Wall Udder (2025)
Directed & Written by Alexandra Hayden
Starring Sawyer Fuller & Kevin Andrew Grady
Comedy
★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
One of the most brilliant and strange films to grace Fogfest VI, Alexandra Hayden’s Wall Udder features a very literal udder in a wall of a couple’s home as the centrepiece of everything that follows. The couple start fighting after the woman smells milk on the man’s breath and questions him directly: “Were you sucking someone else’s udder?” They’re eventually interrupted by a robber who’s transfixed by the wall udder. But ultimately, the udder winds up revealing more than intended for the couple.
Wall Udder is as hilarious as it is surreal, and underneath it all becomes a great vehicle for a very common relationship anxiety by transposing the worries onto the udder. At one point when the woman’s ranting about her issues with their wall udder, she says she can’t fathom waking every day to the same udder; something many people worry about related to a partner, not a disembodied udder they hang on the wall. The absurdity conceals the genuine in Wall Udder, particularly as the couple reveals more and more to each other about their own respective relationships to the udder. Sometimes saying ‘what the fuck?’ is a great thing. Embrace it.
Cire [English title: Wax] (2026)
Directed & Written by Alexandre Forgues
Starring Victoria Michel, Laurence Gallant, & Marie-Pier Chayer Demers.
Horror
★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
While Wall Udder disembodies, Wax goes further into the body, as a student struggles with increasingly nasty ear troubles. Pus starts to ooze from her ear after a while but she avoids seeing a doctor and opts to try treating it herself at home. One night, she has a dream of pulling a long worm from her ear. From there, things get increasingly worse for her and her gross ear.
Wax feels like a perfect metaphor of the post-secondary academic experience. The short’s protagonist stresses over marks after getting 71% on a lab study paper; curiously, we see the subject of the paper was parasites. The academic drive in many of us becomes the parasite and it feeds off us until there’s nothing left. Wax smartly situates its body horror right in the head, where the battle of academia does its worst damage. This is uncomfortable horror at its best and nastiest with excellent attention paid to effects. Wax will feel painful for anybody because of its queasy focus, though doubly so for grad students whose heads are swollen with the weight of academic expectation. Sometimes you’ve just gotta drain that wax, no matter how gruesome a job it is to do.
