TIFF Reviews: Chastain vs. Sarsgaard, Ethan Hawke & Michael Keaton direct

The 2023 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival began on Sept. 7 and runs through Sept. 17.

Memory 

Memory, the latest film from Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco, opens in an A.A. meeting. “I remember,” each member says as they recollect their relationship with Sylvia (Jessica Chastain). She’s 13 years sober, a single mom with a teen daughter. They live in a bad neighbourhood but in a clean apartment with many locks and a high-tech security system. Sylvia works at an adult daycare and has a close relationship with her sister, who insists she attends their high school reunion. Sylvia is resistant; we’ll discover why by the movie’s end. Alone and sober, she leaves the party early, followed by a (presumed) former classmate. He waits for Sylvia outside her apartment overnight, and in the morning, when she calls a number she finds in his wallet, she finds out his name is Saul (Peter Sarsgaard), and he has early-onset dementia. 

Performances lead in Memory. As Sylvia, Chastain is tense and wistful. She’s overtly assertive in protecting herself from harm but also driven by longing. Her body language is stiff and closed off but betrays a deeply rooted desire to be loved. Sarsgaard, who won an acting prize for the role at Venice, plays Saul with sensitivity. He takes Saul’s confusion and lapses in memory and turns them inward; he becomes quiet, and his focus wavers. Yet, his performance bursts with vulnerability, an openness that shifts between desperation and serenity. The film features strong performances from supporting characters, particularly Merritt Wever, who plays Sylvia’s sister Olivia, and an infuriatingly good Jessica Harper as their mother, a strict “keeping up with the Joneses”-era housewife. 

For a film that seems particularly ripe for Oscar bait, Memory does avoid many pitfalls. The narrative trajectory often leads down unexpected roads, and the filmmaking errs on the side of restraint rather than bombast. That being said, the script, which hinges so much on questions of memory and identity, would be better suited to a more expressionistic and less realistic form. The tone feels ill-matched for the style, and narrative progression can sometimes feel clumsy and even awkward. (Justine Smith)

Memory does not currently have a release date. 

Knox Goes Away 

While there’s nothing new about actors turned directors, the 2023 TIFF lineup features at least 10, many of them debuts. Among them is Michael Keaton’s middling first film Knox Goes Away, about a hitman losing his memory. A vanity project that allows Keaton to play a cool genius with a sick job, while also giving him the chance to play the “challenging” role of a man suffering from a rapidly declining illness, Knox Goes Away feels like a second-rate TV movie. As the movie opens with jazz music that feels pulled directly from a royalty-free archive, John Knox pulls into a diner where he regularly eats with his friend and work partner. They rib each other about their bad habits and set out some of the most on-the-nose exposition you’ll see in a mainstream movie this year. 

Nothing about Knox Goes Away feels considered or well-researched. Structured similarly to Nolan’s Memento, the movie can be understood as an elaborate puzzle where the audience might be expected to sit in suspense to see how all the different threads come together. Yet, the movie neither resembles reality nor leans into the heightened world of film noir. It feels like a lower-level episode of a C-grade crime TV show that half of America watches but you’ve likely never heard of. Formally, the film lacks elegance and intention. Characterizations are thin and feel like the imaginings of a boy just out of high school who watched and misunderstood some Scorsese gangster films. The adult characters feel unreal, and their struggle is wholly disconnected from any emotional reality. If the film is watchable, it’s because it features a cast brimming with charisma, particularly Al Pacino, Marcia Gay Harden and James Marsden in cushy, if not underdeveloped, supporting roles. Yet, most of the cast feels stiff – Keaton included. It’s a bleak and pointless film. Skip it. (Justine Smith)

Knox Goes Away does not currently have a release date. 

The Human Surge 3

The Human Surge 3, Eduardo Williams’ hypnotic odyssey into the digital realm, offers a mind-bending exploration of our interconnected world. In this cinematic journey, three groups of friends from far-flung corners of the globe — Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and Peru — meander through their enigmatic environments, gradually weaving their stories into a collective march. Williams’ choice to bypass a traditional sequel and jump straight to “3” exemplifies the film’s challenge to established norms.

The film’s form is as captivating as its content, shot using a groundbreaking 360-degree camera, melding reality, fantasy, and the surreal. Williams transforms this contraption into a storytelling tool, creating an immersive dreamscape. Dialogue, seemingly disjointed yet eerily and at times profound, permeates the film. The sound design, which, according to Williams, is naturally captured but artificially manipulated and enhanced in post-production, has almost a 3D binaural feel that makes the voices and ambient soundscapes very present and clear within the 3D space environment. Characters traverse physical virtual spaces, their conversations echoing the dissonance and connection of our digital age. Williams’ flair lies in presenting the digital world not as a mere simulacrum but as a parallel reality with its own truths.

