Genre Offerings of 2019’s St. Louis International Film Festival

Tomorrow is the start of the 28th Annual Whitaker St. Louis International Film Festival (SLIFF). Along with films like Waves directed by Trey Edward Shults (It Comes at Night) that is being distributed by A24 and stars St. Louis’ own Sterling K. Brown lies a few genre offerings including a particularly nasty German serial killer film based on a true story. Below is a collection of synopses, trailers and playdates when you can check out these films during festival.

Editor’s Note: If you’d like to see all features and short films that are tagged with the genre of “horror”, Cinema St. Louis has that sorted for you via https://www.cinemastlouis.org/sliff/genre/horror. We have omitted short films from this list. All synopses taken from cinemastlouis.org will be italicized below. This list is also ordered by first playdate.

LITTLE JOE

Alice (Emily Beecham), a single mother, is a dedicated plant breeder at a corporation engaged in developing new species. She has engineered a very special crimson flower, remarkable not only for its beauty but also for its therapeutic value: If kept at the ideal temperature, fed properly, and spoken to regularly, the plant makes its owner happy. Against company policy, Alice takes one home as a gift for Joe, her teenage son, and they playfully christen the breed Little Joe in his honor. As the plant grows, however, so does Alice’s suspicion that her new creations may not be as harmless as their diminutive nickname suggests. Variety writes: “In ‘Little Joe,’ (director Jessica) Hausner works in a shivery and deliberate modernist spook-show style, one that calls up echoes of early David Cronenberg and the Stanley Kubrick of ‘The Shining.’ She holds us in a refined trance, tantalized with fascination at what’s waiting around the corner.”

LITTLE JOE is playing on Saturday, Nov 9 at 7:30pm at Tivoli Theatre. Buy tickets here.

ZOMBI CHILD

In “Zombi Child,” which debuted at Cannes, stylish French director Bertrand Bonello (“Saint Laurent,” “House of Pleasures,” “Nocturama”) offers his unique take on the horror film. In 1962 Haiti, a man is brought back from the dead only to be sent to the living hell of the sugarcane fields. In Paris, 55 years later, at the prestigious Légion d’honneur boarding school, a Haitian girl confesses this old family secret to a group of new friends — never imagining that her strange tale will convince a heartbroken classmate to do the unthinkable. Indiewire writes: “Folding history onto itself more explicitly than any of Bonello’s previous films, ‘Zombi Child’ peels back centuries of racist stereotypes to rescue Voodoo from the stuff of black magic and portray it instead as a kind of communion — a communion between spirits, a communion between generations, and a communion between the dislocated joints of an empire.”

ZOMBI CHILD is playing on Saturday, Nov 9 at 9:00pm at Tivoli Theatre. Buy tickets here. It will play again on Sunday, Nov 17 at 1:00pm. Buy tickets here.

#LIKE

Rosie (Sarah Rich), a teen in Woodstock, N.Y., is mourning the anniversary of younger sister Amelia’s death. She’s shocked to discover that the mysterious man who sexploited Amelia — bullying her to commit suicide — is back on the web and seeking new victims. After the authorities refuse to get involved, Rosie discovers a hidden dark side and decides to take justice into her own hands. Calling the film “a feminist horror masterpiece, minus the blood and guts you’ll usually find within movies in the same genre,” Film Threat writes: “If you like twist-filled revenge thrillers, this should be the next movie on your watch list.” A SLIFF note: Actor Marc Menchaca (“Ozark”) — who plays the man Rosie identifies as the online troll — was the 2013 winner of the New Filmmaker Forum competition for his co-direction of “This Is Where We Live.”

#LIKE is playing on Sunday, Nov 10 at 8:30pm at Tivoli Theatre with director Sarah Pirozek. Buy tickets here.

WHEN I LAST SAW JESSE

In November 2006, student Jesse Ross traveled to Chicago to participate in an academic conference. While attending a meeting, he rose from his chair and walked out of the room. He has not been seen or heard from since. The haunting “When I Last Saw Jesse” — directed by SIU-Carbondale graduate and Kansas City resident Brian Rose — tells the story of what happened in Chicago that night, exploring the impact of Jesse’s sudden and mysterious absence on his family and friends. Using audio interviews with friends, family, and students on the trip and evocative black-and-white 16mm footage of the places Jesse visited and lived in, the film draws viewers inexorably into the mystery. With its voice-over interviews and narration and its scenes of locales almost entirely devoid of any human figures, “When I Last Saw Jesse” becomes ever more disquieting as it unfolds. Jesse himself proves an elusive figure, almost a cipher, even before he disappears. The opaqueness of his portrayal only adds to the film’s overall feeling of dread, and the narrow focus on the events of that weekend in Chicago creates an appropriately overwhelming sense of claustrophobia.

WHEN I LAST SAW JESSE is playing on Saturday, Nov 16 at 1:00pm at Missouri History Museum with director Brian Rose. FREE SCREENING.

THE GOLDEN GLOVE

Acclaimed filmmaker Fatih Akin (“Head-On,” “The Edge of Heaven,” “In the Fade”) offers a pitch-black horror film — based on a true story — set in the grimiest, least savory quarters of 1970s Hamburg. At first glance, Fritz (Fiete) Honka is a pitiful loser: The man with the broken face carouses through his nights in a red-light-district dive, the Golden Glove, chasing after lonely women. As his fellow bar hounds tear up over schmaltzy German songs and drink copiously to dull their pain and longing, none of the regulars suspects that the apparently harmless Fiete is actually a monster: a murderer who preys on middle-aged women. Calling the film “a profound portrait of a serial killer,” the film site Birth.Movies.Death writes: “Fatih Akin’s latest film explores this exceptionally dark and dank corner of society, eschewing the seemingly unavoidable sexiness of the true crime genre to tell an appropriately depraved, visceral, and deeply unsettling story the way it should be told.”

THE GOLDEN GLOVE is playing on Saturday, Nov 16 at 9:30pm at Tivoli Theatre. Buy Tickets Here. It will play again on Sunday, Nov 17 at 12:15pm at Tivoli Theatre. Buy Tickets Here.