Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.On peak days at the Toronto International Film Festival, the well-caffeinated attendee can choose from 15 different titles screening around the same time. The festival’s commitment to presenting a full menu of options — from prestige dramas to topical documentaries — makes it a sprawling affair. Genre fare too has a reliable home at the festival, not only at its perennially packed Midnight Madness screenings (which began with body-horror The Substance, starring Demi Moore) but also in primetime slots.Heretic, starring Hugh Grant, was one high-profile horror selection, arriving with the savvy imprimatur of distributor A24. Outwardly, this is another film about a monologuing mastermind who entraps hapless visitors in his lair, but the jailer in this case is Grant (in requisite aviator specs). “Mr Reed” engages in coy theological debate with two Mormon missionaries, fresh-faced teenagers introduced as Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher). The initial frisson comes from dogmatic conversations about life and death that gradually acquire a grim urgency.Weirdos are still a profitable asset in horror — witness this summer’s runaway box office for indie hit Longlegs — and Grant displays his flair for macabre humour, hauling out a Monopoly board game to make satirical points about religious texts. The actresses, who are clearly destined for even better things, nimbly play with expectations around their characters’ naïveté (which grew doubly interesting when both spoke of growing up Mormon in a post-film Q&A). A dank dungeon awaits in the film’s second half, but director/writer pairing Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who also co-wrote A Quiet Place, preserve a riddling sense of dark mysteries rather than solely relying on gore.Weirdos are still a profitable asset in horror, and Hugh Grant displays his flair for macabre humourStill seeking distribution at time of writing was Relay, a procedural thriller starring Riz Ahmed as a white-hat hacker who protects whistleblowers from their employers. The secretive procedures in question recall resourceful cold-war spycraft: Ash (Ahmed) communicates with clients through a speech-to-text relay service used by the deaf which is legally required to preserve anonymity. Some clients simply wish to return the documents they have stolen, strike a deal and not be bothered. Ash’s latest, biotech employee Sarah (Lily James), faces relentless surveillance and pursuit from her company’s plainclothes security squad (headed by Sam Worthington).Director David Mackenzie (Starred Up) brilliantly turns the streets and apartments of New York into a workaday battleground, as if any of us might someday need to drop off documents under a stack of tabloids at the corner newsstand. Ahmed excels as a professional guardian angel, struggling to stay one step ahead as the crisis management threatens to escape his quietly confident grasp and as he becomes attracted to Sarah. Mackenzie conveys the laborious effort and paranoia behind the scenes in low-trust corporate environments. (Kudos too for casting ace character actor Matthew Maher as another client in the film’s menacing opening.)A terrific pressure valve at the festival came with Friendship, starring comic Tim Robinson of the popular Netflix sketch series I Think You Should Leave. (If you don’t know the show, you might have come across the “We’re All Trying to Find Who Did This” meme of Robinson in a hot-dog suit.) Here he plays suburban dad Craig, who can’t believe his good fortune at befriending his neighbour, effortlessly chill weatherman Austin (Paul Rudd). They hang out, drink beer and go on an impromptu mystery tour of the city’s sewer tunnels; for a moment, khaki-clad office normie Craig feels cool.A sublime pratfall puts the brakes on their fast friendship, yet what follows isn’t your average extended riff on man-child awkwardness, despite the presence of the ever-sure-footed Rudd. Robinson’s foot-in-mouth persona is presented with perfect comic timing and written with inventive absurdism, but this is also a satirical portrait of suburban humiliations and swaggering beta males that surpasses many po-faced dramas on that subject. As Craig’s long-suffering wife, Kate Mara throws her husband’s self-absorption into relief by playing things straight. Craig keeps revealing the hilarious limits to his self-defined horizons: after taking drugs, his trip consists of merely a slightly odd visit to a sandwich shop.The latter half of the festival affords the chance to catch up with buzzy titles such as Nightbitch, Marielle Heller’s adaptation of a 2021 bestseller. The story of a stay-at-home new mother who has werewolf tendencies proved divisive with its pointed critiques of gender inequities, comparable to the pop admixture clinched by Barbie. Another anticipated fiction feature was The End from Joshua Oppenheimer, director of wrenching 2012 documentary The Act of Killing. His audacious post-apocalyptic musical is set entirely in the sprawling bunker of an energy baron (Michael Shannon) and his family (Tilda Swinton, George MacKay), and dauntingly explores the emotional and societal toll of an endgame mentality.No account of TIFF would be complete without nonfiction, and indeed music documentaries about Bruce Springsteen and Elton John charmed crowds. But two portraits galvanised on a different level: first, Sinead O’Shea’s Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story showcases the recently deceased Irish novelist in ferocious TV clips, journal readings (by Jessie Buckley) and a very late interview, all stunning for their unflinching candour.Demonstrating a kindred clear-eyed intelligence, Tata is a sinewy vérité film about love and survival among generations of women in co-director Lina Vdovîi’s Moldovan family. It was another title that showed that, for all the stars at the festival, the Toronto red carpet productively extends to the well-known and unheralded alike.To September 15, tiff.netFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
