Hellbender Movie Review(Fantasia International Film Festival)
- Anthony Nadeau
- Aug 19, 2021
- 3 min read

(This is the only available picture from the movie currently, no poster and no trailer as of this review)
From The Adams family(John Adams, Toby Poser, Zelda Adams) comes another delve into the unknown the unreal from the family that brought you "The Deeper You Dig" back in 2019 comes to their new film that just premiered this past weekend at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal.
This film tells the story of a young girl Izzy(Zelda Adams) and Mother(Toby Poser) who are living out in the wilderness, just the two of them surviving off the land, literally because they're eating the pine cones, they're eating branches, they're eating twigs and other oddities that you don't normally see people consume in a movie. There's no flesh-eating here or that sort of thing, this film gets really dark in certain parts and no I'm not referring to the lighting either.
This is a slow burn movie you have to give it patience, Toby Poser is fantastic as she was in The Deeper You Dig I feel like she even reached more into her soul the performance was so real you almost feel like she could be a witch and Zelda is quite good in this she had a very very small but prominent role in The Deeper You Dig, but here we get to see more of her abilities as an actress and songwriters they wrote all of the songs that they perform in the movie.
Their other daughter Lulu Adams plays Amber, she plays an adjacent neighbor that's kind of down the hill from where the mother-daughter family is living at.
She's actually occupying this house when the owner isn't home and has herself a little swimming pool party of sorts and helps herself to whatever is outside essentially and it's a different kind of coming of age, it's not your typical puberty, sexual exploration sort of thing this is more soul searching in a way without giving too much of the story away it deals with the occult, it definitely has me intrigued as to what these folks are going to do next because I mean The Deeper You Dig was phenomenal, then this one they reached even a little further and they just can't seem to have a limit on their talent because Mother and Izzy are rolling around the snow, it's really a bonding moment for the characters and it really works.If you have seen the film you know exactly what I'm talking about if not, we'll just leave it there and not spoil anything for anyone who hasn't seen it yet.
For me this family of filmmakers has peaked another level of where horror can go I think it's even fair to say that what they're doing with her right now is what Wes Craven did with Scream maybe that is putting a little pressure on them? I don't know
Before the movie even showed at the Fantasia International Film Festival they had already signed a deal with Shudder through Yellow Veil Pictures, they're going to have exclusive streaming rights come spring of 2022 in Canada, the US, and other regions. So if you're not able to make it to any of the film festivals it will be available in the spring of 2022 so look out for that.
Make sure if you're not subscribed to Shudder to subscribe, just so you can see this one because it's a home run they knock it out of the park with this one, it was like the bases are loaded and everybody came in and they won the world championship.
This is definitely within my top five and might even be my number one movie of the year for me it's just like I said earlier in the review and I'm just eager to see what they're going to do next because yeah, this is great!
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