What to see at the 2025 Fantasia Film Festival
Festivals and events
If you're craving an unconventional, art house-style movie-going experience that feels both old school and cutting-edge, look no further than the Fantasia International Film Festival's 29th edition, happening July 16 to August 23, 2025.
Founded in 1996, the Fantasia International Film Festival is a world-renowned genre movie celebration, once described as "a sanctuary for genre" by director Joe Lynch. Here, "B movies" by lesser-known writers and directors are elevated and celebrated alongside wild new works by critically and commercially successful filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro (Academy Award Best Picture Winner, The Shape of Water) and Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar).
With an audience of fans and industry professionals, the thrill of Fantasia comes largely from its interactive screenings and spirited yet respectful Q&As. Known for generating buzz around low-budget films in the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror genres, Fantasia also showcases extraordinary cinema from Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Come for the zombies, vampires, and aliens, and stay for the fun atmosphere and panels with some of genre film's biggest stars. With so many world and Canadian premieres taking place, you might just be among the first to see the next breakthrough horror film!
With a colossal lineup of over 125 features, more than 200 shorts, and an abundance of special events, exhibitions, and artist talks, Fantasia 2025 is an event not to be missed. Read on for a selection from this year’s massive program, then head to Fantasia’s website to discover everything happening at this singular summer film event.
A small town's descent into madness
Fantasia's 29th edition will open with a special screening of Ari Aster's neo-Western black comedy, Eddington. Set in May 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a standoff between a small-town sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and mayor (Pedro Pascal) sparks a powder keg as neighbor turns against neighbor in the fictional town of Eddington, New Mexico.
Postcards from Japan
Maverick director, festival favourite, and 2016 recipient of Fantasia's Lifetime Achievement Award Takashi Miike returns with a triple threat: the World Premiere of the cat-pocalypse J-horror anime Nyaight of the Living Cat, the coming-of-age boxing drama Blazing Fists, and the anxiety-inducing legal thriller Sham. In Yuta Shimotsu's New Group, a cult-like mentality turns high school gymnastics into a nightmarish dance of death, delivering a creepy, Junji Ito-esque critique of modern society. The long-awaited sequel Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark is a metaphysical mind-melt, colliding kawaii cat-girl aesthetics with paranoid pop-art brilliance. Daigo Matsui’s Rewrite offers a fresh take on the time-loop tale, challenging audiences with a coming-of-age romance where not everything is as it seems. All You Need Is Kill! adapts Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s landmark 2004 novel, retelling the popular alien-invasion time-loop story from a new point of view with a narrative structure inspired by video games. Finally, Garo: Taiga reveals the origin story of the Golden Knight Garo in a tale befitting the 20th anniversary of the Japanese sci-fi universe, Tokusatsu.
Razor-sharp cultural commentary
In Izabel Pakzad's Find Your Friends, a desert girls' trip turns into a tense mission of revenge against hostile locals, offering a sharp look at festival culture and the fragile divide between the sexes. Ava Maria Safai's "bubblegum horror" Foreigner sees a teen immigrant in 2004 dye her hair to fit in, only to attract a demonic force. Alex Russell's Lurker is a tense deconstruction of celebrity obsession, where a fan's proximity to a pop star becomes a matter of life and death.
Spotlight on Quebec & Canadian Cinema
Montreal icons Kelly-Kay Hurcomb and James Watts deliver a slacker comedy for the modern age with Messy Legends. Following disaffected millennials over one night on the Saint-Laurent strip, the film is a funny and desperate love letter to a version of the city that may be gone forever. Chloé Cinq-Mars’ debut feature Nesting is an intimate and unsettling portrait of a new mother grappling with postpartum depression, whose fragile psyche cracks after she witnesses a violent crime. In Anna Kiri, a young delinquent woman’s attempt to turn her life around leads to a tense and shocking collision between the city’s criminal underbelly and its elitist literary scene.
Genre gems from around the globe
A beautifully crafted Chinese animated feature from writer-directors Yu Ao and Zhou Tienan, The Girl Who Stole Time promises a fantastical and existential yet enchanting journey that explores the aching reality of impermanence. Lucid expands a festival short into a '90s grunge-fueled feature nightmare, where a candy elixir unleashes terrifying creativity. Real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie star in Together, a shocking body horror where a mysterious force corrupts both a couple's relationship and their flesh.
Deemed too frightening for its original streamer, Adilkhan Yerzhanov's Kazakh Scary Tales brings nightmarish regional folk horror to the screen in its World Premiere. A cop ventures into a remote village to investigate a series of gruesome events, only to find himself caught in a storm of local witchcraft and death.
The South Korean thriller Noise uses brilliant sound design to create unbearable tension as a woman with a hearing impairment is plagued by bizarre sounds. Finally, from the directors of Amer, Reflection in a Dead Diamond is a thrillingly imaginative ode to '60s Euro-spy films starring Italian screen legend Fabio Testi.
The South Korean/Indonesian co-production The Verdict is a dynamic thriller where an elite court security guard takes justice into his own hands after his wife is murdered by an affluent young man who thinks he’s above the law. In The Book of Sijjin and Illiyyin, Islamic folk horror meets ultraviolence and gore as a bullied woman calls upon evil forces to enact gut-churning, heinous revenge. The time-loop horror Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo, based on “one of the scariest urban legends of Taiwan,” traps a man in a nightmare where he is forced to witness his partner’s horrifying death over and over again. In the South Korean drama Fragment, the lives of two teenagers are intertwined after one’s father kills the other’s, forcing them to choose between vengeance and redemption. Finally, Cielo is a magic realist, modern fairy tale from Bolivia, which follows an eight-year-old indigenous girl who performs miracles to rescue her mother from poverty.
Documentaries from the Edge
Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers explores the transgressive 1960s art scene, from harrowing butoh dance to freak-show theatre. Occupy Cannes is a moving and hilarious look at the legendary Troma Entertainment team, led by Lloyd Kaufman (recipient of this year’s inaugural Indie Maverick Award at Fantasia) as they fight to sustain independent art on what could be their final trip to the Cannes Film Festival. In Barbie Boomer, a passionate 67-year-old Barbie collector must cope with the grief of donating some of her beloved dolls to a museum in Quebec City.
For All Ages (and the Young at Heart)
In a special screening from Paramount, Smurfs sees Smurfette (Rihanna) lead a mission into the real world to save a mysteriously captured Papa Smurf (John Goodman), with help from an all-star voice cast. In Maya, Give Me a Title, acclaimed director Michel Gondry assembles a collection of charming, crafty animations he made for his daughter, prompted by story titles she gave him over nightly phone calls.
Official Closing Film
The festival closes with Genndy Tartakovsky’s Fixed, a hilariously lewd adult animated comedy. When lovable mutt Bull (Adam Devine) realizes a trip to the vet to be neutered is imminent, he and his pack of friends (Idris Elba, Fred Armisen) set off on one last wild night to unleash his raging animal impulses while he still can.
The 29th edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival runs from July 16 to August 23, 2025. Screenings will be held in Downtown Montreal at the Concordia University Hall Building and J.A. de Sève cinemas, with additional events at Montreal's Cinéma du Musée and BBAM! Gallery.
Sarah Beall
Sarah Beall is a writer, editor, and creative who loves food, fun, and all things arts and culture. Her wanderlust has taken her to such places as São Paulo, Brazil, Seoul, South Korea, London, England, and New York, New York, and yet she’s always happiest playing tourist and living the good life in Montreal, the world-class city she’s called home for over 20 years.