Ceiling King
Directed & Written by Mats Udd
Starring Sanna Sundqvist, Emma Broomé, & Jörgen Thorsson.

Horror

★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

In Mats Udd’s Ceiling King, Emma (Sanna Sundqvist) returns to her childhood home to deal with her father’s things in the wake of his death. She’s reluctant to even go back inside the house due to all the memories. When she finds a tape featuring old answering machine messages she’s delighted to hear her father’s voice again. Then she hears… something else. And horrifying memories of childhood return.

Ceiling King is a creepy little short that works well enough on the surface to be an enjoyable horror experience. What’s really haunting about Udd’s film beyond the surface is how it confronts the way we memorialise, and often idealise, the past, only to be traumatised when reality and its horrors come crashing back down on us. Emma remembers the love of her father, but clearly forgot the horrors lurking on the periphery of her young life. Ceiling King is anti-nostalgia. It’s about the things we don’t want to remember, and the things we actively work to forget.

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Lost Wax
Directed & Written by Omorose Osagie
Starring Pamilerin Ayodeji, Diana Egwuatu, Eyiyemi Olivia Rogbinyin, & Wumi Tuase.

Drama / Fantasy

★★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

Omorose Osagie’s Lost Wax is one of Fantasia 2026’s most thoughtful genre stories. The short involves a little girl who goes missing from an apartment building in Benin City, Nigeria, as well as a bronze caster who lives in the building and finds herself haunted by the girl’s disappearance.

Lost Wax is a story about the haunting power of empathy and the pain of communal grief. The bronze caster has no family connection to the little girl who disappeared but feels the grief of community. In a spectacular animated sequence, the bronze caster sees a large, shadowy entity reaching down into the apartment’s community, snatching children one by one. She’s representative of how empathy can be a haunting experience, and also what it means to live in community with others and to feel the pain others in a community feel. By the end, Lost Wax deals with a sliver of beauty in the wake of grief, as the bronze caster offers the little girl’s mother something in the way of a tribute; it doesn’t take away the mother’s grief, though its thoughtfulness illustrates how those in a community hold each other up even in the tiniest ways.