Neither of these movies is horror. We want that on the record before anybody scrolls down looking for a body count. What we got out of the Fantasia Film Festival this year included a handful of screeners that landed outside our usual lane, and two of them were just too good to let them sit there unmentioned.
So we rolled them into one episode and called it a mini double feature. Both had their world premiere at the festival, both are excellent, and they could not be more different from each other if they tried.
Why We Covered Two Non-Horror Films on a Horror Podcast
We were fortunate enough to receive screenings for a few different films throughout Fantasia, and a couple of them did not fit our usual genre coverage at all. They still felt worth talking about. Genre cinema is a wide net, and these two are sitting in it for completely different reasons.
We kept the whole conversation spoiler-free, mostly because we have no information on whether either of these films is getting distribution in any capacity. When you cannot promise your audience they will be able to watch something next week, going deep on plot beats feels a little cruel.
So we stuck to overarching themes, a few performances, and the general shape of each film.
Tight Lettuce Is a Family Drama That Earns Every Laugh
The first film is Tight Lettuce (original French title Tissé serré), a bilingual Quebec production that premiered on July 18. It is the feature directorial debut of Harrison Houde, and it is based on a true story. The official synopsis is unusually accurate, which Arthur was quick to point out:
That is pretty spot on. For once, it is pretty spot on.
A son films his father’s addiction hoping to document his recovery, and as he sacrifices everything to save him, he has to decide how much he will lose for someone who may not want saving.
Joel is in his late twenties (28, we think) and lives in a small town near the border of Quebec and Ontario. His father Bodo has struggled with addiction for what looks like Joel’s entire life. Bodo used heroin for years and switched over to fentanyl about five years before the film picks up. The opioid crisis is not a Canadian problem or an American problem; it is happening in a lot of places at once, and this film sits right in the middle of it without ever feeling like a lecture.
Arthur laid out the part that makes opioid addiction so brutal to watch on screen:
The whole problem with opioids is that it is very hard to stop because it is super addictive. And the thing is, if you stop and then you get back on the wagon a bit, you will most likely die.
That is the shadow hanging over every scene where Joel tries to help. Getting clean is the goal. Getting clean is also what makes the next relapse lethal.
We do want to flag that this one is heavy. Meaghan got emotional just recapping it, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
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The Performances Are the Whole Reason This Film Lands
Dakota Daulby plays Joel and also co-wrote the film. Emmanuel Bilodeau plays Bodo. Maxim Roy plays Joel’s mother, and Christie Burke plays Joel’s partner Taylor. The supporting cast is stacked with faces you will recognize if you grew up on Canadian television, which turned a serious drama into an accidental round of spot-the-actor for us. “It’s very Canadian,” Arthur said.
Bilodeau is doing something remarkable here. The film shows real footage of the actual man at the end, and watching that after two hours of Bilodeau’s performance is a genuine gut punch. The mannerisms, the way he moves through a room, the way he handles being confronted, all of it tracks. Arthur’s read was that this had to be a deep character study built off that documentary footage, and you can feel the homework in it. The real Bodo was a successful contractor making good money, and the tragedy is that the skills never left him. He just cannot use them.
What we do not see on screen very often is the long view. Movies love a recent addiction, the three-to-five-year slide where recovery still feels close enough to touch. Tight Lettuce gives us decades. Thirty years of this. That changes everything about how the family behaves, and it is a different sort of experience to sit with.
The film also finds real humor in all of it, and most of that comes through Bodo himself. He provides comedic relief while being portrayed honestly, which is a very hard needle to thread. There is no rating system we can apply here. We are not going to sit around talking about digs and kills and how great the blood looked.
How Much Do You Lose for Someone Who Might Not Want Saving
The thing driving Joel is a belief that a lot of people carry: if you just love someone hard enough, you can fix them. Much of the film is about him running into the limits of that idea, and it never gets preachy about it. Everyone around him has landed somewhere different. His mother is still technically in the picture but has stepped back. Taylor is present until it becomes too much and she has to leave. Nobody in this film is wrong.
