A Titanic Benedict Cumberbatch, Time Machine Award 2025
We continue to celebrate the fantastic genre in all its forms. A sinister raven entered the Meliá Auditorium to talk to us about grief, while the memories of a former spy in a lonely hotel on the French Riviera conjured up the ghosts of the best European giallo films. All this on a day that saw several minutes of applause with the arrival of actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who was honored with the Time Machine Award. At the same time, we were visited by one of the great voices in new Spanish filmmaking. We're referring to Ion de Sosa, who presented Balearic, a thriller with an exquisite mise-en-scène.
Time Machine for a British Performing Arts Titan
The BBC's colossal Sherlock, imperial Khan from Star Trek, Marvel's charismatic sorcerer capable of rising from his own grave, and the sinister voice of the enormous Smaug in Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy, British actor Benedict Cumberbatch exudes passion and charisma from every pore.
Just as the second week of the Sitges Film Festival got underway, Cumberbatch's arrival caught everyone's attention at the presentation of The Thing with Feathers, the commendable feature debut from fellow Englishman Dylan Southern, who adapts one of the most acclaimed novels in recent years, written by Max Porter.
At this afternoon's hybrid Encounter, attended by the actor and director before an audience that was half fans and half journalists, the acclaimed actor from The Imitation Game shared his intense process of connecting with grief and redemption in a psychological drama with metaphorical dimensions, where he plays a father who has suddenly lost his wife and tries to maintain the equilibrium in his home, where he lives with his two young sons, played by brothers Richard Boxall and Henry Boxall. The problem is that the father's pain is so strong, so intense, that a sinister crow ends up infiltrating the house where they live.
With this metaphor about the process of grief, the director expressed the importance of the monstrous element not being computer-generated, but something tangible, built by different professional talents. According to Cumberbatch, this allowed for “greater interaction during filming.” Although the gigantic appearance of the raven “posed a great difficulty” in connecting with the sadness of losing a loved one, it also opened up the possibility of dialogue on stage in a more physical than abstract way. Cumberbatch also spoke about how important it is for him to “be part of a project from the beginning, because you can see all the processes before its release, whether it's a play, a Hollywood production, or an audio drama,” in addition to his role as a producer with a commitment to promoting new talent in the film industry.
Meanwhile, Southern, a director worth keeping an eye on in the field of fantastic genre, shared that ten years ago, he read Porter's novel, which inspired the film, and was struck by the way it “addresses grief so directly and honestly, avoiding all sentimentality” without shying away from violence and even ugliness to tell “a story full of chaos and rage in the service of the truth.” Southern even revealed that reading the book “unlocked deep emotions” about the loss of two friends he suffered when he was very young.
Sometimes, literature and film have the power to exorcise memories. The Thing with Wings expresses this impulse. Its screening in Sitges, following the presentation of the Time Machine Award to an exuberant Cumberbatch, proved therapeutic for more than one viewer, who found its storyline and powerful visual display to be a therapeutic form of fantastic genre film.
A Great Miniature Adventure
The most veteran voices among the press attending the Sitges Film Festival say that Jack Arnold, one of the great American B-movie directors, visited the Retiro Theater in Sitges in the late 1990s. Today, the spirit of Arnold, father of classics such as Creature from the Black Lagoon or Tarantula, was very much alive during the presentation of a film that perfectly invokes the possibilities of the fantastic genre in all its glory. L'homme qui rétrécit, a French production directed by Jan Kounen, is not exactly a remake of the iconic The Incredible Shrinking Man that Arnold directed in 1957, but rather a new adaptation of Richard Matheson's novel of the same name about the existential adventure of a man faced with the nightmare of his body starting to shrink unrelentingly.
Winner of an Academy Award for The Artist, Jean Dujardin, who arrived in Sitges accompanied by the director, brings forward to the context of our times the anxieties embodied by American actor Grant Williams in the original film more than half a century ago, during an era of Cold War and nuclear paranoia. “I think we all are burdened with some kind of trauma throughout our lives,” Dujardin confessed to the media, “and we want to process it.” In a way, the problem faced by the father played by the French actor in the film could well be a metaphor for “something as universal as loneliness.”
Meanwhile, Kounen shared the challenge involved in adapting Matheson's novel “like Guillermo del Toro with his new Frankenstein” in a story co-written with Christophe Deslandes. As for the mise en scène tricks, the director of Doberman explained the process of filming with a motion capture camera and the difficulty involved in “shooting scenes on the same set on different scales” in a kind of “surgical shoot” that turned out to be “a veritable tour de force” in a house that becomes a cathedral from the point of view of a diminishing Dujardin. Likewise, the crew of L'homme qui rétrécit highlighted the soundtrack by Alexandre Desplat, which unfolds halfway between dramatic composition and cartoon in a concept about “the forces of living and becoming aware,” distinguished by fabulous special effects, perfect to be enjoyed on the big screen.
