TIFF ’23: What To See at This Year’s Fest, Sept. 11

By Jim Slotek, Liz Braun, Thom Ernst, Karen Gordon, Kim Hughes, John Kirk, Chris Knight, Liam Lacey and Bonnie Laufer

Another week, another round of screenings at the 48th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival. Herewith, our thoughts on just a few of the many films screening today.

After the Fire (Discovery)

Mon, Sept. 11, 2:10 pm, Scotiabank 1.

French director Mehdi Fikri takes on a hot-button issue in his country in this simmering social realist film. Karim, a 25-year-old man, is in police custody. His family and members of his working-class immigrant community assume foul play on the part of the police. Although he’d been estranged from her for three years, his eldest sister Malika (a riveting Camélia Jordana, leading a uniformly terrific cast) is devastated, and determined to get justice through the courts, no matter the cost, butting against a system that protects the police. This deeply affecting film explores the impact on her, on her family, and the society at large. KG

Backspot

Backspot (Discovery)

Mon, Sept. 11, 3 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 1; Fri, Sept. 15, 9:45 pm Scotiabank 14.

Backspot takes the sport of professional cheerleading to the extreme. Directed by Toronto’s D.W. Waterson and produced by Elliot Page’s production company, the film was written by Joanne Sarazen, based on a story by Waterson. It centres on Riley (Reservation Dogs’ Devery Jacobs), a teenage girl given the chance to cheer with the all-star squad, Thunderhawks. With a major competition on the horizon, Riley must navigate her crippling anxiety, her relationship with girlfriend and fellow cheerleader Amanda (Kudakwashe Rutendo, TIFF Rising Star ’23) and her desperate need for approval from her new coach (Evan Rachel Wood). Her interaction with the girls is tough to watch at times but understandable given the pressure they are under to succeed. BL

Concrete Utopia (Gala Presentations)

Mon, Sept. 11, 10:50 am, Scotiabank 1; Fri, Sept. 15, 9 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 1; Sat, Sept. 16, 8:30 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 3.

Apartment buildings make great settings for parables about urban living and income inequality; check out Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, Only Murders in the Building or (this one’s horrible so just take my word for it) the 2020 film Pandemic. Korean director Um Tae-hwa gives us a vision of a post-apocalyptic Seoul in which it seems only one building has been left standing. The residents, including a married civil servant and nurse, must figure out how to keep things going, which they do by first electing an unlikely leader, then clearing the building of all outsiders, whom they take to calling cockroaches. The ending rattles on a little, and the married couple’s story isn’t as fleshed out as it might be, but this is still an interesting, timely tale of power and society. (Note: the TIFF schedule lists the running time as both 2:10 and 2:40; the first one is correct.) CK

Knox Goes Away (Special Presentation)

Mon, Sept. 11, 5:30 pm, Roy Thomson Hall.

Michael Keaton directs and stars as hitman John Knox in this bleak, paradoxical neo-noir thriller. Bleak because it’s the dark story of a hitman slipping into a rare form of dementia; paradoxical because it’s a morality tale, with a kind of David Mamet twist, told by people with weak morals. Keaton as Knox is great as he plays his encroaching loss of memory with silent gazes, neither dignified nor explosive. The problem is the film’s direction, which wavers from the grim to the comic without settling on a common ground where the two extremes can co-exist. And the missteps — sadly Marcia Gay-Harden gets caught up in one of them — sidesteps both the grim and the comical in favour of sentimentality. The difficulty begins with the way Keaton sets up the opening scene; nighttime with Keaton in a diner having a late-night breakfast with a business associate (Ray McKinnon). Despite good performances from both actors, the scene plays like a forced two-hander. Their seemingly mundane dialogue is meant to trigger, without the viewer’s knowledge, hints of a culture, a friendship, and a long history. Problem is, their conversation is truly mundane and the hit-man tropes are anything but subtle. Still, the film has it moments of genuine humour, as well as genuine thrills. Oh, and Al Pacino is fun. TE

Monster (Special Presentations)

Mon, Sept. 11, 3 pm, Scotiabank 2.

Winner of both best screenplay for Yûji Sakamoto and the Queer Palm at this past year’s Cannes Film Festival, Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda (Shoplifters, Broker) unfolds a story about how a situation looks from different perspectives. Eleven-year-old Minato (Sōya Kurokawa) lives with his attentive and loving mother (Sakura Andô). When he starts acting strangely, and saying strange things, she traces the problems back to his teacher Hori (Eita Nagayama). When she tries to address it, she runs into a maddening wall of obfuscation by school officials. The film resets and looks at the situation again and again, through the eyes of each person involved, shifting our perceptions each time. In the end, as with so many of his films, Kore-eda’s heart is with the children. KG

The Zone of Interest (Special Presentations)

Mon, Sept. 11, 8:45 pm, Scotiabank 3.

Writer-director Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of the Martin Amis’ novel — winner of the Grand Prix at this year's Cannes — is a quiet, powerful study of the banal face of evil. The film focuses on Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the commandant of Auschwitz, who lives a stone’s throw from the camp with his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and their children. The film focuses on daily life for the Höss family: their lovely orderly house and their garden, which Hedwig has landscaped so beautifully that she laughingly notes that she’s been called the Queen of Auschwitz. Höss runs the camp with the icy efficiency of a bureaucrat with big career aspirations. Glazer never takes us into Auschwitz, but the camp looms in the background: the guard tower, the barbed wire topped wall, the endless smoke and ash from the crematoria, and the intermittent sounds of guns, of orders barked, of pain. Glazer keeps the camera distant, never judging. The result is devastating. KG