Megalomaniac (2023)
Director: Karim Ouelhaj Run Time: 118 min. Release Year: 2023
Starring: Benjamin Ramon, Eline Schumacher, Pierre Nisse, Raphaëlle Lubansu, Wim Willaert
Country: Belgium
Language: French with English subtitles
About the film:
Winner of the Jury Prize for Best Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Film Festival, along with the Outstanding Performance Award for Eline Schumacher.
Martha and Félix are the children of the Butcher of Mons, a notorious Belgian serial killer from the 1990s. Unstable and riddled with insecurities, Martha lives vicariously through social media. Her brother, crushed by the family legacy, takes over their father’s killings. Harassed and violently assaulted at work, the docile Martha falls into madness and goes through the looking glass into her’s brother’s strange and terrifying world.
“an arthouse psychological descent… [with] boundary-pushing, hyper-violent horror… Megalomaniac is a conversation starter”
—Meagan Navarro, Bloody Disgusting
About the filmmaker:
Karim Ouelhaj is an author, director, and producer. He founded the audiovisual production company Okayss to support his freedom of expression with his first feature film, Parabola (2005), which was selected at Venice Days in 2005. The film is the first part of Ouelhaj’s societal triptych that includes 2013’s Monkey Dust (Le Repas Du Singe) and 2015’s A Reality Every Second (Une Réalité Par Seconde). In 2016, his award-winning fantasy short film The Frozen Eye (L’oeil Silencieux) won the Grand Prix and the Méliès d’argent at BIFFF (Belgium) followed by the Méliès d’Or at the 2016 European Fantastic Film Festivals Federation. Among other projects, he directed an experimental musical movie around the Belgian rock band Frank Shinobi in 2010.
His fourth feature as a director, the hyper-violent Megalomaniac (2023) won the Cheval Noir Award, the top prize for best feature at the 2022 Fantasia Film Festival.
See our upcoming films