Speaking with TheWrap as part of our TIFF 2024 interview and photo studio, Washington shared that playing Boy Willie on both stage and screen was “a liberating experience.” It helped, too, that he was led behind the camera by his brother Malcolm Washington, who makes his feature film directorial debut with “The Piano Lesson.”

“[It was] a liberating experience, given my reverence and my respect for the our filmmaker, for our director, our leader — what he envisioned, how he wanted to open up this story cinematically,” John David told TheWrap.

Speaking alongside co-stars Danielle Deadwyler, Corey Hawkins, Ray Fisher and Michael Potts (the latter two of whom also starred in the Broadway revival), John David celebrated his brother’s vision of tying “the Wilsonians and the OGs who’ve done it before us” with younger audiences with a “a new lens.”

“That was exciting to be able to explore those new foundations and new frontier, in a way, through his eyes, through his lens,” John David said. “So basically, from stage to the film, it was more about really being present in the moment and what the reality of the situation is, not necessarily worrying about who you have to reach in back of the audience, how you have to your marks, necessarily. But it was more about whatever felt authentic and true at the time and space at that particular moment of the scene.”

Joining the cast in TheWrap’s studio was Malcolm Washington and his co-writer Virgil Williams. Speaking to the freedom he felt as a filmmaker in adapting Wilson for the screen, Malcolm echoed the desire to link new audiences to the classic material.

“When we approached the material, we knew that we wanted to take an approach that I hadn’t seen with some of the other takes on August Wilson’s work,” he told TheWrap. “And I think it’s always important to speak from your own personal truth and frame of story in the way that you see it.

“So when we started, I knew that we wanted to do something that would communicate to audiences that might not necessarily feel like they had access to the work itself, because you’ll hear the word reverence so much in speaking about this work, and we revere Mr. Wilson, and we revere this text. But we wanted to make it accessible because sometimes there’s a distance between what a young person — the distance between where they are and where the material is, and we wanted to bridge that gap and introduce this work to people that might see themselves in it, but would never give it a chance themselves to approach it.”

Watch TheWrap’s full Wrap Studio interview with “The Piano Lesson” cast and creatives in the video above.

The post John David Washington Says Taking ‘The Piano Lesson’ From Broadway to Netflix Was ‘A Liberating Experience’ | Wrap Studio appeared first on TheWrap.

The film’s co-director Kristina Grozeva encountered the soldiers as a kid living in Bulgaria, and co-director Petar Valchanov said this inspired them to use the true story as a jumping off point for their own story.

“It’s incredible when you have a chance to work on something that has been inspired by something that really happened, because you realize that real-life stories have even more layers than fictional stories,” producer and star Maria Bakalova told TheWrap’s Steve Pond at TheWrap’s 2024 TIFF Studio sponsored by Moët & Chandon and Boss Design.

Valchanov said psychics were front and center in the media at this time in Bulgaria. “This is part of the beginning of this transition period between the end of communism and [beginning of] democracy, which somehow still continues,” he said.

Bakalova, who first burst onto the scene in “Borat 2,” said the film was an exercise in tonal balance between the comedy and the drama.

“It’s not a typical comedy, it’s not a typical drama. It’s something that’s blurred between a satire and a tragedy, which is for me the perfect version of a movie, because it provokes conversations,” she said.

Bakalova’s co-star Julian Kostov added that the film ultimately serves as a cautionary tale to “be mindful of who you follow.”

“Just because you like to believe something doesn’t make it actually real or the truth,” he said. “There’s a lot of ways that we’re being manipulated in so many ways, through our phones, through the consumption of social media and our news. So it’s a cautionary tale that even people who think themselves very intelligent can be swayed into following false prophets and craziness, so be a vigilant citizen.”

“Triumph” is Bulgaria’s entry for the Best International Feature Oscar.

The post Maria Bakalova Says Stranger Than Fiction Film ‘Triumph’ Is Somewhere Between a Satire and a Tragedy: ‘It Provokes Conversations’ | Wrap Studio appeared first on TheWrap.

In TheWrap’s review of the film, Chase Hutchinson called it “less of a horror film than it is an existential grappling with the end — while also being a jubilant celebration of the moments that make life worth living along the way. It’s Flanagan’s vibrant equivalent of Charlie Kaufman’s ‘Synecdoche, New York’ that finds hope and meaning in his own way just as it is one of the best modern Stephen King adaptations one could hope for.”

Unlike festivals like Cannes, Berlin, Sundance and Venice, Toronto does not give out a jury award to the festival’s top film. Instead, viewers at all public screenings are invited to vote for their favorite films on the TIFF website, with the resulting audience awards announced at the end of the festival.  

The last 12 People’s Choice Award winners, and 15 of the last 16, have gone on to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, and five of them of them – “Slumdog Millionaire,” “The King’s Speech,” “12 Years a Slave,” “Green Book” and “Nomadland” – have won the Oscar. Prior to 2008, only seven of the first 30 TIFF winners were nominated for Oscars, with “Chariots of Fire” and “American Beauty” winning both awards.

