Fantasia Film Festival 2025: ‘Hold the Fort’ and ‘Noise’ Offer Residential Horror
Our Fantasia Film Festival coverage continues with two films that offer distinctive horror experiences in housing communities. The first is a horror-comedy called Hold the Fort, about an HOA fighting forces of evil in slapstick fashion. The second movie is called Noise, involving a woman with hearing loss attempting to find her missing sister, who disappeared after hearing supernatural noises above her apartment. Even worse, the neighbor might be trying to murder her.
Are these films worth keeping on one’s radar? Here are our capsule reviews of Hold the Fort and Noise from the Fantasia International Film Festival 2025.
Hold the Fort review: An HOA Horror-Comedy
Hold the Fort centers on the most terrifying subject known to mankind: homeowners associations. A phrase so horrifying, it might cause Jason Voorhees to have nightmares. However, the horror comedy features more threats than a pesky HOA. The film by William Bagley imagines a housing community defending itself from a variety of monsters. While there are some genuinely hilarious moments, at times, it’s hard to tell whether the cheese factor in Hold the Fort has gone too far.
The film, written by Bagley with a story credit by Scott Hawkins, focuses on Lucas (Chris Mayers) and Jenny (Haley Leary), a couple who move into a new neighborhood with a high-priced HOA. Upon their arrival, they are greeted by the man in charge of the HOA, a well-put-together, mustache-wearing persona named Jerry (Julian Smith). In their first encounter, Jerry’s overly friendly presentation resembles Mr. Rogers’s, but his passive comments sound hilariously menacing. For example, he invites them to an annual HOA party, but the words make it sound like they’re attending their own funeral. As for Lucas and Jenny, there’s an underlying tension between them about whether they made the right choice of home.
Once the HOA festivities begin, they meet several neighbors, including a coked-out woman named Leslie (Tordy Clark), an older couple named Ted (Levi Burdick) and Annette (Michelle Lamb) a confrontational roughneck carrying a giant wrench named Marcus, and more. As the party continues, Lucas and Jenny slowly learn why HOA fees are so high. Once a year, a portal opens, and monsters invade the neighborhood. Lucas and Jenny think the “monster invasion” claims are a joke until the first wave of creatures attacks, and neighbors start dying.
Hold the Fort has a feature-length runtime, but like New Girl, its style resembles a sitcom. Some might even say it would make a strong pilot for a TV series. Similar to New Girl or The Office, character traits are exaggerated for comedic effect. For example, Clark‘s performance as Leslie, the drug-loving neighbor, is almost identical to Meredith’s from The Office. Another character, McScruffy (Hamid-Reza Benjamin Thompson), nearly pushes the film into Looney Tunes territory. When neighbors are in danger, everyone keeps asking, “Where is McScruffy?” When he arrives, the character (seemingly a mix of Ash from Evil Dead and Rambo) hams it up with dialogue and sports an absurd amount of weapons.
It’s difficult to fault a movie that is unafraid to take itself seriously. This attitude extends to creature effects, which include monsters like werewolves that are depicted as transparent costumes. If one is seeking mindless, silly humor, Bagley and his crew certainly understand the assignment. That being said, Hold the Fort feels like a project better suited for the small screen. Aesthetically and conceptually, it would work better as a weekly sitcom where a group of eccentric homeowners battle evil forces.
Noise review: One of the creepiest films at Fantasia 2025
Noise is both deeply creepy and timely. In a post-pandemic world, the mix of isolation and aggravation among neighbors feels especially prominent. The film hauntingly explores these social dynamics through a J-horror lens involving an apartment haunted by phantom noises. With the addition of a character who suffers from hearing loss, the film offers a clever use of suspense through silence. However, the script might be one draft away from matching the heights of other movies in the same subgenre.
Directed by Kim Soo-Jin, the film centers on Ju-young (Lee Sun-bin), a woman with a hearing impairment who rushes home from a distant job when her sister Ju-hee (Han Soo-a) disappears. Before leaving the apartment, Ju-hee exhibited strange behavior. She claimed to hear loud noises from the neighbor above. Yet, for some reason, Ju-young could never hear anything. Now that Ju-hee has gone missing, the suspicious noises begin to reveal themselves to Ju-young. Even more unsettling, a neighbor below their apartment starts threatening Ju-young, claiming to hear similar noises coming from her apartment.
Noise follows a similar investigative narrative seen in movies like Ringu and Chakushin Ari (One Missed Call). In those films, the main characters try to uncover the mystery before the entity can cause them harm. The same is true of Noise, with the added supernatural element of a spirit making a sound similar to the one in The Grudge. The key difference is in how Soo-jin builds suspense.
One sequence cleverly uses her hearing loss by having Ju-young put her phone into dictation mode, with words scrolling across the screen while no one is in the room. The film also takes advantage of the quiet first-person perspective when she’s in danger, stripping away the sense of safety from the audience as Ju-young fights for survival with zero sounds around her. The creative choice is a surprisingly impressive use of sound design in the supernatural sequences.
For most horror films, the strength of the experience depends solely on the lead actor. Lee Sun-bin delivers a compelling and vulnerable performance as Ju-young. When all sound is removed from the visuals, the burden falls on her to convey the suspense, and she handles it effortlessly.
Despite its strengths, Noise has weaknesses in parts of its script. For example, Ju-young’s neighbor keeps threatening her life, but she never involves the police, despite the numerous notes he leaves on her door. The ending also has some plot holes, which might require a rewatch to fill in the gaps.
Still, Noise is one of the creepiest films at Fantasia this year, effectively creating genuinely unsettling “teeth-clenching” scenes. It’s rare to find a good horror movie with a genuinely strong disabled lead, and Noise stands out as one of the best since Fantasia brought Midnight in 2021.
Also check out: Fantasia Film Festival 2025: Rewrite Offers Complex and Sincere Sci-Fi
