TIFF 2021 Has Begun!

Why Watch That Radio

On this episode of Why Watch That:

Our reviews (so far) at this year's Toronto International Film Festival, including:

Petite Maman

Following a girl’s journey to her mother’s childhood home, French auteur Céline Sciamma’s latest is a tender tale of intergenerational connection.

Céline Sciamma’s TIFF ’19 selection Portrait of a Lady on Fire garnered international acclaim for its sumptuous rendering of queer female desire and the overwhelming power of both truly looking and truly being seen. Sciamma’s follow-up brings the writer-director’s exquisite craft and acute insights into longing to bear on a tale of childhood grief and wonder.

After her grandmother dies, Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) is taken to her mother’s childhood home. While her parents go about cleaning out the house, Nelly explores the surrounding woods. She encounters Marion (Gabrielle Sanz), a girl exactly Nelly’s age and to whom she bears a striking resemblance. The pair become fast friends, constructing a hut together, sharing lunches, and talking over the life transitions both are in the midst of. (Marion is only days away from going to hospital for an operation.) Incrementally, the girls’ eerie similarities yield revelations that merge events of the past with those of the present.

Working once again with cinematographer Claire Mathon and production designer Lionel Brison, Sciamma gently ushers us into a series of hushed, crepuscular spaces where the spectral meets the everyday and time seems to fold in on itself. Drawing lovely, subtle performances from her young stars, Sciamma allows us to see the world through Nelly and Marion’s eyes. The result is a film of tremendous tenderness and sombre beauty that, like all of Sciamma’s films, celebrates the spectrum of feminine connection. -DIANA SANCHEZ

SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

France, 2021

French

70 minutes

Director

Céline Sciamma

Cast

Joséphine Sanz, Gabrielle Sanz, Nina Meurisse, Stéphane Varupenne, Margo Abascal

Screenplay

Céline Sciamma

Mothering Sunday

Olivia Colman and Colin Firth star in this deeply affecting adaptation of Graham Swift’s bittersweet novel about secret love in post-WWI England.

Featuring captivating performances from up-and-coming talents Odessa Young (TIFF ’18’s Assassination Nation) and Josh O’Connor (The Crown), and Oscar-winning veterans Olivia Colman, Colin Firth, and Glenda Jackson, this exquisite adaptation of Booker Prize–winning author Graham Swift’s eponymous novella transports us to Britain’s inter-war years for a story of grief, responsibility, and hidden love.

Jane (Young) works as a maid for the Nivens (Colman and Firth), an aging home counties couple who, like so many other families, lost their sons on the battlefields of the First World War. Jane is having a secret affair with Paul (O’Connor), son of the Nivens’ neighbours, the Sheringhams. Paul is the only member of his peer group to return from the front, a status that has left him with a powerful dose of survivor’s guilt and a weighty sense of duty to his family, who expects him to pursue a legal career and marry a woman of his station — which is to say, not the likes of Jane.

On Mothering Sunday, her day off, Jane trysts with Paul at his house while his parents are away. There is a sense of quiet idyll to their stolen hours of lovemaking and Jane’s gentle exploration of this world of wealth and prestige. Yet a double shadow hangs over this precious day, arising from the horrors of the recent past and the disappointments and sacrifices looming in the pair’s future.

Scripted by Alice Birch (TIFF ’16 world premiere Lady Macbeth) and directed by Eva Husson (TIFF ’18’s Girls of the Sun), Mothering Sunday draws us into Jane and Paul’s rendezvous, vividly evoking both its sensuous peaks and sobering undercurrents before zooming ahead into a future time when all this can be placed in perspective. -DIANA SANCHEZ

SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

United Kingdom, 2021

English

104 minutes

Director

Eva Husson

Cast

Odessa Young, Josh O'Connor, Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù, Olivia Colman, Colin Firth, Glenda Jackson, Patsy Ferran, Emma D’Arcy

Screenplay

Alice Birch

The Starling

Melissa McCarthy, Chris O’Dowd and Kevin Kline star in Theodore Melfi’s bittersweet tale of a couple working their way toward the other side of grief.

Melissa McCarthy has long proved she can play both wild comedy and heartbreaking drama. Working again with her St. Vincent director Theodore Melfi and buoyed by a superb supporting cast, she soars in a complex role that draws upon her impeccable timing and emotional instincts.

Lilly (McCarthy) is always the one who holds it together when things go south for her family. A year has passed since she and her husband Jack (Chris O’Dowd) lost their infant daughter. Grief got the better of Jack, who’s now recovering in a psychiatric clinic. Lilly holds down her job at the grocery store, keeps up the family’s expansive rural property, and faithfully makes the weekly two-hour journey to visit her husband.

Concerned that Lilly isn’t tending to her own grieving process, a counsellor at Jack’s clinic suggests that she see a local therapist, Larry (Kevin Kline, also appearing in Festival selection The Good House). The counsellor neglects to mention that Larry long ago gave up psychology to become a veterinarian — a practice that will prove germane when a dive-bombing starling begins wreaking havoc in Lilly’s garden.

