Ah Girl (2026) Toronto Film Festival 2026

 

The arc of a year or so in the life of a young girl in Singapore. We watch as her parents divorce, she shuttles between homes, makes friends and runs an illegal chewing gum business.

This a solid little drama. Like life it's an up and down affair with some pieces better than others.  Feelings for the film went up and down over the course of the film, but what I loved was that when it was done, I liked the film a great deal, including the up and down nature of the film since it made it so much more like life. If there is anything I didn't like it was Ah-girl's hair cut towards the end

Please forgive me I don't have a great deal to say beyond that. Not because the film is bad but more because the film plays like life and it's hard to critique a person's life, even if they are fictional.

Worth a look,

Ephemera (2026) Tribeca 2026

An actress heading to the US impulsively asks her dance instructor on a date on her last night in Shanghai.

We’ve seen this sort of tale before (the director admits the jumping off spot is the Before films), but it really doesn’t matter when it’s told as wonderfully as this.

Easily one of my favorite films of Tribeca EPHEMERA delights the soul thanks to two wonderful lead performances, and script that gets out of the way and just lets the ladies work. This if a case of not so much telling a story but opening a door on two lovely people and letting us watch them interact for a while.

Nothing happens and everything does.

Its glorious.

Highly recommended.

One of the best of 2026.

Amoeba (2025) Toronto 2025

Choo, a rebellious 16 year old attending a Chinese school in Singapore, befriends three other students and they are inspired by the stories of the gangster fueled past to form a gang. While the girls embrace the ghosts of the past in the stories they also attempt to try and contact the ghost that Choo insists wanders around her bedroom.

Full disclosure, as much as I liked AMEOBA, I think I was the wrong audience for the film. While I could enjoy the film and it's coming of age tale, I think I would have loved this even more if I was a young lady just out of my teens. This is very much film connected to being a young woman who doesn't feel she fits in.

That said, I liked AMEOBA a great deal. It's a well acted film that nicely examines what it means to be in a world where one is not supposed to stand out.  I  like enough that I wish I could have connected to it more,

Recommended.

A pointer toward HEAVENS: THE BOY AND HIS ROBOT (2024) Fantasia 2024

A young boy bonds with a robot and ends up being a mecha pilot fighting against the martian aggression.

A largely CGI film with some humans in the mix, HEAVENS is more for kids than adults. If I had seen this as a kid I would have been hopelessly lost in its world and the notion of fighting space robots. 

While not bad, the film is heavily geared to being family friendly with the result that I lost patience early. Clearly I'm the wrong audience.

If you have a kid who likes fighting robots, this film is going to keep them entertained.

A Journey in Spring (2023) NDNF 2023

An older couple go through out their day. She works, he repairs the sink at home. When she passes away, he tells no one and remembers their past.

This is a memory play where everything is told in the physical actions rather than the words. Dialog is at a minimum, largely in the flashback memories, so what we are clued into the feelings and emotions is all through how the characters move. Any dialog ends up being commentary on the emotions of the largely wordless now sequences. (Though at the end we realize that everything but the beginning and end is a memory)

This is a beautiful looking and very deliberate film which you will either love or hate depending on your feelings toward the pacing and reflective nature of the film. This is where not a lot happens even though a lot of emotion is kicked up as one man contemplates his relationship to his wife. For some this is going to be manna from heaven and for others this is going to be close to watching paint dry. This is best described at moving at the speed of life.

For me the film was a mixed viewing experience. While I was okay with the pacing, my feelings for the film dissipated toward the conclusion. I say this because there was this moment toward the end where I realized that this was not going to have a big pay off. Emotionally there isn't enough here.

The problem is that the film plays as if it's a feature version of a short story. Short stories, and short films, have a rhythm all their own. Because of their brevity they can  show us moments, or pieces of a story, or even have endings that leave us hanging. Watching A JOURNEY IN SPRING I frequently could hear the voice of a short story narrator telling us the story. The ending, when it came could have been dead on perfect for a film a third of the film's length but not for something running 90 minutes.

Mirroring a short story in a feature can work, Ryusuke Hamaguchi's EVIL DOES NOT EXIST is a cinematic short story in feature form and it works with devastating power. However it takes more than simply stretching  a story to feature length.

While there is much to love in the film, the look and performances, A JOURNEY IN SPRING is a film best seen by an audience who can connect to it's deliberate pacing.

DREAMING AND DYING (2023) NDNF 2024

After years apart three school friends meet and consider their lives and relationships. 

Odd off kilter and magic realist drama  is an art house film full of long silence, meaningful sighs and sad looks. It is a film that is full of self importance and unspoken meaning.

