Fantaspoa Review: Dialing in to The Kirlian Frequency is a spooky good time

Throughout most of April, Fantaspoa descends upon the city of Porto Alegre in Brazil. It's Latin America's biggest genre festival, with more than 210 films showing throughout the month, most of which are making their Brazilian premieres. Take a look at their lineup -- a ton of exciting and interesting movies. 

The fest's virtual coverage offerings gave me the chance to catch up with The Kirlian Frequency, a film that came on my radar late last year but that I hadn't been able to track down until now. It feels appropriate that it ended up appearing before me again somewhat randomly, from a place I didn't expect. Because this is a movie that has a mysterious air to it, one that feels like you ought to be discovering it on some strange channel in the middle of the night, a bout of insomnia sending you to sit in front of a screen where you find your nightmares writ large (or small). There's a sense that this is a movie you shouldn't be watching, full of stories you shouldn't be hearing. It's something forbidden, that's supposed to be lost. It has all the makings of a future cult classic.

And that sense is built into the very DNA of the film. Based on a webseries, Cristian Ponce's The Kirlian Frequency centers on a radio program that documents the strange goings-on of Kirlian, a lost town on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. The town is known for its weird and horrific happenings, with a population that includes aliens, werewolves, and all other manner of monstrous creatures. The skull-masked host of the radio show invites various guests on to share their stories, and if the stories are compelling enough, the host might offer them something in return (often, information). The host feels like a god as much as a guide, maybe all-powerful within the confines of his studio, maybe all-knowing when you go beyond those walls.

One point the host knows (as do we, the audience, thanks to the film's opening crawl): we're witnessing the final broadcast of the show, because it's the final night of Kirlian's existence: April 30, 1987. A mysterious comet hangs overhead in the night sky, a portentous signal that always brings bad tidings. Tonight, it threatens to wipe Kirlian off the map completely, only to be remembered via tapes of this radio program that have been smuggled and traded, ghostly mementos of a place few remember.

The film is structured as a bit of an anthology, with various characters coming in to narrate their stories, with the host interjecting to help clarify the narratives. The action within the studio is live-action, while the stories being told are delivered in animation that looks like comic book panels come to life. Many of the characters are sometimes depicted as silhouettes with only their eyes and certain other elements showing, an evocative stylistic choice that elevates the sense of mystery, and often dread. All of the actors deliver great work, and the film hinges so much on their delivery of their narration, which is uniformly great, and very creepy. I also just love the character of the DJ -- you can feel there's so much history to who he is, even if we don't get to delve in.

And that's true of the world at large. Through these stories, we get to learn a lot about Kirlian, but what's just as exciting is how much lies beyond the film. The world-building is so strong and detailed that you really feel like you're being dropped in media res into a place with a long history and so much more that we could learn, if only we had more time. (Blasted comet!) It shows how confident the story-telling is here; you end up really feeling the loss of this place, as horrible as it might have been.

As is the case with any anthology, certain stories will resonate with different viewers. For me, I particularly loved the opener, told by a school principal, about a haunted adult magazine full of depictions of monster-fucking (for lack of a better term...as if there could even be a better term than "monster-fucking") found by an innocent student. Another favorite is the story told by a young activist, which details a monster that haunted the town in her younger years, stalking and killing children.

Eventually, all of the stories connect somewhat (some very loosely), which feels exactly right for the first-person accounts of a small town. Everyone knows everyone, each citizen casts a long shadow, and an event that happened decades ago can easily continue to reverberate into the present day. Horrors beget horrors, and every generation will be haunted by them.

I found myself particularly moved and intrigued by the notion of how many of these stories are even real (within the film), and how many are stories being told by citizens who are trying to make sense of how their lives turned out, how grim the world seems. The stories we tell ourselves to justify our existence and our choices are sometimes just as heightened and strange as the more clearly-defined fictions we seek out to entertain and thrill. In The Kirlian Frequency, they all might be one and the same, the horrors real and imagined impossible to pull apart.