The best part of attending a film festival for the better part of a week? The unexpected discoveries. After seeing more than 15 films at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, we came away with more than just a set of top five favorite films.
Best Gimmick – Presence
Steven Soderbergh is back with another film that feels, in its scale and budget, like it belongs at the beginning of his filmography rather than from this year. Soderbergh swings a lot, and sometimes he misses, but his willingness to experiment always makes his films an interesting prospect. That gamble pays off in Presence, a film that centers around a spirit (shot in first person from the ghost’s POV) confined to a house and trying to discern its place there.
Presence takes a fairly generic horror idea, for the most part residing in a dime a dozen script, and elevates the execution with the camera acting as the ghost’s POV. The shooting style means there are times when the seams are showing in what is essentially a series of one-shot, long takes. But the way the film weaves through its moments keeps the action feeling novel in what otherwise might come off as a stage play. At times I thought a lot about the titular presence, while other times it effectively fades into the background and allows us to immerse in the family dynamics.
Speaking of those family dynamics, the ongoing conflicts of the parents occupy the most interesting part of Presence, shooting style aside. The real hit of the film is Chris Sullivan’s portrayal of a father trying to protect his daughter – if Lucy Lui is channeling Mary Tyler Moore a la Ordinary People, Sullivan is effectively emulating Donald Sutherland in the same film, and with similar levels of gentle pathos. It’s easy to reference other films when talking about Presence. You’ve seen pieces of Presence everywhere, some of them quite ordinary and even undercooked, but you’ve never seen them combined in exactly this way before.
Biggest Letdown – The Last Showgirl
Girl Power is having its moment at TIFF, which makes sense on the heels of 2023’s Barbie-mania. Director Gia Coppola seizes on that moment with The Last Showgirl. On its face, The Last Showgirl is about the dying art of Vegas showgirls in favor of Cirque de Soleil stunt artists. In reality, The Last Showgirl feels primarily like a well-intentioned Pamela Anderson comeback vehicle, in the same mold of Mickey Rourke’s career-defining comeback in The Wrestler.
Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier to root for the intentions and the idea of The Last Showgirl than its execution. Filled with an overly styled and fuzzy cinematography that borders on feeling like a mistake, Coppola’s effort to elevate and rebrand Anderson feels like a paper-thin story lacking the necessary oomph or performances to justify its existence. Everyone is going through the motions, but minus a few line deliveries from supporting cast member Jamie Lee Curtis, the performances are middling, and the quiet performance from Anderson coupled with the understated script leave for an underwhelming experience.
File this one under “wanted to like.”
Best Screening Experience – The Life of Chuck
2024’s TIFF delivered what will likely go down as my most memorable screening experience with The Life of Chuck, which also happened to take home the People’s Choice Award as audience-goers favorite film. An adaptation of the Stephen King novella by the same name, The Life of Chuck is a three-party story that is told in reverse. The first is about the impending end of the world, and the choices characters make when confronting the end. The second is about a mysterious figure named Chuck (Tom Hiddleston), and the third is fantastical tale about an old home with hidden secrets. It’s a novel way of telling a story, and that these three stories click together so seamlessly is a success both for director Mike Flanagan and for King’s solid source material.
What made this screening experience so memorable, though, was the way Flanagan and his cast approached it. Rather than hanging out backstage for the Q&A, as most stars do, the cast sat front and center with the audience to digest the show with everyone else. Sitting a few rows away from the likes of Tom Hiddleston, Mark Hamill, Stephen King, and Chiwetel Ejiofor while they experienced the screening was extraordinarily strange, and the audience was the loudest and most enthusiastic bunch I’ve seen yet.
Biggest Surprise – Heretic
Going into TIFF, you have a sense of what you’re getting into with about half of the movies on your list. Usually they’re ones that have already premiered at Cannes or Venice and have some collective word-of-mouth. And then you have the gambles – usually smaller films by unknown artists where you take a chance. Heretic was the rare film on my list that felt both like a bigger commercial film and also felt like a genuine question mark. I’d seen a preview but was otherwise uncertain of what to expect, while leaning slightly pessimistic that the film would be a pretty generic one that leaned on its stunt casting of Hugh Grant for commercial success.
Color me surprised to find Heretic to be one of the best scripted horror films I’ve seen this year.
Heretic is somewhere between a movie like Saw and a movie like Dogma. It interrogates not just the concept of faith and belief but the man-made concepts and iterations in modern-day religion, often with jokey metaphors and comparisons. This part of the script is where Heretic hits the best, abandoning the trauma-metaphor trap so many horror films have fallen into lately, and instead just engaging in an interesting dialogue about religion. As a horror film, fortunately it’s also still quite good – Grant makes a more menacing and interesting villain than the much-hyped performance of Nic Cage in Longlegs, and the script plays on typical horror tropes by taking some surprising turns.