Conor Marsh lives a secluded life with his dog, Sandy, until one day he begins playing Obex, a new, state-of-the-art computer game. When Sandy goes missing, the line between reality and game blurs and Conor must venture into the strange world of OBEX to bring her home.

Baltimore-based writer-director Albert Birney (Strawberry Mansion, 2021 Sundance Film Festival) returns with another delightfully skewed and surreal lo-fi fantasy. Set in pre-internet 1987 and strikingly shot in monochromatic black and white, the film depicts Conor’s (Birney) lonely existence of solitary screen time, transfixed by early Macs with slowly rendering graphics and TVs aglow with the horror movie late show.

Matching these hypnotic images, Birney immerses us in a dense soundscape of warm droning synths, clacking keyboards, malevolent static, chirping cicadas, and the click and whine of dot matrix printers. The film’s dreamy nostalgia soon becomes an analog nightmare as Conor finds himself trapped in a low-tech but high-stakes video game. 

We’ve been waiting to give you the good news for months: legendary director Lav Diaz’s new film, Magellan, is finally sailing on over to The Frida Cinema!

At the dawn of the modern era, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (Gael García Bernal) navigated a fleet of ships to Southeast Asia, attempting the first voyage across the vast Pacific Ocean. On reaching the Malay Archipelago, the crew pushed to the brink of madness in the harshness of the high seas and overwhelming natural beauty of the islands, Magellan’s obsession leads to a rebellion and reckoning with the consequences of power.

A vast, globe-spanning epic from Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz (Norte, The End Of History), Magellan presents the colonization of the Philippines as a primal, shocking encounter with the unknown and a radical retelling of European narratives of discovery and exploration.

Get ready for one of the wildest cinematic experiences of your life as Play It By Fear (@playitbyfear.33) kicks off their brand new Sunday Scaries series by screening Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 surrealist masterpiece Hausu (aka House).

The story follows a group of schoolgirls headed to a haunted house for summer vacation, only for things to go from weird to…weirder. From floating pianos to killer stuffed animals, the film is an explosion of colors and chaos.

Join us for this Japanese cult classic (and certified Frida Cinema Favorite) that has become legendary for its bizarre special effects, haunting visuals, and wacky storytelling. It needs to be seen (on the big screen) to be believed.

Akira Kurosawa kicked off the 1960s with his underrated film noir piece The Bad Sleep Well, screening at The Frida Cinema as part of our ongoing retrospective on the works of the legendary Japanese director.

The story is simple: a vengeful young man marries the daughter of a corrupt industrialist in order to seek justice for his father’s suicide. What follows is a film that combines elements of Hamlet and noir to chilling effect in exposing the corrupt boardrooms of postwar corporate Japan. 

Continuing his legendary collaboration with Toshiro Mifune, The Bad Sleep Well is a lesser-known stroke of genius in the filmmaker’s canon, but great nonetheless. See it on the big screen, where it rarely plays!

Play It By Fear (@playitbyfear.33) continues their brand new series, Sunday Scaries, with a belated 40th anniversary celebration of Steve Miner’s House! 

After the disappearance of his young son and a painful divorce, horror novelist Roger Cobb (William Katt) retreats to his late aunt’s spooky old mansion to write a book about his Vietnam War experiences. But solitude isn’t what he finds. The house is alive–filled with vengeful spirits, interdimensional portals, demonic entities, and at least one closet that REALLY needs a warning sign, man.

House is a gloriously bizarre blend of haunted-house horror and off-kilter comedy that only the 1980s could have produced. It’s a cult classic has earned a devoted following for one simple reason: it’s genuinely weird as hell.