TIFF ’24: What to See at This Year’s Fest, Sept. 11

By Jim Slotek, Liz Braun, Thom Ernst, Karen Gordon, Kim Hughes, John Kirk, Chris Knight, and Liam Lacey

It’s Wednesday, which puts us roughly halfway through the Toronto International Film Festival. Seen anything great (or ghastly) yet? We sure have and have been committing our opinions to this blog daily. We will continue to do so until the end of this week, then weigh back in on Monday with our overall takeaways. Meanwhile, here’s what cooking on today’s schedule.

A Missing Part

A Missing Part (Centrepiece)

Wed, Sept. 11, 12:35 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 14.

Sincere and nonjudgemental, this tender family drama from Belgian director Guillaume Senez is set in Tokyo where Frenchman Jay has been reluctantly living for the past nine years, since he and his Japanese wife split up. Because of Japanese family law as it pertains to foreign-born parents, Jay is not permitted access to his daughter Lily, now 12. It’s killing him, so Jay trades his chef job to drive a taxi at night, leaving his days free to try and locate his daughter. One day, Jay picks up a mixed-race, middle-school girl; by some incredible chance, could it be Lily? If so, what has she been told about her dad and his glaring absence from her life? Romain Duris’ Jay conveys anguish with every rearview glance, but the film sends audiences out on a hopeful note. In a word, lovely. KH

Babygirl (Special Presentations)

Wed, Sept. 11, 5:30 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 1.

“Be careful what you wish for” could be the logline for this erotic drama with Nicole Kidman as Romy, the brilliant if perennially twitchy founder-CEO of a tech company whose ability to boss around Wall Street types doesn’t extend to the bedroom, where her desires go unspoken and unmet by her husband (Antonio Banderas). That is, until handsome young intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson, Triangle of Sadness) glides into Romy’s world, intuiting her kink and delivering, big-time. Issues of power dynamics and risking everything for sex feel undercooked with director Halina Reijn focusing instead on unpacking Romy’s panoply of quirks. The casting also feels like a misfire; while Kidman and Banderas are reliably committed, their star status undermines suspension of disbelief. Fabulous window dressing — Romy’s wardrobe, eclectic music, exquisite interiors — can’t quite compensate for a hollow core. KH

Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (TIFF Docs)

Wed, Sept. 11, 12:15 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 10.

Through the last quarter century, the Haitian-born, French-based filmmaker Raoul Peck has moved between dramatic features (Lumumba) and poetic documentary (I Am Not Your Negro). His latest, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found uses a lightly fictional autobiographical narration, voiced by American actor LaKeith Stanfield, to tell the story of a largely forgotten photographic artist. Cole’s reputation is based on a 1967 book, House of Bondage, the first photo book to chronicle and protest the outrages of apartheid, published when he was 27 after his move to New York. After a few years of fame, Cole struggled both professionally and psychologically, experiencing periods of depression and homelessness. He died from cancer at 49, days after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. Cole’s reputation was revitalized when 60,000 of his negatives, including New York street photography along with personal writings, were discovered in a Swiss bank in 2017, and House of Bondage was republished in 2022 in an expanded edition. At times, the voiceover technique can be distracting, particularly in sequences when Cole seems to be speaking from the afterlife, instructing you how to interpret his South African or New York street photos, which are filled with humanity and drama. At the same time, this speculative approach synthesizes biographical information without the use of too many talking heads, literally giving Cole a voice again. LL

Ick (Midnight Madness)

Wed, Sept. 11, 9:40 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 7.

Though the humour is fun, there's no real foreseeable resolution to Ick, a story with many different thematic threads running through it, including 1950s monster films, an under-culture of school-trope humour, a throwback playlist of the early 2000s, not to mention the rapid-fire series of goofy jokes all wrapped together by a tendril of apathy, which shows for good measure that this is a film does not take itself too seriously. But who cares? After all, the town doesn’t care about the overwhelmingly present alien parasite in its streets. In fact, the caustic poke at modern society’s indifferent approach to social ills trumped by overwhelming self-interest is a surprisingly inviting way to view this film. So, relax. Take it as it is. Enjoy the jokes and all its goofy monster effects. Don’t get too wrapped up in the story, or else this is going to be hard to watch. JK

Saturday Night (Special Presentations)

Wed, Sept. 11, 3 pm, Princess of Wales Theatre.

