Toronto’s Vanguard program has been one of my favorite
sections of the festival over my first two years of attendance. It’s where I
found “Spring,” “Goodnight Mommy,” “The Duke of Burgundy,” “February” (aka “The
Blackcoat’s Daughter”), and more. And so this year’s line-up became an
essential part of my personal scheduling. Although I had to miss what most are
arguing is the film of this year’s Vanguard, Nacho Vigalondo’s “Colossal”
(another writer will cover it), and I have yet to get to Osgood Perkins’ “I Am
the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House.” The sad news is that this year’s
Vanguard, at least for me personally, will not live up to previous years, as
the three films that I have seen from the program are all various degrees of
disappointing.
Let’s start with a noir genre exercise that actually shared
Opening Night of this year’s fest back on Thursday. While Denzel Washington and
Chris Pratt were walking the red carpet for “The Magnificent Seven,” the
talented cast of “Message From the King”
were on stage across town at the Elgin Screening Room. Fabrice Du Welz (“Alleluia”)
directs this story of a man coming to Los Angeles from Cape Town, South Africa,
looking for his sister. I’m often fascinated by foreign directors tackling
places as symbolic of America as L.A., and this particular riff on “The Limey” stars the great
Chadwick Boseman, an actor whom I keep wanting to see get the right part to
take him to the next level. This isn’t it.
Boseman stars as Jacob King (yes, that’s his last name, and
he literally says the title after beating someone nearly to death, which is
indicative of the film’s overall lack of subtlety). Jacob arrives in L.A.
looking for his sister, quickly finding her battered body in the morgue. She
was tortured before she was killed, and Jacob soon learns she had fallen deep
into the underbelly of the City of Angels, getting involved in heavy drug use
and pornography. As Jacob gets closer to figuring out who killed his sister, he
gets deeper into the grotesque world of Los Angeles, starting with petty drug
dealers and moving up to politicians and power players. Teresa Palmer co-stars
as a woman who lives with her daughter in the same hotel in which King is
staying (and who becomes his only friend), while Luke Evans and Alfred Molina
play the sleaziest of the sleaze.
And I do mean sleaze. “Message From the King” eventually
gets so grimy that you want to wash it off. I don’t have a problem with
movies that explore dark territory, but said exploration demands something in
exchange. It could be clever dialogue, interesting characters, thematic depth—whatever
it may be, we need a reason to venture into Dante’s Inferno, and “Message from the King”
doesn’t really provide one.
A much better film but still a slight disappointment thanks
largely to sky-high expectations set by my colleague Glenn Kenny is Ana Lily
Amirpour’s “The Bad Batch,” although
it’s a film that I certainly want to see again and could use some more time
away from festival madness to unpack and analyze. Something similar happened
with Amirpour’s “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” a film I didn’t immediately
take to at Sundance like some of my colleagues, but that grew in memory and on
repeat viewing. You should seek it out if you haven’t seen it. “The Bad Batch”
is an even more ambitious venture, and it shows off Amirpour’s incredible sense
of framing and overall confidence. There aren’t many directors willing to start
their sophomore film with fifteen dialogue-free minutes, but that’s the kind of
filmmaker this is—one willing to take risks.
“The Bad Batch” opens with an unnamed girl being pushed into
a desert of cannibals and villains. Think the landscape of “Mad Max: Fury Road”
about a generation before the action of that masterpiece. She’s one of “the bad
batch,” the people deemed unworthy of civilization and now forced into a
dangerous world that basically consists of two societies—one of muscled
cannibals led by Jason Momoa, and another of dancing fools in a town called
Comfort, led by Keanu Reeves. Despite having two limbs literally eaten by the
former group, our heroine learns that they may actually be a better
alternative.
“The Bad Batch” contains very little dialogue and almost no
traditional narrative. It is hard to even describe it accurately, which is
exactly what I think Amirpour wants. She wants to challenge expectations. Personally,
I wish the journey led somewhere more rewarding. Too much of this project feels
half-baked, like notes in a journal that needed to be formed into something
more concrete. There are also times when I sense the artifice of it all instead
of believing the world in which it takes place. However, I give Amirpour tons
of credit for committing to her vision, and I look forward to seeing where she
looks next.
A TIFF site description that compares a film to Roman Polanski’s “The Tenant” sets a certain
bar of expectation that Lorcan Finnegan’s “Without
Name” cannot get over. This first-time director has the ambition to get his
work into Vanguard, but the execution is repetitive, lacking and pretentious
when it should be scary. “Without Name” wants to echo mood horror pieces like
those of Polanski or David Lynch but there’s a reason that so few people make those
kind of films—they’re really hard to pull off.
Eric (Alan McKenna) is a land surveyor, hired by a
mysterious employer to survey a remote forest, where he basically starts to go
insane. By the time his lovely co-worker Olivia (Niamh Algar) gets there, Eric
is seeing figures in the woods and hearing strange sounds. Don’t worry, this is
no “Blair Witch”—it’s more an undefined threat marked by sound design and shots
of Eric looking concerned. The concept of getting lost in the forest and the idea of the
natural world holding threats greater than we could possibly understand offer plenty of opportunities for horror filmmaking. Finnegan can’t
quite find the hook, keeping us as lost as his hero.
