It’s just a few weeks since Grimmfest 2025 wrapped up in Manchester, and the horror- and genre-focused festival now launches its own distribution brand, GrimmVision, set to feature the most acclaimed indie titles from each year’s festival.
As its launch titles GrimmVision has two very different entries from its 2024 edition; Tim Travers and the Time Traveler’s Paradox is a very funny, rather mindbending, somewhat gory sci-fi comedy out of the United States. Making the most of a limited budget, a handful of perfectly-cast guest stars (Joel McHale as an Alex Jones-type radio host; Danny Trejo as a fearsome assassin/family man; Keith David as the Creator…maybe) and an absolutely brilliant central performance by Samuel Dunning as a couple-of-dozen subtly different versions of the same mad scientist, Tim Travers seems like a dead-cert for a future cult classic comedy…and there’s no reason there shouldn’t be a couple of sequels on the way, too.
At the complete opposite end of the spectrum is M: Beyond the Wasteland, a deeply affecting postapocalyptic tale of survival from Macedonia’s Vardan Toziya. The film boasts two splendid child performances from Aleksandar Nichovski and Matej Sivakov as Marko and Miko, respectively, two boys who find themselves bonding amid the grimmest, most starkly beautiful (post-)Soviet ruins this side of Tarkovsky’s Stalker.
Both films are available now through GrimmVision, with more to follow.
