Late in David Cronenberg’s new thriller, The Shrouds, a character pours herself a bowl of cereal and then adds milk from a plastic bag. It’s a small, unimportant moment in a movie that traffics in big, scary ideas about life, death, and everything in between. But sitting in the audience for a screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, I felt seen.
I wasn’t alone. At the movie’s Canadian premiere earlier this week, TIFF head Cameron Bailey referred to Cronenberg as “Canada’s filmmaker.” Milk bags are as much a part of our Canadian heritage as subsidized health care and the Tragically Hip; not since Samuel L. Jackson flashed his Raptor bag in Jackie Brown has an on-screen prop generated so many appreciative murmurs of local pride inside a Toronto multiplex.
Like 2022’s superb Crimes of the Future, The Shrouds serves as a reminder that, at 81 years old, Cronenberg is still one of the world’s great filmmakers: bold, uncompromising, clever, and fearless. He’s also a very funny guy: The film’s opening scene, in which a visionary tech mogul named Karsh (Vincent Cassel) tries to seduce a blind date by inviting her to watch a subterranean video feed of his late wife Becca’s moldering body, skewers rom-com clichés while simultaneously unveiling a statement of purpose. As Geena Davis said in The Fly: Be afraid, be very afraid.
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It’s been 50 years since Cronenberg began probing our collective discomfort zones, and The Shrouds reconfigures many of the director’s pet themes—including the complex, multidirectional relationship of psychology, biology, and technology—into a fascinatingly abstract pattern. Lean, chiseled, and draped in Yves Saint Laurent, Cassel cuts a charismatic figure as a man who’s caught between sublimating his melancholy emotions and monetizing them; Karsh’s controversial GraveTech app, which monitors his monied clients’ burial plots in streaming HD, has a glorious sort of morbidity. As The Shrouds opens, GraveTech is on the verge of a potential billion-dollar global expansion—a move that draws scrutiny and worse from a loose network of environmental activists, ideological terrorists, and shadowy power brokers. To make things even trickier, Karsh is contemplating a love affair with his sister-in-law Terry (Diane Kruger), a gorgeous but troubled pet groomer who happens to be the identical twin of his dearly departed wife (also played by Kruger in a series of hallucinatory interludes).
This perverse flourish of neurotic romanticism evokes Vertigo (a title name-checked in the dialogue) as well as Cronenberg’s own doppelgänger-themed classic Dead Ringers. The Shrouds is nothing if not self-referential; on at least two separate occasions, Karsh is warned about his habitual reckless driving, lest he smash up his Tesla à la his maker’s epochal autoerotic saga. (His name even sounds like Crash.) Elsewhere, our hero’s personalized AI helper-bot Hunny—a flirty, diabolical version of Siri who looks like a yassified version of Becca and Terry and is voiced by Kruger—evokes the sexualized technophobia of Videodrome, a movie that was ahead of the curve in predicting the erotic possibilities of personalized devices (and gave us the iconic image of James Woods plunging headfirst into the voracious maw of his own television set).
Hunny is a wonderful creation, and her mix of programmed servility and insidious manipulation conjures up the same palpable anxieties about AI and digital surveillance electrifying some of TIFF’s other key entries this year. Like Cronenberg, the Japanese master Kiyoshi Kurosawa is an ace at peeling back the veneer of realism to expose something uncanny underneath, and his new thriller, Cloud, is a sophisticated send-up of social commerce culture, focusing on a callow young factory worker, Yoshii (Masaki Suda), who supplements his income by reselling goods online. A conceptual companion piece to Kurosawa’s Y2K-era masterpiece Pulse—which imagined the internet as a portal connecting the worlds of the living and the dead—Cloud depicts a drab, grayed-out Tokyo of cubicles and assembly lines where every interaction is wholly impersonal and transactional. Yoshii, who has no real personality to speak of, could be the flesh-and-blood embodiment of the profit motive, while his clientele—who organize together via message boards and hatch a plan to violently abduct the guy who’s been scamming them—are like refugees from one of Park Chan-wook’s overwrought revenge thrillers, an Etsy comment section come to life.
