Cults

In Fabric is a haunting ghost story set against the backdrop of a busy winter sales period in a department store and follows the life of a cursed dress as it passes from person to person, with devastating consequences.

Tasya Vos is a corporate agent who uses brain-implant technology to inhabit other people's bodies, driving them to commit assassinations for the benefit of the company. While she has a special gift for the work, her experiences on these jobs have caused a dramatic change in her, and in her own life she struggles to suppress violent memories and urges. As her mental strain intensifies, she begins to lose control, and soon she finds herself trapped in the mind of a man whose identity threatens to destroy her own.

Justine, raised as a rigorous vegetarian, arrives as a freshman at the reputable Saint-Exupéry Veterinary School. As she leaves the family home, Justine abruptly moves into a mad new world of strange school traditions and vicious initiation tests, and before long, she must chew over her unshakable herbivorous beliefs. More and more, as Justine descends deeper and deeper into a hidden world of uncharted animalistic tendencies, an unprecedented and equally morbid craving for meat will transform her into a very different being, but now that her corporeal awakening is finally complete, is there a point in denying her hunger for raw flesh?

Alexia suffers a terrible skull injury and has a titanium plate fitted into her head. When she gets out of the hospital, she rejects her parents and embraces passionately the car that almost killed her. The coming years she has problems with her sexuality and meets Vincent. Vincent is a tortured man who tries to preserve his strength by injecting steroids into his aging body. Will they find a way to deal with their emotional problems?

USA in the 1970s. We follow the highly intelligent Jack over a span of 12 years and are introduced to the murders that define Jack's development as a serial killer. We experience the story from Jack's point of view, while he postulates each murder is an artwork in itself. As the inevitable police intervention is drawing nearer, he is taking greater and greater risks in his attempt to create the ultimate artwork. Along the way we experience Jack's descriptions of his personal condition, problems and thoughts through a recurring conversation with the unknown Verge - a grotesque mixture of sophistry mixed with an almost childlike self-pity and psychopathic explanations. The House That Jack Built is a dark and sinister story, yet presented through a philosophical and occasional humorous tale.

Forty-six year old Reverend Ernst Toller is the pastor at the historic First Reformed Church in upstate New York. It is seen as the "tourist" church or the "souvenir shop" (its historical significance partly it being a stop on the underground railroad before the slaves crossed into Canada) by Abundant Life, which owns the church and which operates a modern self-named five thousand seat church overseen by Reverend Joel Jeffers. First Reformed is celebrating its two hundred fiftieth anniversary this year, for which a major event is planned, modest in size only at First Reformed itself although the dignitaries like the governor and mayor will be at attendance there, while the event will be simulcast at Abundant Life. Most of the speech-making will be done by local industrialist Ed Balq, a major benefactor of Abundant Life and who is the major donor for the necessary upgrades at First Reformed to be able to hold the event there, and for the event itself, while Toller's participation will be minimal beyond the introductory sermon. First Reformed is generally a sparsely attended church meaning that Toller doesn't have to do much direct ministering, although he does have the stock answers when asked how God factors into this or that situation in one's life. Toller himself has long been divorced, his marriage which could not survive the death of their son, Joseph, in war. Because of that history, Toller believes he is incapable of human love, despite a brief relationship with Esther, the choir mistress at Abundant Life, she who is arguably still in love with him. Toller is neglecting the warning signs about his poor health, the symptoms pointing to a probable diagnosis of stomach cancer, which is only exacerbated by his largely liquid (i.e. alcohol) diet. Toller is already examining his life and work in writing a daily journal for a year, that journal which he intends no one ever to read, but these issues in Toller's life become more pointed when a new pregnant congregant, Mary, asks him to speak to her husband Michael, who Toller will learn is an environmentalist concerned about bringing another human life into what he already sees as a world doomed because of man's role in climate change.

