But before I explain it, I'll note that my third MIFF day -- this past Friday, after kicking off the festival last Friday and Saturday -- was, like the previous two, also a double feature. And like the previous two, both movies in that double feature were at the same venue, which is not at all usually the case with my MIFF double features. Usually I'm just lining up whatever I want to see and hoping that the time in between them is enough to get to the second one. With my 2026 MIFF double features, I knew it was enough, because they were one after another at the same venue.
The major shift from the first four movies, though, was in language. My first four MIFF movies were all in a different one from my own: two in French, and one each in Mandarin and Japanese. The funny thing about those two in French, though, is that neither director is actually from France or another country where French is spoken. Parallel Tales' Asghar Farhadi hails from Iran, and The Diary of a Chambermaid's Radu Jude is Romanian. (And so, there is a small amount of Romanian in Chambermaid.)
The two movies on Friday night were both in English, and both hail from Australia, the only two such films I'm seeing at the festival. In fact, the next four are also in English, before we return to -- you guessed it -- French for the final film.
And Friday night's movies were both at the Capitol, my favorite MIFF venue, which otherwise never hosts commercial movies. So I've only ever seen MIFF movies there.
The place looks even more like an amazing spaceship from where I was sitting for the first movie, a lot farther back than I usually sit. The reason I sat so far back? Allocated seating, or as Americans would know it, assigned seating. I think that was a first for this venue, and they did it at both movies.
In any case, here is that view:
But I haven't even told you what the movies were, or, as per my tradition, what I did before getting there.
Determined not to have as much unprogrammed time as I did before last Friday's double feature, I went shopping first for a USB fan, since the one I have at work died that very afternoon. There were times when I thought it might have been dead previously, when it just wouldn't start at all. But a well-placed smack on the side always got it going again. This time? It slowed down more and more until the blades were barely turning. That gave me the confidence to call a time of death.
I couldn't find a USB fan at Big W, but I used up enough time on the attempt that I almost found I'd fallen behind the pace. So I had to hurry to my current favorite restaurant in Chinatown -- in other words, the one I know has the dish I like so I don't bother to try any others -- and gobbled down this:
Yeah it's as yummy as it looks.
The service was so fast that I had plenty of time to stroll over to the Capitol -- enough, actually, that I succumbed to the wafting smells of a crepe stand on the way, especially inviting on a winter's night.
The first movie was Maddelin McKenna's Mad Rush, and this was its world premiere. In fact, it was such a "friends and family" type screening that I almost felt like I had walked into the wrong cinema. As various people spoke at a podium before the film -- including McKenna and her producer, Sarah Clayton -- there were concentrated cheers of adoring loved ones every time a name was dropped for one of the people involved in the production, most if not all of whom would have been there in the audience. It made me feel a slight twinge of guilt for seeing it as "just" your average punter, to use the Australian term, who thought the premise looked interesting and therefore stole a seat from someone who might have been more directly invested in it. (Though the seating capacity is pretty large, as you can probably tell from the picture above.)
That premise was that the lead actress you see above, Senuri Chanandri, plays an Australian woman named Madisha, who gets called by a scammer and marched around the Melbourne central business district while also going about the events of her day, including learning that her roommate intends to move out of their apartment, and running into a former coworker at the workplace from which she was just fired.
And so this is where you get half the title above. I'm pretty sure this is the first MIFF film I've seen that was set primarily in the same neighborhoods where MIFF takes place, Melbourne's central business district, or CBD. And so yeah, I did get some enjoyment from pointing out familiar locales, some of which I had just walked through, which is a real rarity given the lack of movies set in Melbourne. In fact, Mad Rush may be the first movie where I've ever gotten to point out locations that were familiar to me from 13 years of living in this city.
Unfortunately, I didn't get a huge amount of enjoyment from the rest of the film, and I'm sorry to those filmmakers who may be reading this. (I like to think my blog doesn't actually get out there very far, but with a small movie like this just having its debut, I think it's possible if not likely that they will be reading this.)
My chief complaint was that I found it very hard to relate to the main character, who shows the sort of gullibility in the face of an obvious scam that you might expect of a 75-year-old with Alzheimer's coming on. And I do know people in that position are susceptible to such scams, where they force you to a bank to withdraw your money while staying on the phone line during the whole process, because that sort of chicanery befell my mother, who indeed was showing the early signs of dementia. In her case it was a few years earlier than age 75.
But the character played by Chanandri is supposed to be about, I don't know, 28? What 28-year-old in Melbourne in 2026 does not have their radar up for obvious scams? I know scammers do their thing because it works on some people, but I don't feel like a 28-year-old, who is a bit lost but otherwise appears to be a person of intelligence, would just march around the city, withdrawing money and trying to get to places to wire it, because a trio of shady people on the other end of the phone line, who pass off to each other to continue trying to play good cop-bad cop with her, have told her to do so. It frustrates us in the way that characters who create their own problems frustrate us. The events of Mad Rush could have been avoided entirely if Madisha just said "Get fucked!" and hung up on them in the first instance.
