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13 Films to Look Out for at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival
Palestine 36 The Toronto International Film Festival begins today, with many of this awards season’s festival heavy-hitters (Hamnet, The Smashing Machine, Sentimental Value, Train Dreams) screening for North American audiences. As usual, though, we focus our preview on newer titles as well as a few sleepers that have premiered earlier this year. Below, find 13 films we strongly believe are worth your time at Toronto.
Maddie’s Secret
The opening night selection for TIFF’s Discovery program is the directorial debut from NYC comedian John Early, wherein he stars as Maddie Ralph, a dishwasher working at a trendy food content company who struggles with bulimia. Despite broadcasting a perfect facade on social media, Maddie is incapable of confiding in anyone—not her adoring husband (Eric Rahill) or lesbian best friend (Early’s frequent collaborator Kate Berlant)— about her self-destructive compulsion, which is exacerbated by workplace demands and interpersonal obligations. Early’s comedic sensibility is amplified by the presence of fellow comics Vanessa Bayer and Conner O’Malley, yet the film’s perspective on eating disorders refuses to veer into the realm of distasteful parody. —Natalia Keogan
Retreat
“The world’s first Deaf thriller” is the tagline for UK director Ted Evan’s debut picture, Retreat, about a Deaf woman journeying to an isolated retreat for Deaf people and who finds there psychologically coercive practices. The festival’s catalog description suggests comparisons to films such as Marcy Mary May Marlene and Safe, and while there have been thrillers with deaf/Deaf characters, such as Hush and A Quiet Place, Retreat is the first picture helmed by a Deaf director using British Sign Language in its production.—Scott Macaulay
Palestine 36
Annemarie Jacir made Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2004 following her short film, Like Twenty Impossibles, in which a contemporary Palestinian film crew has to evade Israeli checkpoints. Twenty-one years later, she premieres in Toronto a film again set in Palestine but decades earlier. The Palestinian entry into this year’s Oscar race, Palestine 36 is a 1936-set story about Palestinian resistance to colonial Britain during the British Mandate for Palestine. Eleven countries contributed financing to the film, and the cast includes Hiam Abbas and Jeremy Irons. — SM
Dry Leaf
Shot on a Sony Ericsson W595, the same circa 2008 cellphone used for that earlier film, Dry Leaf unfolds in a lo-fi haze, its finer visual details lost in impressionistic images of the natural world that at times resemble paintings more than early digital video. Besides lending the movie a rich, uniquely textured look, it also imbues its plot—in which a middle-aged man named Irakli (played by David Koberidze, director Alexandre Koberidze’s real-life father) searches the villages of rural Georgia for his missing daughter—with a vaguely mystical sense that the film isn’t about locating a lost woman, but finding personal peace in an ever-changing world. With the help of an invisible partner (a not-uncommon Koberidze trope) and a list of abandoned soccer fields his daughter had recently photographed, Irakli sets off across the countryside where he meets a variety of kids and locals who, through their anecdotes and testimonies, speak to a generational sea-change transpiring in the country’s less populated regions. Just as Irakli steadfastly pursues his goal, so too does the film quietly operate by its own logic, pausing between visits to each town for observational passages of the Georgian landscape paired with the magical sounds of Koberidze’s brother Giorgi’s electroacoustic score. The result is a rare narrative film that seems to exist in a state of suspended animation. In Dry Leaf, time isn’t of the essence—it is the essence.—Jordan Cronk
Mare’s Nest
If all onscreen adaptations of DeLillo’s writings have proved disastrous—with the notable exception of David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis (2012)—that’s largely because of their failure to transpose his dialogues. There’s a musicality to the way his characters speak, not to mention a humorous solemnity to their exchanges, you’d be hard pressed to find in works like Noah Baumbach’s White Noise (2022) or Benoît Jacquot’s Never Ever (2016). When we spoke after of the premiere, Rivers said DeLillo told him he wasn’t quite sure if the play would work as a film, but the choice to cast children in all three roles proves oddly fitting. Their committed, extremely serious line readings capture some of his writings’ comic majesty in a way no other adaptation had managed. This isn’t to reduce Mare’s Nest to a faithful translation—the film’s second half basically refutes the play’s overarching thesis. Prophesying from his mountain retreat, the scholar’s convinced that as the world crumbles words will eventually replace things (children won’t be playing with snow but “with the word for it”). Yet as Moon’s journey progresses, Mare’s Nest suggests the opposite, shedding its verbose earlier segments to swell into something more elusive. Shot on Super 16mm by Rivers and co-cinematographer Carmen Pellon, Mare’s Nest teems with hand-processed monochrome sequences candied with water marks; words and dialogues all but disappear, while the frames feel alive to the mysteries that haunt Moon’s path. Lopsided and confounding as it may come across, Mare’s Nest radiates the girl’s own curiosity for these uncharted landscapes, and the excitement is often infectious.—Leonardo Goi
