Platypus (Fantastic Fest 2026)

The platypus is a confounding beast, one which defies and disregards all known laws of nature; it is undeniably a mammal, yet it has a bill, webbed feet, lays eggs, and produces venom. Even the plural of its name, “platypuses”, feels like it violates some deep, unspoken rule. British scientists in the 1700s denied the creature’s existence upon first encountering it, with the anatomist Robert Knox believing the platypus to have been some kind of unholy chimera stitched together by sailors on the Indian Ocean – but in our (ostensibly) more enlightened times of today, we know for certain that the platypus is real, and also that Knox bought a lot of cadavers from serial killers, which is an odd bit of synchronicity given the film I’m about to discuss.

Aside from being a mammalian curiosity, Platypus is the title of a new horror film from director Joshua Gratton, and Platypus is also the name of its focal figure – a blood-drinking, dream-haunting masked slasher-killer who functions like a bizarre hybrid of Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, and BOB from Twin Peaks. Shot entirely on 8mm film in British Columbia, Canada, Platypus is Gratton’s sophomore feature following the hard-to-find cult gay slasher Cuties (2020), and whilst this is also a queer-lensed ‘80s slasher throwback, I would argue – without having seen Cuties – that this one is a far odder and more abstract venture than his aforementioned debut. Selected as part of the Next Wave Competition at Fantastic Fest 2026, I can’t begin to imagine how a packed audience would react (let alone at 11:30AM) to something this stylistically-driven and tonally bonkers – and I think that may well be the ideal setting to experience Platypus in.

The loose plot of Platypus follows Kimberly (Kayla Lundstram), a student plagued by recurring prophetic nightmares of a supernatural murderer named Platypus, (played interchangeably by Aoife Josie Clements, Tristan C. Pina, and Dakota Blais) who rises from his nest at night to indiscriminately slaughter the residents of her small town using a variety of inventive methods and unconventional weapons. We then spend the majority of the film watching Kimberly hang out with her friends Cynthia (Giselle Morison) and Scott (Micah Greentree) as she vows to stop Platypus from rising to kill once again, interspersed with regular scenes of carnage which prove she hasn’t been very successful at doing so.

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The narrative that Platypus follows is of less relevance and importance than its atmosphere, as Gratton’s film is extremely vibes-heavy. Hypnotically-paced and structured like a dream, Platypus is a surreal, experimental, and knowingly schlocky exercise in exploring the rhythms of a mid-’80s shot-on-video slasher, with the subgenre being stripped back to its most raw, basic premise of a serial-killer hacking his way through a long line of victims whose mere purpose is to be murdered. Years ago, when I reviewed AGFA’s restoration of the similarly offbeat Satan War (1979) as part of The Geek Show’s Fantastic Fest coverage, I mentioned the term “murderdrone”, which was coined in a zine of the same name to refer to slow, repetitive, “droning” slasher films which represent the genre in its most abstract form. Platypus very much deserves to carry the “murderdrone” banner with pride, even down to its delightfully vintage score composed by Jay Arner and one of the film’s stars, Aoife Josie Clements – the latter of whom, for full transparency, I had the honour of briefly appearing in my own micro-budget film The Estrogen Gospel (2024).

For a modern-day throwback to ‘80s slashers, Platypus is remarkably authentic-feeling, and regardless of its comic leanings, it feels less like a pastiche and more like a legitimate attempt at making a lost gonzo murder-movie from a bygone era; it already fits nicely on Fantastic Fest’s 2026 line-up, but I’d argue it would be in even more fitting company placed on a video-store shelf alongside VHS splatter-oddities such as Day of the Reaper (1984), Sledgehammer (1983), and Ogroff, the Mad Mutilator (1983), with the last of those titles even playing to Fantastic Fest audiences the day prior to Platypus’s premiere, which kind of feels like seeing the film accompanied by its unpredictable and slightly shifty French grandfather. At other points, I was reminded of more classic works of the bizarre; a recurring vision of Clements having her fortune told by a tarot reader (Kat Clifford) in a curtain-lined room gave me flashbacks to Ray Dennis Steckler’s The Incredibly Strange Creatures… (1964) and other similar regional carny-horrors, whilst Dusty Danbins’ doom-laden narration brought me the same kind of incomprehensible dread and awkward giggles as the dialogue in Carl J. Sukenick’s Alien Beasts (1991). Yet, more than anything, I kept thinking of Jane Schoenbrun’s recent film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026), and the conversations that film has about the figure of the slasher villain being some kind of deity that wills and controls the universe that surrounds (and revolves around) it; Platypus’s name is the title of the film, and the world is his violent playground – everyone and everything within is fated to be subject to the living end that he represents, a personification of death in both a literal and symbolic, tarot-style sense. It also helps that both Platypus and Camp Miasma feature appearances from the very talented Henri Gillespi, who has had a hell of a year in film so far.

For all the wonderful things I have said and could say about Platypus, and all the ways in which I believe it to be effective in its aims of being a surreal, silly, brain-fogged slasher film, I’ll confess that Gratton’s latest wasn’t entirely to my personal tastes. Maybe it’s because I prefer the accidental surrealism of something like Sledgehammer (1983) to the intentionally tongue-in-cheek absurdity on display here, or perhaps I wasn’t fully able to get into the slow, cyclical pace of the movie, but by the end I felt like Platypus is a movie which I love more in concept than I do in practice, or at least in the way it was executed here – which isn’t to disregard the work of a whole bunch of wonderful and talented people who came together to make it. If there is something inherently and universally lovable about Platypus, for as niche as its aesthetic and structural appeal may be, it’s the fact that you can see its seams in a way which perfectly highlights the fact that this is a silly low-budget slasher put together by a bunch of friends who had fun making it, and it’s that kind of hand-made genre filmmaking which I value more than anything, especially when it comes to films on the festival circuit. I also feel the need to state that Platypus has a killer twist which I’ve struggled not to spoil throughout the course of this review, but when it hits you, it’ll hit you good…

Platypus, like its namesake, is a weird one – hell, what’s a platypus doing in Canada when they’re native to Australia? For those who enjoy strange, slow, sleepy, silly, schlocky cinema, though, this may be just your thing – and though I watched it on my lonesome, it is very much the kind of movie you’ll want to experience in good company. Just remember – even if you aren’t alone, you’re never safe from Platypus!

ROBYN’S ARCHIVE – PLATYPUS