2 hours ago
10
Defining Toronto’s place within the fall festival season has become a little harder in recent years. As fewer studios and film-makers want to brave the risks that come attached to premiering on such a stage (last year’s best picture winner One Battle After Another skipped festivals entirely and went straight to cinema), those that do tend to prefer Venice, Telluride and, especially this year, New York.
Last year’s biggest Toronto breakout was Obsession, a micro-budget, up-for-sale horror that played as part of the midnight madness strand, and while that film is now being pushed as an awards contender, it’s not what crowds and pundits typically expect from the starry, prestige-first festival. Is it best viewed now as a rough-and-ready genre hub or maybe a sales market, where perhaps we can still expect some Oscar contenders to be unveiled. It can make figuring out what to see and what to avoid a little harder – but here are some films to keep an eye on over the next week or so.
The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd
Last year’s Venice-premiering drama The Testament of Ann Lee might not have secured Amanda Seyfried the Oscar nomination the campaign had intended for her but it was yet another fascinating stop on the actor’s recent reinvention tour. Highs have also included being the very best thing in the smash hit thriller The Housemaid and deservedly winning all the awards for The Dropout, while the lows have been the misbegotten dirge drama shows The Crowded Room and Long Bright River. She continues to avoid the easy options with her role in Tim Blake Nelson’s unusual and unsettling prison drama The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd, playing a teacher who develops feelings for a prisoner, played by Scoot McNairy. It’s set to be a complicated watch about the limits of empathy and forgiveness and could be one of the most talked-about films of the festival.
Misty Green
Toronto is a festival known more for its tendency to showcase A-listers rather than break newcomers. But last year it saw the world premiere of a little horror film called Obsession, which made instant stars of director Curry Barker and lead actor nde Navarrette, who many are now tipping for Oscar consideration. The lead of Chris Rock’s Hollywood-sIet drama Misty Green is by no means new to the industry, but British actor Rosalind Eleazar is known more by some for stage work, and to most for being in various TV shows such as Slow Horses and a Harlan Coben Netflix thriller. That’s likely to change after a buzzy Saturday night premiere, even surrounded by better-known faces such as Adam Driver, Daniel Kaluuya (visibly on screen for the first time in four years!), Anna Kendrick and Rock himself. She might be playing a struggling actor on screen but in what’s looking like a strangely underpowered best actress race, this could be the role that nudges Eleazar into the big time.
A Talent for Murder
There are echoes of Ira Levin’s delicious 1978 play turned 1982 movie Deathtrap in the set-up and trailer for the playful thriller A Talent for Murder, which one could say is taking the Knives Out spot without a new Rian Johnson mystery to premiere (all three have previously been unveiled at Toronto). It shares similar ingredients to the Caine/Reeves caper – based on a play, two-person dynamic, remote house, potentially devious writer, some left-turn twists – and one can only hope it provides at least some of the same satisfaction. Helen Mirren plays a fictionalised Patricia Highsmith, whose remote solitude is interrupted by Alden Ehrenreich’s young agent, who has been sent to insist she write one final Tom Ripley book. The two then embark on a game to plot a murder with intentions in the dark. It offers a perfectly juicy role for Mirren while, after Fair Play, Weapons and a deserved Tony win, I remain thrilled by the ongoing Ehrenreich-aissance.
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother
After winning two best supporting acting Oscars, one would have assumed that Mahershala Ali would be an inescapable presence in Hollywood. But for reasons he’s hinted at were out of his control (he recently told GQ that “some of how quiet I’ve been is not really of my own choosing”) there have been only a handful of roles, none of them leads. His much-anticipated, and teased on-screen, turn as Blade ended up collapsing and instead he teamed up with that film’s once-attached director, Mogul Mowgli’s Bassam Tariq, for something smaller instead, the religious revenge thriller Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother. He stars as an assassin who is forced to play sole parent to three children after his wife dies while also getting caught in a web of cults, porn and breast milk. In the overcrowded subgenre of hitman movies, this aims to bring something new and unusual to the table and remind us – and Hollywood – how compelling Ali can be.
