A few months after cryptozoologist Barbara Valentine disappeared hunting for the mythic Sooka creature in the BC backwoods, Kay (Chloe Pirrie) tags along with a women’s walking group trekking through the same terrain. Branching out on her own, she has a close encounter of her own — emerging dazed and confused, no longer the same woman. Lost in more ways than one, she drifts across a highly sexed and misogynist Canadian hinterland, bouncing from seedy bars to middle class suburbia, becoming someone else along the way.
Oozing psycho-sexual anxiety, Kryptic feints toward creature-feature quirk, but its oddity morphs into something altogether stranger, slipping and sliding across fixed identities like a David Lynch movie, purposefully pitching us into a cosmic space beyond sat nav, where our coordinates have been scrambled. It gets murkier, muckier, yuckier… Kourtney Roy does not hold back! Playing a double role, Chloe Pirrie is a sister under the skin to Andrea Riseborough’s Mandy, while Cayne Mackenzie throws a big synth score over the whole thing, steps back and lights the match…
Special Event: Friday May 9, join us for KRYPTIC LIVE a one-time-only screening live scored by composer Cayne Mackenzie + Q&A with director Kourtney Roy (Tickets: $25)
A beautiful meditation of gender, time, and slime. Lots of slime.
Mary Beth McAndrews, Dread Central
A feminist-driven revenge movie as much as it is a a sickening (at times) creature feature, director Kourtney Roy has intentionally developed the thinking man’s thriller. Confusing and confronting, metaphorical and macabre, Kryptic is a dark fairytale of the little-girl-lost temperament that needs to be experienced above all. It may not make sense, but it’s undeniable how much you’ll remember. 4/5 stars.
Peter Gray, The AU Review
Kryptic is bizarre, jarring, and esoteric in its abstract approach, and Chloe Pirrie is the anchor holding it together.
Meagan Navarro, Bloody Disgusting
Kourtney Roy
Chloe Pirrie, Jeff Gladstone, Jason Deline, Ali Rusu-Tahir, Kamantha Naidoo
Canada
2024
English
Indigenous & Community Access
Credits
Screenwriter
Paul Bromley
Cinematography
David Bird
Editor
Tommaso Gallone
Original Music
Cayne McKenzie
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