The question of righteous retribution and the aesthetics of voyeurism are also central to Steven Soderbergh’s Presence, which pivots on a clever if limited gimmick: Simply put, it’s a haunted house movie told from the ghost’s point of view. Its characters are a semi-dysfunctional family of four whose members can variably sense the supernatural intruder in their midst. Whoever the spirit is (or was), it’s focused on Chloe (Callina Liang), a moody teen recently retreating inward and away from her overbearing mother (Lucy Liu) for reasons that David Koepp’s screenplay gradually unpacks, one deliberately opaque vignette at a time. Imagine Panic Room (which was also written by Koepp) filtered through Paranormal Activity, although the final product is ultimately less than the sum of its carefully choreographed parts. It’s always fun to watch a master filmmaker challenge himself, and the craft here really is impeccable, but between its predictable plotting and pro forma exploration of everybody’s favorite new elevated horror theme—say it with me: trauma!—Presence feels like a limber but limited exercise in cinematic problem-solving rather than a genuine experiment in terror.
The thing that’s probably weakest about Presence is its attempt to illuminate the lives of stressed-out, social-media-addicted Zoomers; the teenage characters act more artificial than Cronenberg’s Hunny. For a more sophisticated form of contemporary adolescent portraiture, there’s aughties music video maestro Joseph Kahn’s giddy B-movie riff Ick, named for a bizarre and only seemingly benign form of extraterrestrial rot spreading its way through Middle America. Not that anybody seems to care: The Ick, it seems, has been here with us since the year 2000, and the characters are weirdly content to let it lie—at least until it starts turning people into slimy, slavering zombies.
Ick’s small-town setting and Spielbergian pastiche can’t help but recall Stranger Things, except that Kahn actually has aspirations beyond brand extension. No less than its maker’s formally exuberant, productively obnoxious 2017 battle-rap epic, Bodied, Ick is a sophisticated film of ideas masquerading as a cultish crowd-pleaser—it’s almost too fast for its own good, but there’s a certain pleasure in trying to keep up. The swiftness of the dialogue and editing patterns is tied directly to the story’s underlying theme of temporal dislocation, exemplified by Brandon Routh’s haplessly intrepid science teacher hero, who peaked in high school and has dug himself a cozy little rut in the decades since. The prologue’s American Pie–style imagery and pricey pop-punk music cues (Blink-182, Hoobastank, and worse) effectively weaponize millennial nostalgia against itself, juxtaposing it smartly and provocatively against the doomscrolling sensibilities of kids who’ve prematurely given up on the possibility of a future. Part COVID burlesque, part climate change allegory, and wholly in tune with its maker’s virtuoso screwed-and-chopped visual showmanship, Ick cements Kahn as one of our most iconoclastic entertainers. It’s a movie whose silliness is worth taking seriously.
At the other end of the prestige spectrum—in the gold-plated art-house-slash-penthouse reserved for winners of the Palme d’Or—sits Sean Baker’s Anora, whose star-crossed lovers exist in the same state of glazed cellphone hypnosis as Ick’s adolescent ensemble. Ani (Mikey Madison) is a young Uzbek American stripper whose enthusiasm for her daily bump-and-grind is waning; one night at the club, she’s called in to translate for a deep-pocketed, Russian-speaking male client, Ivan (a.k.a. Vanya; played by Mark Eydelshteyn), who likes to make it rain wherever he goes and acts as if Spring Breakers were an educational documentary.
As it turns out, Vanya isn’t just a callow rich kid maxing out platinum credit cards: He’s the only son of easily googled ex-Soviet oligarchs whose willingness to let their progeny run wild in America has its limits. When Vanya first suggests that Ani go from being his private dancer to his wife, she goes from skeptical to susceptible in a hurry. The happily ever after is short-lived, however: No sooner have they started playing house in Vanya’s palatial NYC love nest than reality comes (literally) crashing through the door in the form of the groom’s de facto babysitters, a gang of lumbering, only semi-harmless Armenian and Russian thugs who’ve been instructed to haul him back to Russia and annul the marriage by any means necessary.