The intricacies of Matt Harris’s sensitive, canny screenplay allow us to observe the ways that every act of love — whether toward a spouse, a client, or an insistent bird — requires both generosity and boundary setting. Lilly can’t bear the notion of being a quitter, but without some self-care, all her efforts to care for others could come to naught.

Helmed with rich insight into the healing process by Melfi (Academy Award– nominated for Hidden Figures), The Starling lights upon a rare balance of levity and gravity, mischief and tenderness. -CAMERON BAILEY

SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

United States of America, 2021

English

103 minutes

Director

Theodore Melfi

Cast

Melissa McCarthy, Chris O'Dowd, Timothy Olyphant, Skyler Gisondo, Daveed Diggs, Laura Harrier, Rosalind Chao, Loretta Devine, Kevin Kline

Screenplay

Matt Harris

Publicist

Netflix

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

An eccentric artist (Benedict Cumberbatch) introduces Victorian London to the delights of cats, in Will Sharpe’s enlightening biopic.

From Ancient Egypt to TikTok, cats have accompanied humans on life’s journey. But who made the creatures cute? The Electrical Life of Louis Wain tells the story of the Victorian-era artist whose widely published drawings of anthropomorphized cats transformed them from mysterious to irresistible. In a dazzling, career-best performance, Benedict Cumberbatch plays one of Britain’s most influential eccentrics as a flurry of wild ideas and prodigious artistic output.

Louis Wain (Cumberbatch, also at the Festival in The Power of the Dog) brims with creativity, even as his life in the 1880s oscillates between the delightful and the dizzying. To support his widowed mother and five younger sisters, the academy-trained artist sells drawings of animals from the country fair. His skilled and speedy portraiture impresses, but his often stormy view of the world and those in it keeps him from engaging much with society. That is, until he hires a kind, curious governess for his youngest sisters, Emily Richardson (Claire Foy), who illuminates his life in a way even he’d never imagined. Love blooms across the class divide — albeit to the chagrin of Louis’s stern sister Caroline (Andrea Riseborough), second oldest and second in command.

Writer-director Will Sharpe (television’s Flowers, whose co-star Olivia Colman narrates here) uses dynamic visual technique and colourfully shifting mood to convey Louis’s complicated mind, fickle wealth, momentous love, and consuming grief. Cumberbatch’s transcendent performance stands at the centre of an impressive cast that includes Toby Jones and Adeel Akhtar (also at the Festival in Ali & Ava). Alive with imagination in every scene, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain shows just how we came to live in a cat’s world. Meow. -DESCRIPTION COURTESY OF TIFF

GALA PRESENTATIONS

United Kingdom, 2021

English

111 minutes

Director

Will Sharpe

Cast

Benedict Cumberbatch, Claire Foy, Andrea Riseborough, Toby Jones

Screenplay

Simon Stephenson, Will Sharpe

Publicist

Amazon Studios

All My Puny Sorrows

Michael McGowan’s touching adaptation of Miriam Toews’ beloved novel about two sisters boasts a fine cast led by Alison Pill and Sarah Gadon.

Michael McGowan’s moving adaptation of Miriam Toews’ beloved novel All My Puny Sorrows is propelled by nuanced direction, an affecting script, and a truly stellar, fearless cast. The story revolves around the women of the Von Riesen clan: writer Yoli (Alison Pill), who’s tormented by self-doubt and is going through a tough, protracted divorce; her sister Elf (Sarah Gadon), a well-known concert pianist whose bouts with depression threaten to consume her; their steadfast mother Lottie (Mare Winningham); their no-nonsense aunt Tina (Mimi Kuzyk); and Yoli’s precocious daughter Nora (Amybeth McNulty).

The family are no strangers to sorrow. They left the Mennonite community after their patriarch (Donal Logue) unexpectedly killed himself. (It’s not said explicitly, but the film suggests his church played a key role in his decision.) How the Von Riesens, especially Yoli and Elf, confront — and fail to confront — tragedy and trauma is the central focus of the film. The sisters’ wisecracking banter and acute awareness of each other’s foibles indicates a profound love and mutual dependency, but as Yoli struggles to understand Elf and protect her from her demons, the women’s fundamental differences come to the fore.

Oscillating powerfully between extremes of joy and sadness, All My Puny Sorrows is also one of the most erudite, literary films you will see this year. Much of the close relationship between Yoli and Elf is based on their love of books (stretching from Philip Larkin to D.H. Lawrence), reflecting their intellectual curiosity and capacity for life — which only makes the film all the more heartbreaking, and its ultimate embrace of life so touching. -STEVE GRAVESTOCK

SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

Canada, 2021

English

103 minutes

Director

Michael McGowan

Cast

Alison Pill, Sarah Gadon, Mare Winningham, Amybeth McNulty, Donal Logue

Screenplay

Michael McGowan

Encounter

A decorated Marine (Riz Ahmed) goes on a rescue mission to save his two young sons from an inhuman threat, in the latest from director Michael Pearce.

Suspenseful, wildly imaginative, and eerily resonant, British director Michael Pearce’s follow-up to his TIFF ’17 Platform competitor Beast catapults us into a world where every encounter could lead to peril. Featuring an adrenalized lead performance from Riz Ahmed, this is a thriller for the age of cultural division and seemingly endless existential threat.

