TIFF Reviews: Steven Soderbergh's ghost movie Presence, Sophie Deraspe's Shepherds & more

The 2024 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival began on Sept. 5 and runs through Sept. 15.

Presence

One of American cinema’s few innovators, Steven Soderbergh continually tests through form and function the limits of the medium. With Presence, he reimagines the maligned genre of first-person cinema. With predecessors like Lady in the Lake (1945), the opening sequence of Dark Passage and the underrated La femme defendue (1997), Presence adopts the perspective of a supernatural entity haunting the halls of a beautifully restored home in suburban New Jersey. The expansive warm-toned house features many of the original fittings including fireplaces and textured silver-nitrate mirrors. The unspeaking and largely invisible “presence” cannot leave the space, relegated to roaming the halls as a new family moves in. Everything the spirit sees, we see — the entire world limited to the century-old homestead.

While on the surface, the new family seems like the picture-perfect American family, cracks in the veneer quickly appear. Chris Sullivan and Lucy Liu are a strained parental unit struggling to offer guidance to their children; their popular and high-achieving son Tyler (Eddy Maday) and their sombre and outcast daughter Chloe (Callina Liang). The spirit quickly develops an attachment to Chloe — did they know each other in the past or is something else drawing the spirit to her?

While ostensibly a ghost film, Presence isn’t exactly scary. Perhaps for parents with children coming of age in 2024, the movie hits some terrifying notes about a rapidly changing world. The undercurrent of the film’s horror is an anxiety about an uncertain future. How do we overcome grief? How do we adapt to new environments? How do we find ourselves when we feel lost? Sullivan and Liu are obvious performance standouts with the younger cast struggling a bit more to find grounding within the film’s unconventional structure. Hardly one of Soderbergh’s best films, Presence is nonetheless compelling, and at just 85 minutes, never wears out its welcome. Soderbergh successfully translates the first-person aesthetics that have come to dominate our digital realm into something artful and compelling, transcending a form associated with passive consumption into something spiritual and engaged. (Justine Smith)

Presence will screen in Montreal theatres in January 2025.

Measures for a Funeral

Resuming her collaboration with actress Deragh Campbell, with Measures for a Funeral, director Sofia Bohdanowicz deepens her obsessions. Campbell plays Audrey, a PhD student working on a thesis on the forgotten Canadian violinist Kathleen Parlow. Struggling to move forward in her research, Audrey breaks up with her long-term boyfriend as she also deals with her mother’s sickness. By no means a traditional drama, Bohdanowicz furthers a stylistic approach she refined in films like Ms Slavic 7 and her short film Point and Line to Plane. Tangential and atmospheric, her films interweave research with its character’s loneliness and grief. Ideas and experience intermingle, reflecting a sense of time broken up through readings and research.

Toronto has never looked so beautiful than in the film’s opening chapters. The skyline is familiar but, cast in cold reflective glares, it captures a sense of enormity and duplicity. The cold light, as if the city were enshrined in constant twilight, eclipses Audrey in these early sections. Toronto seems glorious and horrific, a beautiful and terrible place. The space feels like a reflection of Audrey’s inner world, a quiet storm full of potential but stiffened by repression and an uncertain future. With shades of Assayas, the film captures the digital ghosts and alienation of films like Demonlover and Personal Shopper. As Audrey escapes to Europe, one of her friends reads from Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady: “iIt made me think of you.” It’s the story of a woman who goes to Europe to gain knowledge and experience. Will Audrey find herself ensnared as Isabel Archer did, or will she find liberation?

The self-effacing nature of research and creation lends the film a strange quality. It’s rare that movies are about people who are not the main characters in their own lives. Audrey tries to maintain her anonymity, refusing time and again to be pulled into the world of the living. She prefers to be passive, and in rare moments of frank confession, seems to be embarrassed by her emotiveness. The film leads towards an awakening that has the power to make the forgotten whole again, in a bracing and fulfilling final act that takes place in Montreal. Once again, Bohdanowicz demonstrates herself as one of Canada’s most poetic and compelling filmmakers. (Justine Smith)

Measures for a Funeral does not currently have a scheduled Montreal release date.

Tata

I really struggled to connect with this film. For me, there’s nothing worse than journalists turning themselves into the story and calling it journalism — or, in this case, cinema.

In Tata, co-directors Lina Vdovîi and Radu Ciorniciuc create a story around family trauma, generational violence and the suffocating impact of toxic masculinity. Set against the backdrop of Italy, Moldova and Romania, the film follows Lina, a journalist estranged from her father for years after he left their impoverished homeland of Moldova to work abroad. Decades later, Lina is settled in Romania with a stable life and a partner, but her world shifts when she receives a video message from her father, showing bruises on his arms from his employer’s abuse, asking his daughter for help.

