The Verge’s TIFF 2017 Awards

For industry watchers, the annual Toronto International Film Festival is one of the year’s major cinema events. It’s closer to home and more accessible than the Venice International Film Festival (which runs around the same time and spotlights some of the same films), and because it comes so close to the year-end prestige season, many studios use it to kick off their Oscar campaigns for their major films — or get an early sense of whether to launch those campaigns at all.

But Toronto’s annual awards at the end of the festival are an oddball mixed bag. They don’t carry the prestige of the big awards at Cannes or Berlin, and they don’t cover a particularly wide range. There are no acting or directing awards, and most of the categories are specific and sponsored: the NETPAC Award for World or International Asian Film Premiere, for instance (which this year went to Huang Hsin-Yao’s The Great Buddha), or the Grolsch People’s Choice Award (which went to Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri). Clearly what’s missing at Toronto are a few more awards categories, which is why our TIFF correspondents, Tasha Robinson and Bryan Bishop, decided to individually recognize some of the 50 movies they collectively saw at Toronto this year.

One of the benefits of a festival like TIFF is that we get to see a lot of different films, and just because something isn’t great doesn’t mean it’s forgettable. That’s how I felt about this film from makeup-artist-turned-director Sôichi Umezawa. The premise is, in a word, bonkers: an art teacher finds some buried clay, which turns out to be infused with demonic power. When her students start sculpting with it, their creations turn into bloodthirsty monsters that actually eat their creators alive. This isn’t a particularly well-made film. Umezawa leans on tedious exposition to prop up his flimsy narrative, and the film’s editing and visuals suggest a student filmmaker getting his feet wet rather than a polished feature director exercising his skills. But it was without a doubt the single strangest thing I saw at Toronto this year, and there’s something to be said for that alone. —Bryan

Austrian provocateur extreme Michael Haneke (Caché, Funny Games) starts his new film, Happy End, in a fascinating place, with an unseen person using their iPhone to broadcasting their mother’s bathroom routine, their dying hamster, and then their mother again, lying unconscious on a couch. Through running text message commentary, the offscreen character rails against the mother’s poor parenting skills, admits to poisoning the hamster with antidepressants as a test case, and then reveals that drugging the mother into an overdose was the next step. The sequence raises a thousand questions about the unseen poisoner, from the most basic questions (age, gender) to larger ones about what exactly was intended, and who the recording is intended for. But the audience gets no cues about how to process these events. The iPhone’s cold, ungiving lens cuts out all emotion and presents the poisoning as an ugly fact, presented objectively and without question. Later scenes continue the theme: a fatal accident, caused by negligence, is seen through a fixed, distant security camera. And a woman blows off her lover in a phone conversation shot from behind as she drives, with her own iPhone at the center of the shot.

Haneke makes these moments fascinating by filtering them through familiar technology, showing how we use our devices as interpolators and safety screens, distancing us from our own worst behavior by focusing on a future record, instead of a present catastrophe. It’s fascinating to watch these disasters play out without a human face on-screen, and with the perpetual sense of the technology watching humanity’s worst actions, and not judging. Happy Ending is ultimately a disappointment — a toothless, one-note story that chides upper-class white people for their insensitivity and obliviousness, in part by treating a series of mute, confused black refugees like props. But in the early going, it’s just a story about how people don’t need to justify their decisions when they’re solely focusing on the technology that makes them possible. —Tasha

Lost in all the debates over Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! — whether it’s good, whether people understand it, what it really means, and so on — is the fact that it’s a breathtaking technological achievement. The editing and staging toward the end, as reality breaks down, is breathtakingly technically complicated. (Aronofsky recently told Vanity Fair there are more visual effects in the movie than in Noah, his film where giant rock monsters, a worldwide flood, and an endless stream of digital animals all play large roles.) As Jennifer Lawrence’s unnamed character staggers through a constantly shifting landscape, with a battle raging around her and the backdrop continually changing, Aronofsky creates a seamless visual experience that highlights the illusion of being caught in a bad dream. It literally feels like a nightmare, in the way people, recognizable landmarks, and fixed spaces all drop in and out, frequently lost in a disorienting muddle. This year’s TIFF saw a fair bit of spectacle in the big films, but Mother!’s technological proficiency stood out. —Tasha