This film didn't really work for me. From the opening image of a woman sitting by a statue of a hand this film felt off. It wanted me to know it was going to be about something. However as time went on I never clicked with it. In large part this was due to my not understanding why these three were together for any length of time. Yes. there are reasons, but at the same time there wasn't enough to propel even a 75 minute film.

This film missed for me.

Tiong Bahru Social Club (2021) NYAFF 2021 Fantasia 2021

 

A 30 year old still living at home with his mom is given a membership at the cult like Tiong Bahru Social Club which uses computer data to make sure everyone is happy. As part of the deal he is required to help spread happiness through the community.

Off kilter comedy is one part art film, one part satire and one part silly. This a film that you either click with or you don't. If you click with it its a charming film with odd people and odder asides. If you don't its a film that has moments but is trying too hard. 

I fell into it and was charmed by it and its drive just to be something unique and questing to be happy. It was an unexpected reaction since I wasn't planning on covering it and did so on a whim

Recommended

Dances with Films 2020 Horror Capsules: REPOSSESSION and HAWK AND REV VAMPIRE HUNTERS

REPOSSESSION
50 year old man forced out his job tries to maintain his place in the world and ends up unleashing an ancient evil that causes death and destruction across the city.

Slow burn, slow building horror film takes a while to get going but once it does its cold and kind of dispassionate take gets under you skin, especially once the mayhem starts. My initial reaction to the film was not to pay attention to some of the early bit, it was a little too slow for me, but then suddenly I found myself drawn in watching everything unfold and waiting for the next terrible thing to happen.

This is a good little film for anyone who can be a little patient.

HAWK AND REV VAMPIRE SLAYERS
Vampire obsessed security guard hooks up with a vegan landscaper to keep their home town free of vampire.

How you react to this film is going to entirely depend upon how you react to the humor in the film. If you can go with the two nudnicks at the center and the occasionally intentionally dumb things they do you are going to have a great time. If not you’ll have an okay time

Personally I would have like this film to have been played a little straighter. If it hadn’t been as goofy as it is I would have had no reservation in recommending it. The again this is going to be the perfect film to watch with friends and drinks.

Zombiepura (2019) NYAFF 2019

An amusing mix of horror and comedy has a squad of soldiers on a training retreat being ending up in the middle of a zombie plague.

Longtime readers of Unseen Films know that while I like the zombie genre, I am also sick to death of it. The last refuge of an increasing number of lazy filmmakers, the genre has been reduced down to people in bad make up chasing people around for 90 minutes before the end credits roll. There is no logic, no reason, just flesh munching. There is very little thought just the search for cheap scares as the same tropes are repeated over and over again.

By all rights I should be clumping Zombiepura into the crappy zombie film category but surprisingly that isn’t the case. Yes the film is your typical tale of a group of people surround by monsters going to eat them, but the filmmakers spice things up with not only a knowing sense of the genre, but also with real characters that create real situations where we laugh at the silliness of some of it and, most importantly we fear and dread what is going to happen next. We like our heroes and heroines and don’t want them to die.

One of the best films at this year’s NYAFF, Zombiepura is recommended when it plays Saturday night. For tickets and more information go here.

Nate Hood on Zombiepura (2019) NYAFF 2019

Hear ye, hear ye! The first zombie movie from Singapore has arrived!

And incredibly, it isn’t half-bad. That might sound unfairly glib, but anyone who works the festival or VOD circuit long enough usually develops an innate suspicion of any international horror movie that touts itself as the first of anything. Usually it’s just a cheap marketing gimmick meant to suck in horror completionists or the merely curious—rarely are they actually competent films in their own right. But Jacen Tan’s Zombiepura has some putrid meat hanging from its decrepit bones.

Utilizing the tried and true formula for zombie movies seeking crossover appeal, it bounces from genre to genre getting progressively darker and more serious as it continues. The first third plays as a slacker comedy as Kayu (Alaric), the laziest soldier in Singapore’s army reserves, runs afoul of his commanders and the military bureaucracy as he tries to get off guard duty by claiming to be sick. Of course, when he finally arrives at the doctor’s office he discovers that it’s already inundated with soldiers with a strange cough. It’s in this extended introduction that we’re introduced to a large, diverse cast of characters inevitably doomed to become zombie chow, such as Kayu’s best friend, the equally cowardly Jeya (Haresh Tilani). But we also meet a handful of characters who’ll obviously survive until at the least the incredibly dark—figuratively and literally—last act, as they’re either foils for his own personal growth or potential love interests, specifically the appropriately named “Beauty” (Joey Pink Lai), the daughter of one of the army camp’s employees who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

While the third act descends into predictable genre hysterics, it’s the second act that packs the most punch as it follows its band of misfits as they navigate the overrun camp. Tan gets a lot of comedic mileage over his zombies retaining “muscle memory” of their past lives—whenever the Singaporean anthem is played they snap to attention and when they’re confronted with an obstacle course they instinctively run it even while pursuing prey. But unlike the films of George A. Romero, there’s no satirical bite here—Tan isn’t making a statement about militarism or the depersonalization endemic to restrictive states like Singapore, they’re just gags. That might not be enough for some people, but for casual genre fair, it’s decent enough.

