LFF Dispatch #4: Land of Hope and Gory - Horror Shorts from the UK, France, and Canada

I didn't arrive in London in time to cover the first screening of this horror-themed program–or programme, which looks classier–but it plays again on Oct 18, the last day of the festival. Lucy Luscombe's Meatmylk is the only film the LFF didn't include in their digital library, but I wrote about all others. Of the six films, the LFF has offered a content advisory for four regarding scenes of graphic violence or injury, nudity, and sex. Most horror fans wouldn't find any of these films too hard to take, but non-horror fans may want to take note. In alphabetical order.

ALL YOURS
(Sophia Di Martino, UK, 2025, 8 mins)

All Yours begins with a bit of foreshadowing as the lovely Audrey (Loki's Sophia Di Martino), a lonely homemaker, peels and eats a hard-boiled egg. That night, she finds herself scratching at her neck. The next morning, the scratching continues until she pulls a thin layer of skin off her entire body. 

It's nothing like the self-mutilation of Marina de Van's unsettling In My Skin; it’s more like a snake doing what snakes do. Audrey looks the same afterward, but now a disgusting pile of skin covers her bathroom floor. She tries to tell her best friend, except Mora (Lady's Sian Clifford) only wants to talk about herself, so Audrey heads to the kitchen and gets to work. 

What starts out as a disturbing development culminates in a metaphor for liberation, enhanced by filmmaker Di Martino's charming performance.

FISHBRAIN
(Max Vanderspuy, UK
2026, 22 mins)

Creature feature meets folk horror in Max Vanderspuy's Fishbrain. 

Ori (Dune: Prophecy's Chloe Lea), a young woman in a fishing village, dropped out of school to look after her surly grandfather, Jeb (Red Riding's John Henshaw), after her grandmother died. 

Something has been ailing the local fish population, but she swears she's serving him the good stuff. Once she's had enough of his shit, though, she turns to the bad stuff, but it has no effect on the old bastard. As their relationship continues to devolve, the toxic fish exert a more profound effect on her. 

Vanderspuy shot the film in low light with frequent cutaways to slimy fish with squishy guts. After Tony, the seafood-centric film about Anthony Bourdain, I found myself craving fish and chips. After Fishbrain, I'd rather not look at a fish ever again, so I can't say it didn't make an impression.

THE LAST SNOW / La Dernière Neige
(Rodolphe Bouquet-Populus, France, 2025, 19 mins)  

A night-skiing enthusiast gets separated from his companions in Rodolphe Bouquet-Populus's survivalist thriller The Last Snow. 

With extra time on his hands, Guillaume (Guillaume Pottier) decides to take a chair lift up the mountain to watch a ski ceremony. He rides with Isabelle (Compartment No. Six's Dinara Drukarova), a mysterious Russian woman who tells him about a deadly bear attack and explains how the resort handles times of light snow. She also expresses an intense fear of heights, so I'm not exactly sure what she's doing on a chairlift in the first place. 

Then they catch glimpses of alarming sights and sounds suggesting that an unhinged creature is on the loose, so Guillaume does all he can to persuade Isabelle to jump off the chair to run away, but she's as stubborn as hell, and things don't end especially well. 

The actors are convincingly scared shitless and the writer/director builds tension effectively, but The Last Snow doesn't really go anywhere, other than to confirm that the tallest of tales can turn out to be true. And that night skiing probably isn't the best idea.   

MAN EATING PUSSY 
(Emily Lawson, Canada, 2026, 12 minutes)

Oh, those frisky Canadians! 

When I received an email, shortly before the festival, about a film called "Man Eating Pussy," I thought there must have been a mistake. Was it spam? Was it pornography? No and no, as it turns out. 

Actor and director Grace Glowicki, who first came to my attention in Booger and last graced Seattle cinemas with Dead Lover, plays a sex worker with a vagina for a face. In real life, even women would probably find that pretty horrible, but the terminally ill man who meets with her for a date seems more surprised than horrified, and the makeup effects are truly impressive. 

I won't say more, other than that Glowicki and Julian Richings are pretty great and that the title has a different meaning than you might expect. This short would make for a particularly provocative pairing with Mitchell Lichtenstein's Teeth, a black comedy about a young woman (Jess Weixler) with teeth where one would not normally expect (or want) to find them. 

THE SORROWS OF YOUNG CHARLOTTE
(Shir Ariya, UK, 2026, 13 mins) 

Charlotte (Liv Jekyll) and Werther (Fabian Bevan) are longtime friends. Until recently, she was in a relationship and he was single, but after four years, her boyfriend dumps her, and she's devastated. Werther steps in to offer support, but he's really hoping to consummate a longtime crush. 

Charlie is lonely and vulnerable enough to give in, but when he tries to perform, he can't. Then, he spots some potency pills in her medicine cabinet, and they're able to finish what they started. Afterward she makes it clear that this was a one-off, but it's too late: he's confessed his feelings, and the pills worked too well, leading to a darkly comic conclusion. 

Although a man could have made this film, I knew a woman did, because Werther believes that Charlie's boyfriend is the only thing standing in his way--rather than that she's just not into him (though she could have let him down a little easier). Werther isn't necessarily a bad guy, but he's dangerously naive, except instead of turning the object of affection into a victim, like in Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End or Curry Barker's Obsession, Shir Ariya, a Thai filmmaker based in the UK, ensures that the man gets his comeuppance. Though the makeup effects could have been more effective, The Sorrows of Young Charlotte offers a welcome corrective to the films in which a woman must pay for failing to live up to a man's expectations. 

Land of Hope and Gory, an 89-min program, screens at LFF on Sun, Oct 18, 8pm at BFI Southbank, Screen NFT2. The screening is sold out, but tickets may be available at the door. Images from Film Affinity (All Yours poster), the IMDb (Fishbrain poster), the BIFFF (The Last Snow poster), and British Council UK Films Database (Liv Jekyll in The Sorrows of Young Charlotte).