THE BEST WONDERFULLY WEIRD VOICES FROM THE 2025 DARK MATTER FILM FESTIVAL

Hello hello, everyone! Spooky season has come and gone, and with it the annual rush of exciting new indie creators looking to stamp their place in stodgy ol’ Hollywood.

At a time when movies are more expensive to make and harder to get noticed, 2025’s Dark Matter Film Festival shined the spotlight bright on the next wave of creators determined to overcome the odds and prove that bold original storytelling still has a place in Hollywood.

Before we go on, I’d like to shout out organizer TriCoast Entertainment for inviting me to this event. Not only was it an amazing three days of film, but they did an incredible job cultivating a community of film fans who loved and appreciated all sides of Hollywood, even the goofier unglamorous Z-movies that (while not Oscar-worthy) still allow storytellers the ability to create on their own terms, an increasingly rare privilege in 2025.

But out of everyone, who stood out from the pack? Which films announced themselves as the next big cult classic in waiting? Let’s review:

CHEAT MEAL

Directed By Drew Bierut

Synopsis: Suspicious that his girlfriend is cheating on him with her new personal trainer, Owen decides to take matters into his own hands. What he discovers is far more difficult to digest.

Review: Horror has always been an effective vehicle for satire, casting a light on the extremities of modern-day society by comically enlarging them even further. Director Drew Bierut takes this tried-and-true format and applies it to an effective target: LA-style dieting and fitness. Having lived in LA, I can attest that Bierut nails the passive-aggressive niceties and subtly creepy tones that abound in new-age health circles. The short’s accuracy in capturing a subset of the city yields hilarious results when things go crazily off-the-rails.

Anchoring things is lead character Owen, a winsomely charming everyman brought to life with pitch-perfect rambly dialogue and puppy-dog eyes by actor Cory Walls. The short explores Owen’s insecurities with an imaginative visual eye, including advertisements coming to life and speaking directly to him. As Owen gets drawn into an increasingly blood-soaked affair, the script succeeds off the amazing chemistry between him and girlfriend Ellie, a health fanatic played to perfection by Olivia Scott Welch, nailing the dichotomy of an icy cult member with glimmers of the fun-loving goofball the story tells us she once used to be.

Paired with a gut-bustingly over-the-top bloody climax and some inventive twists, Bierut rises above the cookie-cutter premise to create a genuinely fun piece of satire that makes the most of its various LA shooting locations, rendering the beachy tones of the city and its pulsing underbelly in beautiful detail. 

BETWEEN TWO WAVES

Written & Directed by Courtney & Mark Sposato

Syopsis: After her mother’s death, Cass Milligan returns home for the first time in years, only to find the house isn’t done with her. She’s convinced it’s haunted. Her twin brother thinks she’s unraveling. As buried memories surface, they must uncover the truth before the past swallows her whole.

Review: The debut feature film from Courtney & Mark Sposato, Between Two Waves overcomes its limited budget to provide a surprisingly effective exercise in sci-fi horror minimalism. Utilizing phenomenal atmosphere, the Sposatos breathe life into the film’s titular setting: an old house that feels stately and imposing yet grounded in reality.

Paying respect to haunted house movies of yore, Between Two Waves’ script beautifully underplays traditional sci-fi horror tropes to sell the premise of a house with whispers of the occupant’s tortured past still clinging to the hallways. Every creak, rattle and footstep feels purposeful, every inch of the film’s mise-en-scene hinting at a history that’s never fully explained yet feels coherent and lived-in. The film succeeds where so many others of its kind fails: never feeling like spare parts cobbled together, but one impressive whole.

And it’s all held together by co-stars Koko Marshall, playing lead character Cass Milligan with equal parts wide-eyed fear and quiet resolve, and Dave Coleman, whose sardonic skepticism acts as a delightful counterbalance to the otherwise heavy tone without ever dipping into caricature. Together, these elements come together to weave a tale of family trauma with sparse yet effective dialogue that never feels extraneous or long-winded despite the off-kilter mythology it has to convey.

The film occasionally stumbles in the closing stretch, where you can feel the Sposatos’ narrative ambition exceeding the film’s capabilities. The film begins to feel unwieldy, but cruises to the finish line by staying rooted in its impeccably directed performances and phenomenal atmosphere.

THE TALL DARK MAN

Directed By Taylor Phillips

Synopsis: At her wits’ end, Natalie turns to local legend and summons a mythical hit man known only as The Tall Dark Man to dispatch with her blackmailing ex. When the murder goes horribly awry, she becomes the target of the very evil she summoned.

Review: A delightfully entertaining bounty hunter tale. Making the most of its lean 15-minute run time, The Tall Dark Man implements beautifully lilting dialogue and a languid, relaxed pace to provide one of the most tense sequences in the world of film shorts.

