Killer hounds, rabid chimpanzees and little Jean Dujardin – Sitges Film Festival 2025 | film

Sitges loves his dogs. The puppies were out in force this year, sprawled on café terraces or scooping up feces by their owners, but all (thankfully) were less menacing than the killer dogs that appeared on screen at the 58th Catalunya International Film Festival, just 25 miles up the coast from Barcelona.

The dog massacre provides a gruesome climax to The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, a slow-burn, Carrey-esque yarn coming amid the economic turmoil of Argentina in 2001. In Todos los Males, set in 1950s Chile, a young boy finds that the German half of his family holds dark secrets (Big surprise!), one of which involves hounds tearing up flesh. In Shelby Oaks, a woman investigating her sister’s disappearance makes the rookie mistake of exploring an abandoned prison at night, and finds… nasty dogs! And in the most obvious metaphor of all, Ion de Sousa’s beguiling Balearic tale of the Buñuelos, working-class teenagers are cornered in a swimming pool by a trio of spiteful Belgian Malinois, while champagne-drinking poshos fail to notice an ever-closer forest fire.

Conversely, Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy goes some way to restoring faith in man’s best friend, with a ghost story told entirely from the perspective of a trusty Nova Scotia duck-hunting dog named Indy, who moves with his sickly human into an old dark house in the woods, where the dog senses a malevolent presence that his owner doesn’t. But dogs aren’t the only pets going rogue. In Jean Cuenen’s L’Homme Qui Rétrécit, a respectable and thoroughly enjoyable remake of Jack Arnold’s classic The Incredible Shrinking Man, young Jean Dujardin is attacked by Tofou, the family cat (brilliantly played by Tchoupi). Fortunately, Conen prefers practical effects over CGI, though he nods to modern cinematic traditions with Dujardin’s on-screen appearance.

Vomiting in movies, once rare, is now an established cliche and presents another recurring trope this year. She’s appeared in everything from Silencio, a three-episode pieced together of a Spanish TV series about lesbian vampires, to Tornado, John McClane’s belated follow-up to 2015’s Slow West, in which a Japanese puppeteer’s daughter snatches stolen gold from a group of villains in 18th-century Scotland. With Tim Roth at the helm of the villains, it’s a great setup, but it promises more than it delivers.

There’s more confusion in We Bury the Dead, where Australian director Zac Hilditch, of These Final Hours fame, puts an interesting new spin on the zombie movie, as the Tasmanian population is wiped out by a US military mistake and Daisy Ridley volunteers to remove the bodies in the hope that her missing husband is one of the few said to have come back to life. Unfortunately, Hilditch drops the ball in the third act – although there is plenty of zombie action on the streets of Sitges, where the annual zombie march has yielded apocalyptic visions galore. Pets also go rogue in primates; This is set in Hawaii, where another group of teenagers are cornered in a swimming pool, by a rabid chimpanzee with a penchant for snapping jaws, and each new display of ugliness is greeted with cheers by the audience.

However, some of the biggest cheers were reserved for action movies. In the Forbidden City where martial arts meets the mafia, a Chinese woman searching for her sister in Rome sparks a first-rate kitchen battle, deftly wielding pans, pots and simmering oil in a way that would make Jackie Chan proud. Even better is Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious – who cares if the Asian setting is vague, the daughter kidnapping story is flimsy and the dialogue is stupid when the movie is essentially one long mixed martial arts showdown, with the most exciting fight choreography since The Raid. And if you think Tom Cruise is running fast, wait until you see Miao Xie running after a truck – wearing flip-flops!

But my favorite film at the festival was Japanese Film: New Group, directed by Yûta Shimotsu, whose Best Wishes to All screened here two years ago. Ai looks on anxiously as her classmates form a human pyramid in the schoolyard—and that’s just the beginning of an anti-conformity (and by extension anti-fascist) message expressed in ways that are at once bizarre, funny, and disturbing, and not a million miles away from the surreal visions of horror manga maestro Junji Ito.