Film
Offerings from Hikari and Chloé Zhao at the Toronto International Film Festival – traditionally a rehearsal for the Oscars – had audiences reaching for the tissues. By Andy Hazel.
Tears flow for Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet at TIFF
Unlike a lot of big-name film festivals, Toronto’s is proudly egalitarian. Anyone can buy a ticket, get a selfie on a red carpet and vote for the festival’s biggest accolade, the Audience Award, which is regarded as a bellwether for the Oscars. Evidently the festival’s newest prize, the People’s Choice Award for an international film, is voted by the public. However, as anyone familiar with democratic institutions knows, it’s not always what it seems.
Beneath this populist surface lie layers of privileged access, and tickets are resold at exorbitant prices – US$600 for a ticket to the world premiere of a documentary about the cast of Degrassi Junior High. Still, as Venice made headlines for its world premieres of beloved arthouse directors and the patronage of Hollywood A-listers, the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) gathered a line-up of 292 titles that reinforced its image as a festival for the people.
Now in its 50th year, TIFF opened with the documentary John Candy: I Like Me, a long and affectionate account of one of Canada’s favourite comedians. Overshadowing introductions from its director Colin Hanks and producer Ryan Reynolds, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was both funny and statesmanlike as he endorsed the festival, the film and its subject.
“In his films, there was always a scene where John’s character would pivot, having been pushed too far,” Carney said, before adding quietly, “Don’t push a Canadian too far.” Once the cheering died down, he continued. “John’s stories and the stories TIFF platforms, our current times make all the more precious. In Canada, our sovereignty, our identity has come under threat. And when Canadians heard those threats, they channelled their inner John Candy.”
The next morning when I joined several hundred of these Canadians in one of the festival’s many prattling queues, one TIFF regular told me that if I’m reviewing the movie festival, I should be sure to review “the festival, not the movies”.
“I’ve been coming here for 29 years and it’s the atmosphere that makes it worthwhile,” he said. “If you see a good film, that’s great, but it’s the way the city gets involved that’s exciting. Look at this,” he said, gesturing to the crowds milling outside the shiny façade of the Roy Thomson Hall. “This is what it’s all about.”
It took until the next day before I properly understood. Like Hobart’s Dark Mofo or Rio’s Carnival, TIFF takes over the city. For 10 days, downtown Toronto becomes a cinephile’s paradise. King Street West, home to Canada’s Walk of Fame, is shut to traffic and turned into Festival Street. Here, between outdoor screenings, brand activations, photo walls and cordoned-off red carpets, hundreds of movie fans queue for films, food trucks or experiences.
Rather than Cannes’ black-suited men who only say “non”, TIFF exists on the goodwill of thousands of helpers in yellow shirts who are, unsurprisingly, friendly and patient. Many of them are retirees who work with a calm demeanour and a sense of civic duty, so it’s hard not to feel at home. Still, it is the movies that have brought us all here.
Measured by length of queues and media impact, the festival’s opening week was dominated by its big-budget world premieres. The first of these was Paul Greengrass’s The Lost Bus, a gripping account of the 2018 Camp Fire, California’s most devastating wildfire, and the bus driver and teacher who saved 22 schoolchildren from the inferno. Starring Matthew McConaughey as driver Kevin McKay, and America Ferrera as school teacher Mary Ludwig, Greengrass’s film finds its power in hewing as closely as possible to realism, filling out the cast with firefighters who battled the blaze and blending actual fire with composites of real footage.
The devotion of festivalgoers was intense: some queued for seven hours to secure a seat to Rian Johnson’s latest Knives Out entry, Wake Up Dead Man. Few filmmakers can marshal such a star-studded ensemble. Here Johnson sends Daniel Craig’s detective Benoit Blanc into the gothic shadows of Chimney Rock, a small town in upstate New York where former boxer turned priest Reverend Jud Duplenticy – a magnetic Josh O’Connor – serves under Monsignor Jefferson Wicks, played with Wellesian thunder by Josh Brolin, at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude. When a seemingly impossible murder unsettles the parish, Blanc is called to unravel the true motives within its tight-knit congregation. Wake Up Dead Man is Johnson’s most spiritual and macabre mystery yet. It’s also his funniest.
Attracting a smaller crowd but similarly strong reviews was Rental Family, the new film from Japanese director Hikari, who helmed several episodes of the Netflix hit series Beef. In Tokyo, a failed American actor, inhabited with wide-eyed sad-sack energy by Brendan Fraser, takes work playing a human stand-in for social or family occasions. While jobs such as “professional mourner” and “pretend husband” are as real as the emotions they can invoke, Hikari’s film takes the premise one step further when a client asks Fraser’s character to pose as an 11-year-old girl’s long-absent father to ensure she can get into a school that would reject the child of a single mother. It’s a proudly sentimental film, with a tonal tightrope only someone like Robin Williams could have walked, but it generated a rustle of quiet weeping in the cinema and at time of writing is a frontrunner for that coveted Audience Award.
Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet summoned an orchestra of sobs, nose-clearing and unabashed crying. Adapted by Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell from O’Farrell’s bestselling novel about the wife of a well-known Elizabethan playwright and the death of their young son, the film showed at Venice last week before arriving in Toronto.
Zhao introduced Hamnet with what she called “a somatic exercise” that made the packed theatre even more vulnerable to her gorgeously rendered tale of Agnes and William Shakespeare’s courtship and how their young family coped with inconceivable loss. Rarely has Renaissance England been so attentively re-created and even more rarely has an actress turned in such a viscerally moving performance as Jessie Buckley. Max Richter’s emotively minimalist score makes it seem as if Zhao is devising a strategy to efficiently dehydrate her audience, or has invested heavily in Kleenex.
In contrast, the festival’s Midnight Madness section is TIFF at its rowdiest. One of the festival’s great traditions, it invites audiences to engage, Rocky Horror-style, with the film. Even the pre-film anti-piracy warning draws a full-throated “arrrgh!” from the crowd, one of many examples of collective irreverence that makes Bryan Fuller’s Dust Bunny – in which a young girl hires a hitman, played by Mads Mikkelsen, to kill the monster under her bed – even more fun than it sounds. Here festival and movie meet – and it feels unmistakably Canadian.
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