Boston Underground Film Festival 2025 Wrap-Up

My second year attending the Boston Underground Film Festival (BUFF) has solidified my intention to return as long as I'm in the area.

Although its single-stream nature means I don't get to choose what to watch, there are some distinct benefits. It requires less pre-festival effort: I have no difficult scheduling decisions to make, so I can go into most features blind, which is my preference. It means I can very often relax between screenings, especially since BUFF and The Brattle Theater don't require you to leave if you have a ticket for the next show. Which also provides more opportunity for conversation with my fellow attendees, especially those whom come back day after day. All great things.

As a genre festival, there are fewer of the intense dramas that constitute the cornerstone of my taste. However, as you'll see below, there's no shortage of quality.

Which leads to the other interesting note: while my top short and features are special, nothing else was truly "great". Quite a few had great elements, but couldn't bring it all together. But I can't blame BUFF, as it mirrors what I've seen in new releases more generally. Although I already had a few favorites by this time in the past few years, I'm highly doubtful that any of my current top five will survive to this year's wrap-up. If last year is any guide, things will sort themselves out by the end, but it's off to an inauspicious start.

Still, the ones I'm highlighting here are diamonds in the rough, and absolutely worth seeking out.

Shorts

Almost every short was narrative, so I've listed them all in one category.

Methuselah

The one documentary short on this list. If the name and poster look familiar, it's because it was also the best short I saw at NHFF 2024. I was absolutely delighted for the opportunity to see it again on the big screen.

Erection and Destruction

As with most features I've seen starring Joshua Burge (namely Vulcanizadora and Buzzard), this is a low-key yet consistently funny take on a super real subject. It was one of the only pure sci-fi shorts of the festival, sticking with its story rather than veering into the surreal and abstract. Although visually it wasn't anything noteworthy, Burge gives an excellent performance as a man desperately trying to cure his erectile dysfunction, who finds community in like-minded and similarly afflicted men and women. It's frank about sexuality (also a staple of Burge's work), and features an excellent appearance by Chloë Levine from The Ranger.

The House of Weird

Speaking of surreal and abstract, as you've probably guessed from the title, that's the essence of The House of Weird. It uses its mesh of different styles of animation to visualize the absurdity of what it's like to navigate your life and the world more broadly, throwing a barrage of quick-hitting stimuli and an endless inescapable maze at you. The slightly disparate styles convey an environment made of comparable yet dissimilar elements, making everything just a little bit more off-putting than it always is. A short, aggressive assault on your sense of comfort within the world.

The Garden Sees Fire

A wonderfully bizarre menagerie of creatures and people, brought to life as a multimedia project, bringing out the strengths of each element. I'll always have a soft spot for animating over photographs, done here to set the story in a forest, and crudely yet effectively shaded at points to depict fire. There's a bunch of stop-motion beings, such as the shark-like creature with saggy breasts munching everything in sight, mingling with a paper cut-out human and hell-hound. It tells the story of an ecology horribly out of balance, fighting back to preserve itself at all costs.

Make Me a Pizza

What starts out as a hilarious parody and undermining of a stereotypical 70s porno morphs into a deeper consideration of the source of our food and the care that goes into it, before making another turn into an outrageous yet intimate co-mingling of both. It managed to keep me on my toes from moment to moment, all while laughing hysterically, sometimes from revulsion but mostly due to the clever script and committed performances delivered by Sophie Neff and Woody Coyote.

Terminal Emulator

Admittedly, the setup is needlessly convoluted, and the VFX to accompany it are off-puttingly cheap and ugly. But once the plot gets going, the complexities of the emotional arc experienced by Nejla (Katherine Bellantone) pull you in, and the surreal imagery, complete with an incredible stop-motion nightmare creature, bludgeon your brain in the best way.

Honorable Mentions: My Child; Howl If You Love Me

Features

There was a documentary feature this year, but it didn't qualify for this list. Of the other twelve features, three were repertory screenings which don't need my help. So these are the best narrative new releases of the festival.

Fucktoys

This is the type of movie which announces itself from its very first shot: lush, off-kilter, hyperreal, highly stylized, gorgeously yet unconventionally photographed, and full of both quick wit and highly unexpected jokes. It's incredibly frank about sexuality and sex workers, and draws a clear demarcation between their jobs and their personal lives and relationships. And it's hilarious from from to back, while still managing to tell a meaningful and touching story of self-discovery.

Protagonist AP (played by director Annapurna Sriram) just wants to raise the money to lift the curse which every psychic in the city can smell on her, but life keeps standing up tripping hazards. She's kind of a mess, but she keeps her wits about her, allowing her to navigate the chaos, albeit not easily. She keeps her head up despite society insisting she needs saving from her line of work, and isn't afraid to fight back. The script is outstanding, only faltering when the social commentary gets too in your face or when it starts to drag in the back half.

Still, it was definitely my favorite feature of the festival. More importantly, the film represents the exciting announcement of a new voice in the world of film, who will hopefully be with us for many years to come.

US Release Status: Seeking distribution.

Head Like a Hole

In many ways, this is exactly the type of feature you expect to see at a small festival: low budget, high concept, leans heavily on its dialog, and minimalist. But that doesn't mean it can't be fantastic.

While the script is excellent and consistently laugh out loud funny, it's the performances which make it sparkle. Steve Kasan nails the balance between incredulous enough to mirror the audience's reaction to his strange employment, while being resigned and desperate enough to justify rolling with it far longer than is reasonable. But Jeff McDonald is the clear standout as his superior, whose gentle nature is undermined by his bizarre relationship to the world, punctuated by an unnatural pattern of speech. The moments which call on him to display true rage are visceral; you absolutely buy this man as a threat. And the whole time, the mystery of what's really going on is mounting.

While also taking aim at religion, this is primarily a satire of office culture and the modern workplace more generally, as well as the perverse relationship many of us have to our jobs and employers. It's a quiet, plodding film, which takes it time building to the ultimate reveal. Yet there's enough going on to keep you engaged throughout, even before you get to the great (if somewhat abrupt) finale.

US Release Status: Picked up; release date TBD.

Honorable Mentions: Sister Midnight; Fréwaka

If you want my thoughts on all of the 59 shorts and features I watched, check out my Letterboxd.