makes her living by exposing men’s proclivities (without their knowledge, I should add), so she is the one who initially sought him out as prey. Now at his home, though, the tables turn, and director Sylvia Caminer delightfully stretches out the will-they-won’t-they tension of sex and violence for all its worth.

As a two-hander for a majority of its runtime, the performances of Dani Barker as Jess and Luke Cook as Tom are key, and there’s crackling tension between them. Barker sometimes struggles in scenes on her own, but she holds up well enough to keep the film from crashing down.

The script doesn’t give either of them much to do, mostly because its foremost concern is the down and dirty business of suspense. There’s ostensibly a message here about chasing fame through online culture, but it all feels a bit disconnected from the actual business of growing and building a fan base online. It’s largely understood that parasocial relationships are rampant and dangerous in these spaces, but Follow Her leaves this untouched in favor of old fashioned stranger danger. One could be chasing fame in any era and end up at that barn, and since everything outside of it feels a bit extraneous, so too does its pinned on messaging.

But when you’re in that barn the film keeps you on your toes, and its playful tossing of expectations is a wild ride to go on.

That’s it for my first report from the Heartland International Film Festival. Which of these films do you want to see? Let us know in the comments!