Companion
Par Magdalena Nitchi
Companion est un film absolument incroyable sorti en janvier qui m’a accroché dès le début. Avec un monologue d’ouverture sur la recherche d’un but transcendant existentielle, je savais que directeur Drew Hancock allait nous emmener dans une aventure folle — et il n’a pas déçu.
Un mélange de science-fiction, d’horreur et de comédie noire, Companion se passe dans un cadre horreur classique — une cabane dans les bois — mais quelques rebondissements inouïs apportent une approche bienvenue et rafraîchissante au genre. Quand Iris (Sophie Thatcher) et son petit ami Josh (Jack Quaid) partent pour un week-end avec des amis, l’un d’eux n’est pas tout à fait ce qu’il semble être, et la situation dégénère rapidement. Je continuerai à écrire cette critique, mais franchement, moins vous en savez au départ, mieux c’est. Bien que je pense qu’il soit suffisamment bon pour un re-visionnement, découvrir tout pour la première fois est toujours beaucoup plus agréable pour ce type de film.
Pour moi, le meilleur aspect de ce film est le jeu des acteurs. Sophie Thatcher et Lukas Gage (qui joue Patrick, un personnage secondaire) ont tous deux brillé dans leurs rôles, et leur capacité à imprégner leurs personnages d’un tel pathos m’a fait fondre le cœur. Même ceux qui ont joué des rôles plus antagonistes (dont les noms ne peuvent être dévoilés sous risque de spoilers) ont fait un excellent travail en délivrant le comportement horrible et sans compassion de leurs personnages. C’est toujours la marque d’un bon acteur quand iel peut vous rendre absolument furieux. Les personnages étaient également très bien stylés, ce qui est devenu un de mes détails préférés. Le type de vêtements portés par chacun d’eux renforcent l’exploration de l’objectification et le droit des femmes dans le film.
Cependant, soyez prévenus : il s’agit toujours d’un film d’horreur. On retrouve à l’écran une agression sexuelle et une série de morts atroces, dont un suicide. Bien qu’il s’agisse d’une comédie noire, la majorité des morts sont traitées sérieusement.
Companion est une combinaison bénite : une bonne intrigue bien exécutée qui sait équilibrer terreur et comédie. L’horreur est souvent basée sur les peurs de la société dans laquelle elle est créée, et le commentaire du film sur les avancées de l’IA et l’objectification des femmes est mordant et plus pertinent que jamais dans notre climat social actuel. Ce film doit absolument être ajouté à votre liste.
Fiyah No. 33
By Magdalena Nitchi
In a rare, perfectly targeted advertisement, I learned of Fiyah, a quarterly speculative fiction magazine founded in 2017 that features stories by and about Black people of the African diaspora. I decided to jump right in with their newly released February issue.
From a budding relationship between two young women—one of whom can psychically slip into the skin of others as easily as she breathes—to the tale of an aspiring chef in a fantastical culinary competition in which a mistake can lead to permanent disfigurement, all the stories in this issue are extremely creative and beautifully written. Editor and publisher DaVaun Sanders took the time to curate a wide variety of stories: the reader is treated to horror, drama, mystery, and romance alongside SF/F. In addition to prose, there is a selection of SF/F poems featuring musings on mirrors, history, and wine tasting.
I’ve been on a bit of a robot/AI kick lately, so it will be no surprise that my favourite work in this issue was “Children of the Singularity” by Danny Cherry Jr. The short story follows a Sentient, an artificial intelligence confined to a highly contained corner of the internet behind a firewall, who is granted permission to inhabit a human body. Despite the peace accords between humans and her kind following an AI uprising, tensions remain high; she is left alone and struggling to find a real sense of identity when she meets Todd. The young man’s strong opposition to being cybernetically enhanced himself along with his complete acceptance of Sentients leaves him struggling to find employment. The story’s emphasis on friendship warms my heart, and its exploration of discrimination and marginalization through two black main characters—one of whom is not entirely human but is nonetheless inhabiting the body of a person of colour—is compelling. Even after finishing the story, I’m still turning it over in my head.
I will definitely come back to Fiyah since randomly reading through a new issue has yielded such good results. If you enjoy short stories and want to support Black authors, then this is definitely the magazine for you.
Talk to Me
By Salma Galal
A decade ago, the diagonal slide of A24’s white logo gave no indication of the quality of the forthcoming feature. But after the mainstream success of The VVitch and Hereditary, the film distributor and production house has proven itself a pioneer of a new age of horror. We may bid farewell to the time of jump scares and CGI monsters and greet the heart-dropping disturbia of their work. For the 2022 film Talk to Me, their terrifying legacy is no exception.
Directed by twin brothers Michael and Danny Philipou, who got their start via their popular YouTube channel, the film builds upon an exquisite blend of tension and nausea. Set in Sydney, it follows a group of teenagers who possess an embalmed hand, rumoured to be the severed limb of a psychic who could speak to the dead. It’s all fun and games until one of them goes over the ritual’s 90-second limit, and the dividing line between the realm of the living and dead begins to blur.
