It wouldn’t be Fantastic Fest without some avant-garde, weird or downright puzzling movies and these trio of films fit that bill perfectly. On one hand, it shows the ingenuity of indie filmmaking and the elasticity of the horror genre, but on the other the results are often hit or miss such is the case of Mushrooms, A Guide to Becoming an Elm Tree and Falling Stars.

With Mushrooms, writer/director Paweł Borowski establishes a mysterious, fairy-tale vibe that continues through most of the film. Filmed completely in a forest, it follows an old, grandmotherly woman (Maria Maj) as she collects various edible mushrooms and berries. Eventually, she comes across a young couple (Paulina Walendziak and Jędrzej Bigosiński) asleep in a clearing. She tries to sneak away, but steps on a branch and awakens the pair. The man tells the old woman that they were out drinking with friends the night before and that their friend group played a trick, leaving them penniless, without any forms of identification and in regal costumes, in the forest. They’re obviously lost, the young woman’s leg is sprained and they desperately need help.

What follows is a slow burn tale of paranoia, as neither the old woman nor the young couple seem completely trustworthy. Mushrooms is the kind of tale that lives on that edge of tension, as your loyalties switch back and forth. It has a very timeless vibe and the clothes the trio wears suggests we’re watching a fairy tale. Borowski leans heavily into this and uses our distrust against us. Clocking in around 70 minutes, Mushrooms still feels long and requires a lot of patience.

I can almost guarantee that you won’t see where the narrative ultimately ends and it’s the kind of film that lives or dies on its ending moments. I don’t actually know how to process the ending…in fact, I’m not sure whether I should be appalled at the direction it goes. I also don’t know how well it will be received by audiences at large. Sure, it recontextualizes everything that came before, but I’m still not certain that’s enough here given the direction it goes. If you’re looking for a gut punch of an ending, you’ll probably find it here…but it’s a little too slow and meandering for me.

Another film that tries to do so much with very little, but is slightly more successful is the long-winded title A Guide to Becoming an Elm Tree, an Irish production that screams avant-garde. Filmed in black and white and in 4:3 resolution (bringing to mind The Lighthouse), writers/directors Adam Mann and Skye Mann craft an ode to a lost loved one with genre slightly at the periphery. The plot is simple: Padraig (James Healy-Meaney) is a widower and enlists the workshop and help of John (Gerry Wade), a carpenter, to craft a coffin for his dead wife. He pays the carpenter up front and then the carpenter gives him a history book on trees and points him to an elm tree to chop down for wood.

Things get slightly more complicated from there, but A Guide to Becoming an Elm Tree is mostly about the rich folkloric and supernatural traditions of Ireland. From wood spirits to morality tales that tie into the narrative, the film becomes a fairy tale about fairy tales. Filmed with virtually no special effects, Adam and Skye rely on editing and robust sound design to slip in the horror touch. With a very small cast and most of the time spent on dialogue or watching everyday actions, the film is a definite slow burn, even at 75 minutes. Smartly, the fairy tales and stories told inform the mental state of Padraig and whispers, both supernatural and of the more local variety, suggest something slightly sinister hiding underneath. It didn’t completely work for me, but for those who are receptive to its charms will find it haunting, yet ephemeral.

Rounding out this trio of avant-garde fairy tales is Falling Stars, the most successful of the bunch. Filmmaking duo Gabriel Bienczycki and Richard Karpala’s feature envisions a world where witches are real, a yearly harvest keeps them at bay and they fall from the sky as…well, the titular falling stars. The film gives us some obscure mythology but mostly just drops us into this world as we follow a trio of brothers who want to see a witch’s corpse. The first act is masterful, as it slowly introduces us to the world and the stakes.

It opens with a woman running down a barren desert road with her two dogs in the bright sunlight. She looks up to the sky, horror dawning on her face…and then she vanishes; whisked away by an unseen force. From there, day turns to night as we see a burgers burning on a grill. Wind blows over a napkin, and the camera tracks it and then up to a TV where an emergency broadcast warns residents to stay inside. This, then, transitions to an ON AIR sign as we meet Barry (J. Aaron Boykin) who runs a late night radio show. Finally, we see the moon in the sky, half illuminated, before it’s revealed to be a reflection of a telescope that one of three brothers looks through.

It’s this opening, helped along by some fantastic cinematography by co-director Gabriel Bienczycki that initially pulled me into the story. This attention to detail helps foster suspense and pulls the viewer in, even when the narrative gets muddled in the second half. Unfortunately, like the previous two films, this feels like a long short film stretched to feature length, particularly with the choice in the second act to careen from the trio of brothers’ story to the Radio DJ. Sure, we get a bit more of the story as the brothers call into the radio station, but it completely resets the narrative in a specific way, cutting away the tension and adding an unnecessary layer. Not only does it cut the tension and sense of overpowering isolation, but it deflates any of the powerful moments from the third act because the attention is away from the core group.

Falling Stars is a movie I admired more than I liked and while the narrative crumbles, the filmmaking technique on display makes me excited to see what Gabriel Bienczycki and Richard Karpala do next.