Melbourne International Film Festival 2024: KNEECAP, BABES, TEACHES OF PEACHES, SASQUATCH SUNSET & WAKE UP

The Melbourne International Film Festival returns for its 72nd year. As per usual, the program is a mix of global features, collections of shorts, documentaries, VR experiences, and restorations of classic movies.

This year, I have chosen a random collection of features and documentaries to enjoy in the city’s incredible cinemas from its IMAX to the Forum, ACMI, and Kino. 

Once again, MIFF brings the heat and remains one of the best film festivals in the world. Here is a selection of the movies I saw this year. 

Kneecap (Rich Peppiatt)

Told with blistering cartoon intensity, Kneecap is the story of two Irish drug dealers and a music teacher who form a hip-hop group that performs in Irish with lyrics about drugs, against the cops, and anti-English colonialism.

Played by the real-life members of the band, Naoise, Liam, and JJ are thrown together by luck and crime, and begin making music that annoys the police and the Radical Republicans Against Drugs who, in their zeal to destroy the group, only seem to make them more popular.

The movie is fast, loud, and hilarious while saying something meaningful about Ireland and the way we erase indigenous languages with barely a thought. The combination of comedy and harsh realities, along with the frenetic filmmaking style, made me think of another classic movie that calls English people wankers: Trainspotting.

The band playing themselves makes this a sort of 8 Mile story and the acting of the three band members is impeccable. I ended up checking on three websites to confirm they were playing themselves as there was not a single moment of their performances where I doubted they were professional actors. 

Director Rich Peppiatt infuses every scene with added flavor whether it’s animation, song lyrics flying around the screen, or POVs from strange spots like within a fruit machine.

Incredible performances from the band alongside great turns from Michael Fassbender and Simone Kirby, make this feel like an instant cult classic. It doesn’t hurt that the Kneecap’s songs are all absolute bangers.

Babes (Pamela Adlon)

I’m a huge fan of Broad City, which is one of the greatest comedy series ever made, so this movie which follows Ilana Glazer having a codependent friendship in New York should have been exactly in my wheelhouse and yet, it never quite ascended to near the heights of Glazer‘s previous work. 

Babes follows Eden (Glazer) and Dawn (Michelle Buteau), childhood friends who have drifted apart geographically – they’re both still in New York but in different parts of the city – while trying to keep their close friendship. At the beginning of the movie, Dawn gives birth to her second child, and on the way home from the birth, Eden meets Claude with whom she has an instant connection and one-night stand which leaves her pregnant. 

Babes is excellent in how it ignores the usual tropes of pregnancy movies. It is honest about the hardships without losing the key point that while, yes, having kids is probably the most difficult thing you’ll ever do in your life, it is also the most rewarding. Sometimes though, it is hard to remember that when you’re exhausted, filthy, and knee-deep in tantrums and advice coming from all angles. 

The problem is that the character of Dawn isn’t very likable. The movie tries to explain this by pointing out she has two small children, is stressed about not being able to breastfeed, and is generally struggling, but the relationship between her and Eden never feels like a two-way street. It’s telling that I was waiting for the friendship to hit the pre-mandated second act road bumps and not looking forward to the eventual reconciliation. 

Maybe I just couldn’t imagine Ilana Glazer hanging out in New York with anyone else but Abbi Jacobson but unfortunately for all the good parts of this movie, it was let down by the central friendship not feeling like something aspirational and more like a toxic relationship I wanted to see Ilana break out of. 

Teaches of Peaches (Philipp Fussenegger and Judy Landkammer)

Peaches is the ur-Brat. If 2024’s Brat Summer is all about losing inhibitions, sweating in the club, and not worrying about being glamourous, then Peaches has been having a Brat life since the 80s. 

Teaches of Peaches is part concert movie, part biopic as it charts the live shows Peaches did for the 20th anniversary of her seminal album “The Teaches of Peaches”. Interspersed with interviews, prep for the concert, and footage from the 80s and 90s, Teaches of Peaches shows us live performances from the anniversary tours that show how 20 years later the ferocity, talent, sex appeal, and provocativeness have not dulled a single bit. Peaches commands the stage like she was born on it and the crowds young and old still worship at her feet. 

Teaches of Peaches is refreshing in that it limits the number of famous singers gushing over the influence she’s had on them to just Garbage leader singer Shirley Manson. Don’t get me wrong, tons of musicians have a little bit of Peaches in their DNA, but Manson gets the point across fine without a dozen similar speakers saying the same thing. 

Instead, we get people who came up through the music scene with her like former roommate Feist and former bandmate Chilly Gonzalez, as well as her current session players, dancers, stylists, boyfriend, lighting guy, etc. who all talk about her influence and the part they play in putting together her anniversary tour. 

The best parts of the movie are the concert clips as Peaches is an incredible performer now and twenty years ago, and watching her just makes you wish you were in the audience then and now and hopefully at some point in the future. 

Sasquatch Sunset (David Zellner and Nathan Zellner)

Sasquatch Sunset, a ninety-minute dialogue-less movie about a family of bigfoots (bigfeet?), is the reason cinema exists. One of the reasons at least. In a world where every day brings us news of another reboot, remake, sequel, prequel, requel, and threequel, it is nice to know that insane, strange, and stimulating cinema still exists. 

The cryptids in Sasquatch Sunset spend their days eating, walking, mating, and doing a log-bashing ritual seemingly designed to find other sasquatches in the Northern Californian redwood forest. We follow the group for a year with the movie broken up by the seasons with each chapter bringing a life-changing event to the group. 

It’s a movie about family, survival, and our treatment of the natural world as the bigfeet (bigfoots?) see their living space encroached by logging companies, stumble upon roads they can’t understand, and find their rituals to search for other sasquatches go unanswered. 

Nathan Zellner, Christophe Zajac-Denek, Jesse Eisenberg, and Riley Keough play the titular sasquatches and they give wild, uninhibited performances, their egos hidden behind hairy prosthetics that allow them to perform with no fear of what they look like. It must have been a joy to engage in pure performance out in the woods, their identities hidden, and the stakes much lower than some massive blockbuster or Oscar contender. 

Huge set pieces, wordy monologues, or groundbreaking VFX are all great ways to show the wonder of cinema, but for me, sometimes it’s four sasquatches going wild about finding some berries in a forest in the middle of nowhere.   

Wake Up (François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell)

Wake Up feels like an instant camp classic. It’s a simple but excellent premise: a group of animal rights activists break into an Ikea-type store in order to deface it and protest the business’ use of rainforest wood in their products. At the same time, the security detail on the night shift is a drunk idiot and his survivalist brother whose hobby is game hunting and making traps.

After some fun shenanigans from the Gen-Zers, their presence is noticed by security and it quickly becomes a cat-and-mouse between the young activists and the rage-filled hunter. 

The movie mostly works though there is a Saw-esque sequence towards the end that had the audience in stitches even though it was played for tension. Occasionally the acting on the younger actors falters and they struggle with some of the more emotional beats. However, the cast is young semi-unknowns so lots of time for them to get better, and this movie is a great one for the filmography as it’s fun, gory, and scary but not in a cheap jump-scare way. 

Wake Up is a great riff on The Most Dangerous Game, and Turlough Convery is fantastic as the furious Kevin, a hulking brute armed to the teeth with improvised weaponry and no mercy for his prey. This is a Friday night pizza and beer movie as it is paced incredibly well with no breaks once it gets going.