Blue Heron
A Canadian-born daughter of Hungarian immigrants, Romvari has long cribbed from her own life story, and her feature debut calcifies some career-long preoccupations: the psychological costs of being severed from one’s history and dredging that up; the role filmmaking can play in that pursuit; ethical concerns one must wrestle with when exposing a painful, private trauma. A chronicle of a few tumultuous days in the life of a Hungarian family of six as they settle in their new suburban home outside Vancouver, Blue Heron again blurs the line between fiction and autobiography. Though told from the perspective of youngest child Sacha (Eylul Guven), the film belongs to her older brother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), a cherubic teen prone to self-destructive tantrums no one at home knows how to deal with. Romvari refuses to write him off as a troubled child, much less decipher his unease, and the restraint with which she crafts her latest family archaeology is her paramount achievement. Without resorting to big moments or treacly statements, Romvari crafts a shattering story of personal and artistic catharsis; I can’t wait to see what she’ll come up with next.—Leonardo Goi
Fuck My Son!
Someday an intrepid repertory theater will program a double bill of the recent Jennifer Lawrence R-rated comedy, No Hard Feelings, and its underground cinema mutant twin, Todd Rohal’s TIFF-premiering Fuck My Son!, which is a no-holds-barred assault on the senses, leavened throughout by the darkest and most splatterific of humor. When we selected Rohal for our 2006 25 New Faces list, he said about his independent film ethos, ““If I was going to make a feature, it was going to have to be something I wouldn’t regret. I wanted to make something that would not look or sound like an ‘indie’ film,’ and I approached that from a technical standpoint as well as a storytelling standpoint.” Time will tell whether Rohal regrets Fuck My Son!, but with its story of a insane, near superhuman old woman (played by Robert Longstreet), who kidnaps a young woman and her young daughter so that the woman can, yes, fuck her (mutant) son, it undeniably does not look or sound like any independent film out there at the moment, although one could cite pictures by Stuart Gordon, Troma and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as possible predecessors. (The child kidnapping and imprisonment is one of many third-rail moments, and Rohal’s palate-cleansing solution to audience distress here involves some rather delightful animation.) Still, Peter Kuplowsky in the festival program guide calls the film “the most abject exercise in poor taste since Pink Flamingos,” and he may be correct! — SM
Roofman
Derek Cianfrance, who appeared on our 25 New Faces in 2009, returns with his first theatrical feature since 2016’s romantic drama, The Light Between Oceans. Working from a script he co-wrote with Kirt Gunn, Cianfrance tells the real-life story of the so-called “rooftop robber,” Jeffrey Manchester, who broke through ceilings after hours to steal from the safes of fast food outlets. In Cianfrance’s portrayal, Manchester, played by an excellent Channing Tatum, is a fundamentally decent man trying to care for his family — when he bumps into some McDonalds workers in one robbery, he puts them in the freezer, but not before giving one his coat. With the cops on his tale, he spends a sizable chunk of the movie hiding out in a Toys ‘R Us, improbably prompting comparisons to Castaway, with the isolated Manchester striving to stay sane amidst the cheer of holiday shoppers. Roofman boasts a stellar cast. In addition to Tatum, there’s Kirsten Dunst in one of her best roles, Juno Temple, and, as the toy store’s boss from hell, Peter Dinklage. — SM
Erupcja
Pete Ohs says he was thinking of films like Before Sunrise, Alice in the Cities and Celine and Julie Go Boating after he moved to Poland in 2023 and decided to make “a foreign film” as the next in his “tables of bubbles” movies. As Filmmaker readers know, several years ago Ohs decided to pause pursuing more conventionally produced features and make one microbudget film a year organized around certain rules and parameters. Crews would be tiny (Ohs himself shoots, edits and records sound, with the actors all wearing lavalieres), and scripts would developed with the actors, with only the first half of a scenario in mind before production. The beauty of his “table” films is how organic they feel, how responsive they are to his actors’s individual rhythms and personalities, and how Ohs, ineffably, weaves them in post-production into narratives that feel inevitable and pre-planned. So, yes, Erupcja is Oh’s next table of bubbles movie, but it’s also, as you may have heard, the Charli xcx movie. (Actually, it’s one of two the pop star, actress, writer and producer has at TIFF, the other being Romain Gavras’s Sanctuary). Charli’s great in Erupcja, and so are the rest of its ensemble cast, including Ohs regulars Will Madden and Jeremy O. Harris, along with newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska (Ida), and, especially, Polish actress Lena Góra, lovely and natural as Charli’s character’s romantically ambiguous teenage best friend, now grown up and wondering why her old pal has suddenly appeared in Warsaw. (Read my interview with Charli and Ohs here.) — SM
Honey Bunch.
