A couple move to the countryside looking for a new beginning. But a mysterious mirror turns everything inside out. A young care worker agrees to care for a dying man, only to stumble unto secrets that refuse to stay hidden. A musician struggling with writer’s block is haunted by his own muse and a psychologist starts losing her grip on reality following a harrowing accident. Four separate yet interconnected chapters, each of them a contemporary reimagining of a dark fable by Hans Christian Andersen, tell four stories about fate and acceptance, about love and loss.
GRIMMFEST SAYS: Forget what you might think you know from the relentlessly upbeat Danny Kaye musical, and the various sanitised, sentimentalised Disneyfications of his work. Hans Christian Andersen’s fables and fairy tales are far darker and more disturbing than that, out-grimming the Brothers Grimm; a vehicle for his own sense of alienation and emotional pain, his cynical eye for cruelty and social injustice. A reclaiming and a celebration of that darker Andersen, this anthology sees four directors reimagine four of his most famous stories in radical fashion, remaining true to the spirit of the originals, but taking them as a springboard and thematic unifier for a loosely interconnected quartet of elegant, enigmatic and disturbing psychosexual dramas, somewhat in the manner of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s DEKLOG, only with a frisson of the supernatural or fantastic. Beautifully shot and staged, subtly played, carefully constructed and intelligently written, this is a stunning and unsettling slice of Scandi-horror, and marks a welcome return for Grimmfest alumnus Michael Panduro (THE SUNKEN CONVENT), who contributes the film’s concluding tale.
Individual tickets coming soon!
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