Rating: 6/10

Nate Hood ponders the merits of TOURISM (2018) Japan Cuts 2018

I like to think Daisuke Miyazaki’s Tourism is the kind of movie Agnès Varda and Chris Marker would make if they were bemused, slightly detached millennials with nothing but a long weekend off from work and two iPhones: a DIY meditation on the essential interconnectivity of mankind that casually blends narrative storytelling and in-the-moment cinéma vérité documentary to create something melancholic yet hopeful, cerebral yet heart-felt, intensely culturally specific yet defiantly globally minded.

I suspect many people won’t make it through the deliberately tedious first half, and for good reason—it’s essentially a video diary of Nina (Nina Endô) and Su (Sumire), two disaffected Japanese twenty-somethings working mind-numbing blue-collar jobs who win plane tickets to anywhere in the world in the lottery. They choose Singapore (largely because you supposedly don’t need to speak English to get around there) and set off on their first trip outside Japan. We’re then treated to the equivalent of a thirty minute Instagram story: them going through airport security, them playing with video filters during the flight, them finding their hotel, them visiting tourist traps, them futzing around with selfie sticks, them window-shopping at malls.

But for all its banality, there’s a hypnotic undercurrent of discovery as these two women slowly realize just how small the world is, even if that realization is subconscious. This subtext becomes overt text in the last act when Nina loses Su and her iPhone and gets lost in Singapore’s slums. As she wanders helplessly through the streets, passing temples and mosques, crowded town squares and darkened alleyways, she finds helpful strangers in the strangest places. A random woman she asks for directions turns out to be a secret otaku who sings her the theme of a Japanese kid’s show. Elsewhere she runs into a Muslim family who takes her into their home and feeds her while joking about the different ways their cultures pray before meals. And finally she attends a roof-top concert where a Japanese Yoko Ono lookalike belts out Beatles covers.

This is the ecstatic wisdom of Tourism: the farther away you go from home, the more familiar things and people get. In a way it reminds me of Joji Koyama and Tujiko Noriko’s Kuro: both films show us a surface narrative about culturally misplaced Japanese women while obliquely hinting at deeper, more esoteric truths. But while Kuro depths may have echoed of horror in a disconnected world, Tourism echoes of hope in a digital one.

Rating: 8/10

Tourism (2018) Japan Cuts 2018

I’m going to say upfront that like Daisuke Miyazaki‘s previous film Yamato (California), Tourism didn’t work for me. Part drama, part documentary the film is very close to watching someone’s home movies if they actually took the time to really pick their shots to frame the action.

The plot of the film has a couple of friends going to Singapore to meet up with a friend who lives there. After the touristy places are a bust they go to mall. One get separated and begins to really see the city and its people.

It looks good but it didn’t connect to me. Part of the problem is I really didn’t care for anyone on screen until the second half. I didn’t really care about the characters because they were so bland. Until the touristy stuff goes there is no one here. I think the other problem is that some of the funding came from a tourist board with the result everything has its best foot forward.

If you liked Miyazaki's earlier film give the film a shot otherwise you’re on your own.

For tickets and more information go here

The Offering (2016)

Hitting theaters and VOD this Friday is THE OFFERING a Singapore set horror film.

Jamie is a reporter who receives word that her sister has died. Traveling to Singapore to see what happened she is informed that her sister committed suicide. Unable to believe it she begins digging and finds that her death is some how linked to an ancient evil.  Will she be able to stop the evil and keep her niece safe?

Okay horror film isn't bad, but isn't anything special either. The film suffers from poor staging which seems to think that big open areas are scary. What I mean by this is that much of the film seems to be in large rooms  with lots of empty space. I understand why its being done-to make it appear like no one could be around, but at the same time a lot of it feels like an episode of an architectural show. Worse everything seems too brightly lit, there is no mood or feeling of dread.

To be honest about half way into the film my attention began to wander around. It says a great deal that even with my attention split I stayed to the end, I was interested enough to see where it was going but at the same time I didn't live or die by what happened.

For horror fans worth a look, but it need not be your first choice.