Tim James Brown's film Modem—which received its world premiere on Thursday at the Raindance Film Festival and will have an encore screening there on Wednesday—hangs its narrative on a digital detox holiday that sends a family to a remote house in the Swedish woods. What could possibly go wrong? Even if the bucolic setting didn't sound suitably apt for a horror film, consider the terrifying prospect of a trip away with a tech-free teen. But Modem soon lets the digital world seep back into the family’s idyll when the hardware device of the title is discovered and plugged in; as you'd expect, it's a most nefarious piece of kit.
Once the modem connects to a nearby military comms tower, it triggers a chain of events in which the youngest child, Stig (Stig Lundström), vanishes from his cot while his dad, Michael (Josh Burdett), is supposed to be keeping an eye on him. When Michael’s wife, Johanna (Amanda Renberg), and stepdaughter, Nora (Nika Tallroth), return from shopping, a frantic search begins, and Detective Bergman (Fredrik Gunnarson) soon arrives on the scene. Bergman is familiar with the house—a well‑wrought prologue depicts a similar incident occurring 25 years earlier—but he decides to bring Michael in for questioning.
Michael's case isn't helped by the fact that he'd downed a few beers whilst on babysitting duty, and it's clear that both Nora and Johanna feel that Stig would still be here had Michael been more diligent. Johanna thinks that a couple of passing backpackers (Tuva Alfredsson, Vanja Engström) may have abducted Stig, and the plot thickens when grisly footage of the hikers' apparent demise is found on Michael's laptop. This is an admirable indie chiller, one whose brooding atmosphere owes much to the forest location, and Modem's reflections on the perils of new technology recall another Raindance 2026 title: the screenlife horror Serena.
Having recently screened in IFF Rotterdam's RTM strand, Dutch short Gedoetjes (English: Little Problems) returns to the big screen at Raindance, where it is showing tomorrow and on Tuesday alongside six other short films in the festival's Nova Express programme. Chris de Krijger's impish film—which has a runtime of just 10 minutes—is made up of a series of vignettes, each depicting an everyday situation that soon develops into something far more absurd. De Krijger always shoots the action from a distance, and this consistently funny, very human divertissement features some impressive wide-angled views of Rotterdam.