The plot and lore of the supernatural are succinct, (at only 95 minutes, better to make sure your script is airtight), and the characters, even during their more frustrating moments, are incredibly sympathetic and exasperatingly true to life. Sophie Wilde and Joe Bird are breakout performers, heartbreaking and unsettling to watch amongst a cast already strongly stacked with talented newcomers.
The possession scenes intelligently rely mostly on the actors instead of any special effects. Their squeamish twist of limbs and monstrous, undubbed voices evoke the powerful simplicity of The Exorcist. The ending is as bleak as a horror movie can get. As an R-rated horror feature, this film is not for the faint of heart. There’s quite a bit of gore, and upsettingly, much of the supernatural violence is directed towards a young boy. Additionally, there’s referenced and explicit suicide, and self-harm on screen. With another masterpiece for A24 added to its roster, horror fans may be lucky enough to consider themselves in a genre renaissance.
Mechanize my Hands to War
By Cass Gagnon
You are at war. The opposite frontline is made up of children. You hold your fire. They do not. You are dead.
Mechanize My Hands to War, Erin K. Wagner’s 2024 science fiction novel, is set in the decrepit fields of rural Appalachia in a dystopian future where selective breeding and overexploitation have made successful crops nothing short of a miracle. Grappling against the widespread famine, humans developed androids to work in fields too riddled with pesticide fumes to be tillable by human hands and battlefields where lives need to be expendable.
Androids are not universally beloved. Eli Whitaker, a terrorist on the run, leads a militia into android production factories and razes them to the ground. Meanwhile, Adrian, de facto director of the government military corps, tries to mitigate the damage Whitaker causes as best she can, but her hands are tied: he enlists teenagers and young children into his militia, arms them to the teeth, and deploys them into guerilla operations. Adrian’s side is torn. They cannot shoot at children, but they cannot fight a war by taking the entire enemy contingent hostage. Things take a turn for the worse when a military android, codenamed Ora, shoots and kills a militant child in a raid.
The inevitable clashes arising from the robotization of the workforce, the ethical risks of militarized AI, and the horrors of child exploitation are themes that intertwine intricately in the pages of Mechanize My Hands to War. This complexity is mirrored in the nonlinear structure of the book. The narration goes back and forth between timestamps, characters, and places, filling in a picture bit by bit and slowly setting up for a jaw-dropping final piece.
Wagner’s novel is a masterful, fast-paced piece of speculative fiction that forces questioning of a philosophical nature while presenting an interesting plot and a cast of multi-layered characters. Wagner’s ability to juggle different stories that all come together in the end allows the reader to bask in this dystopian world filled with man-made horrors and ethical dilemmas, question the characters’ and their own morals as they read, and think critically about issues easily adaptable to their world.
The Architect
By Imogen Chambers
Although a novella by definition, Brendan Connell’s The Architect seems curiously self-referential in discussing
“the language of this book, a language without words”. In the literal sense, the book narrates the construction of a spiritual Meeting Place by the Körn Society—a mysterious and influential power in fictionalized Switzerland. In doing so, they soon learn that
“great architecture […] project[s] the spirit”—whether for better, or for worse. The narrative style, however, is admittedly jarring at times. Elegant and cultivated prose morphs with reckless abandon into somewhat amateurish simile, at odds with the uncanny atmosphere for which the author strives. Rather than its execution, it is the philosophical premise that lends the book a semblance of success.
For a tale that relies so heavily on the speculative to create a sense of dread, it seems a shame that so little time is dedicated to the Meeting Place itself. Connell bridges architecture and body horror, creating a motif which strikes at the heart of the speculative. As the visual and the narrative contrast, the “cosmic womb” of the Körn Society proves both surreal and ominously close to home. Architecture may act as the scaffolding for a discussion of the human condition, but it also haunts the novella, a horrific reification of contemporary greed and consumerism. Speculative fiction, after all, allows us to re-examine our surroundings with a clarity that only the uncanny and unfamiliar can allow for.
Perhaps The Architect would succeed more as a short story than a novella. When confined by a somewhat extraneous plot, the novella serves only as a horrific retelling of the Tower of Babel. Rather, in order to construct a speculative mythos for the modern day, we must subvert the liminal and “uncertain language of art” to discover a new architecture. As the Meeting Place begins to take shape, the utopian facade of the Körn Society begins to crumble, and beneath its gilt exterior lies a dystopia whose mistakes we must avoid repeating. Just as they plan to construct “poetry in stone”—a plan which undoubtedly takes a turn for the worse–The Architect, in attempting to shackle its abstract aesthetic in plot, is perhaps too ambitious for its mere 114 pages. Within these pages lie the foundations of a modern mythology—for now, let’s stick to the blueprints.