Toronto After Dark: “A Fantastic Fear of Everything” Review

“Fantastic Fear of Everything” kicked off the final night of Toronto After Dark Film Festival with writer/director Crispian Mills in attendance to introduce the film and for a Q&A following. He introduced the film, informing us that, “Simon Pegg steals the film from himself” (true!), then played a very funny pre-recorded introduction from Simon Pegg who is in the UK filming his other new movie.

“A Fantastic Fear of Everything” is an insane story of a writer who has a phobia of launderettes and a very, very overactive imagination.  Crispian Mills introduces Jack, an unstable children’s author with a near debilitating fear of laundrettes  just as he’s gone off the deep-end triggered by his current project, a teleplay about serial killers called “Decades of Death”. During the film we explore his fears, paranoia and delve into his repressed past in unexpected ways, sometimes with the help of his wacky psychiatrist friend, Dr. Friedkin (the very funny Paul Freeman). The tone is set with a big animated opening sequence (we don’t get enough of those these days!) that takes us through London eventually settling into Jack’s neighbourhood with big music to set the mood.

The “fantastic” in the title  appears to refer to the genre sense of the meaning, the audience is kept on the edge of knowing just how much of what we see is real and what is imaged. The film takes us on a journey through Jack’s neuroses and his delusions as Mills’ direction and set design conspire to bring us into his unhinged world.

Simon Pegg is electric, carrying the majority of the film, particularly in the first half, solely on his shoulders. Pegg’s energy is appropriately manic as he stomps, slides, skitters and otherwise hurls himself about his apartment half-clothed and riddled with anxiety. Between Mills’ writing and Pegg’s performance, Jack, despite being an unhinged character in a surreal film, appears as a grounded, well rounded character without erring too far on the side of a cartoon even when he is literally being visualized as a cartoon hedgehog.

The strange apartment Jack lives in is askew with oddly billowing curtains while the floors of each room and the hallways all appear to be at differing height creating this weird fun-house of his apartment. The place is filthy, dank, and jam packed with things, books, records, newspaper clippings, pictures and his research for his current project, full of little character building details like the fact that Jack owns a rotary phone.

Each corner, each piece of the room is used to tell the story. The camera makes quick cuts from place to place emphasizes images, angles, a curve in the bedsheets that might be something else, zeroing in on a picture to illustrate a point made by Jack’s inner monologue. The camera uses unusual angles, shadows and reflections to set up anticipated terror so we, along with Jack, aren’t quite sure what’s there in the house with him, what’s real and what isn’t.

There are strong visual themes throughout the film particularly the image of an eye, in the Q&A Mills informed us that the eyeball imagery was inspired by Roman Polanski’s 1965 film “Repulsion”. The story begins with a close up of Jack’s eyeball, and the theme carries throughout in the “killer’s stare” that haunts Jack and more abstractly in some of the more surreal sequences meshing with the circular opening of a laundry machine in Jack’s nightmares.

Another obsession is with shadows and reflections. Both are places where we see distortions of the truth. Jack see’s terrifying nightmare killers in the shadows and on the other end of the telephone. He looks in the mirror hardly seeing himself but wondering what’s behind him. In this vain, the film plays with our perspective of how we see things. Without giving away a really great reveal in the laundrette later on in the film, I will say that the film is very conscious of perception of how we see ourselves, how others see us, and what we choose to acknowledge. It’s a very self-conscious device in that filmmaking is all about showing us the story  in the way the director means for the audience to understand it and the way Mills withholds and then presents certain information brings attention to that in a very satisfying, entertaining way.

The first act is very much a monologue, a one man show punctuated by interactions with Clair, Jack’s book agent played brilliantly by Clare Huggins, getting harassed and loosing a sock to the neighbourhood kids, , that escalates into a frenzy of paranoia, conspiracy theories about the local Vietnamese gangs,  that

Amara Karan as Sangeet is one of the highlights of the latter part of the film bringing fresh perspective into what has become a very claustrophobic story giving the second act the momentum to continue to through to the grand finale. She gets the full “bombshell fantasy dream girl” treatment complete with slo-mo, wind blowing, rock and roll (another fun POV from the mind of Jack) when she first enters the laundrette and the film. At first glance Sangeet appears to be the nice girl next door, ready to help the scared man in the laundrette but not willing to stand by gracefully when she thinks he might not be so harmless. What is especially wonderful about her character is that she comes fully formed. Sangeet does not exist in the film simply in service of Jack, she is a girl who has a family who worries about her, laundry to get clean and a fierce survival instinct. Not to mention the fact that Karan just exudes cool in Sangeet, when she realizes the whole knife-wielding maniac in the laundrette thing was a misunderstanding she shrugs it off and goes on her way. Until…

Henry Lloyd-Hughes as PC Taser steps up to the major challenge of matching Pegg’s Jack so late in the film.Without giving too much away their characters play off each other in such a strange oddball fashion as they recognize their similarities, including the way they identify so strongly with different musical genres (FYI: This film includes Simon Pegg rapping and a “Final Countdown” stereo sequence). They are in many ways, distorted mirror images of each other – with Sangeet facilitating this communication between the two broken men the film finds is wonderfully strange, animated climax in the story of two hedgehogs who are lost in the woods. This story breaks into a stop-motion animation sequence done by Chris Hopewell and as the film concludes, is eventually published as a children’s book.

When asked if he would ever release the Harold the Hedgehog book, Mills responded that he test drove the story on his then 3 year old son (sans the blue language of course) and found it too terrifying. Still I say, release it for us big kids language and all!

Pegg’s performance alone is worth the price of admission. The rest of the film is really an insane trip – if you’re looking for something totally weird, funny and entertaining, “A Fantastic Fear of Everything” is absolutely for you.