{Fantastic Fest 2026} Posthumous (2026): Analog Grief on VHS

Josh Tanner makes his feature directorial debut with Posthumous, co-written and produced alongside Jade van der Lei, and the World Premiere crowd witnessed a small, sad, deeply emotional story unfold in real time. Zoe (Sophie Lowe) returns to her childhood home in Queensland to be near her ailing, estranged father (David Roberts), and while there she discovers a videotape that unravels everything she thought she knew about her own birth and her mother’s death, an unraveling that ultimately awakens something considerably less explainable than ordinary grief.

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The build here is intriguing from the jump, and the shifting points of view woven across the opening credits set an off-kilter tone right from the start. Before the story really begins we are immediately uncomfortable. Tanner is clearly a filmmaker with a strong handle on tone, and hearing him talk about the project at before and after the film the director came across as a genuine hoot, someone who clearly loves this material and this genre. I loved the film’s central concept above almost everything else it does. The idea that people should keep recording birthday messages for their kids regardless of the very real possibility they won’t be around to deliver them in person is a gut punch of a premise, and there’s something quietly devastating buried in how much of being a parent, the film argues, simply gets absorbed into the role itself rather than passed down as usable advice. You can’t really warn your kid about everything in advance. Part of being a parent is being a witness and partner. What happens if you can’t be there? The necklace running through the central mystery as a recurring visual motif is an ouroboros, and once that clicks, the film’s entire thematic loop about grief, memory, and love across generations snaps into much sharper focus.

This is a film thoroughly consumed by patterns and textures. The production design deserves serious credit here. The sets are dressed beautifully throughout, and there’s tremendous mise-en-scène on display in nearly every room Zoe wanders through, each space clearly telling you something about the family that used to live there. There’s a stretch of occult material in the back half, digital ghosts and ritual summoning circles, that had me thinking, almost against my will, about how close certain wellness-obsessed cultural currents (read MAHA) sit next to old-fashioned occultism. It’s a lot of ideas swirling around at once, admittedly, and there’s a fair amount of occult mumbo jumbo you just have to go along with without asking too many questions, clearly Ring-inspired in places (especially in the VHS elements) , but the sweetness underneath all of it reinforces rather than undercuts the film’s genuinely unsettling atmosphere. One of my favorite scenes of the entire festival, genre film or otherwise, involves nothing more elaborate than a VHS slot and the dread of what might be waiting inside it.

The back half stumbles a little, and it’s worth being honest about that. What was meant to conjure something purely metaphorical instead summons a very literal demon, and the pacing gets noticeably punchier from that point forward but loses some nuance in the trade. We lose a bit of the mystery too, particularly around the different versions of the central VHS tape that felt richer when they were still ambiguous. The third act could stand to tighten up and get to its ending more efficiently, and the hubris-of-man beats grow a touch predictable by the finish line. The boyfriend character, Alex, stays pretty one-dimensional throughout, more of a functional presence than a fully realized person. But the many eyed monster design has a good start to it but ulimtately loses some of its weight in its dependence on CG to fully render it. Posthumous is deeply personal even when it isn’t perfect, and it’s full of heart in exactly the places that matter most.

Posthumous had its World Premiere at Fantastic Fest on September 19 at Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar, marking a genuinely strong feature debut from an Australian filmmaker well worth keeping an eye on going forward. Tickets and the full schedule are at fantasticfest.com/film-guide.