Fantasia 2026 Review: ‘Beasts Clutching at Straws’ is an Uneven, But Thrilling, Dark Comedy

Hideo Jojo is back with two movies at the Fantasia International Film Festival this year, and one of them is vying to win the Cheval Noir Award. It’s, of course, the one we’re talking about in this review, Beasts Clutching at Straws, an adaptation of Keisuke Sone’s Beasts Clawing at Straws, which was previously transposed into a 2020 Korean film by Kim Yong-hoon. Jojo’s readaptation had its North American premiere at Fantasia and was met with trepidation by the audience, as it introduces a free-flowing, nonlinear structure that initially feels hard to follow. 

And yet, the plot is simple. Kanji (Ouji Suzuka), an online streamer who loves pranks, finds a bag full of money at the internet café he works for. Initially turning the bag over, Kanji steals it back after realizing that such money could potentially help his family’s situation, especially considering that his grandmother suffers from dementia. Two other stories are shown in parallel, one regarding a sex worker who befriends someone with deep connections to organized crime in an attempt to get rid of her abusive and violent husband, and the other focuses on a corrupt police officer who plans a fraud with the bag to save himself and leave the criminal operation of a powerful Yakuza boss. 

These stories obviously intersect, but not in the way you think. Jojo never tells the audience which part of the story a given scene is set in, but will frequently transition between storylines through “zipper” cues. By that, I mean that whenever we go from one scene to the next, a zipper appears on-screen (likely the bag’s zipper) to let us know we’re moving on. Maybe Jojo overdoes it. Maybe it can confound more than it enthralls. But it doesn’t matter, because the transition is always sleek and seamless, almost as if the movie is structured through vignettes rather than a properly cohesive story, especially as he’ll frequently repeat fragments of images we’ve seen before, right from an opening Toei logo that jolts us out of our seats. 

The opening half, however, is a little dense, perhaps too dense, as it moves from one playful and comedic scene to something extremely violent and excessive. There’s one particularly distasteful domestic abuse scene that should come with a massive trigger warning, because the violence is directly shown and unpleasantly staged. You couldn’t hear a pin drop during that scene, and yet Jojo knows when to switch back to comedy a few scenes later, almost as if everyone forgets it ever happened in the first place. I never did, and found that moment particularly gratuitous, but it works best when you realize that he’s essentially putting all genres in a blender to see what sticks. 

After a relatively rough opening few scenes, Jojo begins to find common threads and communicate with his seemingly disparate timelines. It’s at that point where Beasts Clutching at Straws becomes so much more than what its first few scenes demonstrated and is pure, ecstatic pleasure. Without giving too much away, the dark comedy morphs into an action movie with one of the most impeccably mounted fight sequences I’ve seen all year: first a car chase that morphs into a one-on-one brawl inside a cinema, culminating in bloodletting so excessive it made the Concordia crowd go ape. It also references a movie-within-a-movie, adding a metatextual nature to the proceedings that genuinely made my jaw drop. It is, as we say in Québec, “un grand moment.”

That part saves the movie from being a potential disaster, especially its final few twists and turns that feel a bit cheap but are actually way funnier than they have any right to be. It helps that the acting is rock-solid, even in scenes that are quite difficult to watch, because it coalesces into a satisfying conclusion that, strangely but purposefully, wraps up each storyline well. If the journey was rough around the edges, at least the destination was all the more worth it in the end.

For anyone in town or interested, Jojo has another movie out at Fantasia, Nameless, which is actually premiering as this review is getting published. While this critic won’t be able to see the film then, if you were charmed by Beasts Clutching at Straws, perhaps you should see what he has to offer next, which looks and feels tonally different. That’s what Fantasia is all about, and the programming is starting to pick up on its sixth day after all!

SCORE: ★★★