Fantastic Fest: 13 Days Till Summer is a chilly, effective slasher
Photo courtesy Akson Studio
Fantastic Fest 2025 is taking place in Austin, Texas right now, and the yearly indie/genre film fest has a bunch of cool, killer premieres. These films are either headed to theaters soon or are looking for distribution. Our film writer, Adrian Torres, is covering the new releases. Catch up on all these previews right here.
Bartoz M. Kowalski’s Playground, which played Fantastic Fest in 2016, is a film that lives in festival infamy. Kowalski’s flick is a slice-of-life story, following the last day of school through the lens of three pre-teens. In the final act, it becomes a true crime film culminating in a truly horrific sequence of the kind that stays with you for years. It’s utterly gut-wrenching.
Nine years on, Kowalski returned to Fantastic Fest with his latest work, 13 Days Till Summer. A dark, mean, unforgiving slasher that’s exactly what you’d expect from the envelope-pushing director.
We begin introduced to gangly teenager Antek (Teodor Koziar), who’s talking with the police after finding the body of an unhoused person in a park. The police suggest to Anek that his school’s former janitor, who previously murdered his wife and kid before vanishing completely exactly one year ago, could be a suspect.
Antek is visibly shaken by the experience, but the rest of his life isn’t exactly sunshine and rainbows. He’s mercilessly tormented by bullies at school. His sister, Paula (Katarzyna Galazka), blames him for their mother’s recent exit from their life. As their father leaves on a work trip for the weekend, Paula gathers her rowdy friends for an impromptu party that Antek feels too fragile to fight.
Once the party kicks into full swing, 13 Days Till Summer starts to show its teeth. A masked killer seizes control of the siblings’ smart home and systematically begins tormenting the teens in shocking and devious ways.
Kowalski and co-writers Mirella Zaradkiewicz and Thor Magnuson are refreshingly matter of fact in how they present the situation. There might be smartphones and apps that control the shutters and doors of the smart house, but overall, the role of tech is relatively low-key. There’s no Scream-esque postmodern winking or nodding. No reinvention or subversions like Freaky or Happy Death Day. No social media commentary like Bodies Bodies Bodies. This is just a pure slasher that operates coolly and effectively.
The characters fit expected archetypes, but they never feel thin. They all have personality traits that help them stand out from one another. That helps given the dispassionate way the killer offs their victims. Each one has a heft to it, even if the kill lasts only for a few seconds. Cinematographer Cezary Stolecki holds a few extra beats on these moments, the weight of each death is that much more uncomfortable, and provides a discomforting slab to display the film’s unsettling practical gore.
The killer also features one of the most disturbing masks in recent memory, which features an upside-down face with slightly large eyes. It’s the kind of disturbingly simplistic image that burns into your brain and you hope you don’t see before you drift off to sleep.
The movie’s ending, which involves one of the most overused twists in cinema history, may seem like a cop-out at first. That’s exactly what Kowalski wants. He and Stolecki have trained viewers to hold their gaze at some rather nasty moments, only to expect them to roll their eyes when they pull the rug out beneath them. All the while, keeping the frame focused on what will happen when the screen goes to black. It may not be as cruel an ending as the one provided in Playground, but it’s just as evocative.
From the outside, 13 Days Till Summer might seem like the latest in a long list of slashers cashing in on the subgenre’s boom. Casting it off, though, would be foolish. How it operates in the smaller moments, the brutality of the kills, and the seemingly disaffected nature of the killer make it a surprising gem.
If that doesn’t sell you already, it’s 80 minutes long, including credits. Sometimes the best things come in small packages.