The Human Surge 3 transcends traditional storytelling, blurring the lines between documentary and fiction. The film’s fragmented narrative challenges viewers to embrace its chaotic beauty. A symphony of visual and auditory experiences, the film captures the essence of our interconnected world, almost like a physical chatroom-like dialogue between people from all around the world but present in the same virtual physical space. It’s an unconventional journey through landscapes that become real and virtual, echoing our 21st-century existence, where screens mediate our perceptions. For those seeking traditional storytelling, this avant-garde masterpiece may prove challenging. But for those willing to explore the uncharted waters of contemporary cinema, The Human Surge 3 is a mesmerizing, mind-altering experience.

Eduardo Williams’ creation is an invitation to dream, to embrace the possibilities of cinema as it evolves, mirroring the ever-shifting landscapes of our digital age. In a world where boundaries blur and screens shape our realities, The Human Surge 3 stands as a testament to the limitless potential of cinema. (Chico Peres Smith)

The Human Surge 3 does not currently have a release date

Wildcat 

Subverting the familiar tropes of the biopic, Ethan Hawke directs his daughter, Maya, in Wildcat — an examination of author Flannery O’Connor’s life and work. Part biographical, the film is also broken into various anthology vignettes, bringing to the screen O’Connor’s spikey, gothic storytelling. Initially, it’s hard not to feel pressed up against the wall. The film feels blunt, reducing poetry to something a little too literal and concrete. The line between artifice and naturalism is over-emphasized as “characters” break the fourth wall, running through different lines of dialogue, emphasizing O’Connor’s pen — the writer working her way through a story. At first glance, the film, toned in an unpleasant shade of cobalt and cerulean blue, feels overly ambitious: it seems impossible that neither O’Connor’s prose nor her genius will translate to the screen.

Yet, as the film progresses, it winds itself around you. Maya Hawke gives one of the best performances of the year. She feels like a woman torn; she’s assertive and timid, a believer wracked with doubt, a writer who yearns for solitude and a woman who longs for connection. Hawke captures both her frailty and strength, mainly through her voice, which is melancholic and devotional, deep and beautiful. As the film progresses, it investigates the impact of O’Connor’s Lupus diagnosis and her spirituality on her work. The film shines in these moments, trading in the easy cause-and-effect explanation for creating something thorny and uprooted from obvious causality. As Wildcat examines how the notion of suffering becomes central to her work and her faith, O’Connor’s work also becomes clearer. Though heavily flawed, there is something resonant and authentic in Hawke’s approach to the material. It’s a movie that doesn’t always work, but it captures O’Connor’s haunted sensuality and flawed personhood when it does. (Justine Smith)

La Chimera 

In a cultural landscape obsessed with absorbing art as content, audiences are trained to consume art like an insatiable monster, artists that prefer to take the scenic route threaten through their jouissance, convention and conformity. With her latest, La Chimera, which premiered earlier this year at Cannes, Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher takes us on one such journey. The film follows a group of gravediggers pillaging ancient tombs in the Italian countryside, led by a suited Englishman, Arthur (Josh O’Connor), who longs for his lost love. As La Chimera opens, Arthur has recently been released from prison. He goes to live with his lover’s mother (played by an always delightful Isabella Rossellini), as he reprises his mystical, spiritual crimes. 

The film is shot on multiple film formats, including 35mm, 16mm and Super 16, which aesthetically blurs the line between waking and dream life, as well as the past and present (the film is set sometime in the 1980s, but can be imagined, colourful costuming aside, at any point pre-cell phones). Evoking the circus atmosphere and the burlesque stylings of a children’s play, director Rohrwacher draws us into a romantic story of social outcasts searching for a big break. Helpless and hapless, luck never seems to be on their side, but that doesn’t stop them from enjoying life to the fullest. As it overflows with singing and dancing, the movie nonetheless has a melancholy thread as Arthur ambles through grave-robbing in search of the impossible: lost love. The film examines the power of transgression to elicit strong emotions and how all the good things in life hang in the balance of the sacred and the profane — a poetic but accessible film about love, loss and memory. (Justine Smith)

La Chimera is scheduled for a Fall 2023 release. 

For more on the Toronto International Film Festival, please visit the TIFF website.

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