THE NIGHTINGALE is a meditation on the horrors of Australian colonization, set at the turn of the 19th century. The film follows Clare, a 21-year-old native Irish wife and mother held captive beyond her 7-year sentence, desperate to be free of her obsessed master, British lieutenant Hawkins. Clare's husband Aidan intervenes with devastating consequences for all. When British authorities fail to deliver justice, Clare pursues Hawkins, who leaves his post suddenly to secure a captaincy up north. Unfamiliar with the Tasmanian wilderness she enlists the help of an orphaned Aboriginal tracker Billy. Marked by their traumas, the two fight to overcome their distrust and prejudices against the backdrop of Australia's infamous 'Black War'.

Susie Bannion is a young American ballerina who travels to Berlin to study dancing at Madame Blanc's Markos Tanz Company, one of the world's most renowned schools. On her first day, one of the students who had been recently expelled from the school is murdered. As this appalling happening does not seem to be an isolated occurrence, the brilliant new student soon begins to suspect that the school might be involved in the homicide. Her mistrust heightens when Sarah, one of the girls at the school, tells her that before she was killed, Pat confided to her that she knew and guarded a terrifying secret.

Against the backdrop of insufferable domestic ennui, the soft-spoken former saleswoman and newlywed housewife, Hunter, is struggling to stretch the bars of her gilded cage, a lavish and immaculate modernist villa in New York, even though she seems to have it all. But, more and more, as sad Hunter tries, unsuccessfully, to meet her controlling family's expectations, compliance turns into submission, obedience transforms into obsession, and pica, a compulsive eating disorder, starts to take over. Now, swallowing non-nutritive objects and engaging in increasingly impossible tasks becomes Hunter's dangerous newfound addiction, and there's no telling how far she'll go to maintain a false and fleeting sense of power. Who can save Hunter from herself?

Despite second thoughts about their relationship, a young woman (Jessie Buckley) takes a road trip with her new boyfriend (Jesse Plemons) to his family farm. Trapped at the farm during a snowstorm with Jake's mother (Toni Collette) and father (David Thewlis), the young woman begins to question the nature of everything she knew or understood about her boyfriend, herself, and the world. An exploration of regret, longing and the fragility of the human spirit, I'M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS is directed and written by Academy Award® winner Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). Inspired by Iain Reid's bestselling namesake novel.

There, but for the grace of God, goes Maud, a reclusive young nurse whose impressionable demeanor causes her to pursue a pious path of Christian devotion after an obscure trauma. Now charged with the hospice care of Amanda, a retired dancer ravaged by cancer, Maud's fervent faith quickly inspires an obsessive conviction that she must save her ward's soul from eternal damnation - whatever the cost. Making her feature-film debut, writer/director Rose Glass cannily lures the audience into this disturbed psyche, steadily setting up her veritable diary of a country nurse for an unnerving and ultimately shocking trajectory. Morfydd Clark (also at the Festival in The Personal History of David Copperfield) portrays the sanctimonious Maud with an intense stoicism that belies a disquieting vulnerability, as Maud desperately vies for absolution and solidarity from her embittered patient (an enthralling Jennifer Ehle, also at the Festival in Beneath the Blue Suburban Skies). Glass tenderly captures this relationship with an empathetic gaze that first assumes an ethereal, dreamlike atmosphere - but it isn't long before Maud's dogmatic candor incites an irreconcilable friction that spirals her mind into a suffocating confluence of creeping doubt and paranoia. As Glass tightens the screws on her misguided martyr, well-placed nods are made to religious horror forerunners like William Friedkin's The Exorcist, further contributing to the film's increasingly dread-filled malaise. And when this insidious fever climatically breaks, the consequences are devastating and terrifying in equal measure.

"Safe" has been described as a horror movie of the soul, a description that director Todd Haynes relishes. California housewife Carol White seems to have it all in life: a wealthy husband, a beautiful house, servants, beauty, and a lot of friends. The only thing she lacks is a strong personality: Carol seems timid and empty during all of her interactions with the world around her. At the beginning of the film, one would consider her to be more safe in life than just about anyone. That doesn't turn out to be the case. Starting with headaches and leading to a grandmal seizure, Carol becomes more and more sick, claiming that she's become sensitive to the common toxins in today's world: exhaust, fumes, aerosol spray, etc. She pulls back from the sexual advances of her husband and spends her nights alone by the TV or wandering around the outside of her well-protected home like an animal in a cage. Her physician examines her and can find nothing wrong. An allergist finds that she has an allergic reaction to milk but explains that there is no treatment for that sort of allergy. She sees a psychiatrist who does nothing but make her nervous. In the hospital, Carol sees an infomercial for Wrenwood, a new-age retreat for those who are "environmentally ill," and leaves her husband and stepson to try and find salvation at this retreat: headed by a phony, grandstanding, "sensitive" individual named Peter Dunning.

