Fantasia Fest 2025: Here are 5 films we’re most excited to see

In 2025, film festivals that offer virtual access immediately have my attention. This year’s massive Fantasia Fest, running July 16 through August 3, promises to delight and terrify. There are 125 features and 200+ shorts to dig your teeth into – wowzers! So, coming up with our top 5 features we’re most excited about was no easy feat. But we managed.

You can check out the complete lineup, snag tickets, and more!

Below, B-Sides & Badlands handpicks 5 feature films we absolutely can not wait to see.

The Undertone

Established sci-fi author Ian Tuason’s first feature brings terror to the podcasting arena, creating an unforgettable horror experience! Nina Kiri (THE HERETICS, THE HANDMAID’S TALE) stars as podcaster Evy. Tending to her dying mother, her job as a co-host of The Undertone is the one thing that keeps her tethered to normalcy. When her co-host Justin (Kris Holden-Ried, THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY, LOST GIRL) presents ten disturbing audio files of a man and his wife, the story they tell becomes weirdly connected to Evy and her mother. With brilliant use of a home as the liminal space between life and death, an intense performance by genre favorite Kiri, and haunting sound design that will leave your blood cold, THE UNDERTONE is a new entry in the haunting folk horror catalog you won’t soon forget.

Nesting

A familiar name to Fantasia audiences, Chloé Cinq-Mars returns to the festival with her debut feature, NESTING (PEAU À PEAU). Delving into the quiet horrors of early motherhood, the film opens with a scream in the night. Pénélope (Rose-Marie Perreault, FAKE TATTOOS), a new mother grappling with sleep deprivation and postpartum depression, finds herself unable to separate dream from reality. After witnessing a violent hold-up in a convenience store, her already fragile psyche begins to crack. Sensitive and haunting, NESTING offers an intimate, unsettling portrait of a mother unraveling. Perreault delivers a career-defining performance, capturing Pénélope’s disintegration and tender attempts at self-reclamation. Denied the idealized “glow” of new motherhood, she’s left to drift in darkness, slowly losing her grip on reality. What emerges is a chilling and deeply human exploration of identity, isolation, and the aching silence surrounding maternal mental health.

Flush

Middle-aged coke fiend Luke (R. Jonathan Lambert of Quentin Dupieux’s REALITY) has gone to confront his ex at the club where she works, determined to somehow win back her love. One thing leads to another and he soon finds himself wedged firmly in a toilet, effectively trapped in a bathroom stall – with a heap of drugs that he stole from the bar’s resident dealer. He’s soon found, setting off an increasingly crazy series of events as Luke’s world is assailed from every conceivable direction in a bizarro race against time that will leave you gasping for air. After years of winning awards everywhere from Clermont-Ferrand to Sitges with his inspired short film work (DERNIER CRI, PARIS BY NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD…), Parisian super force Grégory Morin has finally made a feature, and it’s utterly, gloriously insane. Evocative of Dupieux by way of Gaspar Noé and early Álex de la Iglesia, FLUSH is as inventively delirious as it is wickedly cinematic, a real-time, over-the-top blast of absurdist indie brilliance.

The Book of Sijjin and Illiyyin

A woman regularly belittled and bullied by her employers calls upon evil forces to obtain her vengeance in the most heinous of ways. Blending Islamic folk horror, ocular torture à la Lucio Fulci, and imagery evoking THE EVIL DEAD, Indonesian director Hadrah Daeng Ratu’s THE BOOK OF SIJJIN AND ILLIYYIN will satiate even the most ravenous fans of gore and ultraviolence. Writer Laila Lele offers a gut-churning script that plunges us into the heart of a waking nightmare in which even children aren’t safe – and can end up splattering the walls like miniature Jackson Pollock artworks. Viewer discretion is highly advised here, as Indonesia has become an inexhaustible source of terrifying works, generous in their offerings of gore, twisted tales, and fascinating Muslim mythology populated by djinns and other demons. All we can really do is sit back and take pleasure in discovering and exploring – to our own risk and peril!

Anna Kiri

A young delinquent narrowly escapes a violent altercation with a local gangster after a robbery gone wrong. Anna (Catherine Brunet, FARADOR, IN MEMORIAM) seizes the chance to turn her life around, but soon realizes the price of freedom is high and the past is not so easily left behind. Francis Bordeleau’s second feature is a unique exploration of a young woman’s emancipation and a quest to find her voice through relationships and writing. Brunet’s performance is stellar and she is accompanied by an impressive cast including Charlotte Aubin (L’EMPEREUR, VIRAGE), Maxime de Cotret (LE PLONGEUR, FRONTIÈRES), Caroline Néron (STAT, ÉTERNELLE), and Anne-Marie Cadieux (SOLO, LES HOMMES DE MA MÈRE). A thriller in its own right, sometimes playful yet often tense and shocking, ANNA KIRI creates a sharp juxtaposition between the lowest rungs of the city, struggling to make ends meet, and the elegant if not outright elitist members of the literary scene. The two worlds attempt to coexist on screen, setting up a collision course with a wildly explosive conclusion.