TIFF: Nina Hoss in "Pelican Blood" and "The Audition"

Chris Feil takes a look at two performances by one of the greatest German actresses...

Katrin Gebbe follows her relentlessly grim Nothing Bad Can Happen with another slow-building horror-adjacent character study with Pelican Blood, a portrait of motherly conviction that love isn’t enough and hope is toxic. Nina Hoss is Wiebke, a skilled horse trainer and mother bringing a second adoptive daughter Raya (Katerina Lipovska) to her ranch. Shy at first, Raya quickly establishes herself as deeply troubled and a threat to her older daughter Nicolina (Adelia-Constance Giovanni Ocleppo). Misbehaving turns ominous, with Wiebke determined to show Raya the love she has been denied even as something evil within destroys Wiebke’s life...

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TIFF: Thrilling Trio "Dogs Don't Wear Pants", "Sea Fever", and "Resin"

Chris Feil takes a quick look at three under-the-radar films at TIFF for genre fans and thrill seekers...

J-P Valkeapää’s Dogs Don’t Wear Pants is a giddy shocker about grief and domination, an imposing Scandinavian delight that could make John Waters proud. The film follows Juha (Pekka Strang), a heart surgeon still grieving the death of his wife a decade prior as he raises his teenage daughter. Almost comically by chance, he stumbles into the dungeon of dominatrix Mona (a suberb Krista Kosonen) whose asphyxiation routines become an addiction for Juha that bring him in hallucinatory communion with his dead wife. The film shocks with its spiritual and biological intimacy (get ready for some seriously squirm-inducing gore), but moreso in its wicked sense of humor. We’ve got a weird one here, and it’s kind of spectacular...

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TIFF: "A White White Day"

by Nathaniel R

In the middle of the stylish grief-stricken Icelandic drama, what appears to be an amateur children's play is airing on the television. The camera drifts to it and stays far longer than is natural for "background" atmosphere in a movie. An astronaut and assorted spacesuit wearing children, have experienced some kind of spacecraft crash. As we zero in on the television, the lone adult onscreen. after finding out that each of his charges are still alive (for now), launches into a hysteric speech about how 'we're all going to die. Including your parents and siblings. Yes, even you.' Salka, an eight year-old towhead granddaughter of the the film's protagonist, watches the television with her cheerio-sucking baby brother, entirely unfazed by this truth. Obviously children's entertainment like this would only fly in Scandinavia or maybe France, where young'uns can also drink wine with their parents and learn their existential nihilism young.  

Which is not to snarkily say that A White White Day is nihilistic. Just that it's pragmatically clear-eyed even when it should be crying. Far from callous and cold, despite the temperatures suggested by that omnipresent fog, thick-maned Icelandic horses, and all the heavy sweaters, the film is warm when it counts. This is a compassionate drama about grief and the sideways behaviour that will out if you keep stifling the main thing...

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TIFF: Robert Eggers' euphoric hell of "The Lighthouse"

by Chris Feil

As gloopy with various bodily fluids as it is with sea foam, Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse lulls us into insanity from its first foggy frame. Diverging from the more straightforward horrors of his debut The Witch, Eggers thrusts us into the isolate hellscape that is the male mind with this Mellville-esque absurdist dark comedy. The bizarre quotient is high, both in the film’s psychosexual hysterics and crusty verbal dexterity, as the film devolves into an abstract battle of the wits and wills of two men meant to preserve the titular phallic monument. It’s genius and a complete hoot.

Set over a century ago on an offshore island, this tempestuous and physically taxing setting plays host to the two male egos of Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe’s lighthouse watchmen. Dafoe’s superstitious, more experienced Thomas immediately puts Pattinson’s Ephraim to back-breaking arduous work, dominating him further over candlelit dinnertime monologues...

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TIFF: "Synonyms" is essential viewing

by Chris Feil

Unfolding with the wonder of a contemporary fable, Nadav Lapid’s Synonyms takes a sometimes witty but often breathtaking approach to displaced national identity. Already awarded the Berlin International Film Festival’s Golden Bear, the film is an unpredictable existential examination of redefining oneself in a world that exploits you, and the limitations of willful self-reinvention.

Newcomer Tom Mercier stars as Yoav, a young Iscraeli man relocating to Paris after a term in the military. He’s quickly robbed of all his belongings while squatting in a posh apartment, begging for help naked throughout the building before being found near death by young couple Caroline and Emile (Louise Chevillotte and Quentin Dolmaire). They possess the prototypically French persona that Yoav wants to adopt, and are all too generous and willing to play welcoming committee...

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