If you’re looking for speculative, fantastic cinema, you don’t have to confine yourself to the Midnight Madness program – there’s plenty of genre work circulating throughout the entirety of the festival. Here are 10 features that look to hit that particular sweet spot of pop culture and artistry. And, yes, the new Halloween movie is one of them.
Aniara
In space no one can hear you shop. Swedish directors Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja adapt Harry Martinson’s epic poem (!) about the passengers of a luxury space ark – designed as an interplanetary mall – who are confronted with a literal and existential crisis when an accident disables the ship and sends it hurtling into deep space. It sounds like the movie Passengers wasn’t smart enough to be.
Sep 7, 6 pm, Scotiabank Sep 9, 9:30 pm, Scotiabank Sep 15, 5:45 pm, Scotiabank.
Border
Winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes earlier this spring, Ali Abbasi’s mystery-thriller casts Eva Melander as a border security agent with the ability to smell people’s feelings – which makes her an asset when she’s brought into a child-pornography investigation, but also may prove a liability when she finds herself drawn to the prime suspect. Oh, and it’s based on a short story by John Ajvide Lindqvist, author of Let The Right One In.
Sep 10, 9:15 pm, Scotiabank Sep 12, 3:15 pm, TBLB.
Freaks
The debut feature from Vancouver filmmakers Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein follows a seven-year-old girl (Lexy Kolker) who escapes her confining father (Emile Hirsch) and ventures into a world that’s stranger than she ever could have imagined. Or maybe that’s just because Bruce Dern plays an ice cream man.
Sep 8, 9:30 pm, Scotiabank Sep 10, 9:45 pm, Scotiabank Sep 16, 6:45 pm, Scotiabank.
Halloween
Picking up 40 years after the events of John Carpenter’s 1978 slasher masterpiece – and apparently ignoring every other film in the franchise, which at this point is the only sensible strategy – David Gordon Green’s Halloween brings back Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode for another night of terror, somehow folding in her adult daughter (Judy Greer, which is perfect casting) and granddaughter (Andi Matichak) as well. It’s weird to think that Michael Myers would now be in his 60s, but he’s probably kept himself in shape, right?
Sep 8, 11:30 pm, Elgin Sep 8, 11:59 pm, Winter Garden.
High Life
The last time the revered French auteur Claire Denis ventured into genre, the result was the deeply unsettling horror riff Trouble Every Day. Seventeen years later, she’s trying her hand at science fiction, casting Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, André Benjamin and Mia Goth in a story about convicts sent into deep space on an exploratory mission to a black hole. Where will they end up? What will they find? Why does Pattinson’s character have an infant daughter aboard? I’ll be first in line to find out.
Sep 9, 9:30 pm, Roy Thomson Hall Sep 11, 11 am, Winter Garden Sep 14, 9:45 pm, TBLB.
Hold The Dark
After the mournful Blue Ruin and the nerve-shredding Green Room, Jeremy Saulnier returns with a survival thriller starring the formidable Jeffrey Wright as an author enlisted to find a missing child in Alaska after the boy’s mother (Riley Keough) claims he was taken by a pack of wolves. Co-starring Alexander Skarsgård and written by Saulnier’s lucky charm Macon Blair, it looks to be an eerie, unsettling experience that’s perfectly in line with the director’s other work.
Sep 12, 6 pm, Princess Of Wales Sep 13, 1 pm, Elgin Sep 14, 9:45 am, TBLB Sep 15, 2 pm, Ryerson.
In Fabric
Having established himself as a masterful textural stylist with the Argento pastiche Berberian Sound Studio and the lush BDSM-flavoured psychodrama The Duke Of Burgundy, Peter Strickland makes his Midnight Madness debut with a thriller about an accursed dress that wreaks havoc on anyone unfortunate enough to encounter it. The cast includes Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Julian Barrett, Gwendoline Christie and Sightseers’ Steve Oram. Who will survive and what will they be wearing? Let’s find out together.
Sep 13, 11:59 pm, Ryerson Sep 14, 8:45 pm, Scotiabank Sep 15, 11:45 am, Scotiabank.
The Lie
Remaking Sebastian Ko’s German thriller We Monsters – which premiered at TIFF in 2015 – writer/director Veena Sud relocates the action to America and casts Peter Sarsgaard and Mirielle Enos as parents determined to protect their teenage daughter (Joey King) after the girl tells them she’s killed her best friend. The original was a tricky, sinister little movie, and an English-language interpretation should be right in Sud’s wheelhouse after The Killing – where, of course, she first worked with Enos and Sarsgaard.
Sep 13, 6:30 pm, Roy Thomson Hall Sep 13, 8 pm, Elgin Sep 14, 9:30 pm, Scotiabank Sep 16, 2:15 pm, Scotiabank.
Nekrotronic
When the Queen of Hell (Monica Bellucci, because of course) starts using social media to lure people to their eternal damnation, an Australian sanitation worker (Ben O’Toole) and a cadre of rogue demon hunters must band together to save the day in the latest from Kiah Roache-Turner and his brother Tristan, who made their bones with the splatterific Aussie zombie venture Wyrmwood: Road Of The Dead. The Midnight Madness crowd will be disappointed if this one isn’t at least as messy.
Sep 7, 11:59 pm, Ryerson Sep 9, 4 pm, Scotiabank.
The Predator
How do you get people interested in a franchise that’s spent 30 years not quite getting the respect it deserves? You give it to Shane Black – who had a small role as one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s doomed comrades in the 1987 original – and let him do whatever the hell he wants with it. (Apparently this includes a role for Canada’s Sweetheart, Jacob Tremblay.) After Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man 3 and The Nice Guys, I have total faith that Black will deliver something that honours the core concept of the franchise, while still taking it in a weird new direction.
Sep 6, 11:59 pm, Ryerson Sep 7, 9:30 pm, Scotiabank Sep 11, 9:45 pm, Scotiabank.