Centering on the immediate buildup of a broken woman (Ashleigh Morghan) hiring an enigmatic hitman (Aion Boyd) to eliminate her blackmailing ex, the short immediately sucks you in with Boyd’s captivating performance. Evoking the villains of an old Leone western, Boyd’s unnamed hitman arrests the senses, as director Phillips simply lets the camera roll on his distinctive sunken features and lets him rattle off soliloquies that wouldn’t be out of place in a 60s Spaghetti Western. Yet somehow, he retains his menace and never dips into caricature, largely due to his fantastic chemistry with co-star Morghan, who fantastically captures an exhausted 21st century woman with a loving heart despite her minimal dialogue.

The short’s pacing is top-notch, lingering on shots and allowing the tension to naturally ratchet up. Each story beat is allowed the time to sink in, accented by the short’s percussive score that feels engineered to get the heart pumping. The writing balances its unease with pitch-black comedy perfectly, as the hit’s target flees the house with an unplanned birthday clown in tow.

The film’s ending sequence, hinting at a further conflict between the lead duo, feels a bit rushed (a symptom of the film’s streamlined run time), but its lasting effect announces Phillips as a bold new player in the indie thriller scene.

ATTEMPTED MURDER

Directed By Gavin J. Konop

Synopsis: When a demented social outcast becomes the protege of an infamous slasher called the Jack-O-Lantern Killer, his aspirations spiral as he finds himself hindered by his own clumsiness and stupidity.

Review: Attempted Murder could have coasted on its simple yet effective premise: a 21st century “quiet incel” archetype trying to ascend to the level of a serial killer and failing miserably. Yet, director Gavin J. Konop instead decided to craft a universe melding pulpy Z-grade horror with 2000s-core high-school mumblecore-comedy, to fantastic results.

The film’s most immediate quality is its impeccable cinematography. With brightly rendered colors and dutch angles galore, the film’s sequences feel ripped out of 2003 in the best way possible. A particularly impressive in-camera one-shot flashback (simulated entirely through flawless foley and lighting changes) show that Konop is a director capable of transcending limitations and making a few hundred dollars seem like a few hundred thousand.

Not to mention, the story itself is fantastic.Daniel, played by Daniel Cuaron, plays a muted quiet outcast with aplomb, and his deadpan oafish presence yields unending laughs in comparison to the haunted visage of Don Erikson’s Jack, a serial killer wrestling with his own tortured past. As Daniel attempts to take up the mantle of his hero, his bumbling idiocy leads to some incredibly imaginative comedy of errors, as he winds up undoing the legacy of the man he once aspired to.

Maximizing the film’s 39 minutes or run time, Konop crams an entire world’s worth of backstory and manages to subvert it at the same time, poking fun at how the mythology of serial killers is actually quite commonplace in 21st century outcasts – but that society is safe because they lack the je ne sais quoi to do any real harm. It’s a laughably smart way to thumb your nose at modern-day society, and proves that Konop is primed to be a huge new voice in horror-comedy.

DOWN TOWN

Directed By Gavin Gaitan

Synopsis: An ensemble action-comedy that follows the stories of T-Mo (the hustler), Hunny (the prostitute) and Jerry (the junkie), over the course of 24 hours in the criminal underbelly of Los Angeles.

Review: To top it off, an LA classic: the ensemble crime story. Director Gavin Gaitan’s clear love for LA is on full display as he casts a harsh light on the rarely-seen dark corners of downtown Los Angeles in this tightly-knit, sprawling ensemble crime flick about three characters caught in a tangled web. Ensemble films live and die by their plotting, and Gaitan’s expert filmmaking let audiences loose into a tangled Chandlerian web that envelops the entire city. Narratives weave in and out of each other, yet never feel confusing or drag on. The film feels tight, streamlined, and effortlessly watchable.

Gaitan’s understanding and direction of character is top-notch. Lead duo T-Mo and Hunny, played by Donnevan Tolbert and Cheyenne Marie Washington, walk the unsteady tightrope of a truly toxic couple that spend most of their time arguing (in Gaitan’s spectacular dialogue lifted right off the streets of Compton) but remain effortlessly charming and lovable. Gaitan allows us moments of vulnerability with each duo, and despite their unending selfishness, audiences find themselves rooting for their success. Their reconciliation in the film’s climax is genuinely heart-rending, only to be hilariously undercut with yet another argument.

Lifting the plot are the escapades of Jerry, whose wimpish character should outwardly make you want to love him, but Gaitan actor Seth Aguirre somehow finds endless giggles in turning the camera onto Jerry and letting him get tortured over… and over…. and over. At every single turn.

With a who’s who of local character actors and cinematography that captures the dreamlike haze of the city, Gaitan captures an LA that feels boundless, both tantalizingly and terrifyingly. And as the film ends with all three characters scapering off into the night, audiences will be left clamoring for more of Gaitan’s vision.