Littermates sneak peek at Fantastic Fest, 20th Sept 2026
The prologue to writer/co-director Scott Tinkham and cinematographer/editor/co-director Michael Woloson’s Littermates is taken from its chronological centre, but here stripped of all context, so that its surreal details serve both to muddle and to mystify. A woman (Kayless McGregor) wearing headphones and a gas mask sits in a hot tub facing a field, when a man (Joey Bader), also in gas mask, summons her to come pose for a polaroid photograph being taken in front of a country house by a second man (Oliver Woolf), himself too in a gas mask, who addresses his subjects as Liam and Mel – and when the photographer suggests that all three are safe to remove their masks, and requests ‘big smiles’ for the shot, both his subjects look more shell-shocked than happy.
In fact these two have come a long way. For a flashback then shows ‘Liam’ literally shell-shocked and under fire in the forest, before his future photographer Chester rescues him in a helicopter, brings him to the country estate, and begins the slow process of rehabilitating this damaged man. Helped by Chester’s kindness and patience, the man regains the powers of speech and other functional abilities, even if he remains childlike in his behaviours. Liam is the name that Chester arbitrarily assigns the man, who can no longer remember who he is, but who now lives in devoted awe of his saviour and protector. Soon they are joined in their relative safe haven by the woman, who staggers onto the property in a state of agitated befuddlement. Like Liam, she is afflicted with amnesia and trauma, but we can see, when Chester writes down for her on paper her new name Melanie and she insistently crosses out the last four letters, that she has a rebellious streak.
Regularly punctuated by the sound of distant gunfire, the sight of smoke plumes, and repeated air raid sirens and gas attack warnings, Tinkham and Woloson’s feature debut takes place amid an ongoing war. Yet its setting somewhere in the south of England is otherwise idyllic, even Edenic, with Chester, like some benign if mysterious god, providing a Paradise for his infantilised, ingenuous guests, keeping them under control with a system of rewards (or ‘nifties’) for their good behaviour, and imposing a single prohibition, for their own safety, against leaving the property’s perimeter. Yet his guests are wayward. Together they secretly drink Chester’s liquor – and Liam proves both jealous of his new littermate’s progress, and lost like a pubescent boy in the strange world of feelings that she arouses in him, while Mel longs for nothing more than to explore the forbidden forest that lies beyond. Naturally, like the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, this will end in lost innocence and exile.
Like the photos which adorn the walls of the house, Littermates is a family portrait, even if the clan at its centre is provisional and something of a surrogate for the real thing. Chester is all at once father and, as his apron emblazoned with the words ‘Queen of the Kitchen’ suggests, mother to two ‘children’ who, incongruously, are more or less his own age, and shows only beneficence, generosity and good will until the point where he himself becomes as damaged as his wards. The film’s tone is droll, as adults behave like kids, and rules are made to be broken – but behind the eccentric whimsy and outside the little ordered world that Chester has created, there lurk danger and death, as this film shows the devastating toll that war takes on ordinary, everyday lives, and the immense loss that it leaves in its wake.
strap: Genesis tomorrow: Scott Tinkham and Michael Woloson’s droll feature debut is all at once sunny countryside idyll and wartime tragedy.
© Anton Bitel
