Fantastic Fest 2023: Neil Ferron's Short Film "Fishmonger" Is A Delightfully Strange Catch
A pathetic Irish fishmonger must survive a sex pact with an ancient fish creature in order to save his mother's soul from burning in hell.
Mothers can put a lot of pressure on their sons, especially when it comes to marriage, and while it might seem like they’re anguishing in a lake of hell fire over the ostensible disappointments brought upon them by their children, they seldom (if ever) actually do. Well, in Neil Ferron’s supernatural dark comedy short, Fishmonger, the mother is literally being consumed by hell fire up to her ankles that threatens to burn up her whole soul if her son, Christie (Dominic Burgess), isn’t married by the time she dies. She’s been struck down with a deadly case of St. Moira’s Bloat, a condition contracted by eating cheese curdled from her own breast milk (yeah, you read that right), which not only causes some wickedly frothy unchristian diarrhea but also eternal damnation as well — should her son be unwed by the hour of her death, that is.
Christie’s predicament is bleaker — and weirder — than it appears too: the only single female on the isolated Irish isle can’t even look at him without gagging. This leaves two options: either he commits suicide — because his mother can’t die with an unwed son if she doesn’t have a living son — or he ventures out to a cove beyond the treacherous waters to find a mermaid who can grant him anything he wishes, provided he ponies up the required half cup of semen. The resulting journey is a weird, wild, and wonderful one, full of tentacle sex, exploding hell-blisters, old-school cinematic techniques, and even a musical number. What more could a connoisseur of strange cinema ask for?
When you get an email from the director self-describing the film’s DNA as “Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Eggers' The Lighthouse, a splash of 90s Disney, and Ingmar Bergman on bad mescaline,” you get excited. We’d say toss in the human/fish romance of The Shape Of Water, the mother/son dynamic and dark ending of Brazil, and The Mighty Boosh’s Old Gregg, and you’re even closer to the gloriously grotesque, deeply affecting hilarity Ferron and company cook up. All its influences and potential comparisons are in no way a slight either. The truth is when you put all these things in a blender, you’re bound to come up with something pretty cool, but Fishmonger transcends the derivative at every turn, using its influences as mere touchstones to create something new that will have you surprised, delighted, and even a little repulsed (in a good way).
The film’s cinematography from Jack McDonald is cut from the rib of Jarin Blaschke’s work on The Lighthouse, and he matches his phenomenal atmospherics with each frame and setup. The editing from Augustine So keep the pacing even and the momentum moving at a fast clip. It’s a rock solid 25 minutes with nary an ounce of blubber on its sturdy bones. Ferron showcases his tremendous talents as both a writer and director here, and he cleverly makes full use of the frame, creating compositions that maximize the comedic effect, amplify the old-school aesthetics, and key into the emotional core of every scene. He also makes sure the performances are perfectly pitched to the specifically quirky tone he’s striving for (think Monty Python’s The Lighthouse).
Fishmonger’s apparent Eggerisms are just the lure of siren song, and the whimsical oddity and laugh-out-loud absurdity is its well-baited hook, but you’ll be surprised by just how much its emotions and vulnerability harpoon you. Beneath its bizarro nature, sputtering demonic pustules, and seaweed vomit lies a profoundly personal story of love and suicide and human empathy. At the end of the day, what you have here is a small film with an incredibly ambitious reach. It’s a special slice of strange cinema through and through, and we loved every second of it.
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