Spanish-born writer/director Miguel Llansó is one of my favourite contemporary filmmakers thanks to just two films: Crumbs (2015) and Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway (2024). Both are uniquely internationalised co-productions: the former a Spanish-Ethiopian affair, the latter adding Estonia, Latvia, and Romania to the mixture. Both employ all strange and unexpected manners of pop culture reference, manipulation, and satire. Each tells its own science fiction story, with Crumbs presenting a post-apocalyptic African odyssey and Jesus a self-aware cyberpunk thriller. I love both films because they are enormously clever and brilliantly inventive.

Llansó’s third film, which premiered this weekend at the Fantasia International Film Festival, marks a progression in his style and a step into – at least superficially – a more coherent sort of screen narrative. Infinite Summer focuses on Mia (Teele Kaljuvee-O’Brock), an Estonian teen marking the gap between high school and college with a holiday in a cabin by the lake. She hopes to spend time with her best friend Grete (Johanna Rosin), but Grete’s attentions have been stolen by the more mature Sarah (Hannah Gross). Lonely and resentful, Mia encounters the self-named Dr Mindfulness (Ciaron Davies) who offers her the chance to try his new meditation app: a device combining inhaled vapours and AR technology.

There is visibly a bigger production budget at work this third time around. The scrappy collage-like pastiche of early films has been replaced with slick visual effects and crisp, attractive photography. There is a strong use of colour at work. To an extent the film feels less like the earlier Llansó pictures and more like his contemporaries in innovative genre cinema Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead – at least aesthetically.

Any concerns that the more conventional storyline and presentation have blunted Llansó’s inventiveness are quickly abolished, as Mia’s experience grows to incorporate psychadelic experiences, international police investigations, disappearing animals, and the apparent undead. Infinite Summer is a strange trip – wonderfully so – boasting deliberately heightened performances and all manner of surprises. Kaljuvee-O’Brock is a strong and appealing lead actor, with both Rosin and Gross perfectly encapsulating her easy-to-recognise bitchy friends.

At the film’s midpoint, a police investigation into Dr Mindfulness’ technology introduces Steve Vanoni as a detective named Jack. With a heavily lined face and oddly thin build, Vanoni is an actor seemingly purposefully built for cinema. He is well balanced by his partner, the cool and calm Detective Katrin (Katariina Unt) As Jack co-opts much of the narrative in the film’s second half, the story expands in an addictive fashion. It is strange stuff, but it is also refreshingly miles away from conventional cinema. Anybody with a taste for the off-kilter is going to love Infinite Summer.

Infinite Summer premiered at the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival. Click here for more information.