'NIGHT OF THE LIVING DICKS': Don't Be One {Fantasia 2021: Short Film Review}

Fantasia International Film Festival - Night of the Living Dicks is a strangely profound experience for how much it is dressed up in aesthetics that could be absolutely vapid. ​

The film follows Venla, a young woman who discovers a pair of glasses that makes every man around her look like they have a dick attached to the top of his head. As things escalate, she will befriend some, and fight off other dick men. 

In the hands of a less skilled creative team, this premise could be extremely offensive and empty, but director Ilja Rautsi leans hard (no pun intended) into the contradictory elements of hypermasculine ideologies. The film begins as an allegory for how men are often allowed to be aggressively sexual in many situations, then segues into skewering the absurdity of the patriarchal structures, then plateaus in an expression of how people can choose to not be a part of them. The film also smartly juxtaposes the absurdity of how aggressively masculine groups can be horribly homophobic, while also displaying a blatant eroticism for the male body. 

​In the end, Night of the Living Dicks makes the smart choice to go out on a feeling of honest community. After all, the thing that hypermasculine ideologies ultimately stop human beings from doing is connecting to each other. It takes effort to fight against that, but the reward is much better than the rest.

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Author

Stephen Tronicek is a director/screenwriter focused on psychological horror and comedy. He grew up and is based in St. Louis. Stephen discovered film at a young age and became a professional film critic in his junior year of high school. This eventually led him to write screenplays and make short films. His horror screenplay, "Pieces" was a quarter-finalist in the Launch Million Dollar Screenplay Competition. Focuses include character-driven stories, violence as an extension of the psyche and seeing how much emotionally resonant story material you can get away with if you stick to the theme.