With all due respect to the landmark 50th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, the hottest tickets in the city over the past few days have been for the Blue Jays, currently leading the American League East and in the midst of a home stand at the Rogers Centre. Not only is the team still playing meaningful games deep into September, but it’s also warm enough outside that the stadium’s retractable dome is open—a detail that dovetails nicely with the most spectacular sight gag in local hero (and BlackBerry director) Matt Johnson’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. The movie begins with a sequence in which the long-suffering, never-were indie-rock stars played by Johnson and his collaborator Jay McCarrol—both playing, as usual, versions of themselves—attempt to parachute from the observation deck of the CN Tower onto the diamond at a Jays game, a set piece located at the intersection between James Bond and Jackass.
Such kamikaze (and literal) publicity stunts are Johnson’s stock-in-trade; his sophomore feature, Operation Avalanche, was shot partially on the sly at NASA. The hook of Nirvanna—which functions simultaneously as an extension, enlargement, victory lap, and Viking funeral for the cult web series that Johnson and McCarrol created in 2007—lies in sussing out the authenticity of the very real-seeming chaos on-screen. For instance: The word before the film’s Midnight Madness premiere was that the owners and operators of the CN Tower were none too pleased that Matt and Jay had managed—while staying in character and in focus for a set of clandestine video cameras—to breach security and shoot material on the building’s 345-meter observation deck. The results are anxious and awe-inspiring even after it’s clear that the film’s crack special effects team has messed with the images; their leap takes them across the uncanny valley.
There’s nowhere for Nirvanna to go from there but down, and the film’s high spirits belie a melancholy aspect. A time-travel conceit literalizes the degree to which Johnson seems to be chasing after his own cheapjack culture-jammer glory days: What does it mean, existentially, to be pushing 40 and still wearing an ironic fedora? The shrewd visual trickery and sleight-of-hand editing that collapse the distance between the original series’ zero-budget aesthetic and this more comfortably subsidized version can’t actually erase the passage of time. If anything, they deepen it. Meanwhile, the question of whether such an unrepentantly Toronto-centric vision—crammed with civic in-jokes that reportedly whipped the hometown audience into genuine hysteria on opening night—will successfully crack the American market early next year, when the film is released via Neon, is worth pondering, as is the possibility, more plausible than ever, of the buzziest English Canadian filmmaker of his generation being one hit away from decamping to the United States for good.
The consequences of leaving Toronto are also dramatized in Chandler Levack’s Mile End Kicks, a (semi-)romantic comedy whose title refers to Montreal’s hipster epicenter but that begins with its heroine, Grace (Barbie Ferreira), giving the middle finger to the CN Tower. It’s a shot I’ve never seen before, a nifty encapsulation of civic ambivalence. Like Levack’s previous effort, I Like Movies, Mile End Kicks is a coming-of-age fable with the reference points switched from video store culture to the rituals and vicissitudes of early 21st-century indie rock; considering the film’s dateline, it’s fun to imagine that the Toronto that Grace is fleeing to hunker down and write a small-press monograph on fellow Canadian Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill is the same one being prowled by Matt and Jay. Because Johnson and Levack are friends of mine—and the same goes for Sophy Romvari, whose Vancouver Island–set feature debut, Blue Heron, is one of the best-reviewed movies of the year—it’s hard to objectively review their work. Still, the interest of so many American critics in these and other Canadian titles in this year’s program suggests a banner year for the country.
