Film festivals are an unpredictable, choose-your-own adventure journey; the Toronto International Film Festival’s 2025 lineup includes 291 unique titles to choose from. Which is to say that no two people will have the same journey.
Still, each year, a few themes emerge for me from the crop of films I manage to ingest in the five-day period I spend at the festival. Thinking about the themes and moods these films have in common often serves me better than thinking about what separates them, and makes for a fascinating exercise when comparing films of varying genres from all over the world. This year’s recurring anxieties around paternal failures and economic abandonment feel less like coincidence and more like the artistic unconscious processing our current moment.
So what cropped up this year?
BAD DADS
Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value was the first film I saw of the festival, and it absolutely set the tone for what was to come. Stellan Skarsgård plays a father trying to reconnect with his daughters through a new movie he writes after their mother passes away. But I was surprised by just how many titles I saw throughout the festival ruminated on the failings of our fathers this time around, especially since most of these films weren’t strictly about struggling or failing fathers – it was just a core tenet of a major character in each film.
Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire explores much larger societal issues (described below) but couples it with a dose of cold father in a performance from Al Pacino. White-knuckle thriller Sirât, directed by Óliver Laxe, stars Sergi López as perhaps the most well-meaning but irresponsible father of the bunch, as he searches the desert for his missing daughter by following EDM ravers to a party against the backdrop of looming war. Director Hikari’s Rental Family sees Brendan Fraser ruminate on the failings of his own father as he takes an unusual acting gig and pretends to be a child’s absent father to help her get into a more prestigious prep school. Awards buzz circles Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, a historical fiction regarding William Shakespeare’s family life and how it may have inspired his works – including his inability to stick around for his family and cope after the loss of a child. And finally, L’nu filmmaker Bretten Hannam’s Sk+te’kmujue’katik (At the Place of Ghosts) sees two brothers deal with childhood trauma surrounding their father while trying to track down a malicious spirit from their past.
ECONOMIC ABANDONMENT
While fathers failed their children, larger systems were failing adults just as dramatically. Several films at TIFF saw protagonists play by the rules and end up in desperate economic conditions regardless. Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice tackles some of the immediate pressure people are feeling regarding AI and job displacement by following Lee Byung-hun’s portrayal of a man who finds himself without a job or prospects and decides to literally eliminate his competition to climb his way back up the corporate ladder. Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada uses a sci-fi lens to explore the impact of an industry’s collapse killing an entire community and the specific residents who inhabit it. And Dead Man’s Wire, which managed to intersect both of the most prevalent themes I found at TIFF this year, features Bill Skarsgård’s portrayal of real-life kidnapper Tony Kiritsis, who famously held a mortgage executive at gunpoint for several days after feeling he was wronged by the lender. This one most literally depicts someone driven to extreme measures by financial institutions that exploit people at their most vulnerable.
What struck me most about this year’s festival is how these themes mirror the anxiety of our moment. “Bad dads” aren’t just stories of personal failings, but reflections of larger safety nets and systems that have failed to provide stability. What happens when the traditional institutions we’re supposed to trust – family, employers, financial systems – are broken?