Quebec’s Fantasia International Film Festival—said to be the largest and most influential genre fest in North America—is back on and in person this year. True to its name, the event’s lineup includes some of the most fantastical, bizarre, imaginative, gasp-inducing, and flat-out weirdest features coming to the global stage.
Among them is an exciting “Spotlight On Queer Cinema,” which includes a number of films we’ve previously featured on Queerty, including paranoid horror Hypochondriac, backwoods thriller Swallowed, LGBTQ wrestling doc Out In The Ring, and the wild queer pastiche Please Baby Please.
But there’s another film we’ve neglected to mention until now, and—hoo boy!—does it look like a doozy. Seriously, even the trailer has sent our heads spinning.
From auteur filmmaker Eduardo Casanova—dubbed the “Spanish John Waters”—comes La Pietà, a surrealist odyssey that’s somehow about both the toxic relationship between a mother and her queer son and the North Korean dictatorship. Color us intrigued!
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Actually, color us Pepto Bismal-pink, as the vibrant hue seems to be a major through-line in this unique vision that combines the melodrama of telenovelas with the majestic staging of classic MGM musicals. It’s high camp meets lowbrow, as La Pietà deals in sex, gore, and every kind of bodily fluid imaginable.
“La Pietà,” in English, means “the pity,” and the film takes its name from a famous Michaelangelo sculpture of the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus. That Casanova gleefully re-stages the piece with his cast clothed in pastels should tell you everything you need to know about his cinematic grand allusions.
Breakout actor Manel Llunell stars as Mateo, an adult son constricted by his unreasonable yet ailing mother, Libertad—played by the legendary Ángela Molina, a muse of Pedro Almodóvar. As their bond coils tighter and tighter, Casanova leans in, building to a truly unnerving, unforgettable filmgoing experience.
The film followed up its Karlovy Vary International Film Festival debut earlier in July with its first Fantasia screening this week, and reviews have been predictably aghast—and positive. ScreenAnarchy called the film “a stunningly vulgar triumph in puke pink pastels” and, honestly? That says it all!
If there’s a chance you’re in Quebec, Fantasia will be hosting an encore screening of La Pietà on July 25—more info here. The rest of us will have to await further details, but we imagine the images included in this brief teaser alone will be lingering in your head for quite some time.
Watch the trailer below, but—be warned—it is definitely NSFW.
KZNBama
John Waters? I think they meant David Lynch.
Kevan1
Agree. This is not John Watersesq. David Lynch is a better comparison.
Phillip
I don’t think I will be watching this.
Some director seems to be putting his psycho-dreaming trash into celluloid and I’d rather not waste my time.
Waters did a better job at it. If these are the better cuts from it, they need to be ashamed in my opinion.
inorez
‘Pietà’ is ‘pity’, but is just as much or more often used to mean ‘mercy’ or ‘compassion’. Same as ‘piedad’ in Spanish.