[Fantasia International Film Festival]: Bowels of Hell

Benjamin Damini as Genesis

Fantasia International Film Festival goes to the toilets with the Brazilian gross-out horror Bowels of Hell directed by Gurcius Gewdner and Gustavo Vinagre. A São Paolo apartment complex experiences serious plumbing issues as toilets seem to be violently sucking residents into the pipes.

Malu (played by Martha Nowill) is a party event planner who is not only struggling from the toilet-caused death of her son from years back, but is also attempting to come to terms and accept her non-binary child Genesis (Benjamin Damini). When Malu takes on the job of a gender reveal party for a delusional social media influencer, her stomach problems increase ten-fold. Along with all her personal problems, Malu’s apartment block is being terrorised by an entity that haunts the toilet system, and is out for blood...and feces. 

Martha Nowill as Malu

Bowels of Hell is another entry into the recent spout of scat-horror to grace cinematic screens which includes Flush (2025) and Scared Shitless (2024), and whilst there is endless gross-out poop jokes, Gwedner and Vinagre’s feature seeks to delve deeper past the u-bend and explore just how shitty parent and child relationships can get. Malu is filled with a deep trauma concerning the death of one of her twins, but finds herself bottled up with these emotions that prevent her from connecting with her living child who is exploring gender identity as a non-binary person. Martha Nowill and Benjamin Damini have an electric dynamic as the familial pair whose relationship is fraught with tension and desperation. 

Even though Bowels of Hell is billed as the “grossest movie of Fantasia 2026”, it takes a surprisingly long time for any sort of action to occur, with much of the run time afforded to setting up a tedious gender reveal party being held by an insufferable social media couple. And so by the time the shit quite literally hits the fan, the pay off doesn’t seem quite worth the build up.

2 Screams out of 5