Surprising no one, I’m awarding this to Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut. As I covered in our review, Molly’s Game is a lot like watching the best (and sometimes worst) elements of Sorkin’s work distilled down into their pure essence. It’s got all the expected walk ’n’ talks and quippy dialogue, and because Sorkin is directing as well, the film fully buys into its characters’ heroic nobility — even when they’ve done some not-so-noble things. But unlike films in the Steve Jobs vein (or even The Newsroom, at times), this is a movie where that tactic actually works, because Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba are such incredibly good performers. While Chastain’s Molly Bloom carries almost every single scene in the film, my favorite moment actually belongs to Elba as her attorney, Charlie Jaffey. With full theatricality, he touts her moral bona fides in a stirring call to action that echoes the great courtroom dramas of film history while nailing that soaring, aspirational tone that’s the key to Sorkin’s best work. That moment makes the entire movie worthwhile. —Bryan

Shia LaBeouf’s offscreen antics have become such a consistent part of his career that I couldn’t resist checking out his performance as tennis enfant terrible John McEnroe in this film from director Janus Metz. It focuses on the competition between rising superstar McEnroe and reigning Wimbledon champion Björn Borg (Sverrir Gudnason). Borg is seeking his fifth consecutive title in the film, while McEnroe is trying to get in the way and grab his first. The film plays like a clash between the id and the superego: McEnroe is all wild impulse and petulant rage, while Borg has locked down all emotion in the name of reason, until he practically begins to fall apart. I’m no tennis fan, but I nevertheless found the drama between the two enthralling, in no small part due to LaBeouf’s performance. Whatever demons he may be trying to exorcise with his oddball art projects and real-world meltdowns, he channels them here to great effect. His McEnroe is in a state of perpetual motion, unable to modulate his behavior, and seemingly terrified at what might happen if he ever dares to slow down to reflect. I won’t say it helped me understand McEnroe the man — I began the film with memories of him throwing tantrums on television, and that’s the way I left the film as well — but the film somehow gave me the sense that I had a better understanding of LaBeouf the actor, instead. —Bryan

In spite of the sprawling title and an equally sprawling cast, the latest from In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths writer-director Martin McDonagh is a fairly fleet movie. The snappy dialogue and constant verbal one-upsmanship moves most of the scenes along quickly, such that whenever the film slows down — as it does during one telling mid-film sequence involving a local sheriff played by Woody Harrelson — the emotional impact is considerable. But it would all fall apart without the crucial performance of Coen brothers staple Frances McDormand (Fargo, Burn After Reading) as Mildred, the character who raises the title billboards on the outskirts of her rural town. Nine months after her daughter was raped and murdered, the police don’t seem to be pursuing the case, and the town’s most prominent deputy, the casually racist, smug Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell) is spending more time harassing locals for invented crimes than examining the evidence of a real one. So Mildred posts three billboards taking the police to task, and becomes national news. The key to McDormand’s performance is that she plays Mildred as perpetually angry: sometimes weary and angry, sometimes sad and angry, sometimes conciliatory angry, and sometimes hugely, destructively angry. It’s a nuanced portrayal that’s often funny, and always capable of drawing sympathy. She isn’t a Punisher-esque rage monster. But she does seem capable of absolutely anything, including fighting the whole town of Ebbing if she needs to. McDormand’s performance makes this largely outlandish story seem plausible, and always entertaining. —Tasha

