TIFF 2023 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 stacked year has outpaced my pen more than ever: the latest — and perhaps final — Miyazaki, a new Bertrand Bonello, a brutal Indian actioner, and Demián Regna’s nasty followup to 2018’s Terrified are just some of films screening at 2023’s TIFF. Here are the capsule reviews The Boy and the Heron, The Royal Hotel, Knox Goes Away, Kill, and Boy Kills World.
The Boy and the Heron
It’s easy to forgive the world’s most disingenuous retiree when he rips it out of the park every time. The Boy and the Heron, Hayao Miyazaki’s purportedly final film - a designation that’s already been walked back - opens portals of vivid imagination between a young boy’s hopes and an old man’s regrets. The story of a 12-year-old venturing into a fantasy world to reunite with his late mother, The Boy and the Heron finds Miyazaki at the height of his prowess: a thematic and visual bingo card that never feels derivative of an animation master’s magnificent oeuvre. Its manic exploration and parade of self-reverie might be more unwieldy than your typical Miyazaki fare, but its touching finality - an immortal, old legend facing his own end - is shattering, even if it isn’t exactly true yet in the real world. A-
The Royal Hotel
Following two American backpackers (Jessica Henwick, Julia Garner) working temp at a rural Australian hotel to scrounge up cash, The Royal Hotel once again finds director Kitty Green exploring ratcheting, gendered tensions. Toeing the line between genre exercise and workplace thriller, the film borrows the grimy visual language of nastier, more subversive fare to explore the horrors of simmering male aggression. Green’s austerity and limber deployment of suspense mines astounding performances out of Jessica Henwick, Julia Garner, and Hugo Weaving, but The Royal Hotel is a movie that cooks and cooks and cooks without ever boiling over. B
Knox Goes Away
In the year of the ubiquitous, high-profile hit man yarn - Richard Linklater and David Fincher both have their takes in 2023 - Michael Keaton’s Knox Goes Away feels like it’s barely stepping up to the plate. As both director and star, Keaton ekes out a familiar neo-noir centered around a contract killer battling dementia, but can’t decide whether it should be a character study or a slow-burn assassination thriller. Glacial and uninvolving despite its leading man in fine form and some clever shuffling of breezy genre tropes - hit man with a heart of gold, an ill-fated “one last job” - Knox Goes Away never quite shakes its indecisiveness. C+
Kill
The comparison being thrown around for Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s single-location brawler, Kill, is that it’s The Raid on a train. With its leaned-out premise and non-stop parade of bloodletting, it's not an entirely unfair analogy, but the combination of Hindi cinema melodrama and an absolutely monstrous action movie performance from Lakshya is a powerful tonic of a different make. Firing on pistons of pulverized skulls and obliterated limbs, Kill toggles seamlessly among tragedy, fisticuffs, and macabre humor as a lone commando tries to save the woman he loves on a train besieged by thieves. Hindi ultra-violence is the name of the game, and Kill is an absolute pro at it. B+
Boy Kills World
Wake up, honey, the worst Deadpool clone you’ve ever seen just dropped. A competently choreographed martial arts actioner blown out by hacky, flat humor and unbearable voiceover, Moritz Mohr’s Boy Kills World quickly drowns in a pool of its own excess. Not even its dazzling melees - buoyed by a lithe and committed Bill Skarsgård - can distract from how painfully it insists upon its unfunny tripe. A revenge “epic” begat by stereotyped Asian mysticism and dystopian clichés, it’s actually astonishing how much Boy Kills World’s genuinely fun action is obscured by its ugly aftertaste. D