‘Apparently the economy was more important than breathing,” says an astronaut, peering out of her space station window as planet Earth is enveloped by a cloud of lethal gas. This is the absorbing sci-fi chamber piece Rubikon, directed by Austria’s Leni Lauritsch, her first foray into this genre. There was no problem breathing, though, at the 55th edition of the Sitges international fantastic film festival of Catalonia, just south of Barcelona, where the gentle sea breeze never fails to dispel the allergic sneezing that plagues me in cities.
Ecological awareness was in the air, with each film preceded by a “It’s bloody green” public service announcement, reminding us to recycle dismembered body parts and dispose of walking corpses in the organic bin. “We are not afraid of the end of the world. In fact, we like it!” says the announcement. Just as well, because this year there was no shortage of post-apocalyptic scenarios, such as the snowbound dystopia of Kirsten Carthew’s Polaris, starring Viva Lee, or the seed wars and weaponised plant life in Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper’s Vesper. Nor was there a dearth of pandemic symbolism; in Paolo Strippoli’s Flowing, hallucinogenic sewer gases turn the inhabitants of Rome into the sort of homicidal berserkers we once read about in James Herbert’s The Fog.
