Pamela Anderson’s The Last Showgirl opens the Whistler Film Festival

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Fresh snow on mountains isn’t the only draw for Whistler when December rolls around.

The early winter season is also a welcome time for film fans as the curtain rises on the annual Whistler Film Festival (WFF). Now in its 24th year, the WFF runs from Dec. 4-8 with 118 films (47 features and 71 shorts) from 14 countries. Canadian cinema is well-represented with 21 features and 52 shorts. Five of those features and 33 of the shorts have B.C. pedigrees.

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Opening the festival this year is the much-buzzed-about Pamela Anderson career revitalizer The Last Showgirl. From director Gia Coppola, The Last Showgirl also stars Jamie Lee Curtis and tells the story of a veteran Las Vegas showgirl who must get a new life after her show closes after a 30-year run.

While the WFF has programmed some buzzy and potential award-winning Hollywood fare like The Last Showgirl, the heart of the film festival are the indie offerings.

“It’s a place where people can dabble and see films that normally they wouldn’t see,” said WFF program director Robin Smith, who is programming the festival for the first time this year. “To me, it’s sort of like expanding your mind to things you may normally not stream or rent, or even watch in your local movie theatre.”

Festivals are also the place for first-time filmmakers to show their work. And this year, the WFF’s features list includes the films of eight first-time feature directors.

One of those directors is North Bay, Ont., native, Kourtney Roy, with her film Kryptic. A suspenseful horror-thriller shot entirely in the Hope area, Kryptic tells the very creepy and clever story of Kay (Chloe Pirrie), a woman who is searching for a missing cryptozoologist — otherwise known as a monster (Bigfoot, etc.) hunter — who was last seen heading into the woods looking for something called the Sooka (a big, hairy beast with a mole-like face).

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Along the way, Kay meets a collection of very well-drawn characters that each inhabit their own weird little worlds, making the film essentially a scary, sinister road trip that bends reality as easily as Bigfoot bends a tree branch.

“People if they ask me what’s the film about? I have said, ‘Well, actually, let me ask you a couple of questions? Do you like mucus? Do you like monsters that masturbate? Do you like awkward sex scenes?’ If you respond ‘yes’ to one or all three of those things, then this movie is for you,” said Roy, a Paris-based award winning photographer and graduate of the Emily Carr University of Art and Design. “I say psychosexual thriller or a mind-bending creature feature.”

Smith says Kryptic, which had its world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival in March and plays the WFF on Dec. 6 (7:15 p.m. at Village 8), struck him because it wasn’t a straightforward horror film that ties things up in a bloody bow.

“To me, it is a bit of a genre-bender, which I am always a fan of,” said Smith. “It is about a woman who is trying to figure out who she is. There is self-discovery to it. It does go down a very different road … It’s fun, it’s playful. It’s a bit Lynchian as in David Lynch, in a sense.”

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Key to this film achieving peak psychological thriller status is the deft balance it strikes between clever and creepy.

“When it comes to psychological horror movies, just having a monster running around with a big knife is not going to cut it for the majority of people,” said the Toronto-based Smith.

Like the surprise summer hit and B.C.-shot film Longlegs, Kryptic is a psychological horror movie that will please the audience member who doesn’t care about the bodycount. But instead wants to think through the story and ask ‘why?’

“It’s less about the jump scares … and it’s more about the head scares,” said Smith.

The film was shot over 19 days in late September and early October of last year in and around Hope. If you have ever driven through Hope, you know the area, hemmed in by steep mountains and an often-raging river, is ripe for a mysterious monster-in-the-woods story.

“It was amazing to go to work every day in such incredible environments, and the sets we had were amazing. It was an amazing art department,” said Pirrie over Zoom from London, England. “Going into the forest was its own thing. Obviously, I’m not Canadian, so to me there was a naiveté there that probably translated into the film in some level. I massively enjoyed it.”

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For Roy, the experience shooting this movie was one of many firsts.

“Everything was a surprise,” said Roy over Zoom from her Paris home. “I had never been on a professional film set before. All my films had been really kind of small, very indie, very low key. The machinery, in a figurative sense, the machine is rolling. You have to just go with it even if you don’t feel like you’re ready … Whatever happens, the machine keeps rolling, right?

“You just try and go every day and make it work … It was a super-fascinating process.”

Here are 3 more B.C. films to check out at the Whistler Film Festival: 

Resident Orca 

Dec. 6, 4:45 p.m., Rainbow Theatre

From first-time feature documentary directors Sarah Sharkey Pearce and Simon Schneider, this complicated and heartbreaking film tells the story of the last living southern resident killer whale in captivity.

An orca named Lolita, the film follows the attempt to free her and bring her back to the Salish Sea, 53 years after being captured and displayed at the Miami Seaquarium.

NiiMisSak: Sisters in Film 

Dec. 6, 2:30 p.m., Village 8, Theatre 7

Filmmaker Jules Koostachin directs this documentary about IsKweWak (Indigenous women) storytellers in the film/TV industry, specifically here in B.C. The film features creatives Marie Clements, Jessie Anthony, Kayah George, Tristin Greyeyes, Asia Youngman and the mighty matriarch of Indigenous female film storytellers, Alanis Obomsawin.

Hunting Matthew Nichols  

Dec. 7, 5:45 p.m., Village 8, Theatre 7

This mockumentary/horror/docudrama from director Markian Tarasiuk, who appears in the film, follows the story of a filmmaker (Miranda MacDougall) who sets out to investigate the disappearance of her teenage brother and his friend, who went into the Vancouver Island woods 23 years earlier and never came out.

Along the way, she uncovers evidence that makes her think he may still be alive.

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