TIFF 2024 Film Review: Festival Dispatch
CAPSULE REVIEWS FROM THIS YEAR’S TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Welcome to my dispatch from this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Like always, I won’t be writing full reviews of everything I see at the festival, but this year has plenty of notable features worth at least a quick write-up: Sean Baker’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner, Kiyoshi Kurosawa like you’ve never seen him before, and Steven Soderbergh’s haunted house flick are just some of the highlights at 2024’s TIFF. Here are the capsule reviews for Presence, Cloud, Nightbitch, Anora, The Shadow Strays, and Conclave.
Presence
A sub-90-minute haunted house yarn told from the perspective of a ghost, Steven Soderbergh’s latest has every pretense of a minor work. But even as a fan of late-career Soderbergh, I found Presence to be one of the coolest things he’s done in years: a horror gimmick elevated by brazen formal discipline, drawing a straight line from its poltergeist to filmmakers as puppetmasters and voyeurs. Its story is familiar, but there’s nothing familiar about the way Presence is shot; leave it to Soderbergh and his hunger for experimentation to bring fascinating textures to the simplest narratives. Great ending, too. B+
Cloud
From the moment you meet online opportunist Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud, the parallel to Pulse — the director’s other Internet-era chiller — is apparent: the ubiquity of screens and the digital malaise of modern disconnect seemingly once again personifying technology as consumptive pathogen. But it’s all a ruse. Cloud is likely Kurosawa’s most straightforward film that makes a beeline for the other side of plugged-in terror — an escalation of anonymous petty crimes that bridges the gap between doing damage with a keyboard and the violence of bloody, in-person retribution. Those expecting Kurosawa’s signature contemplative, cursed imagery might be surprised by his humor and his Straw Dogs-esque action chops: Cloud’s final act is a symphony of shoot ‘em up carnage that took me, and the TIFF audience, for a loop in the best way possible. A
Nightbitch
Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch is somehow even more awful than its widely-derided, misleading trailer. The struggle of motherhood told exclusively through Facebook mom group memes dug from their 2008 graves, read aloud, Nightbitch finds Amy Adams acting the hell out of a middle-aged existential crisis. It might be the best work Adams has put forth in years, but the film leans neither into the goofy body horror promised in its marketing nor the pointed feminist anthem it clearly wants to be. Toothless and almost offensive in its trope-laden depiction of white suburban domesticity, Nightbitch functions mostly as narrow treacle. C-
Anora
There’s plenty to love about Sean Baker’s 2024 Palme d’Or winner, Anora. Coasting on Mikey Madison’s sublime performance as a brassy sex worker who gets in over her head with the son of a Russian oligarch, it’s easy to see Anora’s path to Cannes’ top prize through its sheer charisma and mile-a-minute shenanigans. But Anora stumbles with a hubristically long runtime when it really has only one note — however fantastic it is — to play, even when the vibe shifts in its second half. Sean Baker reaches back in time to rediscover a romantic charm that has all but evaporated from modern cinematic storytelling, but he also widely miscalculates one thing: those movies used to be a tight 90. B
The Shadow Strays
Plucked straight from the well of “one last job” and “hitman with a heart of gold” fare, Timo Tjajhanto’s The Shadow Strays follows an assassin in moral crisis as she disobeys orders to rescue a young gangland orphan. Having never met an action movie cliché it didn’t love, The Shadow Strays embroils its well-worn tropes with bloody underworld power struggles — a Tjajhanto specialty delivered with earnest commitment. With night vision ninjas, brutal choreography, and goopy squibs straddling the thin membrane between horror and action, The Shadow Strays makes superstars out of Aurora Ribero and Hana Malasan: two fonts of athleticism on a gruesome collision course of bloodshed. 2024 finds action fans eating good, and The Shadow Strays is another full-on meal from a genre legend. B+
Conclave
From its stacked cast to its high-stakes Vatican drama, everything about Edward Berger’s papal succession thriller, Conclave, screams prestige awards player, but believe it or not, it’s actually a B-movie in disguise. Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, and Sergio Castellito act their hearts out as politicking clergy vying to be the next pope, but Conclave is far from the serious awards-bait veneer it fronts. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing: an overwrought score, a goofily thin election year allegory, and an outrageous final twist are only a few moving parts of its manufactured gravitas — Conclave leaves just enough wiggle room to suggest it knows how silly it all is. Gorgeously shot with its trashy melodrama placed at the most opportune moments, you could do a lot worse at this year’s TIFF than a stealth, theological soap opera. C+
