‹ Back

(Fantasia Fest 2026) HOME BODIES: An Unsettling Home Between Cube, Buddy, and Pin.

By. Radek Velicka

 

 

Republushed with Permission. Original Article is posted HERE. 

 

 

Casey Walker returns to Fantasia with a contained sci-fi thriller that uses a single location, three young characters, and practical effects to create an unsettling world filled with unanswered question.

Casey Walker returns to the Fantasia International Film Festival after fourteen years, having premiered his horror comedy A Little Bit Zombie there in 2012. In the years since, he has worked as a producer on acclaimed Canadian genre films including The Void and In a Violent Nature. His new film, HOME BODIES, is a far more serious and intimate sci-fi thriller that demonstrates how an atmospheric and visually compelling film can be made on a relatively modest budget.

Red and Blue live inside an enclosed retro house where every day follows the same rules. Food appears automatically, they keep each other company, and most of their entertainment comes from VHS tapes of a children’s show called Barn, starring a cow, a pig, and a chicken. Watching over their lives is Papa, a disembodied voice behind a locked door who decides what they are allowed to do and how they should behave.

During a holiday resembling Christmas, they receive an unusual gift. Pal, an androgynous humanoid who does not speak, mimics their behaviour and follows instructions, enters their home. Pal also begins receiving VHS tapes, although their content is considerably more violent. Red, initially afraid of the newcomer, becomes increasingly attached to them, while Blue remains suspicious. The arrival of a third person gradually fractures the previously close bond between the siblings.

Somewhere Between Buddy, Cube, and Pin

HOME BODIES feels like a combination of Buddy, Cube, and Pin. From Buddy, it takes a children’s television aesthetic and transforms it into something sinister. It recalls Cube through its enclosed setting, unexplained rules, and the sense that its characters are part of a much larger experiment. It shares with Pin the psychological ambiguity of a humanoid figure whose independence remains uncertain: is Pal a being with their own personality, or merely a reflection of the desires, fears, and violent impulses of the people around them?

Walker also cites Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and Ray Bradbury’s short story The Veldt, about children growing up in a house that satisfies their needs far too efficiently, among his influences.

Walls can protect just as easily as they can imprison. ATTACK ON PARADISE traps its characters inside an apartment building under siege, transforming another ordinary space into something equally claustrophobic, though through relentless action rather than quiet psychological unease.

Growing Up by Someone Else’s Rules

Walker describes adolescence as a kind of horror: the moment a child realizes that the world they were given is not the world that truly exists, and that its rules were created for a purpose nobody ever explained to them. Red and Blue did not choose their house, their names, their assigned colours, or Papa.

“Papa is not cruel. Papa is institutional.” The house represents a system that cares for the children and provides them with safety, food, and entertainment, while also controlling them without having to explain any of its decisions. Pal enters this arrangement as a social experiment, revealing how easily the relationship between two people who have never known anyone else can be disrupted.

Walker works with a single main location, three central characters, and relatively simple production design, but these limitations mostly benefit the film. The house is simultaneously a home, a prison, a laboratory, and a substitute parent. Its retro furnishings, automatically replenished food, VHS tapes, and repeated rituals create a strange atmosphere in which it is clear from the beginning that something is deeply wrong.

Practical Effects Instead of a Digital World

The house was built as a complete set inside the former printing floor of a decommissioned newspaper factory in Hamilton, Ontario. The fictional show Barn received its own puppets, songs, episodes, artwork, and props, which were then incorporated throughout Red and Blue’s world. The filmmakers prioritized practical effects, even creating the film’s final view with miniatures and forced perspective.

Much of the film’s success rests on real-life twins Emma Ho and Ian Ho, appearing together in leading roles in a feature film for the first time. They naturally convey both the closeness between the siblings and their growing division. Red’s curiosity gradually becomes stronger than her fear, while Blue clings to familiar rules and the safety they 

provide. His anxiety is a response to an earlier trauma that his body remembers, even though his mind has been protected from its full origins.

Ess Hödlmoser is perfectly unsettling as Pal. The character does not speak, but their looks alone are enough to convince me that this is not someone I would want to bring home.

I enjoyed HOME BODIES most when it was slowly constructing its world and mysteries. It becomes weaker when the story should begin to escalate more dramatically. Although it gradually reveals additional fragments of this world’s history, none of its discoveries are surprising or breathtaking enough to match the expectations the film so carefully creates. Its deliberate ambiguity is understandable, but some of its themes would have benefited from being developed more clearly within the story.

HOME BODIES is an atmospheric independent sci-fi film that uses a single location, a handful of actors, and a strong central idea to create a distinctive world. Its mysteries deserved greater escalation and more powerful revelations, but I would have happily spent more time inside this world and would gladly watch another similarly intimate genre experiment.

Fantasia rarely settles on one definition of strange. Where HOME BODIES builds its mysteries with restraint and quiet world-building, DANCE FREAK dives headfirst into surreal imagery and cosmic absurdity, proving just how wide the festival's imagination can stretch.