Jason Reitman’s decision to make a film about the first night of Saturday Night Live (Oct. 11, 1975) — and film it in real time from 10 pm on the night of — is a gutsy one. Not as gutsy as the actual event, but an artistic gamble, nonetheless. The originals (Chevy, Aykroyd, Gilda, Belushi, Andy Kaufman et al) are instantly recognizable, thanks to some uncanny casting of lookalike young actors. If you’re a deep fan, you might also appreciate characterizations of people like the joined-at-the-hip writers Al Franken and Tom Davis, Dick Ebersol, and Rosie Shuster (who actually has a sizable chunk of plot). The style is breathless, like Aaron Sorkin on meth, with energized and stoned people walking and shouting simultaneously. These handful of captured minutes may be embellished, but the message about how impossible this seemed at the time comes through loud and clear. JS

The Girl With the Needle

The Girl With The Needle (Special Presentations)

Wed, Sept. 11, 9:30 pm, TIFF Lightbox 2; Thurs, Sept. 12, 8 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 14; Fri, Sept. 13, 9 am, Scotiabank Theatre 3.

Director Magnus von Horn will position you at the edge of your seat and never allow you budge with this beautifully made, harrowing investigation of an infanticide case from 1921. In post-WWI Copenhagen, a seamstress (Vic Carmen Sonne) lives in poverty after her husband is reported missing in action. A wealthy lover takes up with her and then discards her when she becomes pregnant; circumstances put her on a path that leads to a friendly woman (Trine Dyrholm) who helps unmarried mothers. In black and white, and with every technical element working brilliantly to make you sick about the human race. We mean that in the best way, of course. LB

The Shrouds (Gala Presentations)

Wed, Sept. 11, 9:30 pm, Roy Thomson Hall; Thurs, Sept. 12, 2:30 pm, Royal Alexandra Theatre.

David Cronenberg’s new film is about an entrepreneur who invents wired-up burial shrouds that allow people to watch the decay of their buried loved ones in real time, via gravestone monitors or phone apps. As reviews out of Cannes noted, the film is in some sense an exploration of Cronenberg’s grief over the death of wife Carolyn in 2017. If those details suggest something terribly gruesome and solemn, that’s not really true to the Zen spirit of The Shrouds, a strong late-career film that contemplates how our minds are held by bodies that eventually disintegrate. There are a few laughs. The electronic burial premise is established in the film’s brilliant-funny-gruesome, worst-date-ever sequence, in which entrepreneur and recent widower Karsh (Vince Cassals looking very much like Cronenberg) takes a date (Jennifer Dale) to dinner at the restaurant he owns next to the graveyard he also owns and allows her to visit his wife’s televised grave site. When somebody later desecrates the graveyard, the film switches to a mystery about how and why we live, die, and memorialize our loved ones.

The script is talky, full of red herrings, with hints at global forces at play. The film itself is claustrophobic or, to use a clever pun in the script, encrypted. It’s a small, recursive world, shot in muted interiors. Inasmuch as there’s a recognizable plot, it involves Karsh’s brother-in-law Maury (Guy Pearce), an incel electronics whiz who was once married to the lookalike sister of Karsh’s late wife, both played by Diane Kruger. While bodies are mutilated by surgery, disease, and grief, the brain keeps spinning stories to keep the shadows away. LL

You Are Not Alone (Discovery)

Wed, Sept. 11, 9:15 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 10; Thurs, Sept. 12, 3:40 pm, Scotiabank 7.

Quebec writing-directing team Marie-Hélène Viens and Philippe Lupien have hit it out of the park with their first feature, a sci-fi, love story, thriller mash-up following broken-hearted Léo (Pier-Luc Funk) who delivers pizzas for his family’s restaurant, avoiding people as much as possible. But in one night, he meets two individuals who will change his life: Rita (Marianne Fortier) with whom he has undeniable chemistry, and John (François Papineau), a taxi driver who is an alien predator eyeing Léo as his next victim. You can see how this whole premise could have been total fromage, but Viens and Lupien have a strong hold on their material, keeping it dramatic without leaning into tropes. They make the connection between the Léo and Rita crackle with energy while the scenes with John are menacing. The cast is note perfect. Papineau’s alien is not a caricature. But the film hangs on the charismatic performance of Funk, who channels the complexities of a someone longing for love but hamstrung by fear. KG