Marvel’s mishandling of its Blade reboot will likely go down as one of the studio’s biggest mistakes. There was a great actor in place to play the vampire hunter (Mahershala Ali), and a promising director set to take over the reins (Bassam Tariq). In retrospect, though, the disappointing demise of Blade might not be such a bad thing, because Tariq and Ali have collaborated on something much more interesting than a superhero reboot: the powerful hitman thriller Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.
That was one of five movies I was able to cram into a very hectic third day at the Toronto International Film Festival (you can see my previous reports here and here), and it was one of those days that drives home why events like TIFF can be so special. Each film I saw was drastically different from the last — there was everything from a drama about drifting cars to a throwback horror flick based on a famous Japanese ghost story — which was a great reminder that there are still plenty of new ideas left in the world of film.
So let’s get to it. Here are some rapid-fire reviews of everything I saw on day 3 at TIFF.
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother
Latif (Ali) lives a life of contradictions: he’s a devout Muslim and loyal father, but he also works as a hitman, albeit one who works under a specific moral code (only kill bad guys; never use a gun). But both his faith and his code are tested when his wife dies and he’s forced to become a single father to three kids, including a newborn baby. At the same time, his blood-soaked past comes back to haunt him, putting everyone at risk. We’re in a great moment for pure action flicks like Furious or the John Wick franchise, but Your Mother offers something very different. It’s a powerful character study, one where the action is comparatively fleeting, but all the more powerful and impactful because of it. It’s a film that always left me guessing just how Latif was going to get through this, and, despite being very serious and often solemn, the story also has plenty of laugh-out-loud moments. Ali is excellent as the morally questionable righteous killer, but I was also really impressed by John Cho as the villain, a charismatically unhinged leader of a right-wing church group.
A slow-burning crime thriller, In Alaska, co-directed by Jaap van Heusden and Vinnie Karetak., follows a suicidal teen named Woody (Leo Matthew Temela) who, after a tragic mishap, finds himself wanted by the FBI for causing millions of dollars worth of damage to an oil pipeline. It’s a film of two sides: Woody’s desperate attempts at survival, and veteran agent Susan (Noomi Rapace), the only who realizes the damage wasn’t caused by eco-terrorists. In Alaska is a moodier take on the genre, and one that asks some difficult and important questions about both its leads, particularly Woody, who constantly grapples with whether he even wants to live at all. What starts out bleak ends on a much more hopeful note.
Conceptually, Anna Biller’s The Face of Horror is a mishmash of styles and influences. It’s based on the influential Japanese ghost story Yotsuya Kaidan, but adapts the tale for 14th century England. It then renders the whole thing in the style of Technicolor horror classics. That curious combination works, though, as the film has a campy sense of theatricality to it, with over-the-top performances and classic-style special effects — including some truly memorable make-up work — that lend its grisly tale of murder and betrayal a distinct vibe. And it’s all held together by two strong lead performances: Eleanor (Kristine Froseth), the jilted wife-turned-nightmare of Edward (Jonah Hauer-King), a smarmy and morally-dubious knight who is the kind of asshole you can’t wait to see get what’s coming to him.
Image: Image: Roadside / Vertical
A film that explores that nagging question many long-term couples are forced to answer repeatedly: when are you going to have a baby? Written and directed by Lauren Miller Rogen, Babies is centered on Annie (Anna Kendrick) and Aaron (Seth Rogen), the only childless couple in their social circle. But Annie can’t stop thinking about the question — there’s a lot of her internal monologue debating the pros and cons of having kids — and the couple are forced to really confront the idea when a close friend and her young daughter come to stay with them, providing a taste of parenthood. Babies works for two reasons. First, it’s hilarious: Kendrick and Rogen have a blast together, and the supporting cast includes the likes of Issa Rae, Zach Cherry, and Ed Helm. But it also feels grounded in a way that makes it very relatable, whether you have kids or not.
If Good Will Hunting and The Fast and the Furious were smushed together, you might get something like Drifter. The film is directed by longtime Fast star Sung Kang, who also plays the lead role of Tree, the janitor of a smalltown race track who moonlights as a driver for a drug kingpin. But all he really wants to do is drift, and events conspire to bring him to an event where he’ll go up against the best drifters in the world. The challenges are much more than just on the track, though; Tree has spent most of his life alone, so he’s forced to learn to open up to others, and he also has to contend with extracting himself from the world of crime. Unfortunately, Drifter leans too heavily on the established formula of underdog sports stories, which makes most of its beats feel predictable, with the exception of its completely improbable ending. Worse still is that, with the exception of Tree, none of the characters feel developed at all, and the crime thriller aspect doesn’t gel well with the feel-good story. At least there are some beautiful sequences that make drifting a car feel like an artform.