Peter Dinklage is having a moment. He’s an international star due to Game of Thrones. His science fiction movie Rememory just launched on VOD. (He plays a man trying to solve a murder which centers on a groundbreaking piece of memory-recording technology.) And he had prominent roles in a couple of TIFF movies. In Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, he plays a sweet, sad, proud local man with a clear crush on protagonist Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand). He comes in for some significant bullying from other locals when he tries to romance her, and he faces it with dignity. But that performance pales compared to his role in Jon Avnet’s Three Christs, where he plays one of a trio of schizophrenics who claim to be Jesus. All three men have been institutionalized, and have come under the care of a therapist (Richard Gere) who believes making them confront each other’s delusions will bring their own into focus. Dinklage brings across the agitation and insecurity of mental illness, but he naturally gives the role the same sort of artful, wounded dignity he so often brings to his performances. His desperation and frustration — and in his better moments, his Christ-like forbearance — do a great deal to bolster a film that sometimes struggles to tell anyone’s story in particular. —Tasha

Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak was an emotional tale chock-full of gothic beauty, but narratively coherent it was not. So when I started watching Brian O’Malley’s The Lodgers, I was intrigued by what appeared to be a similar premise: would this little Irish horror film pull off what Del Toro couldn’t? The answer is both yes and no. O’Malley’s film tells the tale of two orphaned twins who live inside their creepy family home, which may — or may not — be haunted by some creepy aquatic phantoms that live beneath a mysterious door in the floor. It doesn’t have the lush beauty of Del Toro’s film, but it does have atmosphere for days, and I ended up thinking of its creepy imagery and sound design whenever I turned off the lights at the end of a festival day. Given the number of horror films I saw at TIFF, that was no small feat, and I’m looking forward to revisiting The Lodgers when it gets a proper release. —Bryan

The title of Jenna Bass’ movie suggests a stoner comedy, and her South African characters do spend some time smoking up as they head out together on a long road trip. But the fantasy of the title refers to something that happens en route: bundled together in a tent for warmth, the four friends wake up to discover they’ve swapped bodies. Bass uses the Freaky Friday premise to let the characters examine race and gender issues: the one man in the group is disturbed at the possibility that he’ll now be treated the same way he’s treated women, and the most politically active of the group is appalled to find herself in a white body. Body-swap stories are almost exclusively about “how the other half lives” experiences, but this foursome mostly just interacts with each other, confronting their fears and prejudices, and testing their friendship as their panic over the situation pushes them to drop their guards and reveal their feelings about each other. It’s the smallest of indie movies, reliant almost entirely on the actors’ abilities to evoke each others’ body language and speech patterns. But it winds up as a personal, painful window into present South African youth culture, and into the issues young people face solely because of the bodies they’re born into. It’s smart, vibrant filmmaking on a micro level. —Tasha

The last time comedian Louis C.K. directed a feature film, it was Pootie Tang. Outside of a small, cultish group of fans, most people have forgotten that ever happened. That’s probably better for humanity in general. But with I Love You, Daddy, the writer-director-star has managed to craft a shockingly earnest movie that’s both funny and tragically sad. C.K. plays Glen, a Hollywood writer who has only a semblance of a relationship with his 17-year-old daughter, China (Chloë Grace Moretz). In getting a new TV project off the ground, Glen casts a movie star, played by Rose Byrne, whom he is not-so-secretly infatuated with. But during the process, China becomes enamored with an aging film director (John Malkovich) who’s known to prefer much younger women. Glen can’t deal with China’s relationship, his feelings for his new star, or the creative pressure he’s under, and the wheels come off from there.

The movie is heavy on the Hollywood insider jargon, but it nevertheless plays like a timely story about a man so wrapped up in himself that he is utterly incapable of understanding the negative impact he’s having on all of the women in his life, from his ex-girlfriend (Pamela Adlon) to his producing partner (Edie Falco). In fact, I Love You, Daddy is so earnest and heartfelt that I don’t even think the film really warrants the use of “pretentious” in the name of this award. And yet… it’s a 35mm drama from the director of Pootie Tang. How else was I going to describe it? —Bryan