DIASPORA
2023 · 16m · Canada
Directed by Tyler Mckenzie Evans
Genres: horror, satire, thriller
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
A woman begins to wonder if the disappearance of the Black families living in her neighbourhood may be caused by something more than just gentrification.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—someone weaponizing horror tropes instead of just recycling them, turning the jump-scare machinery into something that actually *means* something about displacement and erasure. This is the kind of genre subversion that makes you furious at how obvious it becomes in retrospect.
Evans situates the film squarely in the lineage of '70s socially conscious horror—the DNA of Candyman and Night of the Living Dead—but the satire occasionally threatens to overwhelm the formal rigor; the metaphor's power depends on restraint the editing doesn't always exercise.
The single choice that makes this work is treating disappearance as literal absence rather than metaphorical—the camera keeps searching empty frames where people should be, and that formal decision, sustained across sixteen minutes on a modest budget, generates more dread than any creature could.
Reviews
Writer/director Tyler Mckenzie Evans crafts a sharp, enthralling and effective metaphor of gentrification, using a combination of genre and satire to cleverly dramatize and amplify the effects of the housing issue.
Festivals
- Toronto International Film Festival 2022
- FogFest Horror Film Festival 2023, Best Short Film Director