This Brazilian cosmic horror is one of FrightFest 2026’s dark gems—a curveball gleaming in the Discover Screen schedule. Also, going by its introduction, it’s caused the kind of mischief (failing subtitles and cult audience numbers) that can only boost its reputation.
It’s like a hand reached from another dimension to mould the perfectly sized screen, screening room and a fairytale of buzz. And that’s understandable, given that it’s a deliciously balanced mix of crime, space terror, body horror, and startling physical VFX. Director Kapel Furman may be a floating, shimmering, gold-eyed extraterrestrial being of supreme power if the audience left buzzing by his fifth feature is anything to go by.
It starts with a nighttime story: a 15-minute monochrome prologue that fills us in on the grief-stricken early 20th-century engineer driven to madness by grief who builds mystical mechanisms to find his dead wife in a reality outside our own. Jump to the modern day, and two paramedics rescue a burnt woman on the plot of the engineer’s long-demolished house. In the gold she clutches in her hands, they see the route away from their very different problems.
It’s easy to get behind the two protagonists in this simply sketched tale of the knowable meeting the incomprehensible. The knowable is avarice; the incomprehensible is the madness-inducing multiverse. Almost everyone we meet covets gold – either to steal a better life or cheat fate – and for each it brings them into contact with the impossible. Like some of the genre’s greatest hits (Remanence firmly lodges some chains in Hellraiser, for instance), it’s the simple premise at the heart of it that resonates.
After the Engineer disappears from the mortal realm, the screenplay neatly introduces its characters. From their first scene, we know Victor is a womanising, commitment-shy paramedic living beyond his means, while his partner, Demian, is a struggling single parent crushed by his insurance company and bank. It’s in the cursed gold that they find a joint cause and then regret.
Furman’s visualisation of the cosmic horror brings an eerie charm. Remanence doesn’t create a new visual language for realms beyond comprehension so much as freshen up a huge number of classic and retro influences. It’s thrilling to glimpse into other dimensions, with inexplicable oozing planes of cosmic indifference, where bug proboscises probe statues orbiting Lovecraftian pyramids. While he wisely keeps reality on a small scale in the suburbs of Novo Hamburgo, Furman, as a VFX and make-up specialist, is clearly having a blast on the other side.
Then there’s the buzz. The film’s subtitle is Voltagem—A Voltage Cosmic Horror, which sums it up. It crackles and burns with cosmic potential and gloriously physical, vintage effects work. Horrifically adorable effects flesh out the world-building until that flesh starts falling off. The reanimated Engineer emerges into our world as a husky 80s-style desiccated corpse, floating in an electromagnetic storm that sends knives flying into ceilings, chisels backwards across desks, and, in one teeth-clenching scene, a fork scraping on its tines down a corridor. As he recovers his loot, his body steadily reanimates, his eyes resolving as gold spheres, which are even more freaky puppetry when, on a couple of occasions, he unleashes some impressively gory deaths.
As it unleashes multi-dimensional power on its implacable mission to recapture its looted gold, the Engineer is likely to make your skin crawl as much as your mouth grin. Still, it can’t all be a one-sided (if multi-dimensional) jewellery grab. There’s nuance, too. There aren’t any out-and-out villains to be dispatched or made to answer for their actions. Even the boorish Victor shows flashes of empathy for Demian’s home life. But they, like us, are just in the path of an unrepentant, unknowable force.
Quirky, artistic, culty, human, inhuman, fun, creepy… Remanence creates its wonder from very little. It’s another cosmic triumph of a debut at FrightFest.
Remanence had its European premiere at FrightFest 2026 on Friday, August 28
