RESIDENT EVIL taps into the hilarity and frustration of the game

Film

I’m a big believer that games like Resident Evil, while not actually all co-op, are a team sport. It’s a fun, exhilarating, and sometimes exhausting proposition to play these games; resource management is scarce and frustrating, panic is high, and the game overall leans into a campiness that can create a lot of laughs if you play with a friend or group of friends. “RUN!” “No, go back that way!” “You’re out of bullets!”

TIFF 26: CLUB KID is TIFF’s biggest breakout

Film

People line up for hours at TIFF to see the latest work from their favorite filmmakers, but it’s also where future directorial stars are born. Take last year: Curry Barker premiered Obsession to the Midnight Madness crowd, and twelve months later he’d made one of the most profitable independent films of all time. This year, a directorial debut generating similar heat is Club Kid, from writer-director-star Jordan Firstman, who seems to come out of nowhere with one of the festival circuit’s biggest darlings.

The End of Oak Street: All Feathers, No Bones

Film

I was a huge fan of It Follows, like so many. David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 breakout was lean, inventive, and genuinely unsettling. It was the kind of early career work that makes you want to follow a filmmaker for the rest of their career. So when his follow-up, Under the Silver Lake, landed him in “director jail,” it felt like an overreaction.

LEVITICUS doesn’t need a monster

Film

There’s a particular kind of horror that doesn’t require a monster at all — the fear of being seen, known, of getting what you thought you wanted. Great horror has always understood this. Leviticus understands it too, and is at its best when the film trusts that that’s enough. It’s at its worst when it reaches for the trappings of the genre to prove the point.

BACKROOMS excavates the fear of turning a corner

Film

If you had to describe a dog to someone who’d never seen one, and then asked them to draw it, would it look like a dog? If they’d never seen an actual dog, could any approximation of what you’d described – 4 legs, 2 ears, wagging tail – get them close enough? And even if it did: would “close enough” to an actual dog just be all the creepier?

This is an image Kane Parsons’s Backrooms keeps circling back to. Is it possible to transmit your interior self to someone else? And if it is, would the result even be recognizable?

Folk horror meets pop glamour in MOTHER MARY

Film

Director David Lowery is not exactly known for broad films that appeal to the masses. So there’s some irony in the fact that Mother Mary is – on paper – Lowery’s most commercial film. It features Anne Hathaway as a pop star, a soundtrack from Charli XCX and FKA Twigs, stunning gowns, and centers on the dissolution of a female friendship. It’s appealing and relatable in concept, but surprisingly, Mother Mary may turn out to be Lowery’s most polarizing film yet.

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