I Play Rocky
Ever since Green Book went from Toronto crowd-pleaser to controversial best picture Oscar winner, director Peter Farrelly hasn’t quite mastered his graduation from gross-out comedy king to serious film-maker. There’s been a Zac Efron Vietnam movie no one saw, a Zac Efron comedy no one remembers and a Mark Wahlberg caper no one liked, but his latest is unlikely to be as easily ignored. I Play Rocky tells the story of how small-time actor Sylvester Stallone, played by Anthony Ippolito, wrote an industry-shifting screenplay that became a franchise-spawning smash hit. It’s fair to be wary of Hollywood myth-making but this is a genuinely fascinating backstory to a film that has truly endured – and without a great deal of obvious, old-fashioned Toronto crowd-pleasers on the lineup, this could bring the house down.
Everybody Wants to Fuck Me
There promises to be some raucous Friday night fun with the suggestively titled, and in some places censored, darkly comic thriller Everybody Wants to Fuck Me. It’s a problem that faces Taron Egerton’s overly curated “nice guy” whose pained virtue-signalling soon starts turning him into the object of desire and then obsession on the London dating scene. Given how many of us swipe and like, it’s wild there haven’t been more worthy films about the horrors that can come with it (Fresh remains one of the only effective examples and barely anyone saw it) and as Egerton reaches an interestingly daring stage of his career (his wildly over-the-top villain in Apex felt somewhat revelatory), one wonders how far he’s willing to go.
Ancestors
At last year’s festival, one of the best films I saw was also one of the smallest, given a quiet premiere far away from the crowds. The engaging and enraging football drama Saipan told us what we already knew about Steve Coogan (that he’s a far more versatile actor than any of us had originally predicted) but it also introduced the wonderful Irish actor Éanna Hardwicke, who as Roy Keane gave one of the most indelible turns of the season. He’s back again this year in Ancestors, a film that might also be experiencing a similarly low-key rollout but one that’s about something wildly different. It’s described as a ghostly journey through 1980s London, gripped by the horrors of the Aids crisis, through the eyes of a gay man whose visions range from Christina Hendricks to Rupert Everett as he searches for a lost love.
Prima Facie
Anyone who was lucky enough to witness Jodie Comer’s one-woman feat of acting athleticism in Suzie Miller’s gutting #MeToo drama Prima Facie will have found themselves rather changed by the experience. They might also understandably be a little cautious about that specifically stage-friendly drama being transferred to the big screen with a new actor in her place. For Prima Facie the movie, Comer has handed the baton to Cynthia Erivo, now taking on the role of a ruthless working-class lawyer whose defence of men accused of sexual assault gives her an unusual and unsettling perspective when she is raped by a colleague. Even without the more punishing restrictions of the stage, it still promises to be an intensely difficult challenge on screen but one that, if pulled off, could be Erivo’s most acclaimed performance to date.
Faith
It’s long been hard to define the career of the writer-director Paul Andrew Williams, who broke out with the relentless crime thriller London to Brighton back in 2006 and hasn’t stayed in the same lane since. He’s given us gloopy comedy gore (The Cottage), grim hoodie horror (Cherry Tree Lane), dark domestic violence TV (Murdered by My Boyfriend), sentimental schmaltz (Song for Marion) and, most recently, bleak suburban drama (Dragonfly). It’s therefore hard to know what to expect from Faith, a film starring James McAvoy and Adolescence awards-magnet Erin Doherty, a film billed as a “heartbreaking” supernatural drama about a romance with a twist. It could go a million ways, but as ever Williams is sure to keep us on our toes.
Being Heumann
In a time of envelope-pushing best picture winners including Moonlight, Parasite and Nomadland, it became easy to dunk on a film like Coda, an old-fashioned, formula-first drama more intent on comforting audiences over challenging them. But it was still far from an obviously safe bet, with a cast of mostly deaf actors making it an Oscars outlier, and a win for Troy Kotsur made him the first deaf man to win an acting Oscar. Being Heumann, director Sian Heder’s follow-up, reunites her with Apple and with a noble cause, this time telling the story of Judith Heumann, the groundbreaking activist whose work had a major impact on the mainstreaming of disability rights. There are supporting performances from Mark Ruffalo and Dylan O’Brien but it’s led by Ruth Madeley, who has become one of the most prominent wheelchair-using actors in the UK – and if all goes to plan, she could be a serious force in the best actress race.