Follows one day in the life of Jane (Julia Garner), a recent college graduate and aspiring film producer, who has recently landed her dream job as a junior assistant to a powerful entertainment mogul. Her day is much like any other assistant's - making coffee, changing the paper in the copy machine, ordering lunch, arranging travel, taking phone messages, onboarding a new hire. But as Jane follows her daily routine, she, and we, grow increasingly aware of the abuse that insidiously colors every aspect of her work day, an accumulation of degradations against which Jane decides to take a stand, only to discover the true depth of the system into which she has entered.

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Tina, who has grotesque, almost animal-like physical features, has always felt self-conscious about her looks. Regardless, she has: a live-in boyfriend, Roland, a dog trainer, at her isolated house in the woods, although they have never had sex, and Tina's father, who is in the early stages of Alzheimer's, believing he is solely using her; the unconditional love and support of her father; a small group of friends; and the admiration of her bosses and coworkers in her job as a customs agent at the Ferry terminal, as she is literally able to "smell" human emotions, especially guilt and fear. It is using that innate ability that she stops a seemingly straight-laced person entering the country, he who was found to be carrying a memory card containing child pornography. As such, her immediate supervisor, Agneta, places her on a small investigative unit to discover the producers of this material. Tina is surprised when she is found to be incorrect about another person going through customs, Vore, an entomologist who, like her, possesses those similar grotesque, almost animal-like physical features, he who is found not to be carrying anything incriminating. In Vore and Tina's multiple encounters at customs, the two begin a friendship, Tina, for the first time, believing she having found a kindred spirit. As Tina learns more and more about Vore, the more she learns about herself. As more and more information comes to light, Tina has to decide whether to abandon the life she has known in its entirety for the future that Vore offers her, that future which may go against what she has always believed to be the good about being human.

As renowned for her morose nature as she is for her horror fiction, writer Shirley Jackson (Elizabeth Moss) is crafting yet another masterpiece when the arrival of newlyweds Fred and Rose disrupt her creative process and marriage to literary critic - and philandering professor - Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg). As Stanley spars to maintain academic dominance over his would-be protégé Fred, Rose attempts to dampen her own ambitions and adjust to married life while living under the roof of their fiery intellectual hosts with quicksilver loyalties and myriad neuroses. When the motives of Shirley's literary muse prove elusive, Rose's curiosity and trusting nature make her tender prey for a brilliant author whose only allegiance is to her work.

Will (Ben Foster) and his teenage daughter, Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie), have lived off the grid for years in the forests of Portland, Oregon. When their idyllic life is shattered, both are put into social services. After clashing with their new surroundings, Will and Tom set off on a harrowing journey back to their wild homeland. The film is directed by Debra Granik from a script adapted by Granik and Anne Rosellini.

As the wavering cry of the foghorn fills the air, the taciturn former lumberjack, Ephraim Winslow, and the grizzled lighthouse keeper, Thomas Wake, set foot in a secluded and perpetually grey islet off the coast of late-19th-century New England. For the following four weeks of back-breaking work and unfavourable conditions, the tight-lipped men will have no one else for company except for each other, forced to endure irritating idiosyncrasies, bottled-up resentment, and burgeoning hatred. Then, amid bad omens, a furious and unending squall maroons the pale beacon's keepers in the already inhospitable volcanic rock, paving the way for a prolonged period of feral hunger; excruciating agony; manic isolation, and horrible booze-addled visions. Now, the eerie stranglehold of insanity tightens. Is there an escape from the wall-less prison of the mind?