Fantastic Fest ’23: A low-budget speculative tale’s ambition outstrips its ability in Falling Stars

Courtesy of Fantastic Fest

This is part of our coverage of new genre films premiering at Austin’s Fantastic Fest. 

Establishing yourself as a promising new cinematic voice doesn’t mean your first film needs to be perfect. That might sound antithetical, but if a strong voice and vision can shine through a small budget, then that’s proof of a talent worth taking note of. Case in point: Richard Karpala and Gabriel Bienczycki’s feature debut, Falling Stars, is very much a substance-over-style affair. Thankfully their world-building and characters are (mostly) enough to distract from their overactive sense of flair.

The film opens with a succinct scrawl that sets up the world: While Mayans helped shape calendars as we know them, it turns out their system was flawed. Most know the new year to starts on Jan 1, but a subset of individuals across the globe claim it’s October 15, otherwise called “first harvest.” For these folks, life exists in the mystical realm where nightly curfews and wind advisories are coded messages. Warnings of falling stars in the vicinity mean witches are descending to earth.

Sitting out and staring at the night sky, three brothers, Mike (Shaun Duke Jr.), Sal (Andrew Gabriel), and Adam (Rene Leech) ponders the existence of witches. Throughout their lives, they’ve been told numerous stories, and yet, they’ve never actually seen a witch. Suddenly, Mike drops a bomb: his buddy Rob (Greg Poppa) has not only seen a witch, he also killed and buried one. Before you can say “bad idea” the trio head off to Rob’s for a date with destiny.

Arriving at the burial site, Rob lays down the rules: Don’t touch the witch, don’t look too long at the witch, don’t pour anything on the witch. Doing so will curse anyone in the vicinity. Curious to get a better look, Adam accidentally knocks over a beer that dribbles on the tarp. Mike worries it counts as desecration and freaks out. Rob claims it’s fine, but events prove to be anything but when Rob mysteriously vanishes.

Because there’s no budget to do much else, after the trio make their way back to the burial site Falling Stars gets talky, and as a result loses momentum.

Shrouding things in mystery isn’t a bad thing, as it can often draw viewers in, but having a juicy setup with no payoff can be a letdown, and the film veers dangerously close to this territory. As uneven as the second half of the film is, it still introduces interesting ideas like the consequences of seeing a witch, outside skepticism, and the theory that falling witches can take over human bodies.

It’s hard to fault Falling Stars for its shortcomings, considering how ambitious it manages to be even with a shoestring budget. Its mumblecore-ish nature can be refreshing, but ultimately it leads to cop-outs and recycling old material, which knocks a few points off its total grade.

Conversely, given how good the actors and ideas are here, it’s easy to imagine Falling Stars being remade with a bigger budget, something which recently happened when 2014’s Last Shift was remade as this year’s Malum. Even if that isn’t the case, Karpala and Bienczycki show they are directors with vision, a pair whose work is worth keeping an eye on.