Bruised Sky
Directed by Gary Kent
Screenplay by Kent & Michael Nolan
Starring Che Bell, Geoff Bell, Nathan Mack, & Nathan Smith.

Horror / Thriller

★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

Gary Kent’s Bruised Sky rocked Fantasia 2026 with its dark tale from 1970s Essex, inspired by real events. Two teens, George and Tommy, are friends of a friend who meet to play basketball. When George wants to score some weed he takes Tommy along to his dealer’s house. The dealer, Dean (Geoff Bell), is a bit of an oddball, but seemingly harmless; at least at first. A day of basketball and smoking weed quickly pivots into abject terror.

A clear riff on the American serial killer Dean Corll’s relationship with David Owen Brooks and Elmer Wayne Henley. Ultimately this real-life inspiration doesn’t matter. The way the story’s told is what makes Bruised Sky so shattering. It doesn’t take long to realise something bad is about to happen, sooner or later, but how the rest of the events unfold is chilling. The ending is also a cold dose of terror, to know that the events we’ve just witnessed aren’t just a single awful event, they’re actually part of a terrible, violent cycle. Bruised Sky evokes a world many of us are old enough to have grown up in: a world with much less supervision in which young people often navigated difficult, dangerous situations far beyond the safety of mom and dad’s house or even the comfort of neighbours. Unfortunately the short is based on real horrors experienced by far too many boys and young men. Kent does the subject matter justice by avoiding being graphic or explicit, allowing the film’s tense, terrifying drama to speak volumes.

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Exponat
Directed by Lars Bürmann
Screenplay by Hürcihan Gül
Starring Imme Beccard, Eckert Matilda, & Luzia Oppermann.

Horror / Thriller

★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

Lars Bürmann’s Exponat (aka Exhibit) tells the story of Kim (Luzia Oppermann), a homeless woman dealing with a mysterious and intense pain in her abdomen. One night she passes out and an artist called Annette (Imme Beccard) takes Kim back to her studio. Annette looks after Kim, offering her painkillers and a roof over her head. But is Annette’s concern altruistic? Is it something sinister? At first Kim resists. The pain within her forces her back to Annette, and eventually she figures out what’s actually going on between them.

Similar to elements of Bruised Sky, Exponat deals with the brutality people are willing to do to others in exchange for something that benefits them. In Exponat, the reality of why Annette is helping Kim, as well as others it turns out, acts as a perfect metaphor related to the art of creation, and can be read in a number of potential ways. In a timely fashion, Exponat works as a grisly response to the rise of generative AI and technofascist claims it’s meant to liberate human creativity while simultaneously stealing human creativity to feed an anti-intellectual machine. Kim’s pain effectively becomes fodder for Annette’s supposed creativity. Annette quite literally uses a piece of Kim as her own art. The brilliance of Exponat is that, in the end, Kim refuses to allow it to continue happening—a drop of hope in a short that’s drowning in existential pain.