Breeder
Directed & Written by Sapphire Sandalo
Starring Taylor Bradley, Ina Dahilig, & Kristine Gerolaga.

Horror

★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

One of Fantasia 2026’s most upsetting g shorts was Sapphire Sandalo’s Breeder, focusing on a woman being pressured to become a mother and trying to resist it. All of a sudden she starts experiencing strange phenomena when a sticky substance oozes from her bully button and there’s someone, or something, lurking outside her house trying to get in. That’s when she’s confronted by a hideous creature that will alter her life forever.

Sandalo’s perfectly nasty, disturbing short uses the Tikbalang from Philippine folklore to deal with the horrors of patriarchy. What’s unique, adding to the terror, is that the source of patriarchal pressure in Breeder doesn’t necessarily come from a source you’d immediately expect. Sandalo tells a story about how (hetero-)patriarchal expectation can come from other sources apart from just men themselves. And what a horrifying story(/reality) it is.

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Mancave
Directed by Fredrik S. Hana
Screenplay by Hana & Jamie Turville
Starring Thomas Aske Berge & Nina Ellen Ødegård

Horror / Thriller

★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

In Fredrik S. Hana’s Mancave, Charlotte (Nina Ellen Ødegård) can feel her marriage with Didrik (Thomas Aske Berge) deteriorating as he spends less and less time with his family, opting to spend more and more time in the garage. One day, Charlotte decides to clean up Didrik’s garage pigsty, only to discover he has a secret room deep inside the garage. The further Charlotte looks into the garage’s secretive space, the more she’s disturbed.

Mancave is a surreal and unsettling look at how secrets and general lack of communication in a marriage can render men into monstrous, as well as pitiful, creatures. Hana’s short tracks the descent of men when they cease to share their desires, their fantasies, and, ultimately, the truth with their partners. Throughout Mancave, as Charlotte witnesses Didrik’s ‘deterioration’ from the increasingly perverse space inside the garage to the later literal/figurative Swamp of Man, we also see pieces of their happy wedding video, the two differing realities constantly juxtaposed to show just how bad things have become. Charlotte pleads with Didrik: “You know you can tell me anything.” But Didrik has let himself get lost. What started as sexual desire run amok has led him to a place of desolation, a place where he’s no longer a person he or his wife recognise. While Mancave is a horror, it’s a haunting tragedy more than anything.

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Sleep Through Summer
Directed & Written by Erin Mick
Starring Erin Mick, Jordan Dawson, Feaven Abera, Jesse Bond, Nicole Charles, Anisha Kumar, & Ayaka Wilson.

Horror

★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

Erin Mick’s Sleep Through Summer focuses on Ms. Dana (Mick)—a curious mix of a ballet instructor, a therapist, and a dominatrix—as she’s tasked with rehabilitating a man called Linus (Jordan Dawson). Ms. Dana, with the help of three other women, soon begins to put Linus through a bit of ballet practice accompanied by a little humiliation. She tries to see just how far she can push Linus before the inevitable happens.

It’s funny to see people review Sleep Through Summer who’ve walked away from the short believing Mick is somehow encouraging violence against women. The film reads as a metaphor about how we continue to try rehabilitating violent men and it continues to fail. It’s a film that begs us to consider the toll on women the longer we continue to kid ourselves that brutal, violent men can be changed. Ms. Dana asks Linus plainly early on: “Do you believe in the possibility of your own rehabilitation?” It’s an important question since the vast majority of bad men don’t even think their behaviour is bad, let alone in need of rehabilitation.

Sleep Through Summer doesn’t portray an idyllic society that’s discovered how to stop men from continually committing violence against women. Mick’s film depicts a brutal cycle we’ve been endlessly repeating every time we continue to pretend that violent misogyny is only isolated behaviour in a few bad apples that spoil the whole bunch, rather than the reality that it’s the school in which boys have historically been raised. Sleep Through Summer is a brutal reminder that until we change the entire system, every Linus out there will continue to repeat the film’s bloody cycle.