Guillermo del Toro is not a Torontonian, although he was honored earlier this year with a key to the city in recognition of his long-standing commitment to shooting his movies here. That includes Frankenstein, which features zero shots of the CN Tower but nevertheless premiered with a triumphant sense of hometown advantage (as opposed to its mixed reception the previous week in Venice). Speaking onstage alongside Oscar Isaac, Mia Goth, and Jacob Elordi (who loomed humorously over his costars even while trying to contort his body into a too-small chair), del Toro talked about Frankenstein as a long-gestating passion project—the movie he’s been trying to make in many ways since the beginning of his career. The movie reflects his revelation in a different way, however. It feels redundant—a movie defined less by urgency than by inevitability. The theme of man as the real monster has already been present in earlier GDT movies like Cronos, The Shape of Water, and Pan’s Labyrinth; the latter paid loving tribute to Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive, itself a marvelous riff on the Frankenstein mythos. Now that del Toro’s gotten around to the source material—staging lightning storms above laboratories and chases across ice floes, all more faithful to Mary Shelley than to James Whale and Boris Karloff—the effect is underwhelming. Frankenstein is elaborate and expensive but also weirdly muted beneath its color-coded production design; like Nightmare Alley, it’s immaculate and bland. The best thing about the movie is Elordi, who makes for a soulful and elegantly elongated monster, glowering out from beneath a tattered, hooded cloak that makes him look a bit like the Empty Man (or Liam Gallagher at an Oasis gig).
Del Toro’s complex sympathy for his film’s ostensible antagonist means that Frankenstein features more of the Creature taking punishment than dishing it out—he’s shot, stabbed, attacked by wolves, and blown up with dynamite, but he refuses to stay down. In this sense, his kindred spirit at TIFF is probably Dwayne Johnson as former UFC and Pride superstar Mark Kerr—the (nick)namesake of Benny Safdie’s fact-based sports drama, The Smashing Machine, which earned its director the Silver Lion prize in Venice. The first solo directorial debut by a Safdie brother is surely newsworthy, and there’s already plenty of Oscar buzz around Johnson’s performance, which is predicated on a fascinating—and impressive—mix of aura farming and self-effacement. On the one hand, casting a brand-name pro wrestler as a well-known mixed martial artist is completely on the (prosthetic) nose. What’s remarkable about his work in The Smashing Machine, though, is how little of the Rock comes out. Johnson has Kerr’s spacey, small-voiced cadences down cold, and he inhabits the character’s loneliness—sated and then exacerbated by the clandestine drug use that nearly destroys his career and marriage to Dawn Staples (Emily Blunt)—so fully that the film earns a split decision against its own (surprising) conventionality. Thematically, The Smashing Machine slots nicely alongside Benny’s 2013 nonfictional Lenny Cooke (made with his brother, Josh) as a study of the thin, fragile boundary between athletic glory and obscurity. Still, for all its documentary-like textures, it feels very much like a capital-M Movie—for better, and also for worse.
In terms of pure escapist, Hollywood-style pleasure, the film to beat at this year’s festival was probably Wake Up Dead Man—the third Knives Out Mystery and the first to feature a properly compelling lead character to complement Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc. The highest compliment that can be paid to Josh O’Connor’s performance here as Reverend Duplencity, a small-town priest uncovering hypocrisy (and worse) in his parish, is that we barely notice the almost total lack of Blanc during the film’s first 45 minutes. His eventual arrival is welcome—the part fits Craig like a comfortable old pair of slippers—but it’s also true that the movie was doing just fine without him. Rian Johnson’s tendency to supplement his ingeniously worked-out murder plots with strident, audience-pandering political commentary is just as present here as it was in Glass Onion, but that film’s disingenuous rallying cry to smash the system (a bit hard to swallow in the context of the director’s massive Netflix deal) has been swapped out for a sincere study of guilt and sin. The hype around O’Connor is real; his performance as a two-fisted holy man (Reverend Duplencity was once a boxer, just like the priest in The Exorcist) conveys a palpable sense of belief, enough to convert this perpetual Knives Out agnostic into a fan.
Like its predecessors, Wake Up Dead Man is filled with sly one-liners: It’s consistently funny on purpose. With Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee—cowritten and produced by her husband, Brady Corbet, and featuring some of the same creative personnel as The Brutalist—I wasn’t so sure. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The film, which proved so popular that TIFF added extra press screenings to accommodate the overflow, is a sweeping biography of a mythic prerevolutionary American figure, the Shaker figurehead Ann Lee, a self-styled savior who spread the gospel of celibacy among her followers. The flip side to her fame was the hatred of traditionalists inflamed by the idea of a female authority figure—and apt to characterize her brand of Christian love as witchcraft.