The premise initially sounds compelling: a daughter, shaped by her father’s past violence, equips him with a hidden camera to expose the injustice he now faces. As the film unfolds, however, it feels less like a thoughtful investigation and more like a self-absorbed unravelling of personal pain and punishment on camera. Lina’s journey to help her father blurs into a painful excavation of her own trauma, but instead of gaining deeper insights, the film falls into a repetitive cycle of performative misery, guilt-tripping and self-pity void of a clear artistic voice.

While Tata attempts to balance the personal and the political, for me it leans too heavily on the personal, turning what could be a powerful examination of systemic issues into an awkward viewing experience. The filmmakers push the narrative of healing through first-person narration and VHS archival footage from Lina’s youth, but in the end, it feels like we’re watching unsolvable issues like wounds being repeatedly reopened without resolution simply for the sake of having a story to tell.

At just 82 minutes, Tata presents itself as an emotionally charged exploration of survival and justice, but ultimately, it feels to me more like an exploitative vanity project. The camera lingers too long on moments that seem to exist more for the filmmakers’ catharsis than for the audience’s resolution, feelings or understanding. Despite some beautifully shot scenes and moments, the film never quite shakes off the feeling that it’s less about family healing and more about turning personal pain into content. (Chico Peres Smith)

Tata does not currently have a scheduled Montreal release date.

Shepherds

After a health crisis forces him to reconsider his life choices, Mathyas (Félix-Antoine Duval) leaves his advertising job in Montreal to become a shepherd in France, in the shadow of the Alps. With ambitions to write and a deep yearning for pastoral tranquillity, Mathyas throws himself to the mercy of the villagers and quickly gets a position as an apprentice. As with most things in life, though, reality fails to meet his expectations. Through his journey to learn the skills to work with sheep, the quiet world he imagined often gives way to unexpected surges of violence and the tangles of bureaucracy.

There’s a frailty to Duval that lends the film a compelling counterpoint to labour. His stature is lean rather than strong and his expression worried rather than confident. The softness of his youth feels ethereal, particularly in contrast with the gruff bent-over exhaustion of the men he’s now working for and with. Soon joined by Élise (Solène Rigot), who shares his search for meaning, the soft-haired pair seem plucked from the sweeping landscapes of 18th century pastoral idealism. The film’s soft and pale green palette undercuts the constant reminders of the encroaching hopelessness of the 21st century. The farmers are bitter because their lives don’t get any easier. Mathyas’s unrelenting optimism only seems to underline his cluelessness about the reality he now finds himself in. Climate change, shifting social mores and new technology have all transformed the landscape and the work in the shepherding world.

The film lacks the explosiveness of director Sophie Deraspe’s previous film, Antigone, though it hardly demands it. The movie’s structure instead invites the audience to be patient and reflective. It brings us on the same journey of transformation as Mathyas. Based on the memoirs of Mathyas Lefebure, the film prioritizes lived and documentary experience over poetic symbolism. Rather than indulge in fantasy, it tries to present the world as is: paradoxical, infuriating and transcendent. (Justine Smith)

Bergers is scheduled to open in Montreal theatres on Nov .15.

Querido Tropico

Set in Panama City, Querido Tropico is about the unexpected friendship that blooms between a rich older woman suffering from early-onset dementia and her Colombian caretaker. Ana Maria (Jenny Navarrete) has worked with the elderly for some time and her boss recommends her as a live-in nurse with a wealthy family. Ana Maria’s life isn’t easy and she’s recently pregnant without any parental support. She accepts the job. Mercedes (Paulina García) resists Ana Maria at first. She barely acknowledges her existence and asks her to do humiliating and uncomfortable tasks. In denial that she needs any help to begin with, Ana Maria emerges as a reminder to Mercedes that her memory is fading and her control over her life is slipping away.

Motherhood emerges as a central theme as the film explores the different facets and responsibilities of family within Panamanian culture. Women are seen as incomplete if they never have children, and yet, the traditions that once bonded multi-generations are increasingly frayed. Family isn’t necessarily the same force of meaning it once was and now becomes a breeding ground for resentment and alienation. Particularly as Mercedes loses control of her faculties, we sense a deepening loneliness as her daughter prefers to outsource help than take it on herself.

Though the film manages to balance honesty with earnest sincerity, it fails to particularly set itself apart from many other films of its type. A showcase for its lead actors, it is a film that is a mildly compelling, if unremarkable and conventional. The intrigue around Ana Maria’s “secret” is just not enough to propel the film into a more noteworthy category. Instead, Querido Tropico is only ever competent; it lacks ambition and insight. (Justine Smith)

Querido Tropico does not currently have a scheduled Montreal release date.

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