| B- | Fantastic Fest 2026 }
Kudos to this husband/wife creative team. They won the Fantastic Pitches competition at last year’s festival, which earned them $100,000 towards filming, and they went out and got it done. Despite, per the Q&A, losing the house they had been planning on using five days before filming started and having to quickly scrape up another one.
I don’t know how they landed James Urbaniak, but I love him and thoroughly enjoyed seeing him in this quirky role.
The horror half of the movie was spot on, with the odd children’s show video and what that all leads to. I literally gasped out loud at one of the surprises, which I never do at movies.
But I felt the other half of the story (the main characters’ ongoing lives) was too separate. I wanted the two stories to be more interwoven or united, instead of just happening at the same time. (I don’t mean we should find out something like the guy in the videos is the main character’s estranged father. But I wanted the conflicts from the two stories to merge at the end, instead of just colliding like they did. Personal preference.)
But given how early this is in their careers and the overall quality of the movie, I will be interested to see what these two get up to next.
Clip (I usually don’t link to clips, but this one was representative of the movie)
