Movies & TV / Reviews
Fantasia Fest 2025 Review Roundup: Good Game, Foreigner, Touch Me
Image Credit: Fantasia IFF
Fantasia Fest is officially over, and it’s been another great year. This year’s festival has seen great films across genres and I am excited to revisit when they eventually release and inevitably become favorites of other genre fans.
This year was a busy one for me with the festival, and you can check out all of my reviews here including the stellar psychological thriller Lurker, the single-location horror film Hellcat, the charming and potent Troma documentary Occupy Cannes and many more. Before I finish up with my coverage, I have a few more capsule reviews for movies that screened over the last week.
Good Game
The inspirational sports underdog story gets a 21st century makeover in Good Game. Dickson Leung’s action-comedy sets a tale as old as time within the world of esports as Tai, the owner of an internet café (Andrew Lam) decides to assemble a team of unlikely heroes to compete in a tournament to win enough money to keep his internet café open. The team includes his bubbly daughter Fay (Yanny Chan) and former action star Octo (Lo Meng), both of whom are regulars at his business, but the key ingredient is Solo (Will Or) a pro player who is on the downward slide after a successful career.
The story beats here are well-worn – will Solo be able to overcome his ego and work with the team? Will Tai’s ex-wife allow Fay to compete when she finds out? Can the underdogs defy the odds and make it to the finals to save the café? Anyone who’s seen Dodgeball, The Mighty Ducks, Major League or Cool Runnings – just to name a few – will be able to answer those questions.
The key with Leung’s film isn’t suspense though; it’s the performances and the game sequences. The fictional team-based FPS game is depicted via real actors and under the direction of Leung and his stunt team, they’re a lot of fun. The special effects are quite good, making the various matches highlights of the movie. And the cast have great chemistry with each other, delivering plenty of humor and a touch of drama. Good Game doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it makes for a thoroughly enjoyable comedy with no small amount of heart.
Rating: 7.5
Foreigner
While the story explored in Foreigner is a potent one, it trips up in the execution. Everything about this bubblegum horror movie by Ava Maria Safai sounds good from a high level, telling the story of Iranian teenager Yasi (Rose Deghan) who emigrates to Canada and finds herself falling down a spiral as she tries to fit in and assimilate with the local high school mean girls (Chloë MacLeod, Victoria Wadell, Talisa Mae Stewart). Unfortunately, her loss of identity reaches out to something darker, which threatens her and everything she loves.
So much of what Safai is doing here works. The premise is strong and the cast is delivering – Deghan in particular aptly makes is feel Yasi’s pain at the microaggressions thrown her way and deftly flips the switch when she needs to start doing down her dark road. Safai also captures the essence of teen films like Jennifer’s Body and Mean Girls, hitting the right tonal notes more often than not.
The issue is that the story stays more or less on the surface level. It knows what it wants to do, but it feels a bit too timid to truly explore any of it. That leads to a few pacing issues where things move along too quickly and the answers are dropped into our lap rather abruptly.
By no means is it all bad; the comedy is good and there are some truly uncomfortable moments, mostly in the interactions between Yasi and her tormentors-slash-friends. Ultimately, Foreigner is a solidly watchable film that feels a bit more like an example of everyone’s potential rather than something fully realized and standing on its own merits.
Rating: 6.0
Touch Me
If you ever thought your slacker comedy needed more aliens and tentacle sex, Touch Me is the movie for you. That’s not a dig, either; Addison Heimann’s sci-fi comedic thriller is strange and off-putting, but rather charming at the same time.
It helps that Heimann has four top-notch performers in the primary roles. Olivia Taylor Dudley and Jordan Gavaris are a delight and have lived-in chemistry as a Joey and Craig, girl and her gay best friend who, down on their luck, have to hang out with Joey’s controlling ex-boyfriend Brian (Lou Taylor Pucci).
It also just happens that Brian is an alien who says he wants to save the world from climate change and can make anxiety vanish with a touch. That leads to a co-dependent, betrayal-ridden and tentacle-filled weekend full of revelations, violence and awkward dance sequences. Pucci is game to fully play the fool as Brian, and Marlene Forte adds her own volatile element as Brian’s lovestruck assistant Laura.
Touch Me leans into its absurdity and that is very much not going to be for everyone; you have to be able to get in on its defiantly weird vibe. Heimann is having a lot of fun with this as he explores addition, relationships, and working through trauma, and that fun is infectious. He isn’t quite able to juggle the tone correctly in every moment; some veers into darker tones feel a little jarring. For those who have an appreciation for absurdist comedy though, there’s a lot to enjoy here and the characters end up making a strong enough impression to make this worth checking out.
Rating: 7.0
The Fantasia International Film Festival takes place in Montreal from July 16th through August 3rd.
