Fantastic Fest Highlight: ‘Death Has No Master’ Turns a Family Estate Into a Battleground

Fantastic Fest is returning to Austin, Texas, this fall, taking over the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar from September 17-24, 2026. As always, the festival is packed with world premieres, major genre releases, and the kind of completely unexpected discoveries that make it one of our favorite places to find what’s next in horror.

We dug through this year’s massive lineup and pulled out a handful of films we’re particularly excited about, including Death Has No Master, written, directed, and produced by Jorge Thielen Armand.

Coming off its premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, the slow-burn thriller stars Asia Argento (Land of the Dead) as Caro, an expat who returns to Venezuela following the death of her father to sell her childhood home and its aging cacao plantation.

Instead, she discovers the estate occupied by her father’s former employee Sonia (Dogreika Tovar), her young son Maiko (Yermain Sequera), and several other tenants Sonia has been illegally renting rooms to.

Caro wants everyone out. Sonia isn’t going anywhere.

What begins as a battle over the property steadily escalates into something much uglier, with Caro’s attempts to reclaim and sell the estate dragging her into Venezuela’s history of colonialism, dispossession, violence, and social inequality.

Fantastic Fest programmer Annick Mahnert calls the film a “masterfully crafted slow-burn thriller,” with the increasingly hostile standoff turning Caro’s decaying childhood mansion into a reflection of the much larger conflict surrounding her.

Death Has No Master screens at Fantastic Fest this September.