Fantastic Fest Day 2: 'Border' Is A Beautifully Executed Bad Idea, 'Apostle' Delivers Vicious Thrills, And 'One Cut Of The Dead' Is The Best Zombie Comedy In Years

It feels impossible to openly recommend The Wolf House, but it's also a movie that I would never discourage anyone from seeing. Directors Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León have made something unique and singular, a movie that feels like a sinister artifact rather than a modern piece of entertainment. It is challenging, slow-moving and difficult. It is also unlike anything I have ever seen or will ever see again.

How do you explain this film in a bite-sized sentence? You cannot. The prologue sets the stage: Once upon a time, there existed in Chile a German commune, whose citizens lived in isolation from the rest of the nation. To explain their personal ethos, their way of life, they made a movie called The Wolf House, a stop-motion fable about what happened when a young girl living among them disobeyed their rules and was punished with 100 days and nights of isolation in the woods. Now, we're watching a "restored" version of this lost movie.

Of course, none of that is real, but the mere suggestion that we're watching a niche piece of history rather than a modern art project lends to the film's sinister undertones. There are no actual characters in The Wolf House and no real narrative. This is 73 minutes of Cociña and León guiding us through a bad dream, where scratchy 2D animation and homemade stop-motion mingle in constantly shifting, one-shot world. Environments evolve and decay before our eyes, character designs shift and mutate as necessary. There's a tactile nature to the film – you feel like you can touch everything on the screen and the results are haunting and grotesque.

Eventually, the truth about The Wolf House begins to emerge. The film never holds your hand and never feels the need to fill in the gaps about the intentions of its fictional makers, but anyone with a passing knowledge of 20th century world history will figure it out. And it's chilling. But for all of its visual marvels, for all of its (for lack of a more eloquent term) fucked-up revelations, The Wolf House is a chore. However, it being a chore is part of the grand design. You're not supposed to have fun. You're supposed to let this movie happen to you. If you're willing to endure it, there's something powerful here.

Gareth Evans is one of the most exciting filmmakers on the planet and Apostle does little to temper that statement. The director of The Raid and The Raid 2 makes movies that can only be made by him, visceral experiences that pummel audiences and characters alike with a relentlessness that is exhausting and addicting. His new movie could not be more different than the Raid movies, but this slow-burning horror film is Evans through and through, the next logical step for the filmmaker and testament to his skills beyond delivering bone-breaking action. Every genre movie fan should see it.

It is also too damn long, but hey, no one's perfect.

Set in 1905, Apostle drops us into the action with a speed that is almost jarring. A young woman has been kidnapped by a pagan cult, her wealthy father is not in position to deal with the ransom demands, and her mysterious brother Thomas (Dan Stevens) is recruited to infiltrate the cult's island compound and deal with the problem. And within minutes, the story is off the races and Thomas is on the island and everything is dangerous and no one can be trusted and the story doesn't even pause to suggest there isn't something supernatural going on here.

That may be the greatest strength of Apostle: it doesn't waste your time in its opening act and lays every card on the table. Buckle up, the movie says, things are going to get nuts.

It does take a while to get there, though. Once those cards are on the table, Evans takes his time maneuvering them, building the shaky house of cards that will tumble in the final 45 minutes. At 129 minutes, one wonders if Apostle is too long and too slow for its own good in the middle stretch. One wonders if Evans shouldn't have acted as his own editor and if there's a 100-minute cut out there that's leaner, and faster, and more effective. After all, there's a difference between a deliberate pace and wheel-spinning, and Apostle sometimes feels like it doesn't earn the slow burn it desperately wants.

Still, no one directs a situation going straight to hell quite like Gareth Evans. When the slow-burn finally ignites the fuse, Apostle delivers on the visceral action, chilling imagery, and outrageous gore and violence. The back stretch of the film is wall-to-wall with nightmare fuel and blood and crazy ideas, some of which stick and some of which do not. It's the natural extension of "Safe Haven," the V/H/S 2 segment Evans co-directed. It's a spiral into madness and chaos that's as spellbinding and gruesome as anything you'll see this year.

At the center of it all is Dan Stevens, rocking the hell out of his 1905 fashions and skulking like no one's business (Apostle proves that Stevens is the best skulker in the business). A broken, spiritually wounded man with a chip on his shoulder so large that he looks ready to collapse at any moment, Stevens' Thomas is all vicious glares and acid-tongued retorts, a man with nothing to lose except the sister he loves. Stevens is arch here, but it works – Apostle is wild enough to contain a performance this big and this is an actor smart enough to know what this material demands. As he does on FX's Legion and did in the underrated thriller The Guest, Stevens radiates an unpredictable, sexy danger that makes him one of our most valuable leading men.

Has Evans made a particularly deep movie? Not at all. Discussions about Apostle will be about its atmosphere and its mood, that Dan Stevens performance and the gore, the way Evans takes the "English cult on an island" trope and twists it into a pretzel of broken bones and splattered craniums. This movie is all style, all aesthetic. But what aesthetic! No one does aesthetic like this and sometimes, that's all we need.

It takes a certain amount of nerve to call your horror movie Terrified, but writer/director Demián Rugna does a fine job of living up to it. Here is a movie that is less interested in telling a coherent story than it is in just simply scaring the hell out of you. And I, your resident horror-loving scaredy cat, spent entire running time digging my fingernails into my sweaty palms.

It begins with a series of incidents. A women hears voices coming from her sink. A man is haunted in his bedroom by a mysterious creature. A child's death triggers a uniquely unpleasant response. Eventually, the various parties trying to put all of this together (a blend of paranormal investigators and police officers) realize that they're not dealing with separate haunted houses – they're deal with a haunted neighborhood. Once they decide to team up and tackle everything together, things really go to hell.

If that premise sounds like an excuse to just string together a bunch of scares on a canvas open-ended enough to allow just about anything...well, you'd be right. Rugna dabbles in every familiar set-up and style you can image. On a scene-by-scene basis, Terrified is a jump scare factory, a slow descent into madness, a surreal fever dream, and an ultra-violent chiller. The concept of a haunted neighborhood is a clever one, giving him the space necessary to stage whatever scare he wants and to subject this cast of characters to whatever vicious nightmare he care to conjure. As a funhouse ride, Terrified is a spooky, bloody, effective blast.

But what if you want more? Sorry, Terrified is not here to make sense or to explain exactly why all of this is happening and how it fits together. This doesn't feel like laziness (Rugna's script pays lip service to this entire incident being something the characters cannot comprehend), but the choice to favor horror set pieces and big scares over story, character, or basic sense will annoy as many as it pleases. However, if you just want a good scare and little more, you really can't do better than this.