Fishbrain (2026)
Fishbrain is a stunner. Max Vanderspuy's short is a grim, briny little nightmare about love curdling into resentment, and it builds to some of the most impressive body horror I have seen in any film this year, let alone one this length. It is nasty, tender and genuinely accomplished, and it announces a real talent. Three and a half stars, and I cannot wait to see what he does with a feature.
The setup is bleak and beautifully controlled. Ori, played by Chloe Lea, is left alone in a decaying coastal town to care for her grandfather, a man clearly in the grip of some worsening illness and, quite possibly, dementia. He is not an easy patient. He is cruel to her, relentlessly, and the film sits in the airless misery of that arrangement, the burden of duty owed to someone who offers only spite in return. John Henshaw is excellent as the old man, pitiable and monstrous at once.
Worn down and desperate to escape, Ori settles on a way out: she begins feeding him the toxic fish that have washed up dead along the shore. What starts as a grounded, miserable character study then takes a hard turn into the surreal, and this is where Fishbrain truly comes alive. There is a scene, and I will not spoil the how of it, in which Ori is plunged into a churning mass of fish guts and begins, horribly, to transform.
The body horror that follows is extraordinary. It put me in mind of An American Werewolf in London, that same tactile, practical, stomach-turning craft, only wrung out of a short film's resources, which makes it all the more remarkable. It is little wonder the film has already picked up a production design award; every slick, glistening, awful detail is on screen and completely convincing. I actually recoiled, in the best possible way.
What lifts it above a mere exercise in gross-out is that the horror means something. This is a film about love and duty, and about how easily the two can rot into resentment when care becomes a cage. The transformation is not just a spectacle, it is the externalising of everything Ori has swallowed down, all that obligation and disgust made flesh. It is body horror as metaphor, and it lands.
If I am reaching for a criticism, it is only that a story this rich left me wanting more of it, which is exactly the reaction a proof-of-concept short should provoke. Vanderspuy is reportedly developing Fishbrain into his debut feature, and on this evidence that is very good news indeed. Three and a half stars. A brilliantly crafted, quietly devastating piece of horror with a real idea beating under all the slime. Seek it out.
Reviewed from a screener. Fishbrain had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country United Kingdom: The Driver (1978), Pride (2014), The Muppet Movie (1979)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More horror: The Influencer Project (2026), Child (2026), Leave Me Alone (2025)
