The Top 10 Films From The 2025 Fantasia Film Festival

The fights in the ring don’t compare to the fights on the street in Takashi Miike’s ‘Blazing Fists’.

Courtesy of Fantasia Film Festival 2025

The 2025 Fantasia Film Festival was held from July 16 to August 3 in Montreal. The festival celebrated its 29th year with a roster of more than 125 feature films and over 200 shorts. It’s a fool’s errand to attempt to distill this impressive slate into a Top 10 list. Even an insomniac film critic couldn’t see half of the films playing Fantasia 2025 during the three weeks of the festival. So, you could more accurately call this post The Top 10 Films (Of All the Films I Saw) From the 2025 Fantasia Film Festival. (But that’s not very catchy.)

Curation at Fantasia runs deep. Where else will you find Japanese action films, South Korean crime dramas, Argentinian horror films, French thrillers and American indies on the same Top 10 list? In my book, the Fantasia Film Festival is the Cannes of genre cinema. So, break out your Watch List and put these ten films on it, so you don’t miss them as they hit theaters, VOD and streaming services in the months to come.

Best of the Fest – Sham: Japanese auteur Takashi Miike is known for his excesses. From the gore of his 1999 horror classic Audition to his bombastic martial arts films like Ichi the Killer (2001) and 13 Assassins (2010), Miike is the master of “Go Big Or Go Home”. So I was unprepared for this quiet, nuanced courtroom drama based on a real-life incident where a Japanese school teacher was accused of, and ultimately sued over, allegedly bullying one of his elementary-aged pupils.

Seiichi Yabushita (Go Ayano) is by all appearances a kind, caring school teacher, husband and father. As the film opens, we see Seiichi repeatedly intimidating and verbally abusing a child in his class following Seiichi’s awkward parent-teacher conference with the boy’s mother, Ritsuko Himuro (Ko Shibasaki). This opening segment proves to be a dramatization of the mother’s courtroom testimony in the civil suit that forms the second half of the film. The film then depicts Seiichi’s version of events in a Rashomon-style narrative.

Sham is a masterful combination of insightful screenwriting, compelling performances and unintrusive direction. The characters and their motivations provide more than enough drama. No camera pyrotechnics or stagey melodrama is needed. It’s a powerful piece of work that needs no technical embellishment. It’s one of the best films I’ve seen this year and undoubtedly takes my top prize for Fantasia 2025.

Blazing Fists: You know you’re on a roll when one filmmaker places two films in my Top 10 for any film festival much less for a genre powerhouse festival like Fantasia. Along with Sham, Takashi Miike is at the helm of Blazing Fists, a big, brash martial arts action film. As I stated in my recent coverage of the Japan Cuts Film Festival, “the entire film is a cinematic amplifier turned up to eleven. The only people having more fun than the cast is the audience.”

Fragment: How vaguely can I describe the plot of a compelling film to protect its many interesting facets? Fragment is a crime film, but it’s in no way a police procedural. This film deals with the “fallout” of a horrific event, the collateral damage left in the wake of an explosion of violence. In writer-director (and cinematographer) Kim Sung-yoon’s South Korean character drama, two high school classmates share a terrible bond that forms the premise for this examination of victimhood and generational shame.

It takes a brave filmmaker to base his film on the performances of young adult and child actors. To the credit of everyone involved, every minute of Fragment rings true. The film feels like a labor of love with Kim Sung-yoon personally writing, directing and filming its every moment. Labor of love sometimes translates as a low budget or shaggy overall appearance. Not when it comes to Fragment. By retaining such control over the finished product, director Kim has simply seen to it that his vision is what appears on the screen. It’s a poignant look at guilt, shame and redemption.

Forbidden City: No genre film festival would be complete without a big martial arts action extravaganza. Co-writer-director Gabriele Mainetti gobsmacked the festival circuit in 2023 with his film Freaks Out (currently on Amazon Prime). Forbidden City proves he’s no one-hit wonder.

Marcello (Enrico Borello) is a chef in his family’s restaurant in Rome; Mei (Yaxi Liu) is a Chinese citizen who sneaks into Italy to search for her missing sister. The two become unlikely allies when they learn that the disappearance of Marcello’s father may be related to the whereabouts of Mei’s sister. They quickly become entangled in a turf war between Chinese and Italian organized crime bosses as they search for answers.

Mainetti’s films have an epic scale and grandeur that belie their very reasonable budgets. U.S. film executives should take note that it’s possible to make something that feels this big for a fraction of what Hollywood spends on an action film. Cinematographer Paolo Carnera captures the beauty of Rome while still focusing on Mainetti’s fictional underbelly of the great city. It’s rare to find a martial arts film where the audience becomes so invested in the characters. Be sure to see this one on the big screen if it plays an arthouse near you.

The Wailing: This multi-generational ghost story was the best horror film of the festival for me. (The others on this list weren’t far behind.) The Wailing has a scope reminiscent of Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (2023) and a three-part structure that echoes that excellent film. In the opening segment, Andrea begins to believe that she is cursed, being haunted by an entity that’s invisible to the naked eye, but can be captured on video or in photos. She also notices that when she passes a particular apartment building she hears desperate screams (the “wailing” of the title) when no one else seems to notice. My use of the word “multi-generational” is the only hint I will give about what follows.

