Raindance 2026: Modem / Gedoetjes

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.

Darren Arnold

Images: Raindance / Festival Scope

Raindance 2026: Summer School, 2001

Vietnamese traders have become an important part of everyday commerce in Czechia.  Their businesses, ranging from small neighbourhood shops to busy market stalls and wholesale centres, reflect a migration history that began during the socialist era and evolved after the country's political transition in 1989.  Over time, these traders helped shape a distinctive commercial network that is now familiar in towns and cities across the country.  Prague’s SAPA complex—colloquially referred to as "Little Hanoi"—is the best-known example, serving as both a marketplace and a cultural hub for the Vietnamese community.

Dužan Duong's Summer School, 2001—which screens today and on Monday at the Raindance Film Festival—centres on a family of Cheb-based Vietnamese market traders whose dynamic is radically altered when the eldest son, 17-year-old Kien (Bui Thể Duong), returns to Czechia after a decade in Vietnam.  It's not entirely clear why Kien was sent away, but there is notable tension between him and his father, Zung (Doan Hoang Anh), who has been tasked with duping his fellow stallholders into selling their pitches so the site can be redeveloped.  Kien also constantly clashes with his feisty younger brother, Tai (To Tien Tai).

Kien and Tai attend the summer school of the title—Tai is an excellent student, while Kien is reacquainting himself with the Czech language after so many years away—where they meet someone who will make a significant impact on both of their lives.  The story unfolds, Rashomon-style, via the perspectives of Kien, Tai, and Zung, each of whom offers their own version of the same events.  This is engrossing stuff, and Duong, drawing on his own childhood memories, confidently steers a film that manages to be both a coming-of-age tale and a vivid depiction of the Vietnamese diaspora's experiences in post-communist Czechia.

Darren Arnold

Images: Festival Scope

Raindance 2026: Serena / Stairs

Screenlife films, such as Unfriended and its sequel, take the digital clutter of modern life—message bubbles, tab‑hopping, notification pings—and turn it into a stage where intimacy and anxiety unfold in real time.  By confining the action to screens we stare at every day, the form exposes how people curate themselves, how relationships fracture or deepen through pixels, and how the smallest digital gesture can feel seismic.  What seems at first like a technical constraint becomes a narrative engine: the drama lives in what characters choose to reveal, what they hide in other windows, and how their devices quietly betray them.

At their best, screenlife stories capture something uncannily true about contemporary existence, where our online selves are both our masks and our mirrors.  Serena, which screens today and on Thursday at the Raindance Film Festival, is the latest effort in a movement that was admirably pioneered by Timur Bekmambetov but perfected by Rob Savage with his terrific films Host and Dashcam.  Serena sees broke musician Chris (Steven Strait) enlist as a beta tester for an AI chatbot played by Andi Matichak, hitherto best known for her role as Laurie Strode's granddaughter in David Gordon Green's Halloween trilogy.

For this gig, Chris—who is about to become a father—has negotiated an inflated fee of $3000, which might just help him stave off eviction.  What seems like a simple task—ask the bot 100 pre-planned questions—soon goes off-piste as the AI, who has adopted the name Serena, helps Chris generate serious money by predicting football results.  But things take a much darker turn when Serena assumes complete control of Chris' computer and confronts him with some terrible revelations.  The acting, writing, and directing are all strong here, and the taut, suspenseful Serena can sit proudly alongside the best entries in the subgenre.

The Raindance shorts programme Radical Agendas also screens today, and among the eight titles on offer here is Riley Donigan's impressive Stairs.  This sly allegorical tale centres on Ally (Betsey Brown), a New York bride-to-be who has a minor trip on a flight of stairs and subsequently develops a fetish for such tumbles.  With each fall, Ally's injuries worsen, but her search for gratification locks her into a cycle of trying to outdo the previous mishap.  Events reach critical mass at a pre-wedding photo shoot in Central Park, and Stairs' portrayal of hopeless addiction gives way to full-blown body horror as it dares us to keep watching.

Darren Arnold

Images: Cinequest / Festival Scope