Fantasia 2022 reviews: The Breach, The Artifice Girl

After two years of virtual and hybrid editions, Montreal’s beloved Fantasia International Film Festival is back for its first in-person edition since the start of the pandemic.

Read on for reviews of two new titles screening at the festival; the thought-provoking sci-fi thriller The Artifice Girl, and The Breach, a Lovecraftian horror tale set in Northern Ontario produced and scored by Slash of Guns N’ Roses fame.

The Fantasia International Film Festival runs from July 12 – August 3. Tickets and the complete schedule are available via the festival’s official site. All of our Fantasia coverage can be found here.

The Breach

There’s something to say for a horror movie like The Breach that doesn’t necessarily reinvent the wheel, but puts a refreshing spin on well-worn genre tropes. The second film from director (and Rue Morgue president) Rodrigo Gudiño, The Breach upends the Lovecraftian horrors from their traditional origins on the U.S. East Coast to the remote locale of Northern Ontario in this effective and gory new horror entry.

Small town Police Chief John Hawkins (Allan Hawco) has one step out the door on the way to his big city job in Ottawa (!) when a horrifically disfigured body of a scientist turns up on the shore. Hawkins is forced to team up with his nemesis (and local coroner) Jacob Redgrave (Wesley French) along with their mutual ex and boat captain Meg Fulbright (Emily Alatalo) to investigate the incident, which leads them to the scientist’s decrepit leased home. The sprawling and secluded home is filled with strange equipment and apparently rotting from the inside. The group soon uncovers the incredible forces the scientist was meddling with and the ultimate horrors he has unwillingly unleashed into their remote community.

Imagine the third-eye expanding cosmic horror of Event Horizon but set in a sleepy northern Canadian town and you’ll have a good idea of what The Breach is going for. With gloopy practical gore effects, a believable dramatic love triangle, and atmosphere for days (including a killer theme scored by co-producer Slash of Guns N’ Roses fame), The Breach is a classic horror film that goes directly for the throat.

The Artifice Girl

Like the best science-fiction, The Artifice Girl showcases a near-future that may already be upon us. The debut feature from writer-director (and star) Franklin Ritch, The Artifice Girl is a contained and heady tale that forces viewers to recon with the morality of AI and the darkest corners of the internet.

Ritch stars as a brilliant yet disgruntled tech worker who has evolved from working on Hollywood projects to create an AI device to lure in child predators across the web. His creation of a young virtual girl named Cherry (Tatum Matthews) is so convincing that he begins working with a secretive task force (David Girard and Sinda Nichols) to expand the Cherry program in the hopes of saving even more victims of abuse.

At the same time, questions begin to arise as to Cherry’s involvement in this dark scenario; is the program simply executing the will of the team, or does Cherry have thoughts and opinions of her own?

Told primarily through dialogue over the course of many years with only a couple of sets, The Artifice Girl is a cerebral tech thriller that grapples with the kind of big questions that will only become more relevant as our understanding of AI continues to evolve. Helmed by an incredible lead performance by the young Tatum Matthews as Cherry, The Artifice Girl is the sort of unexpected discovery that film festivals like Fantasia were created for.