Sour Minnows (Fantasia Film Festival 2026)

Surrealism has a history stretching back as long as cinema itself, and while it currently seems to be in a long‑tenured lull, it always dips in and out of popularity. The best place to pick up on new voices working in this space is the festival circuit, and with Fantasia 2026 currently underway the voice and title that really stands out is the World Premiere of Harrison Atkins’ Sour Minnows. His previous offering, Lace Crater (2015), has affectionately become known as the “ghost STD movie”, and his while his new feature is being called “the pavement‑licking movie”, there’s more to it than that – but that’s where we begin.

Ricky (David Brown), and Tepper (Chase Williamson), are walking home when they see about a dozen people lying on the tarmac in the middle of a non‑descript Los Angeles street and licking the pavement – which isn’t a metaphor either. Things take a turn for the phantasmagorical from there as an entity known as The Yellow Thing takes an interest in Ricky, his relationship with his flatmate Tepper, and his burgeoning connection with fellow cinephile Aura (Suzanna Son). Beyond that it’s difficult to grasp anything you’d traditionally call a story as as it’s simply Ricky trying to escape a surreal experience that blends reality bending, drug trips and waking nightmares into one indistinguishable journey. There are moments of lucidity where the writer, director, editor, and producer build some fascinating riffs on Los Angelino outsider culture (from its personalities to the movies being made), but that’s all they are – brief flashes of clarity.

Most of the time the structure follows Ricky through the “one‑bad‑day” sub‑genre (like After Hours), that we see so little of in contemporary cinema. From smoking weed with a lecherous music‑video director to being both victim and ghost, to the birth of a connection with Aura, to watching a movie after its lead star has died, to a short respite where we learn that the Yellow Thing is the cause of some surprisingly powerful world‑bending surrealness, to his job analysing the authenticity of AI speech models, all the way to the scene that gives the movie its title — walking through a mall and finding a minnow in his pocket. Surrealism is a complex narrative style whose detractors often accuse of being “and then…” storytelling, but there’s a thread pulling Atkins’ movie together that leads me to adopt one of the laziest and most banal eponyms – Lynchian.

Like so many directors turned into descriptive adjectives its regular usage often misses the mark, but here the Lynch connection is the point – something the Fantasia team clearly agreed with, comparing Sour Minnows to the Hollywoodian mystery of Mulholland Drive. It’s not difficult to see given the shared DNA, especially in how Atkins’ blocking and production design, together with his command of woozy atmospherics and the haunting mystery unfolding in Hollywood, can elicit fear from the most mundane things. To me though, it feels more in line with the nightmare logic of Lynch’s most misunderstood and outright difficult movie, Inland Empire.

The two share a similar structure, and a fascination with movies and cinematic references that exist only within the movie – but not quite as wacked‑out as Lynch’s Rabbits. Instead, Atkins’ internal world‑building (in this context), feels more Kenneth Anger‑like and psychedelic, and the nuance Atkins offers is an entry point where The Yellow Thing – whose interest is piqued by Ricky and Aura – becomes an Angelino rite of passage. Given that the two characters are experiencing this surreal, nightmarish event while crossing paths at numerous junctures and also harbouring aspirations to work within the creative arts, the logic is there to be found, but these are just my thoughts and that’s where surrealism lives or dies – in interpretation and subtext.

That’s one interpretation, but another could be that Ricky just got very, very stoned. David Brown’s certainly very good at playing a super‑confused, super‑stoned person, and the casting of Chase Williamson opens up this avenue even further as he was excellent in the drugged surrealism of Don Coscarelli’s hugely overlooked John Dies at the End. If it is the latter then I approve, because this style of mystery, horror, and Los Angeles underbelly is something we don’t see very often, and even in the broader landscape of independent movies made in California, movies that are made in the home of Hollywood but lie very much outside Hollywood’s machinery are rare.

I was as equally impressed as I was overwhelmed and confused by Sour Minnows, and that’s exactly how surrealism works. The words may differ, the conclusion can vary wildly, and like music, food, or comedy, the interpretation can shift drastically from person to person and mood to mood, so much so that criticism of it may ultimately become meaningless. Right now I like what Atkins is going for, but if you ask me the same question again tomorrow then who knows, and that nebulous variance is why, in an era commanded by the short attention spans of social media, surrealism struggles to get a grip on culture the way it used to.

ROB’S ARCHIVE – SOUR MINNOWS (FANTASIA 2026)