5 Must-See Films Revealed for Trieste Science+Fiction Festival 2026

Trieste Science+Fiction Festival is beginning to pull back the curtain on its 26th edition, revealing five of the films headed to Italy this November — including the latest from Train to Busan filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho, the return of Freaks directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, and a dystopian comedy that HMU caught earlier this year at Fantastic Fest.

Running Nov. 3-8, the 2026 festival will once again bring international science fiction, horror and fantasy to Trieste, with its first wave spanning ecological dystopia, outbreak horror, liminal nightmares, superpowered fugitives and an apartment building overrun by venomous spiders.

Opening the festival will be Markus Lehmusruusu’s Finnish sci-fi comedy The Squirrel. Set in a future where nature and animals have disappeared and been replaced by synthetic substitutes, the film follows Pasi, a designer of artificial animals whose carefully controlled existence is disrupted when he discovers something that should no longer exist: a living squirrel.

Protecting the animal puts Pasi in direct conflict with a society that traded the unpredictability of nature for safety and convenience. Mixing ecological anxiety with absurdist and melancholic humor, The Squirrel uses one small animal to challenge an entirely manufactured world.

The film previously screened at Fantastic Fest 2026 and has been selected as Finland’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the Academy Awards. Trieste will host its Italian premiere in competition.

Yeon Sang-ho, meanwhile, returns to outbreak territory with Colony. The filmmaker behind Train to Busan sets his latest nightmare inside a biotechnology conference where Professor Se-jeong witnesses the sudden emergence of a virus capable of mutating at extraordinary speed.

Authorities seal the building, leaving survivors trapped inside while the infected continue evolving into increasingly unpredictable forms. Combining science fiction, action and body horror, Colony brings Yeon back to the type of societal collapse that helped make Train to Busan an international genre phenomenon.

Following a Midnight Screening at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, the South Korean film arrives at Trieste having drawn more than 5.8 million moviegoers in its home market.

Genki Kawamura’s Exit 8 will bring an entirely different form of confinement to the festival.

Adapted from the internationally successful independent video game, the Japanese psychological thriller traps a man inside a seemingly endless underground corridor. His instructions are deceptively simple: watch carefully for anomalies. If something is wrong, turn back. If everything appears normal, continue toward Exit 8. Make one mistake and the entire process begins again.

The result turns the repetitive familiarity of a subway passage into a liminal nightmare built around observation, paranoia and the fear that something almost imperceptible has changed. The film, which screened in the Midnight Screenings section at Cannes in 2025, stars Kazunari Ninomiya of Letters from Iwo Jima and will screen at Trieste as part of IVIPRO 2026.

Trieste will also welcome back filmmakers Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein with the Italian premiere of Freaks II.

Their original Freaks won both the Asteroide Award and Wonderland Rai4 Award at the festival in 2018. The sequel returns to Mary and her daughter Chloe several years later, with the pair hiding their identities and extraordinary abilities while being pursued by the Abnormal Defense Force, a paramilitary organization dedicated to eliminating people like them.

Mary, however, has reached the end of running. Seeking revenge for the death of her first daughter, she sets out to find the agent responsible.

Described as a violent science-fiction anti-superhero story, Freaks II expands the first film’s ideas surrounding otherness, persecution and society’s fear of those who exist outside accepted norms. The sequel also marks Lipovsky and Stein’s return to independent filmmaking after directing 2025’s Final Destination: Bloodlines. Freaks II previously made its world premiere as the closing film of the 30th Fantasia International Film Festival.

Finally, anyone with a fear of spiders may want to approach Ángel Gómez Hernández’s Crawlers carefully.

The survival horror film stars Revenge actress Matilda Lutz as Serena, the manager of an apartment building overtaken by an infestation of deadly venomous spiders. Police quarantine the complex as the creatures multiply, leaving Serena and the residents trapped inside.

Her knowledge of the building could make Serena the group’s best chance of escape, but survival requires confronting the very thing she fears most. The premise turns hallways, apartments and other familiar domestic spaces into a contained hunting ground as the infestation continues spreading.

Lutz is also set to attend Trieste Science+Fiction Festival for the film.

“Once again, Trieste Science+Fiction Festival turns to the genre we love and its extraordinary creators to tell the story of, and interpret, the times we live in,” Artistic Director Alan Jones said in announcing the first selections.

Jones pointed to the films’ exploration of contemporary social anxieties through everything from artificial animals and runaway viruses to alienation and unknown threats, describing science fiction as a way of finding new perspectives on an increasingly unstable world.

The festival has also announced its 2026 juries. Filmmaker Paolo Strippoli will chair the Asteroide Award Jury alongside writer-director Emma Braslavsky and Ramaskrik Film Festival Artistic Director Morten Haagensen. The award recognizes the festival’s best film from an emerging director working across science fiction, horror and fantasy.

Valentina Ariete, Film4 Editorial Director David Cox and Starburst Editorial Director Martin Unsworth will serve on the Méliès d’argent Award Jury, while Marco Lovisato, Beatrice Pagan and Simone Soranna will determine the Stars War Critics’ Award for Best First Feature.

With only its first five films revealed, Trieste is already presenting a broad snapshot of where fantastic cinema is headed in 2026. The Squirrel, Colony, Exit 8, Freaks II and Crawlers approach the genre from radically different directions, but each finds its nightmare in a world whose familiar rules have stopped working.

The 26th Trieste Science+Fiction Festival runs Nov. 3-8, 2026, in Trieste, Italy.