If the film had at least reached a sort of conventional climax for a film like this, that would have been something, but it very much drifts off in the middle of a thought. I thought I even might have missed something at the end because I have to admit I did nod off for a second. I was almost prompted to ask someone in the lobby afterward, but my sense of decorum made me think better of it.
One interesting tie-in to my reality, though: I myself had just found the night before that I had been the victim of a scam, or rather, the victim of fraud. And maybe my own high alert to it was one of the reasons I didn't believe Madisha's reaction to it.
I won't bore you with all the gory details, but the previous Thursday night I'd gotten a weird text that was purporting to be from my bank asking me to verify a suspicious transaction. The formatting of the text seemed a bit off so I just said "Scam" and didn't really think about it again.
But then the night before Mad Rush, I happened to mention it, and my wife and I checked our bank history. About $1,000 in small charges appeared against the account, between $10 and $23, that were listed as Australia Post. So I spent some time on the phone -- a lot less than I thought I would -- registering the fraud, which my bank will investigate and likely refund. They had me cut up my card and will be issuing a new one. And that's the first time a thing like that has ever happened to me.
I should have checked the account at the time to make sure this text had no basis in reality, and in fact, I do think the text was part of the scam, and not actually from my bank. But just because the text was a scam, it doesn't mean there wasn't something really going on.
I think my own reaction to this text, just dismissing it as a scam immediately, is part of the reason I didn't buy Madisha's willingness to take these mysterious callers at face value. Yes, even though they talked about this being the only way to secure the safety of her finances, I just didn't believe that a smart 28-year-old would fall for the sort of scheme that's targeted at the oldest and most infirm in our society.
In between my movies, I had a caramel macchiato at the Starbucks next door while writing an email reply to a friend who had been due one for about ten days. I also did my Duolingo Japanese lesson for the day and snacked up for the second movie, which began about an hour after the first one got out.
And this one I liked a lot more. The Fox is also Australian but stars Australians you've heard of: Jai Courtney, Emily Browning, Claudia Doumit, Damon Herriman and Miranda Otto. Though those are only the on-screen talent. There are talking animals in this movie, one of whom, a magpie, is claimed by Australians even though he's Kiwi (Sam Neill), and the other of whom, the titular fox, is a Brit (Olivia Colman.)
In fact, while we're on the subject of Neill:
If you can't read what that says, it says "This session is dedicated to the memory of Sam Neill. Forever in film."
Although this was not the premiere, the director, Dario Russo, spoke here too.
There are some surprises that I may have to spoil in order to explain the other intriguing half of my subject.
Courtney plays a small-town farmer who has proposed to his girlfriend, played by Browning, who is not happy at all, but accepts his proposal because a whole pub is looking on when he makes it. (And she's right -- he may not be the worst guy in the world, but he's not fulfilling her needs at all.) It becomes hard for him to ignore the evidence that she's sleeping with her boss (Herriman), also not a great guy, and one night, while hunting a fox who has been eating his chickens, he's got the fox dead to rights. Only he doesn't kill her, because the fox starts speaking to him, and telling him of a magical hole in the ground that can make his girlfriend, who has already started trying to end the engagement, more compliant. All he has to do is throw her into it.
I don't need to tell you what ensues, but I can tell you that a lot of it is very funny, and the funniest part may be the foul-mouthed magpie played by the dearly departed Neill. He's always trying to get somebody to get him a chicken in exchange for not ratting them out for something they've done. That magpie is a right bastard and he's hilarious.
So let's talk about the magical holes.
If you don't know Herriman, you probably should. He's played Charles Manson in multiple projects, most notably Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and has crossed over in other ways that I'm not bothering to check right now.
The role that's relevant to The Fox, and to the title of this post, is his role in my favorite movie of last year, Michael Shanks' Together.
If you haven't seen Together, you are probably still familiar with the premise, which is that the two main characters (played by real-life husband and wife Dave Franco and Alison Brie) find themselves involved in a phenomenon where mysterious forces are causing their bodies to begin fusing together.
And where do they contract this weird phenomenon? Oh, it just happens to be a hole in the ground in the woods that they stumble into.
I just thought it was funny that Herriman would be in movies two years in a row that involve holes in the ground where people emerge quite changed after falling in. And I won't tell you how this hole changes these people, because that would be a spoiler, and The Fox is good enough not to spoil. In fact, I believe it's now my favorite of the six MIFF I've seen in 2026.
The next will be on Tuesday, when I've got just one film, but only because I had to cancel the other half of that double feature, having already watched the second movie I planned to watch (Mile End Kicks) in order to write my MIFF preview. The movie I am seeing is Rose of Nevada, from director Mark Jenkin, who directed Enys Men.
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