The Neuchâtel Intl. Fantastic Film Festival (NIFFF) is never afraid to ask questions.

As per tradition, the Swiss genre showcase will frame its annual retrospective through a sociological lens, this year turning its focus to health with a 20-film deep dive cheekily titled Take Care.

“I was struck by an idiom that’s more common in English than in French,” says NIFFF artistic director Pierre-Yves Walder. “Telling someone to ‘take care’ can be taken as an order or a veiled threat. At the very least, it feels like an oxymoron, especially when the person being told to do so has little control over their situation. And as always, fantastic cinema provides the perfect space to explore these tension and contradictions between fragility, control, vulnerability and power. That’s where genre thrives!”

‘Coma’

Covering a full century of cinematic malady — exploring how we care for others and ourselves and all the potential abuses that can arise — the retrospective casts a clinical light on the body horrors of David Cronenberg’s “Rabid” and the caretaker-from-hell anxieties of the Stephen King adaptation “Misery” while prescribing recent festival gems like Natalie Erika James’ “Relic,” which uses the visual and narrative tropes of the haunted house as shorthands for dementia.

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Other titles include Gore Verbinski’s Eurotrash send-up “A Cure for Wellness,” Kim Jee-Woon’s twisty K-horror melodrama “A Tale of Two Sisters” and Saverio Costanzo’s Venice prizewinner “Hungry Hearts,” which casts Adam Driver and Alba Rohrwacher into a nightmare of toxic codependency. Meanwhile, Todd Haynes’ “Safe” might be the retrospective’s most emblematic choice, connecting this year’s focus with previous inquiries into class, gender and queerness, all while tapping into themes that resonate across the wider festival selection.

“What’s striking is how many of the films we programed early on already aligned with those themes,” says Walder. “There’s a real presence of films exploring mental health, aging, life in retirement homes—sometimes through horror, sometimes more grounded—but always grappling with those transitional moments. Genre cinema has always asked these questions, but right now, in such disorienting times, it feels especially powerful to see filmmakers reflect the world in so many different ways.”

Walder is similarly enthusiastic about Michael Crichton’s hospital drama “Coma,” calling it “a grand, classic ’70s paranoid thriller in all its glory” and praising its incisive exploration of “a deep societal mistrust that was especially acute in the 1970s—and which might feel even more intense if the film were made today.”

‘A Page of Madness’

Yet few heritage choices can rival Teinosuke Kinugasa’s “A Page of Madness,” a masterpiece of Japanese expressionism produced in 1926. Lost for nearly 50 years and never fully restored, its fragmented reels and sudden leaps only heighten the silent era’s disorienting psychosis. Following a man who takes a janitor’s job at a psychiatric hospital to watch over his institutionalized wife, the century-old film feels surprisingly modern, Walder notes, boasting “a kind of psychedelic, completely hallucinatory quality that’s simply magnificent.”

“It’s almost abstract,” he continues. “You fall into the imagery, into the woman’s mind. So in a way, the fact that parts of the film are missing adds something. It becomes almost… Lynchian.”

As should come with little surprise, Lynch’s absence and inspiration will loom over this year’s edition, but at no point did Walder consider a more conventional retrospective. Instead, the festival will pay tribute in quieter and more pointed ways, screening “The Elephant Man” as part of the Take Care retrospective, “Wild at Heart” as part of a classics program, and hosting a talk with author and “Twin Peaks” scholar Pacôme Thiellement as part of the NIFFF Extended conference program.

“The best possible tribute to David Lynch is to talk about his work,” Walder adds.