Like Corbet, Fastvold is interested in cults of personality, but she’s got a more fluid and erotic filmmaking sensibility. If The Brutalist was monumental, The Testament of Ann Lee is eccentric—it’s been styled as a kind of folk musical, with Ann (Amanda Seyfried) and the other Shakers regularly bursting into song-and-dance routines that occupy a middle ground between historical reenactment and magical-realist expressionism. Call it O Mother, Where Art Thou? The idea that Ann channeled her sorrow about the deaths of several of her children in quick succession into a doctrine whose major prerequisite involved a hands-off covenant between husband and wife plays simultaneously as satire and tragedy, with Seyfried selling the ambiguous nature of her character’s repression. At times, the sheer strangeness of Fastvold’s vision, with its mix of ye-olde dialogue and theater-kid choreography, tempts unintentional hilarity, like a very special episode of Drunk History. For the most part, though, the film takes Ann and her angst seriously, and Seyfried powers through a performance that earns its instant tour de force reputation and then some; imagine her rapturous, tranced-out close-up in Twin Peaks: The Return extended to feature length, and you’re close to the highs she achieves here.
Most years, a movie like The Testament of Ann Lee would feel completely singular. What are the odds, then, that there was another strong movie at TIFF about a cult conflating group dance with spiritual ecstasy? Where Fastvold’s film feels excitingly suspended between camp and melodrama, French Spanish director Oliver Laxe’s Sirat is more literally vertiginous, describing the movement of a makeshift caravan of trucks and vans through a mountain pass in the Moroccan desert. The lunar backdrop suits the speculative-fiction tone of the story: The movie is set against the (unseen) backdrop of World War III, with the characters—mostly ravers who ferry their speakers and psychotropic drugs from place to place—sadly resigned to the end of the world as they know it. Their coping mechanism for apocalypse is getting stoned while vibing out to EDM, which Laxe shoots as a full-on hypnotic spectacle. At Cannes, where Sirat copped a Jury Prize, Laxe’s epic was compared to no less than Fury Road, which makes sense to a point. It’s not a thrill ride, exactly: The wide-screen images of vehicles being swallowed up by a merciless, sun-baked landscape are torqued for existential despair (a better comparison: William Friedkin’s Sorcerer). There’s a stretch in the middle of the movie that constitutes some of the most authentically white-knuckle filmmaking in recent memory. When it comes to working the audience over, Laxe is ruthless. Sirat is an arduous viewing experience—one moment made me look away—but it’s also touched by grace, at times feeling less like a movie than a conjuring.
Where Sirat is tough to watch, John Early’s very odd and ultimately wonderful comedy Maddie’s Secret was my favorite viewing experience of the week. The movie, apparently filmed largely in Early’s home with a cast of funny people including Kate Berlant, Conner O’Malley, Eric Rahill, and Claudia O’Doherty, wears its thriftiness and spontaneity on its sleeve alongside its influences; it’s a loving pastiche of after-school specials featuring Early in a remarkably assured and tender distaff performance as a would-be culinary influencer struggling with bulimia. If that sounds like a recipe for disaster, Early aces his own high-degree-of-difficulty assignment by leveraging his alt-comic instincts against a reverent (and revelatory) cinephilia: At the screening, he name-checked Paul Verhoeven, which got a cheer from the crowd. The scrupulously stylized visuals and performances evoke Todd Haynes as surely as the anything-for-a-laugh attitude does David Wain—the phrase that came to mind during the screening was Wet Hot May December, with all the intelligence and irreverence that that combination implies. It’s hard to make a film in scare quotes that nevertheless articulates what would seem to be its maker’s true feelings, and Maddie’s Secret mines its core paradox—namely, mocking the pop culture clichés around eating disorders while taking the phenomenon itself seriously—for all it’s worth. Nirvanna’s heroes may have leapt from the CN Tower, but Early and his team were the ones truly working without a net.