TIFF 2021 Film Review: Festival Dispatch

Capsule reviews from this year’s Toronto International Film Festival

I may be missing the big headliners of TIFF, but that only gives me more time to cover Midnight Madness and the festival’s less splashy titles. My first review roundup from this year’s TIFF includes an alien invasion road trip with Riz Ahmed, Jake Gyllenaal in a remake of a Danish hidden gem, and Naomi Watts in a misguided school shooting thriller. Here are the capsule reviews for Encounter, The Guilty, and Lakewood…

Encounter

Michael Pearce’s Encounter is a nifty little sci-fi jaunt completely caught between two disparate halves, neither of which come together cogently. Coming off a banner year with Sound of Metal and Mogul Mowgli, Riz Ahmed plays Malik Khan, a PTSD-riddled marine who kidnaps his own children (Aditya Geddada, Lucian-River Chauhan) to deliver them from an unseen alien invasion. Encounter attempts a paranoid sci-fi thriller embedded in a commentary on mental illness and how we treat our veterans, but both are severely undercooked. Ahmed is game as always as the film’s saving grace, but it’s a performance galaxies outside of the film’s caliber. There are fascinating ideas at play here, but it’s all saddled with a generic, saccharine crescendo and a severely underutilized Octavia Spencer. C+

The Guilty

It’s so easy to bristle against The Guilty’s very existence as an American remake, but if you’re going to remake something, then Antoine Fuqua’s effort here is the way to do it. Hewing closely to the 2018 Danish film, demoted LAPD officer Joe Baylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) is working the dispatch when he receives a call from a distraught woman (Riley Keough with a voice performance for the books). Soon after, he’s guiding her through her nightmare while also wrestling his own personal and professional failings. If you’ve seen the excellent original, The Guilty won’t give you many reasons to relish this new version, especially when it hits all of the same beats, but Fuqua - along with writer Nic Pizzolatto - injects a distinctly American flavor, and a gripping Jake Gyllenhaal brings a whole different energy to the film than Jakob Cedergren. B

Lakewood

Naomi Watts wailing on an iPhone and limping through the forest for 80 minutes is a pretty good metaphor for the grueling viewing experience that is Phillip Noyce’s woefully manipulative school shooting thriller, Lakewood. The film attempts to ape single-location potboilers such as Locke, The Guilty (see above), and Buried, but mostly comes off tired, dull, and - at its worst - exploitative. Starring Watts as a woman who is desperately racing to save her child after police notify her of an active shooter incident at her son’s school, Lakewood really has nothing tasteful to say about this nation’s virulent trend of mass shootings. With an overbearing score and its overwrought hand-wringing, the film is crafted with an almost insulting presumption on how we’re supposed to feel on the subject matter. Awful. D