This Spanish-language horror tale was principally filmed in Madrid, Spain and Buenos Aires, Argentina. No disrespect to the excellent work of cinematographer Constanza Sandoval, but such gorgeous, exotic locations feel like you’ve won half the battle if you simply show up with a camera. The screenplay by co-writer/director Pedro Martin-Calero and Isabel Pena is a knockout, breathing interesting new life into a horror sub-genre that’s been very well-traveled by previous films. I hate the term “elevated horror”. It implies horror films can’t reach the heights of non-genre cinema. I prefer to consider The Wailing a piece of “ambitious horror”. Label it as you wish. It may be the best horror film of the year (in any language).

The Woman: This psychological thriller from director Hwang Wook a master class in generating suspense from the smallest details. Sun-kyung (Han Hye-ji) finds a new vaccum cleaner through the Korean equivalent of Facebook Marketplace. She meets the eccentric (creepy?) seller, Young-hwan, in a public place to exchange the item. In the aftermath, she believes that Young-hwan is following her, arranging “coincidences” to repeatedly come into contact with her. When she reports the incidents to the police, we learn that Sun-kyung may not be as reliable a narrator as the audience has been led to believe.

The unreliable narrator twist adds just the right amount of confusion to the story. Han Hye-ji’s performance brilliantly plays into the intentional ambiguity of the unfolding narrative. You find out the truth, but not until you’ve reached its very satisfying conclusion. Fans of Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (2019) won’t want to miss The Woman.

Stuntman: Ah, remember the heyday of Hong Kong action films? Co-directors (and co-editors) Albert and Herbert Leung certainly do. Stuntman is the tale of Lee Sam (Stephen Tung), a former action choreographer for Hong Kong action films. His sequences were legendary, but so was his penchant for taking risks with the safety of his actors. Sam has been out of the film business for years when an old director pal contacts him about making a film in the style of the old Hong Kong masterpieces. Can Sam resist one last shot at cinematic glory? But, more importantly, can he avoid becoming the maniacal taskmaster when he once again walks on set?

Stuntman combines action and drama as it explores how far is too far to go for your art? The film adeptly examines the workplace generation gap between Baby Boomers, Millenials and Gen-Z. Are the young people working with Sam lazy and uncommitted? Or are they more attuned to the lines you shouldn’t cross when risking your life for someone else’s entertainment? I love movies about making movies, and Stuntman is a great addition to the genre.

Noise: I almost never find it suspenseful when things go bump in the night in a horror film. Movies like Noise, a South Korean horror film from director Kim Soo-jin, is why I used the word “almost”. This lean, mean film about a haunted (or is it?) unit in a high rise apartment building gets off to a fast start and never lets up.

Ju-Hee (Han Soo-a) complains to her sister, Ju-Young (Lee Sun-bin), that she hears frequent unexplained noises in their apartment. Ju-Young, who is hearing impaired and unaffected by any potential noise, worries that her sister is suffering from sleep deprivation and possibly some type of mental illness. When Ju-Hee disappears without a trace, Ju-Young leaves her work dormitory and moves into the apartment, determined to find her sister.

It’s a common trope to pit the possibility of a supernatural phenomenon against the possibility of undiagnosed mental illness. Is the apartment haunted? Or am I going mad? Poe and Lovecraft explored this territory over a century ago. That said, the screenplay for Noise by Lee Je-hui finds new ways to toggle back and forth between Is it supernatural? and Is there a simple explanation? For every character who’s a Mulder, there’s a character who’s a Scully. Unlike so many horror films, I found the conclusion to be very satisfying.

Hellcat: Lena awakens in a small camper being towed by a pickup truck. She has no idea how she got there, and no clue who is at the wheel. When she tries to peep out the door of the speeding camper, she learns that it’s chained and padlocked. As she tentatively walks around the camper and gets her bearings, a voice over an intercom informs her that she’s been “infected” by an unnamed contagion. And her abductor is actually her Knight in Shining Armor taking her to medical assistance.

The film makes great use of everything not necessarily being as it seems. Writer-director Brock Bodell’s screenplay strategically doles out information, making sure the narrative never stagnates. Veteran horror audiences will certainly suspect where we might be headed, but the film is a cinematic teeter-totter. Just as you’re certain you know what’s going on, it swings in a different direction. It zigs when you expect a zag. Hellcat deserves to find its audience. I look forward to Bodell’s next film.

Flush: This French-language body horror, crime film is a straight-up banger. This is the kind of gem you hope to find on the Midnight Movie roster at a genre film festival. Luc (Jonathan Lambert) is down on his luck: girlfriend woes, estranged from his daughter and on the wrong side of local drug dealers. When Luc is falsely accused of stealing a small stash of cocaine, he receives a serious beating. Upon returning to semi-consciousness, he discovers his head has been stuffed into the floor drain of a men’s room urinal. (Insert green nausea emoji here.)

During the course of its tight 75-minute runtime, Flush squeezes every bit of tension it can out of the minutiae of Luc’s plight. From attempting to call for help while separated from his earbuds to surviving unwanted attention from a coke-addicted mouse, Flush ratchets up the tension and gore (thanks to amazing prosthetic make-up effects from make-up artist Sezen Julie Bakan). Screenwriter David Neiss and director Gregory Morin have added a stellar entry to the canon of single location films.