A decorated marine, Malik Khan (Ahmed) is trained to identify risk. But what if the risk appears totally ordinary? Malik sees bugs. Evil bugs. Alien bugs that seem to be seizing control of people, one after another. Malik can’t convince the world to sound the alarm, but he can at least protect his two young sons from global parasitic invasion — which might involve kidnapping them from the home of Malik’s estranged wife.

Written with Joe Barton (TIFF ’17 world premiere The Ritual), Pearce’s leap into large-scale filmmaking, with its nod to genre classics like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, brilliantly fuses dazzling spectacle with character-driven drama. Encounter’s visuals are by turns gorgeous and shocking. Its atmosphere of American heartland creepiness is both familiar and unnerving.

Yet the film ultimately rests on its performances. Oscar winner Octavia Spencer is masterful in a supporting role that prompts us to reconsider everything we’ve seen, while Ahmed cements his reputation as one of the most compelling actors working today. Whether playfully joshing with his boys, confronting far-right extremists, or defending himself against a human-insect hybrid, Ahmed imbues Malik’s every gesture with magnetism and mystery, leading up to a showdown that blurs the cosmic with the cognitive. -CAMERON BAILEY

SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

United Kingdom, United States of America, 2021

English

108 minutes

Director

Michael Pearce

Cast

Riz Ahmed, Octavia Spencer, Rory Cochrane

Screenplay

Joe Barton, Michael Pearce

Publicist

Amazon Studios

The Guilty

Jake Gyllenhaal stars in Antoine Fuqua’s thriller set over the course of a single morning in a 911 dispatch centre.

Versatile action auteur Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, screening at the Festival as part of TIFF Rewind) reunites with his Southpaw star Jake Gyllenhaal in this riveting film about an emergency responder’s desperate race to save a distressed caller. Unfolding in real time within the confines of a frenetic 911 dispatch centre, Fuqua’s The Guilty delivers on its high-concept premise, channelled through another powerhouse performance from Gyllenhaal.

As a wildfire rages towards Los Angeles, embittered police officer Joe Bayler (Gyllenhaal) winds down a chaotic but tedious shift answering emergency calls — a punitive demotion he received ahead of an imminent disciplinary hearing. His ennui is soon interrupted by a cryptic call from a woman (Riley Keough) who appears to be attempting to call her child, but is in fact discreetly reporting her own abduction. Working with the meagre clues she is able to provide, Joe throws all his skill and intuition towards ensuring her safety, but as the severity of the crime comes to light, Joe’s own psychological state begins to fray and he is forced to reconcile with demons of his own.

Every tense moment plays out on Gyllenhaal’s face, as he spars with a dynamic ensemble of voices in his headset, including those of Ethan Hawke, Peter Sarsgaard, and Paul Dano. Building off a script from True Detective creator-writer Nic Pizzolatto, Fuqua and cinematographer Maz Makhani crosscut the white-knuckle drama with a montage of monitors broadcasting the apocalyptic inferno outside; a surreal, but all too familiar reflection of our mad world. -CAMERON BAILEY

SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

United States of America, 2021

English

90 minutes

Director

Antoine Fuqua

Cast

Jake Gyllenhaal, Ethan Hawke, Riley Keough, Christina Vidal Mitchell, Eli Goree, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, David Castañeda, Paul Dano, Peter Sarsgaard

Screenplay

Nic Pizzolatto

Publicist

Netflix

Lakewood

​​Naomi Watts stars in Phillip Noyce’s nerve-rattling thriller about a mother struggling to rescue her son from a school shooter.

Amy Carr (Naomi Watts) is out for what should have been a restorative morning run when a friend calls with terrifying news: the local high school attended by Noah, her teenage son, has been besieged by an active shooter. Deep within a network of forest paths surrounding her home, miles from town and nearly overwhelmed by panic, Amy refuses to succumb to hopelessness. With her smartphone as her sole means of intervention, she will draw upon every resource she can think of to ensure that her son survives the attack.

Helmed by veteran director Phillip Noyce (Rabbit-Proof Fence, Dead Calm) and written by Chris Sparling, Lakewood plunges us headlong into a desperate scenario unfolding in real time. The film echoes Sparling’s acclaimed screenplay for Buried, a selection at TIFF 2010, in the sense that most of it unfolds as a one-person show, with Amy navigating the situation remotely. Yet Noyce’s film also functions as a tribute to the power of a community working together in the face of calamity, as Amy enlists the assistance of an auto-body shop manager, a 911 operator, a rideshare driver, and one of her co-workers at the Marion County Division of Taxation to help her take matters into her own hands.

It is rare to encounter a thriller like Lakewood, at once high-concept and heartfelt, exhilarating and poignant. It is also a showcase for Watts, who masterfully conveys a captivating fusion of impromptu heroism and maternal devotion. -DESCRIPTION COURTESY OF TIFF

GALA PRESENTATIONS

Canada, 2021

English

84 minutes

Director

Phillip Noyce

Cast

Naomi Watts

Screenplay

Chris Sparling

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