Sitges Continues its Commitment to New Spanish Filmmaking
A filmmaker who goes against the grain with his distinctive underground aesthetics, Ion de Sosa is one of the most unique voices in contemporary Spanish filmmaking, the author of productions as genuine in their formal and narrative deployment as his highly personal adaptation of Blade Runner in his radical debut, Androids Dream, or the surprising Mamántula. In his latest work, nominated for a Goya Award in 2023, De Sosa reinterpreted the detective thriller with a queer perspective in a delirious tale of a police duo in search of a predatory alien, where the freckles on a back looked like stars and the organs of a body scattered on the ground celebrated the organic matter of the monster within us.
De Sosa arrived in Sitges accompanied by his soul mate in the production, Leire Apellániz, to present the sensational Balearic, his third feature film as director and screenwriter, a piece with an exquisite mise-en-scène, filmed in an anamorphic aspect ratio of 2:40, which offered the audience at the Meliá Auditorium a wide and immersive visual experience.
Nominated at Locarno, this sinister fable of Mediterranean darkness filmed with natural lighting is divided into two parts. In a lavish and decadent Mallorca, a group of young people find themselves trapped in the pool of a huge mansion whose owners are away, guarded by three violent dogs, while the wealthiest class celebrates a party nearby in their bubble of luxury and decadence.
The filmmaker confessed that he began writing this story in 2019, entering his midlife crisis, and that it wound up becoming “a fine mixture of screenwriters and benchmarks.” Important names in new Spanish filmmaking with a pronounced postmodern tendency, such as Julián Génisson, Lorena Iglesias, Chema García Ibarra, and Burnin' Percebes, contributed to the development of the script for Balearic, an oppressive summer horror story featuring a cast that includes Christina Rosenvinge, Luka Peros, the alien from Mamántula, Moisés Richart, and a series of emerging talents including Elías Hwidar and Paula Gala, who participated in today's press conference and expressed their enormous satisfaction at working with De Sosa, a filmmaker capable of “breaking the rules in a world where platforms are making an increasingly generalized product.”
The San Sebastian-born director confirmed that the upper class he portrays “is caricatured,” although the film ultimately addresses universal issues such as class division and the selfishness of the elite. He also cited, as key references, the absurdity of Luis Buñuel in The Exterminating Angel, “the expressive faces in Charles Burns' graphic novel Black Hole,” and the idea that is so present in Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, where “evil is just around the corner.”
All these elements shape the nature of a fresh, bold, and formally hypnotic cinema that Sitges is firmly committed to in its diverse lineup of films in the Official In Competition Selection.
A Sinister Camp, a Lone Spy, and Revenge in Southern Chile
At the same time, today's stimulating lineup included the presentation of three productions that present different ways of approaching genre. The Plague is a co-production between Australia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, and Romania, directed by Charlie Polinger, about the oppressive situation of Ben, a twelve-year-old tween, played by young Everett Blunck, who tries to adapt to the hierarchical dynamics of a boys' water polo camp, where he faces an internal conflict due to the bullying suffered by a teammate that he feels concerned about but is unable to express it. Australian actor Joel Edgerton plays the only adult in this horror story that stands out above all for the strength of its young performers.
In addition, from Belgium arrived the acclaimed duo behind Amer, one of the most powerful sensory journeys in contemporary fantasy cinema, winner of the Noves Visions Award in 2009. Its directors, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, returned to Sitges with Reflection in a Dead Diamond, their new film, screened this time in the Official In Competition Selection. Halfway between European secret agent cinema and the most formalist giallo, this neo-pulp gem with a pronounced cinematic revisionism features a cast that includes succulent names such as Fabio Testi and María de Medeiros alongside other talented artists like Yannick Renier and Koen De Bouw.
No less important is the Chilean production Todos los males. Directed by Nicolás Postiglione, who arrived in Sitges after making his feature film debut with Immersion, a claustrophobic thriller that won awards at various international festivals, his second feature film takes us to Valdivia, a region in southern Chile, in the 1950s, where Daniel, a boy who has just lost his mother, begins living with the Riedels, his father's German family, in an isolated place where he will discover dark secrets surrounding his adoptive parents. Postiglione makes the most of the story's potential to create a journey of revenge that will leave no one indifferent.