The Hollywood strike may have prevented this year’s Toronto International Film Festival from being as lively as prior years, but that didn’t hold me back. This year I saw 11 films at the festival. I even liked most of them! Here are all of the films that I saw at TIFF 2023, in the order in which I viewed them.

The Peasants

Poland, Serbia, Lithuania | 2023 | 114m | Polish

The first film I saw at TIFF ended up being one of my favorites. The Peasants tells the story of Jagna, a young woman who, in her search for love, breaks the social taboos of her small, 19th century Polish village. Every frame of the move is a painting, drawn over live-action footage. This artistic achievement is all the more impressive given the direct disruption that the Russian invasion of Ukraine had on the livelihoods of the film crew. The visual style is mesmerizing from start to finish and truly unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I asked myself if I would still praise the movie if it didn’t have the painted visuals, and my answer is yes. The final scene in particular is intense, horrifying, and unforgettable. The characters are richly developed. The music is still in my head. I was extremely impressed by The Peasants.

4.5/5

KILL

India | 2023 | 115m | Hindi

Nikhil Nagesh Bhat, a popular Indian director, was present for the world premiere of KILL at Midnight Madness. His film was introduced as the first action movie “of its kind” in India. This was a brutal, bloody movie reminiscent of Project Wolf Hunting, which I saw in the same setting at TIFF last year. The tone is serious, even though the audience laughed at some of the melodramatic character entrances. I don’t think I would recommend KILL to anyone who has not sought out and discovered it on their own, but I enjoyed my time watching it.

2/5

The Boy and the Heron

Japan | 2023 | 124m | Japanese

By some miracle, I managed to snag the last remaining ticket to one of the showings of The Boy and the Heron, Hayao Miyazaki’s latest “final” film, after I checked for tickets on a whim late at night after returning home from KILL. The best part is that I didn’t have to pay the ridiculous $400+ that I saw resale tickets going for earlier. Would I recommend that someone pay hundreds to see this movie? No, but it successfully hits on many of the same beats that made movies like Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away so enchanting. I know that in Japan, this movie had essentially zero marketing upon release. While I went in to The Boy and the Heron with at least a trailer’s level of knowledge of the movie, I still had basically no idea what to expect. Even after having watched the movie, I find its plot hard to recount or describe (although elements of it reminded me unexpectedly of Lonely Castle in the Mirror). Not everything in the movie is fully comprehensible. But by this point, you should have learned to expect that from Miyazaki. Expect another coming-of-age story with a whimsical plot, angelic Joe Hisaishi score, and masterful, hand-drawn animation that’s both eerie and beautiful.

3/5

They Shot the Piano Player

Spain, France | 2023 | 103m | English, Portuguese, Spanish

They Shot the Piano Player is a stylish animated movie about a music journalist who investigates the life of Francisco Tenório Júnior, a talented pianist who disappeared decades prior in totalitarian Argentina. One of the two directors was present for the screening of the film. He revealed that he didn’t know the movie would be animated at first, which explains why much of the animation is sketched over what is obviously real life interview footage. The journalist character is a stand-in for the movie’s director. I did not realize going in that this was based on a true story, and I only started to suspect that partway through the movie. The audio of the interviewees isn’t always consistent, but purposefully so; the director wanted the authentic voices in there, resorting to actors to recreate dialogue only a handful of times. While I was drawn to this movie because of its unique animation style and bossa nova soundtrack, what stuck with me most about They Shot the Piano Player is its depiction of the tragedy of state injustice, with its callous disregard for the value of individual human life. When the movie finally brings us face-to-face with the government thug who arrested, tortured, and murdered Tenório, he offers the heartbreaking and infuriating reason he targeted a peaceful and non-political piano player: he was a musician; he was artsy, so he was suspicious. That’s it. I’m so thankful that this film exists and tells Tenório’s story.

3/5

Mandoob

Saudi Arabia | 2023 | 110m | Arabic

Mandoob is a Saudi Arabian morality tale about the dangers of alcohol. Needless to say, I felt awkward going into this one with a Heineken in hand. The main character of the story ditches his food app delivery gig for the more profitable world of bootlegging, but his bad decisions only serve to worsen his situation. I thought the film did a good job of painting the protagonist as a sympathetic although flawed character. Most of the movie takes place on the real streets of Riyadh, making me feel like I had experienced traveling to the city by the time it was over.