This one’s a fairly irresistible title for me as it pairs two Canadian filmmaking partnerships I’ve been big fans of. The first is this film’s two directors, Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli, whose previous picture, Violation, was one of the best and certainly most brutal horror films of recent memory. Honey Bunch promises to be another dark genre-bender, dealing with a couple heading to a recovery center boasting an experimental treatment to heal brain trauma. That couple is played by real-life partners Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie, the latter a 25 New Face and the former director of the recent Sundance premiere Dead Lover, also recommended at TIFF. — SM
Forastera
An unexpectedly tender ghost story unfolds in this feature debut from Madrid-born, Los Angeles-based writer-director Lucía Aleñar Iglesias. Set on the Spanish island of Mallorca, the ethereal sunshine and crystalline blue of the Mediterranean cast a melancholy haze upon a vacationing family that must suddenly mourn the passing of matriarch Catalina (Marta Angelat). After inheriting her grandmother’s stylish ‘60s-era flared dress embellished with polka dots, Cata (Zoe Stein) is involuntarily thrust into the role left vacant by her namesake: her grieving grandfather (Lluís Homar) increasingly mistakes Cata for his late wife; her mother (Núria Prims) begins acting like a temperamental teen; even distant relatives incessantly remark about the two’s physical similarities. Though the psychological toll taken on the family is palpable, there is no denying that something metaphysical is also afoot. Shimmering beams of light continually creep into frame, a phantasmic presence that hints at grandma’s lingering spiritual presence, gently guiding her loved ones through tumult. —Natalia Keogan
Sacrifice
Although Pete Ohs’ Erupcja is inarguably Charli xcx’s breakout acting vehicle to watch at this year’s TIFF, her presence in the latest from French director Romain Gavras points to a concerted period of thespian turns from the pop star. The director’s history as a successful helmer of music videos (most notably for M.I.A’s “Bad Girls” and “Born Free”) makes her involvement all the more logical, as with co-star Yung Lean, the Swedish rap sensation featured on a remix of Charli’s “360.” The film features Anya Taylor-Joy as an environmental activist whose radical group takes three hostages at a charity gala — Chris Evans as an out-of-touch actor; Vincent Cassel as, per TIFF’s official description, “a fusion of your least favorite billionaires” (one at least: Elon Musk); and Ambika Mod as their lover — for a sacrificial ritual. With any luck, this effort will be as messy and kinetic as Athena, Gavras’ previous effort from 2022. —NK
Dust Bunny
It’s been a decade since Hannibal was unceremoniously cancelled by NBC, leaving a void in its untraditionally gory primetime slot. Fans have been faithfully (i.e. futilely) holding their breath for Bryan Fuller’s take on Thomas Harris’ literary world to be resurrected; in the meantime, there’s Dust Bunny, the legendary TV showrunner’s feature debut. The film reunites Fuller with Hannibal star Mads Mikkelsen, who plays a hit man hired by 10-year-old Aurora (Sophie Sloan) to snuff the monster lurking under her bed. Co-starring genre icons Sigourney Weaver and David Dastmalchian, Dust Bunny narratively alludes to Luc Besson’s Léon: The Professional, but visually appears more in line with the work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, whose Amélie Fuller has long cited as his favorite film. —NK
