Blondie [Sweden, Jesper Gaslandt, 4] Fraught relations between control freak matriarch and her three daughters come to a head when they return home to help run her 70th birthday bash. Places the expected meltdown at the first act break, then follows the aftermath.
Mushrooming [Estonia, Toomas Hussar, 4] Resentful parliamentarian's Sunday forage in the woods goes spectacularly awry. Barbed comedy of errors.
Thale [Norway, Aleksander Nordaas, 3] Guys abating a death scene find a feral woman in a basement lab. Folkloric creature feature invests loads of atmosphere in a rudimentary storyline.
Motorway [HK, Soi Cheang, 4] Two traffic patrolmen, a young hotshot (Shawn Yue) and a savvy vet counting the days till retirement (Anthony Wong) pursue a cop-killing robber and his ace getaway driver. Leans into its police movie cliches as it reconfigures the car chase set piece for Hong Kong's confined spaces.
Sign o' the times: of all the films I've seen so far at this year's festival, this was the first projected on celluloid. They had to stop a couple of times to fix the focus.