Bagman
Directed & Written by Connor & Vaughn Gaston
Starring Sam Rahmani & Donal Thoms-Cappello

Horror

★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

In Connor and Vaughn Gaston’s Bagman, Nat (Sam Rahmani) works in a comfy office at her desk where she keeps an eye on cameras placed throughout a section of forest. She’s miles away from the locations she watches. So when she notices a bag appear abruptly on one of the forest cams, she has to contact Doug (Donal Thoms-Capello) to get him to take a look at the bag. When he goes missing, Nat’s forced to decide whether she’ll drive miles to check things out herself, or stay at her comfy office space and do nothing.

Bagman is one of the best shorts at Fantasia 2026. We’re implicated in the narrative through the viewer’s identification with the protagonist and her perspective. She becomes implicated in what happens on video and what’s in the bag itself, which feels like a commentary on our role as the watcher behind the screen: are we helpless victims sitting behind a screen, or can we take action and play an active role in stopping the images that appear on it? While it’s not near the same kind of story, Bagman is pushing us to consider similar ideas as Michael Haneke did with Funny Games, and the more you sit with the film once it’s over, the more terrifying it all feels.

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The Bleeding Truth
Directed & Written by Jérémy Guertin
Starring Patrice Beauchesne, Mathys Castonguay, Alex Martel, & Paul Timperley.

Horror

★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

Another intriguing exploration of screens at Fantasia 2026, Jérémy Guertin’s The Bleeding Truth follows a man in a motel room who discovers a mysterious DVD’s been placed in his room’s player. The man hits play on the DVD then descends into the corridors of madness watching a series of nasty images followed by a doctor explaining “what violence truly is,” discussing “homo deus” and so much more. What results from a simple DVD viewing is both gruesome and, perhaps, transcendent.

Whereas Bagman implicates us in the film’s narrative, The Bleeding Truth feels more directed at how media, and the narratives within media, directly affects and alters us, of course to a deeply twisted, horror-movie length. At times, The Bleeding Truth feels like a partial homage to Hellraiser (“These scars are the conduit”), but generally feels like a fresh and terrifying concept of its own. I keep reading the short as a metaphor. The man on the tape laments “an epidemic of anxiety, weakness” and warns that the human species is in danger, which reminds me of all the fear mongering by toxic patriarchal men about how Western society’s become weak and blah, blah, blah. The Bleeding Truth can be taken as its own warning: we either face reality, or we tear ourselves apart listening to madmen on our screens while our own pain becomes fodder for others sitting behind their own screens.