That is the part that stuck with us. Where is your priority when you are the person dealing with this? Joel is 28. He has a house, a partner, the beginnings of a nest egg, maybe kids somewhere in the future. All of that is on the table every single time he picks up the phone. Some people walk away, some people stay forever, some help more, some help less, and all of it comes down to whatever you have to do to protect your own sanity.
Arthur’s verdict:
Seriously, it is a very beautiful movie to watch. You should definitely check it out.
We are hoping it gets at least a limited theatrical run, and since it is bilingual, we suspect a national release is realistic.
Attack on Paradise Puts John Wick in a Belgian High Rise
Our second feature is Attack on Paradise, and Arthur called it Attack on Titan three separate times before he got it right. This one is a Belgian-Dutch co-production directed by Bob Colaers, presented in Dutch and Arabic, and it premiered on July 19. Quick heads up if you go looking for it online: it comes up in a lot of databases as just Paradise, so do not panic when your search turns up nothing.
Suleyman returns home after a seven-year prison sentence to find his apartment block seized by drug dealers, and he has to protect his mother from the violence closing in around her. He shows up with a gift basket, which is somehow the funniest possible detail. Then he realizes the building has been taken over, the police can barely access the area, and today happens to be the day a raid is going down. He is stuck between gangsters and cops with no allies on either side.
The building itself is a character. It is set in Antwerp, in one of those enormous concrete apartment complexes built in the seventies and eighties that you see all over older European cities. Fifteen or twenty floors, hundreds of units, every landing running as its own small community. Arthur, who has opinions about masonry: “Great buildings by the way. They keep the heat in and it’s cold in the evening.” They were built to last, and they make a fantastic vertical battleground.
There is also a sharper thread running underneath about how the crime lord Prince Hamza (played by Achmed Akkabi) is seen by the people living under him. He hands a widow money after having her boyfriend killed. He supplies medication to tenants who need it, including Suleyman’s mother, who needs insulin. Meaghan compared it to how a dictator stays beloved: do the horrible thing, then sprinkle a little kindness on top, then tell everyone to go back to living in the conditions you created.
Saïd Boumazoughe Gives Us an Action Hero Who Actually Bleeds
Saïd Boumazoughe plays Suleyman and co-wrote the film, and that origin matters. All these great action movies exist with all these iconic heroes, and he did not see anyone up there who represented him as an Arab man, so he wrote one. Look at the two films we kept reaching for as comparisons. John Wick and John McClane. Both white leads. (Meaghan’s theory: name your kid John and he is going to be a killer superstar.)
What makes Suleyman work is that he is not bulletproof. He has fight training, and he is very good at it, and that is the entire extent of his superpower. When he takes a hit to the shoulder, that arm stops working properly, and it stays that way. He is not running through fire and walking out clean. The film borrows the fight choreography energy and some of the lighting from the John Wick side of things while keeping the everyman spine of Die Hard, where a guy who happens to be good at something is just trying to reach one person.
We have been enjoying this shift for a while now. Monkey Man did something similar a couple of years back, and we are both huge Dev Patel fans (Meaghan will argue to anyone who stands still that he should have played Heathcliff in this year’s Wuthering Heights, and that is no shade to Jacob Elordi). Getting the everyman is good. Getting an everyman who does not look like every other action lead you have ever seen is better, and it makes the movie more interesting.
The film is also very funny, with genuinely good comedic beats between characters and a lead villain who is such a smug little goon that he sends everyone else to do his fighting for him. It is gritty and realistic without being overly stylized, and it is the kind of movie you should watch with a group of friends. We really hope it finds distribution beyond Europe, even if that ends up being a streaming pickup, because most audiences would have a blast with it. Subtitles are fine. You can handle subtitles.
More Fantasia coverage is on the way, including Nightborn, which we are heading into shortly before it hits Shudder.