Greetings from Toronto, Canada! I’m braving long lines and busy streets for the next week or so to attend the Toronto International Film Festival, better known as TIFF, and I’m planning to take you all along with me. Each day I’ll be publishing a dispatch covering my time at the festival, including thoughts on every single movie I watch. As of now, I have more than 20 different features on my schedule so, uh, expect a lot of thoughts.
TIFF is historically a nice preview of the fall and holiday film slate, featuring a mix of awards contenders, indie flicks, and blockbuster-adjacent movies from big-name directors. In recent years, that has included everything from The Substance, to The Boy and the Heron, to whatever Megalopolis is. One of my favorite TIFF memories is watching the world premiere of Glass Onion in 2022, and seeing The Verge make a guest appearance that I couldn’t talk about with anyone until it started streaming months later.
This year is particularly notable because many of the movies that I’m most looking forward to checking out — including Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein — are destined for Netflix, with only brief theatrical runs. Other films to keep an eye on include No Other Choice from Oldboy director Park Chan-wook; Dust Bunny, the feature film debut from Hannibal showrunner Bryan Fuller; a fantasy anime called Scarlet, which is Mamoru Hosoda’s latest; and Good Fortune, in which Keanu Reeves plays the angel Gabriel.
Photo: Andrew Webster
Now for a little inside baseball. I live just southwest of Toronto, in a city called Hamilton, so I’ll be commuting to the festival most days. If you were ever curious what a Verge reporter takes with them to sit on a train and then a theater all day, well, today’s your lucky day. It’s a little boring, because all I really need is a laptop for writing, voice recorder for interviews, and a notebook for… notes. And, yes, that is a Nintendo 3DS. I’ve gotten really into Picross 3D lately.
As for my first day at TIFF, I managed to squeeze in four movies highlighted by perhaps the best video game adaptation I’ve ever seen. Here’s what I watched:
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
A panic attack masquerading as a movie, it’s a bit like if Uncut Gems was about being a parent. Linda (Rose Byrne) is really going through it: a sick kid who needs constant care, a husband who travels, demanding therapy patients, and, oh, now there’s a giant hole in the ceiling of her house. It’s a constantly escalating fever dream of stress, in which things just keep getting worse, and it’s done in a way that made me feel truly anxious while watching. Thankfully, there’s some welcome dark humor to cut through the gloom, and an ending with just the right amount of hope.
In select theaters on October 10th.
Image: Netflix
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