Some things, once they reach their limit, cannot be contained. A pimple is one of them.
Written and directed by Fernando Alle, Pimple announces itself as exactly what it is and then delivers something wilder than that announcement promised. This gleefully grotesque body horror comedy completely nails the brief, executing its blood-soaked premise with absolute joy. It commits to the bit so intensely that it pushes right past the finish line, leaving you hilariously caught between roaring with laughter and dry-heaving. Alle seems to have designed the film specifically to produce that reaction while making you root for its main character. It is repulsive. It is hilarious. It is completely, unapologetically itself, and in four minutes it accomplishes more tonal clarity than most features manage in two hours.
The film centers on a young boy navigating the specific, low-grade misery of being a loner in an environment that has identified him as a target. He is self-conscious, timid, and carrying the weight of being seen in all the wrong ways by all the wrong people. It is a recognizable kind of quiet suffering, and Alle grounds it with enough sincerity to make the absurdity that follows land with genuine impact. Because what erupts from that ordinary adolescent misery is anything but ordinary. A pimple, as pimples do, reaches its limit. What it unleashes is the kind of practical-effects escalation that could only exist in the specific, beautiful tradition of filmmakers who love their monsters enough to build them by hand.
Tiago Rodrigues plays The Boy with a wide-eyed, shell-shocked authenticity that anchors the film’s most chaotic moments in something genuinely human. His performance is largely reactive, which is exactly right. What he is reacting to demands a face of pure, unfiltered disbelief, and Rodrigues delivers that with a naturalism that makes every escalating absurdity funnier than it has any right to be. He is the still center of a film spinning rapidly outward into beautiful, gooey madness, and that stillness is precisely what the comedy needs.
The practical effects are the film’s crowning achievement and its clearest declaration of purpose. The creature work is tactile, textured, and gloriously, defiantly physical, a loving tribute to the tradition of building your monsters rather than generating them, and the results are as impressive as they are deeply, wonderfully wrong. The creature is shot with the kind of affectionate framing that only someone who spent real time making it could manage, giving the audience full, unobstructed access to every repulsive detail. It is impossible to look away. That is entirely intentional and entirely the point.
Pimple has a moral buried somewhere beneath its gore and its puppetry and its cheerful commitment to excess, something about the consequences visited upon those who torment the quiet and overlooked, but it wears that moral lightly and delivers it with a wink. This is not a film interested in lecturing. It is interested in making you squirm and then making you laugh and then making you squirm again, and in that precise and humble ambition it succeeds completely. Body horror is genre that isn’t for everyone, but Pimple is quick enough to entertain.
Fantasia 2026 runs from July 16th to August 2nd, 2026