59th Sitges Film Festival: ‘Sanguine’ tops the winners’ list

The SOFC jury awarded Best Director to Joko Anwar for Ghost in the Cell. The Indonesian filmmaker is a regular presence at Sitges, although his films are usually relegated to sidebar sections such as Panorama. His participation in the festival’s Official Competition this year has therefore earned him recognition for a decidedly unusual work, one that manages to combine, with considerable effectiveness, unrestrained brutality (the depiction of the murders goes well beyond the grotesque), prison cinema and a bewildering comedy with musical overtones. It was undoubtedly one of the festival’s most curious cocktails, or certainly one of the most unusual within the SOFC.

For this year’s Best Actress award, there were, I believe, numerous strong contenders. Starting with the aforementioned Lizzy Caplan, and continuing with a phenomenal Belén Cuesta who, as I noted in my previous report from Sitges, becomes the emotional compass of 5 minutos más.

Maika Monroe also delivers a masterclass in Victorian Psycho, a film that is nowhere to be found among the award winners despite convincingly transporting the slasher genre to the Victorian era. Monroe’s tour de force is, in my opinion, extraordinary: carrying almost the entire weight of the film on her shoulders, the young actress embodies the expression “less is more” with a restrained performance full of small but unsettling nuances, such as the gentle, barely perceptible swaying of her head, which manages to instil a sense of unease in the viewer.

Yet none of them ultimately took home the award. Instead, it went to Italian actress Jasmine Trinca for her role in The Spiral. Had the prize gone to any of the other actresses I have mentioned, I would still be saying here that Trinca delivered one of the finest female performances in the SOFC. So, indeed, this award recognises an excellent performance, a colossal achievement given the complexity of the film’s central character: a mother whose decisions, over the years, inadvertently drag her family ever deeper into a sinister spiral of pain and death.

This is also the only award recognising one of the finest films screened in this year’s Official Competition: a harrowing tale that lends itself to more than one interpretation, with Evil looming over it as a concept inextricably bound to love — in this case, love for one’s family. An undoubtedly surprising film.

The Best Actor award went to Benoît Magimel for his role in The Birthday Party. The film is a home invasion thriller directed by Léa Mysius, the French filmmaker who previously competed at Sitges in 2022 with The Five Devils. Mysius, however, approaches the home invasion subgenre not through the unbridled violence so frequently seen at this festival, but through a far more restrained and dramatic perspective, in which Franck, the character that earned Magimel his award, emerges as one of the most complex figures in the entire story.

At first, he could easily be mistaken for the villain of the piece, but little by little, new revelations allow for a more nuanced assessment, ultimately revealing a character driven by love and revenge in equal measure. It is a very fine performance, there is no doubt about that, and, truth be told, the competition in this category was not particularly fierce this year either.

The Best Screenplay award went to Casper Kelly for Buddy, a film I also discussed at length in my previous report from this year’s Sitges Film Festival. There is no doubt that the screenplay is one of the strongest elements of this gloriously over-the-top satire, but this was a category with some serious contenders, several of which failed to secure a place among the SOFC award winners. One example is Never After Dark, a Japanese film written and directed by Dave Boyle, which turns the haunted-house subgenre on its head with more than surprising results: here, the threat comes from an unexpected combination of forces spanning both the world of the dead and that of the living.

The previously discussed Drag, Ghost in the Cell, The Birthday Party and The Spiral also boasted excellent screenplays, although these films had already secured their places among the winners. Perhaps one of the more unexpected choices in this category — but one that, in my opinion, would have been no less deserving of recognition — would have been to honour the screenplay for Los Vampires, written by the film’s director, Craig Mitchell. It draws on a real historical event: the filming of Tod Browning’s Dracula during the day while, on the very same sets, a Spanish-language version of the same screenplay was being shot at night with Hispanic actors. From this premise, Mitchell develops an intriguing reflection on art’s need to survive — the Spanish-language version was produced at a time when the arrival of sound threatened the viability of the film business.

Mitchell weaves this theme together with considerable skill, embellishing it with fantastic elements (cinema as a vampire that feeds on souls). It is undoubtedly the strongest asset of a film that never quite manages to distinguish itself in any other artistic area that might have earned recognition at Sitges.

Finally, the Best Cinematography award went to Raphaël Vandenbussche for Titanic Ocean, while Best Music was awarded to the duo Mondo Boys for River, and Best Special Effects went to the Korean film Colony. The complete list of winners, including awards across the festival’s many other sections, can be found here.