At this point in his career, Baker has cultivated his own style of breathless, relentlessly pressurized urban realism, and Anora is as assured a piece of filmmaking as you’re likely to see this year. The mid-narrative shift from luxury-lounge fairy-tale gaudiness to slapstick suspense—with Ani hog-tied and bullied into leading her captors on a frantic manhunt for her suddenly AWOL Prince Charming—unfolds as a grimly absurdist stress dream (that includes a great running joke about the difficulty of finding street parking in Brighton Beach). What’s less certain is what the movie is trying to say about its milieu. Baker’s fascination with the nitty-gritty of sex work has remained consistent over the years, and so has his sense of whirligig empathy for his characters—including and especially when they’re in conflict with each other. But something still feels slightly off about Anora’s handling of wealth and class; by leveling up the scale of his filmmaking and incorporating so many signifiers of conspicuous consumption, Baker risks making a movie that’s accidentally infatuated with its own lavish textures. As for the much-discussed final scene, it’s the sort of sequence designed to start arguments between viewers—a Rorschach test that says at least as much about the viewer’s moral and emotional perspective as it does the characters’ (or the filmmaker’s).
Between its Cannes pedigree and cheering section of critics, Anora figures to be a significant award contender. In recent years TIFF has embraced its status as a statuette-season launching pad, and many of the highest-profile titles on offer—including everything from We Live in Time to Conclave to Saturday Night—are being analyzed in terms of buzz. Exhibit A is Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch, which arrived in town amid hype that it might be the movie to finally win Amy Adams an Oscar after six failed nominations. Certainly, the film gives its star her showiest role in a while as a nameless stay-at-home mom oscillating wildly between boredom, exhaustion, and a festering sense of resentment. Mother loves her 2-year-old son and tells everyone who’ll listen that kneecapping her own artistic career to scrape spaghetti off the floor was a choice she made on her own terms—but somewhere deep in her sleep-deprived subconscious, she hears the howl of primal urges. She also notices that, for some reason, her sense of smell is getting acute, her canines are getting sharper, and she’s maybe growing a tail.
As long as Nightbitch is dealing with the complex and messy emotions associated with parenthood and its discontents, it’s as witty and well realized as Heller’s other comedies; she’s a skillful satirist and a fine director of actors. The problem is that the script’s stabs at Cronenbergian body horror, whether real or imagined or somewhere in between, never fully coalesce. Heller is trying a lot here, and there’s something exciting about a piece of mainstream entertainment that feels like it could come apart at any moment; Adams’s performance as a woman barely holding things together could be an emblem of the movie around her. What’s frustrating is how Heller ultimately navigates the story’s minefield of explosive emotions into safe territory, settling for cheap shots (and cheaper sentiment) instead of pushing the envelope. For all its gory sight gags and shaggy spirit-animal mysticism, the film winds up neutering itself.
Where Nightbitch’s attempts at suburban surrealism fall flat, Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship hits the mark—over and over again, with the sledgehammer finesse we’ve come to expect from the movie’s star Tim Robinson. It’s high praise to say that the film—which pairs Robinson with Paul Rudd as neighbors whose efforts at bro-ing out together have increasingly calamitous consequences—feels like an extended episode of I Think You Should Leave, strip-mining a similar vein of beta-male psychodrama in ways that split the difference between blatancy and sophistication. It’s also high praise to note that, in a way, Friendship is a dead ringer for The Shrouds, insofar as the former’s protagonist is a lonely, paranoid app developer who imagines himself at the center of a vast, elaborate conspiracy, to the point that reality seems like it’s warping around him. (In the same spirit, The Shrouds could be a feature-length I Think You Should Leave sketch: Call it Coffin Flop 2.) It’s not worth spoiling Friendship’s best jokes here, especially since they’re likely to be memed into infinity on social media once the movie opens theatrically. For now, it’s simply worth noting that in addition to being hilarious and sad, the film functions beautifully as a work of film criticism via a running joke that Robinson’s character is excited for the new Marvel movie because, as he says, “This one is supposed to be nuts.” It’s a sick burn, and the fact that Ant-Man is on hand as an accomplice makes it all the better. Just one other time during this vast and sometimes alienating festival that I personally felt seen.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.