Fuck Face
Directed & Written by Dean Puckett
Starring Olivia Driver, Wren Puckett, & Craig Russell.

★★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

One of Fantasia 2026’s most political films was Dean Puckett’s Fuck Face, depicting the ordeal a young single mother goes through when a politician comes knocking on her door. At first it feels like any other visit by a stranger trying to sell something. The man’s visit doesn’t take long to become scary, and the mother’s relentlessly pursued in her own home.

There are so many little bits of brilliance in Fuck Face. For instance, the way the word “skin” becomes a focal point, or the standout lines “When the Queen died, something broke in the sky” and “I just want my bins collected on time instead of being cancelled by non–binary teenagers on TikTok, is that too much to ask?” Perhaps the most fantastic moment of Fuck Face comes when the mother mentions she’s from Cornwall and the politician asks where she’s really from: she’s a white woman, so it becomes a reversal of the typical racist questioning where someone non-white ‘actually comes from,’ as if he’s expecting her to trace back her lineage, trying to draw out her European ancestry further for his political aims. Fuck Face is a brutally satirical short film about the madness of right-wing populism and how it continues to infiltrate everyone’s daily lives.

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Birdcall
Directed by Justin Calandriello
Screenplay by Halle Kott
Starring Sam Beaton & Vassiliki Gicopoulos

★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

Birdcall is a story about a time after an avian disease has left the world ravaged. A scientist and his wife go to a cabin outside of their usual compound, as he continues to work to find a cure. Unfortunately it may be too late for him. With terrifying, mutated birds just outside the door, it may be too late for everybody. Yet the scientist’s wife tries her best in the face of horror to retain hope.

Birdcall uses an infection horror narrative to express a lot of angst about life since COVID-19 first arrived. The scientist, descending into infection and madness, questions: “Can we really fight it? It’s just nature.” His sentiments echo those of people who dismissed the recent pandemic by somehow justifying COVID-19 deaths because the flu kills people already anyway. It’s just natural, they say, many of whom tried to use this justification to let the elderly and the immunocompromised die while everyone else got on with living normally again. Later, the wife remarks that she needs “more than to be safe; that can’t be all there is to life.” This is the feeling of everyone who wants more than just survival, which is all we’re doing nowadays, whether surviving COVID-19 and the continuing ignorance/denial of its lasting effects, or fighting to survive the increasingly devastating ramifications of climate change, or dealing with anything else currently plaguing human existence and threatening it. Birdcall is equal parts depressing and hopeful in the face of a world that, on so many levels, has been reduced from living to mere survival for the majority of us.