TIFF 2025

Eerily echoes my own challenging family dynamic and oldest sibling. That closeness ensured that I felt close to what was occurring on screen. But what jolted me out of it was the on-screen crying.

It made sense for the character to cry there. But the way that those scenes held on the crying, without taking the audience along on that same journey, made it feel unearned. Similar to my thoughts on The Farewell, the commitment to the autobiographical truth results in worse fiction. Which is a shame, because so much of this emotional autopsy is otherwise fantastic.

I went in anticipating interesting things with captioning and audio descriptions, a la The Tuba Thieves, but didn’t get that. Turns out there was a different screening with audio descriptions that I should’ve gone to for it.

Nice to see Deaf genre films; that is, the central drama of the film doesn’t derive from being deaf (Hush, Sound Of Metal), but rather the cult-like control of the group. Also just a really tightly plotted film. Every set up seemingly paid off. No fat.

Time (three weeks) has caused this to fade from my memory. Coming out of the movie, I felt that I wasn’t really on its wavelength. Often I wonder if there’s something that a domestic audience will react to that I won’t have obvious access to.

I had a debate with one of my friends who attended with me about what to do with the final shot, and the divergence of our interpretations pointed not to a depth we were finding in the material, but rather a distance from the material that required us to lay down supposition so as to clear the chasm.

A bad time at the movies.

Two hours of miserablism for what? What new horrors about child physical and sexual abuse have I been made aware of?

Beyond content, the form was also lacking. The leaning on opaque, shallow depth-of-field shots, or off-kilter frames, seemed to mimic films of emotional gravity that the crew has seen, but not understood why those techniques, in their context, wielded power. Instead of arousing strong emotional sensations, I literally got motion sick and had to close my eyes.

After my time at TIFF, I flew to Iceland, and while driving around the island, stayed in Hofn, Pálmason’s home town. Upon checking in to the hotel, I saw a photo book of his being promoted by the hotel, whose concierge was shocked that I was aware of who he was. When I mentioned his films, the concierge didn’t appear to know anything about them, or even their existence.

Anyway, it was nice seeing the landscape here in person. The story was a lovely time.

Beyond everything else (which I didn’t enjoy), the movie was just pretty ugly. Incredibly sharp details. Garish colors. And weird digital overlays and transitions.

Cultural memory as disputed territory.

A missed opportunity of drawing solidarity between the working class and ghosts with what should’ve been “Just angry”.

The director was great at the Q&A, drew interesting parallels with ghost stories carrying an inherent queerness. Transgression, rather than horror.

Just a sequence of events. Feels juvenile, not in the manner of various penis jokes (which it is), but that’s it’s predominantly structured by what seems to be a “wouldn’t it be cool?” impulse for adding material.

It works as a showcase of craft. But as art to communicate something, I don’t think there’s anything there.