2.5/5

Shadow of Fire

Japan | 2023 | 95m | Japanese

Shadow of Fire is a remarkably bleak movie about desperate young people struggling to survive immediately after World War II. Despite his circumstances, the child protagonist displays an almost Christian sense of forgiveness to the people in his life who abuse him. The point of the film, as the director explained to us after the screening, is to convey a strong anti-war message. He was effective in making me not want to witness the scenes in this film play out in real life, but I suppose a side effect of that is that I don’t want to watch them on screen either. This one is hard to recommend, although I’ll say that the actors, including the child actor star, are great at conveying the suffocating misery of their character’s lives.

2/5

The Contestant

United Kingdom | 2023 | 90m | English, Japanese

The Contestant joins The Peasants among my favorite movies of the entire festival. This documentary tells the completely batshit yet true story of Nasubi, a Japanese reality TV star who was locked in a room, alone and naked, with nothing but a stack of magazines and the mission to amass one million yen’s worth of contest prizes. Everything he needed to survive, whether that was food, clothing, etc., he had to win himself from dutifully filling out postcards for magazine sweepstakes. A camera in the room records Nasubi’s every move, and although the producers tell him that most of the footage will never be seen, Nasubi’s bizarre dedication to his task is broadcast weekly to millions of TV viewers. Nasubi becomes a national sensation, entirely unbeknownst to himself, as he spends day after day, month after month, alone and naked in his tiny apartment dutifully filling out contest coupons, erupting into goofy dances every time he manages to win something tastier than dog food. By the time Nasubi actually reaches his goal, he’s become such a sensation that the TV producers decide to keep the deception going and cart him off to Korea to start the challenge over. The manner in which the TV producers finally end the charade and reveal to the clueless, emaciated, and psychologically broken Nasubi how famous he’s become is one of the wildest and rawest things I have ever seen committed to video tape. To viewers of the show, Nasubi is a comedian, but as the man himself recounts in this documentary, the experience was anything but fun. Take away the TV’s laugh track and cartoony sound effects, and a nation essentially bonded over watching a man be starved and psychologically tormented for their amusement. It’s interesting to me that this movie, which is about a Japanese subject and is mostly in Japanese, was created in the UK by a non-Japanese director. How would Japanese audiences feel watching this film, I wonder? The combination of Nasubi’s self-admitted naïveté and the TV producer’s sociopathy created a fascinating and horrifying episode in reality TV history that will hopefully never be replicated.

4.5/5

NYAD

United States of America | 2023 | 120m | English

NYAD tells the true story of Diana Nyad, a woman in her sixties who became first person to swim from Cuba to the US without a shark cage. Nyad herself is quite the stubborn character and often butts heads with her lifelong best friend, Bonnie Stoll. The real-life Stoll was in the audience for the screening of the film. By her account, she was happy with the movie, and so was I. The film does a great job of making the audience feel the struggle of Nyad’s monumental journey – not just in how she navigated the dangerous waters but also her relationships with the people around her. It’s a solid, inoffensive Netflix movie that’s good to watch with your boomer parents. I give it a general recommendation.

3/5

Pain Hustlers

United States of America | 2023 | 122m | English

I loved The Wolf of Wall Street, a movie about real-life corporate greed and excess. So why didn’t I love Pain Hustlers, which hits on many of the same beats? It’s hard to say; I think that despite the movie’s 2 hour runtime, the protagonist’s internal ethical conflict with her work struck me as undercooked. The ham-fisted emotionalism around the opioid epidemic didn’t strike me as entirely sincere, and I think the movie’s way of pinning the blame entirely on big business unjustly obfuscates the federal government’s role in the crisis as well. You can probably skip this movie, although I didn’t hate it.

2/5 

Hell of a Summer

United States of America, Canada | 2023 | 88m | English

Remember the Stranger Things kid? No, the other one. Yeah, well, he and his friend made a teen slasher movie called Hell of a Summer, and you know what? I liked it. It sticks closely to all of the tropes of the genre, which is perhaps a sentence I have no business writing since I never watch teen slasher movies. But I think it manages to find the right tone; one that’s more fun & goofy than dark & scary. It’s a “feel good slasher movie, and there aren’t a lot of those,” said co-director Billy Bryk at the screening. I’d call it adequately entertaining.

2.5/5

Concrete Utopia

South Korea | 2023 | 130m | Korean

When a massive earthquake destroys all of Seoul except for one single apartment building, the residents of that building suddenly find themselves making tough choices about who can stay and who must leave. There’s obviously social commentary here about tribalism and refugee crises. I liked the the no-holds-barred brutality, which I’ve now come to expect from Korean cinema. This is a worthwhile drama for viewers who can tolerate a bleak, stressful couple of hours.

2.5/5