Bowels of Hell (Fantasia International Film Festival 2026)

Gurcius Gewdner & Gustavo Vinagre’s Bowels of Hell arrives at Fantasia, and for a film with a title like, you’d be forgiven for expecting a riotously loud, messy, frantic, and proudly tasteless slab of Brazilian exploitation cinema, bur what you actually get is something stranger, slower, and far more patient than its scatological premise suggests. The film follows Malu, a party planner and mother of two who’s now cracking under the weight of past trauma and the friction of raising Genesis – her rebellious, non‑binary child. When a bizarre curse turns toilets into deadly monsters, Malu is hurled into a surreal nightmare where motherhood, grief, and existential terror can’t simply be flushed away.

The first major shock comes early in the film when Malu pulls her young son’s loose tooth free, and afterwards he’s desperate to take a look at himself so he jumps over and over on top of a toilet in an attempt to look in the mirror above. He dies in a terrible accident – a tragic moment that sets the tone for the film’s fascination with bodily functions, pipes, plumbing, and the literal bowels of the São Paulo apartment block where the ensemble cast resides.

Despite the premise, the first hour of Bowels of Hell is surprisingly restrained with very little happening, and the film spending a long time drifting between the residents of the building, never settling on a traditional protagonist. Malu is the emotional centre but the film frequently jumps to other tenants, including a woman who claims she can use bowel movements for divination (think reading tea leaves and other forms of fortune-telling, just for turds), who moved to São Paulo specifically because it has “bad vibes”. Influencers drift in and out as truly garbage people, adding a layer of social satire that never fully coheres with the main narrative. Another thread that feels like one too many is Genesis’s antagonistic relationship with Malu, the film gesturing towards generational conflict and identity friction without committing or developing either beyond surface tension. Genesis’ claim of having a transphobic mum is undercooked as far as antagonistic rifts go, as it stems from Malu simply wanting them to keep their birth name out of respect for their dead brother.

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Bowels of Hell’s scatological humour is relentless, and there are more “arses on seats” jokes than you’d expect from a film trying to balance grief, trauma, and existential dread. A doctor even delivers the immortal line “I’ve never seen so much shit in my life”, which becomes the statement for the film’s tonal juggling act – and you will feel slightly ill after credits roll. Malu is so bunged up (with grief, trauma and shit), that you’re left wondering if she’s going to explode or if the corrupted monster‑pipes will strike first, this tension being one of the film’s more effective hooks that could have been accentuated even more.

When the horror finally arrives it’s both campy and conceptually horrifying because the toilet monster doesn’t get up and roam the streets, rather it swallows people whole from the bowl, dragging them down into the pipes. The shots of the “creature” are ridiculous, hilarious, and genuinely gross, and being eaten by a toilet is a uniquely vile idea that the film commits to it with gusto (pun intended). The shot of a character’s face talking out of the bowl before being dragged down to hell is hilarious, as is the obviously fake cat who succumbs to the same fate, and although it sounds simple – a toilet eating people – the attacks are varied, grisly, and drenched in practical effects that lean more into campy terror.

There are problems though, a primary one being the runtime as Bowels of Hell is simply too long – instead of two hours, ninety minutes would have been perfect as the patience of the first hour doesn’t pay off with enough momentum in the second, and the ensemble structure diffuses the emotional impact rather than strengthening it. The film is also too textually broad and dramatically inclined for something that is, at heart, an exploitation movie, and while it does have good ideas and is well made, it lacks the X‑factor that would tie its many disparate tones together. Then there’s the final scene, which is a moment so stupid and proudly juvenile, it made me think of Randy Marsh’s giant turd competition in South Park (More Crap, 2007). It’s a baffling choice that undercuts the film’s more thoughtful elements, but maybe that’s the point because Bowels of Hell revels in ugliness, absurdity, and bodily chaos.

In the end, something distinctive emerges out of all that filth never feels fully formed, yet is a uniquely disgusting vision that swings from grounded drama to over‑the‑top absurdity without warning. The core of it all is that it feels like two very different movies jammed together, and as as a fan of Korean and Japanese cinema I have no issue with a movie pinging around with tones as it’s something I’ve grown accustomed to. Rather than the tonal shifts being the issue, imagine if Evil Bong wasn’t a movie about a sentient, malevolent bong, but about the existentialism of rural living with a healthy infusion of intergenerational trauma. Bowels of Hell has it’s successes, and while it’s definitely leagues ahead of a particularly tricky poo, it’s denser than expected and longer than anyone would desire. 

I may have to attack it with a coathanger …

ROB’S ARCHIVE – BOWELS OF HELL