{Fantastic Fest 2026} Littermates (2026): Back to Adolescence

Here’s the conceit, or at least as much of it as I could piece together in real time. Somewhere in the English countryside, during some unspecified and mysterious war, two survivors named Liam (Joey Bader) and Mel (Kaylee McGregor) stumble bloodied and speechless into an isolated cottage. They’re taken in by Chester (Oliver Woolf), an enigmatic caretaker who bathes them, feeds them, and slowly teaches them to speak again. That’s the premise. Getting there, though, is its own experience entirely, because Littermates opens in such a disorienting fog that I was many, many minutes into the runtime before I had any real grasp on what was happening. Not a few minutes. Many.

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That disorientation feels deliberate, and once you settle into the film’s rhythms, it starts to pay off. There’s a 70s, 80s grain to the picture at times, a scuzzy analog texture that gives the whole thing a lived-in, unplaceable quality, even as the aspect ratio does something weird and boxy with its 16:9 frame that I found genuinely jarring, though I’ll admit some of that could be my viewing setup rather than an intentional choice. Either way, there’s a lot to chew on just in how this thing is shot.

Tinkham and Woloson, making their feature debut here, are clearly playing in a soft mumblecore register early on, all frowns and dour looks and stilted, halting dialogue. Honestly, I’m not sure there’s a single line of fully functional adult conversation in the entire first hour. That’s not a knock. It’s the point. Liam and Mel are relearning basic communication under Chester’s watch, and the film commits to that regression completely, letting the audience feel just as unmoored as its characters.

And here’s where things get delightfully strange. Chester’s whole operation runs on what the film calls “nifties,” little tokens earned for good behavior that can be cashed in for small comforts, karaoke, hot tub time, dance parties, favorite meals. It’s a wonderfully sharp piece of filmmaking, using the tokens as a visual shorthand for time passing and trust building, but it’s also blatantly, almost gleefully operant conditioning. This is B.F. Skinner by way of a cottage in the woods, and the film knows exactly what kind of strange laboratory conditions it’s depicting. There’s real paranoia humming underneath even the cottage’s most intimate, tender moments, and that tension never fully releases.

The relationship between Chester and his two charges reads as paternal, but here’s the thing that kept nagging at me: these people all look like they’re maybe a decade apart in age, if that. It’s a genuinely weird dynamic, and the film seems to know it’s weird, using that discomfort rather than smoothing it over. There’s some clear Frankenstein lineage running through this story, maybe more specifically Bride of Frankenstein, in the idea of an adult creator painstakingly building fully grown people back into functioning humans.

As Liam relearns the world, that adolescent unlocking phase spoke directly to the high school teacher in me, all that wide eyed discovery and testing of boundaries. But Littermates gets genuinely subversive when it starts distinguishing between Liam and Mel’s parallel awakenings. Maturity looks like exploration to her. It looks like masturbation to him. There’s a lot packed into that gap, and the film mines it for both its darkest comedy and its most uncomfortable truths, doing a version of the Blue Lagoon setup but with its innocents in their late twenties instead of their teens, which only makes the absurdity of that entire subgenre’s tropes more visible.

I want to be clear that this movie is very, very funny. Everyone involved is clearly having an absolute blast, and Bader in particular is chewing up every scene he’s handed. Is it over the top? Sure. But come on, look at the premise. He understands the assignment, as the kids say these days. There’s a rock at one point with “Liam is Cool” scrawled on it, one of Chester’s nifties, and I was fully gone. Dead. The film’s dark humor runs through nearly the entire runtime, and I found myself laughing and then immediately glancing around, a little guilty about it.

That guilt is earned, because Littermates isn’t afraid to juxtapose all that comedy against at least one scene of real, intense suffering, and the tonal whiplash is powerful even when it’s jarring. Thematically, the film operates a lot like Bugonia does, daring you to call its bluff about what kind of movie this actually is, then smacking you across the face the moment you do.

There’s a clear Wes Anderson influence in the production design and the deadpan compositions, but Littermates has too much genuine menace running through it to ever feel like pastiche. This is a film built for a crowd like Fantastic Fest’s, packed with landmines and daring the audience to step on every single one