We don’t really talk about how serious TIFF used to be. In its early days as the Festival Of Festivals, the programming was practically snooty, only harvesting the very finest art films from the international circuit. The advent of Midnight Madness in 1988 gave the festival a place to showcase genre films and give audiences the chance to get a little rowdier, and now those genre elements can be found everywhere, creeping into dramas and comedies and everything in between.
So here’s our list of the 10 horror, sci-fi and thriller movies, both in and out of the Midnight Madness program, we’re most looking forward to watching at TIFF 2021. Get ready to get weird.
Dune
Every time we release a TIFF lookahead, people ask us why Dune isn’t on it. Well, we told you it’d be on the genre list, and here it is! Delayed by nearly a year from its original November 2020 release, Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s massive sci-fi epic – you know, the one with the sandworms – is heading toward the festival like a juggernaut, promising epic vistas, elaborate action set pieces, Oscar Isaac with a really big beard, Timothée Chalamet as an unlikely messiah and Rebecca Ferguson and Zendaya swinging guns around. Look, it’s Denis Villeneuve’s Dune; at this point you’re either in or you’re out.
Last Night In Soho
I’ve been avoiding any details about Edgar Wright’s latest, because he’s one of my favourite filmmakers and dammit, I just want to see this movie cold. But what I do know is that it stars Jojo Rabbit’s Thomasin McKenzie alongside Anya Taylor-Joy, Matt Smith, Diana Rigg, Rita Tushingham and Terence Stamp; it’s mostly set in 60s London, but not exclusively, and that it’s “kind of a horror movie,” according to co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns. And really, what else do you need to hear?
DASHCAM
Rob Savage’s screenlife creeper Host – about some friends in lockdown who accidentally summon a vengeful spirit over Zoom – was a breakout hit last year, and we’ve been wondering what he’d do for an encore. The answer? DASHCAM, in which an always-on American indie rocker livestreams her way through London, where she blunders into some extreme unpleasantness. Savage and TIFF are keeping this so quiet they won’t even identify the actor playing the lead. Which, we have to admit, is pretty rock-and-roll of them.
Encounter
Want to see Riz Ahmed battle alien-human bug monsters? Who wouldn’t? Michael Pearce’s paranoid thriller casts the Oscar-nominated dynamo as a Marine trying to save his young sons from what’s being described as a “global parasitic invasion,” with Octavia Spencer and Rory Cochrane along for the ride. Pearce last came to TIFF with the Jessie Buckley/Johnny Flynn psychodrama Beast in 2017; this one seems like a very different animal, though the seething intensity might carry over.
I’m Your Man
“Dan Stevens plays a German sex robot” is a great way to secure production funding, but actor and filmmaker Maria Schrader has a lot more on her mind than a single joke: her speculative comedy about a Berlin researcher (Maren Eggert) assigned to evaluate an android (Stevens) designed to be her perfect partner in every way is a slightly uncomfortable examination of the way relationships are built, and whether we really want to find ourselves in the people we love. (Okay, fine: I’ve seen this one. And it’s great.)
A Banquet
Two very focused women, locked in a battle of wills with salvation or damnation hanging in the balance: Rose Glass did some pretty great stuff with this in Saint Maud two years ago, and now it’s Scottish filmmaker Ruth Paxton’s turn to explore the dynamic, with a story of a mother (Sienna Guillory) determined to shake her eldest daughter (Jessica Alexander) of the inexplicable religious conviction that’s forcing her to starve herself. It’s in the Discovery program, but have no illusions: this is a horror movie.
Neptune Frost
From creative life partners Saul Williams (who starred in in Charles Officer’s Akilla’s Escape last year) and Anisia Uzeyman (Ayiti Mon Amour) comes this Afro-futurist experimental musical about an intersex hacker (played by both Cheryl Isheja and Elvis Ngabo) and a coltan miner (Bertrand “Kaya Free” Nintereste) whose unlikely love will spark a revolution that frees Rwanda from centuries of colonial oppression. Williams wrote the script and the score, with Lin-Manuel Miranda and The Halluci Nation onboard as executive producers, and Cannes had no idea what to make of it when it premiered there in July. We cannot wait to see it.
Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash
Indonesian arthouse director Edwin (Postcards From The Zoo) switches gears for an action movie that folds in gangsters, martial arts and a star-crossed love story about two very violent people – street fighter Ajo (Marthino Lio) and mob bodyguard Iteung (Ladya Cheryl), who happens to be protecting his latest mark. Based on a novel by Eka Kurniawan and shot in 16mm, this sounds like the Midnight Madness scrappy crowd-pleaser that comes out of nowhere in the last few days of the festival and leaves everyone feeling just great.
Zalava
In 1978, an Iranian military officer (Navid Pourfaraj) arrives in a remote village in Kurdistan to investigate reports of demonic possession – and soon finds himself in the middle of utter chaos, with the villagers seeing supernatural threats everywhere while a local shaman (Pouria Rahimi Sam) insists he alone can purge the malevolence. Is any of it real? And what happens if it is? Every Midnight Madness program gets at least one satanic-panic picture; this year’s is just a little more ideologically loaded.
Saloum
Actor Yann Gael and writer/director Jean Luc Herbulot – who previously collaborated on the Netflix series Sakho & Mangane – reunite for this Senegalese thriller, set during the 2003 coup, about three mercenaries and a drug dealer who wind up in the Sine-Saloum Delta, where neither the laws of physics nor the laws of man strictly apply. TIFF’s invoking Predator and From Dusk Till Dawn as reference points, so it sounds like things get very bloody very quickly. Which, honestly, is what you want in a Midnight Madness movie.
Read more
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