The Melbourne International Film Festival 2025: Ghosts, Chainsaws, and Porridge

The Melbourne International Film Festival returns for another year of movies and events at one of the best festivals in the world. 

This year had the usual batch of classics, exclusives, documentaries, shorts, and experiences. I found myself focused on movies about death, ghosts, grief, and murder this year. Oh, and a documentary about porridge. 

Here are some of my highlights from this year’s festival.

Chain Reactions (Alexandre O. Phillippe)

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (reviewed below) is a seminal piece of renegade horror that recently turned 50 years old. If it’s not on the horror Mount Rushmore, it’s definitely in the conversation, and Chain Reactions gathers five of its biggest fans to discuss the movie from five unique standpoints. 

The documentary, broken into chapters, features comedian Patton Oswalt, director Takashi Miike, film critic Alexandra Heller-Nichols, novelist Stephen King, and director Karyn Kasuma. The choice of voices is what puts Alexandre O. Philippe’s documentary above other movie retrospectives, as he manages to find five people who, while united by a love of this movie, come at it from five different, fascinating directions. These disparate angles on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre create a rich overview of all the myriad reasons to love this horror classic.

Seeing a comedian in the lineup, you could expect a snarky take on the movie, but Patton Oswalt is not that kind of comedian, and instead, he focuses on the strange beauty that can be found in this horrific movie. On the flipside, Takashi Miike talks about how this movie showed him that film can be painful, and that’s a good thing. Australian critic, Alexandra Heller-Nichols, talks about the inherent Aussie-ness of the movie, especially the shitty VHS that got released over here (more about that later).

Master of horror Stephen King goes deep on the scrappiness of the movie with its grindhouse feel, and the importance of making this kind of unsanitized horror in a world of increasingly clean surfaces and straight lines. Finally, Karyn Kasuma brings it home, discussing the big topics: class and masculinity and the politics of something like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. 

Overall, this is one of the best movies about movies I’ve seen in a long time. It is a love letter to the movie, the genre, and the filmmakers made with never-before-seen footage and fans who can see beneath the surface of the film to the rich undercurrent of wonderful things below.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper)

When The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was released in Australia, it had been banned for ten years. Before its release, the only way to see it was grey-market video tapes that your older brother’s mate’s uncle would supply, and then it would be a shoddy transfer full of crackling sound and washed-out colours. 

In Chain Reactions, Alexandra Heller-Nichols talks about how the colours were so saturated on the Australian VHS tapes that everything looked yellow, which made it very fitting in Australia, as our horror (or sort of horror) movies are often set outdoors in the blazing, yellow Aussie sun: Wolf Creek, Wake in Fright, Picnic at Hanging Rock. It’s almost as though they made a version of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre just for us. 

And the screening I saw at MIFF was from one of those videotapes, transferred onto film and projected on the big screen with all of its imperfections intact, and it was perfect. Watching it like that made it feel like something forbidden, like it had been smuggled in and we weren’t meant to see it. I’ve seen The Texas Chain Saw Massacre many times, but usually on crisp Blu-rays with meticulous transfers and rich sound. This was like watching someone’s Super 8 footage of a bloodbath. 

50 years have not softened this movie, and watching it in a double feature with Chain Reactions was wonderful, as I could apply the insights I had taken from Patton Oswalt et al, straightaway to the film itself. Even with the degraded version we were watching, the beauty that Tobe Hooper manages to hide in the horror shines through, as well as the dark, wry humour that is not talked about enough. Seeing the movie in a packed house of fans and first-timers really showed me how fun this movie can be when it’s not claustrophobically chilling. 

We Bury the Dead (Zak Hilditch)

It is insanely hard to have a fresh take on the zombie genre. After all, Wikipedia lists at least 400 of them and after a certain amount of time, you would think every iteration of “the dead are now alive” would be done. We Bury The Dead proves that that time has not come yet with this inventive, scary, and poignant take on the zombie movie.

In We Bury the Dead, the American government has tested a new weapon off the coast of Tasmania that has caused an EMP, shutting off the brains of everyone on the island, leaving Tasmania a dead wasteland. Volunteers from all over the world gather to help with body disposal, including American Ava (Daisy Ridley), whose husband was on a business trip to Tasmania and Clay (Brenton Thwaites), an Aussie trying to impress his estranged wife with a good deed.

When they arrive in Tassie, they learn that some of the dead have woken up, and though they haven’t come back to life, Ava sees it as a chance to see her husband one last time, even though he’s on the other side of the island from her. 

We Bury the Dead is a rumination on grief and the way we lose loved ones sometimes without a goodbye or on bad terms. It is also a road trip movie, a haunted house horror, and a showcase for the talents of Daisy Ridley, an actress who has followed her Star Wars trilogy with interesting and varied roles like this and Sometimes I Think About Dying. 

We Bury the Dead owes a lot to the 28 Days Later/Years Later movies in its realism, bleakness tinged with comedy, and a military character who isn’t a hundred per cent on the level. It has that same removal of gung-ho heroes to focus on the small story within a large tragedy and how human beings deal with the abyss when it catches your eye. 

A Useful Ghost (Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke)

Winner of the Cannes Grand Prix award, A Useful Ghost is an odd beast. On paper, it sounds like a silly comedy concept: a dead woman haunts her husband’s vacuum cleaner. Instead, we get a dark, slow-paced rumination on the importance of remembering the past, no matter how painful or shameful those memories might be. 

The deadpan dialogue is reminiscent of Yorgos Lanthimos or Riley Sterns, which sells the absurd central conceit. The movie also doesn’t bother with having characters doubt March (Wisarut Himmarat) when he says his vacuum is haunted by the ghost of Nat (Davika Hoorne), and his family are more concerned with the embarrassment of the whole situation and their dislike for his wife when she was alive.

I’m not sure if I enjoyed this movie or endured it, as its glacial pace and meandering plot are sometimes a strength, sometimes a weakness, as often the lack of movement adds to the comedy and other times it feels stilted and boring.

The meta-narrative of an academic suffering a different vacuum cleaner haunting is a beautiful queer love story that crescendos in a wonderfully poignant, funny, and sad sex scene that underlines the movie’s main strength of combining multiple disparate tones in a single scene and making each one work. 

The Golden Spurtle (Constantine Costi)

After chainsaw massacres, ghosts, zombies, and grief, it was nice to settle in for The Golden Spurtle, a short (85 minutes) documentary about the annual porridge world championship held in Caddbridge, Scotland and the people who run the competition. 

Similar to previous year’s documentaries about unusual documentaries like Pecking Order (chicken fanciers) and Set! (table setting champions), The Golden Spurtle focuses on the history of the championship as well as a select number of competitors. My 2025 brain, raised on a diet of reality TV feuds, kept expecting a villain to appear, but, other than one contestant who was a bit too posh for my tastes, the entrants were all just lovely people who liked to make excellent porridge. 

As the world becomes increasingly hostile and scary, a documentary like The Golden Spurtle is a tonic. It’s a warm, conflict-free blanket of friendly and engaging people who come together from all over the world once a year to enjoy the beautiful Scottish countryside and big bowls of fantastic-looking porridge.