Amazing Fantasy Fest Coverage
Fragment review
Amazing Fantasy Fest’s opening feature showcased a strong lead performance, great visuals, and plenty of intentional head scratching.
Festival reviews will not contain spoilers.
Fragment
Directed by Robert Vornkahl
Written by Katy Baldwin and Kristi Shimek
Starring Hailee Lipscomb and Nick Jax Slater
Fragment Review
The Buffalo Dreams Fantastic Film Festival is no more. In its place…Amazing Fantasy Fest. While this is the first year under this name…founder Gregory Lamberson has been running festivals in Western New York for over a decade. What’s in a name? Well…it’s a lot less wordy for one thing. The intentions haven’t changed, however. Amazing Fantasy Fest carries on the Buffalo Dreams tradition of bringing the wildest independent genre pictures available to a theater near…well…me. Setting up shop at the Amherst Theatre for the second straight year, Lamberson curated another batch of crazy films to dive into. For posterity’s sake, the first feature film ever screened at Amazing Fantasy Fest was Robert Vornkahl’s Fragment.
Fragment is an odd one. The kind of odd that makes it a sensible opening feature for a film festival that revels in the odder sides of genre filmmaking. A woman’s (Hailee Lipscomb) attempts to get pregnant are undermined by an overbearing husband, strange neighbors and her work. Fragment is a slice of personal cosmic horror that sees a woman questioning her sanity in a world that might be gaslighting her.
Fragment is a gorgeously shot picture. It also features a very strong lead performance from Hailee Lipscomb. Some of the metaphors are easy to place. The woman tends to a garden where nothing will grow…a clear allegory for her own struggle to create life. Others are…more difficult to connect. Despite a consistent effort to present her job writing code as a piece of the story…I never figured out what it had to do with anything. She stares at a screen, occasionally chatting with a colleague…working to solve a coding problem. She eventually does…and the colleague ceases communications with her. Why? I have no idea. Not everything has to mean something.
Her main issue comes in the form of her husband (Nick Jax Slater). He is controlling well past a point of concern. He monitors her every movement forcing her to adhere to a strict schedule as they attempt to conceive. They’ve lost a pregnancy before…which explains some of his actions…but not enough to understand why she continues to put up with it. She rebels by leaving the house against his wishes to tend her garden and jog off their property…but, for the most part, completely lets him off the hook.
As this is 2024…questions of whether a character is crazy or being gaslit really only ever go one way. Fragment dresses up some of its more obvious story beats by deploying fun science fiction/cosmic horror elements on the story. Visions and odd occurrences that may or may not be happening begin to plague the woman. Her husband befriends the nearest neighbors (Robert Donovan and Siri Olsen) to their desert property. Their strange attitudes do not help the growing sense of danger closing in around her.
Fragments take place mostly in one setting. The couple’s unfinished home makes for a memorable place…and the beautiful vistas spotted during jogging sessions make the world feel more open than it is. It creates an interesting effect. The journeys give the allusion of freedom that the woman doesn’t really have. She’s emotionally, if not physically, bound to their empty, under construction, home. Trapped by a series of schedules and rules with life lived on a timer. He may as well be constructing a cage. He may very well be. The relationship between the couple is never something that you trust as a viewer…making it easy to side with the woman when she proclaims something is wrong.
Which is what we’re supposed to do. Like I said…in a modern storytelling battle between crazy and gaslit…always bet on the latter. There is evil afoot in Fragment. The cosmic warnings and horror imagery don’t even begin to cover it. The woman can’t make anything grow. Not in her garden…and not inside of her. Her husband’s intense desire for a progeny is a flashing red light…no cosmic interference needed.
Fragment ups the memorable imagery as it begins to hint at answers. It remains purposefully confusing, guided by Lipscomb’s excellent performance, until the time is right to uncover what is truly growing in this desert. It embraces the darkest corners of its cosmic story…recontextualizing what came before. Fragment can be frustrating from moment to moment (especially regarding the couple’s relationship) …but it jogs us to a memorable destination.
Scare Value
As the first feature shown at the newly branded Amazing Fantasy Fest (formerly Buffalo Dreams Fantastic Film Festival), Fragment sets a solid foundation. It has a lot of the hallmarks of what the festival wants to be. It’s dark. It’s odd. There’s serious talent behind the camera that more people should be exposed to. It features a wonderful lead performance. And, as is often the case, a (sometimes) baffling narrative refuses to lead us by the hand as we try to follow where it’s going. Basically, a perfect fit for a festival full of truly original films.