“The Life of Chuck,” which also stars Mark Hamill, Chiwitel Ejiofor and Karen Gillian, did not go into TIFF as one of the favorites for the award. It has not been high on the awards radar this year, making it one of the most unexpected People’s Choice winners in recent memory. Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Perez” and Sean Baker’s “Anora,” which finished second and third in People’s Choice voting, are seen as likelier Best Picture nominees.

People’s Choice Awards were also given out in the Midnight Madness and Documentary sections. Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” won the Midnight Madness award, while the four-episode nonfiction series “The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal” won the doc prize.

Several other awards were chosen by TIFF juries. The Platform Award, which carries with it a $20,000 CAD prize, went to “They Will Be Dust,” which was chosen by a jury consisting of Atom Egoyan, Hur Jin-ho and Jane Schoenbrun. That jury also voted a special award to Taiwanese actress Sylvia Chang for “Daughter’s Daughter.”

Cash awards of $10,000 CAD also went to two Canadian films. The Best Canadian Feature Film Award was given to “Shepherds,” while the Best Canadian Discovery Award, which is open to all first and second features by Canadian filmmakers, went to “Universal Language.”

The international film critics association, FIPRESCI, and the Network for the Promotion of Asian Pacific Cinema, NETPAC, also gave out awards to “Mother Mother” and “The Last of the Sea Women,” respectively.

Here is the complete list of awards announced at the brunch:

People’s Choice Award: “The Life of Chuck,” Mike Flanagan
First Runner-up: “Emilia Perez,” Jacques Audiard
Second Runner-up: “Anora,” Sean Baker

People’s Choice Documentary Award: “The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal,” Mike Downie
First Runner-up: “Will & Harper,” Josh Greenbaum
Second Runner-up: “Your Tomorrow,” Ali Weinstein

Midnight Madness People’s Choice Award: “The Substance,” Coralie Fargeat
First Runner-up: “Dead Talent Society,” John Hsu
Second Runner-up: “Friendship,” Andrew De Young

Platform Jury Prize: “They Will Be Dust,” Carlos Marques-Marcet
Special Award: Sylvia Chang, “Daughter’s Daughter”

Best Canadian Feature Film: “Shepherds,” Sophie Deraspe
Best Canadian Discovery Award: “Universal Language,” Matthew Rankin
Best Canadian Discovery Honorable Mention: “You Are Not Alone,” Marie-Helene Viens, Philippe Lupien

Amplify Voices Award for Best BIPOC Canadian Feature Film:
Amplify Voices Award for BIPOC Canadian First Feature Film:
Amplify Voices Producers Award for Canadian BIPOC Trailblazer:

Short Cuts Award for Best International Film: “Deck 5B,” Malin Ingrid Johansson
Honorable Mention: “Quota,” Job Roggeveen, Joris Oprins and Marieke Blaauw
Short Cuts Award for Best Canadian Film: “Are You Scared to Be Yourself Because You Think That You Might Fail?,” Bec Pecaut

NETPAC Award: “The Last of the Sea Women,” Sue Kim
FIPRESCI Prize: “Mother Mother,” K’naan Warsame

The post ‘The Life of Chuck’ Wins Toronto Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award appeared first on TheWrap.

There is plenty of room for heartfelt charm, chaotic shenanigans and more biting observations about its culture clash to be explored, though rarely does “The Deb” capitalize on this. It’s a meandering experience defined by the broadest of narrative strokes, cardboard cutout characters and musical numbers that start fun before growing more oddly obligatory in nature. 

With all that in mind, while “The Deb” is unlikely ever to be considered one of the great movie musicals, it still has a smattering of playful gags that make it hard to fully dismiss. When the film, written by Hannah Reilly with additional writing by Wilson (the latter credit being part of an ongoing dispute), is an unabashed comedy, you almost are willing to dance along with its flaws. When it tries to find dramatic beats, it loses its rhythm, leaving you wishing that it could capture the spark of when Wilson was in the imperfect but still superior “Pitch Perfect.”

The film, which premiered on Saturday at the Toronto International Film Festival, follows Maeve (Charlotte MacInnes) who is being punished for a stunt she pulled at her posh private school and sent to the remote town of Duburn. It’s there that she reconnects with the more reserved Taylah (Natalie Abbott), her cousin who is just hoping to get invited by someone to the town’s upcoming debutante ball.

Surrounding them are a whole lot of quirky characters, including one wacky local played by Wilson herself, who are all trying to get by in the middle of a drought with little support from the government. Soon, they’ll have to band together to use the debutante ball to shine a light on their struggles and secure funding to help keep the town afloat. 

Much of this setup is promisingly silly, only for the film to abandon what could be a solid comedy in favor of the more superficially sweet and saccharine. That approach could be to the taste of those looking for light fluff, but it is ultimately undercut whenever the film haphazardly attempts to offer up more serious observations.

Yes, living in a small town is different from being in a city. And yes, the internet has reduced important conversations about inequality in the world to be about making yourself look good. But rarely does “The Deb” cut below the surface to address these ideas. It builds many of its jokes off of these observations but remains rather one-note, which makes the humor quite repetitive.

In addition, the musical numbers increasingly lose their energy and start to grow more static, leaving little else to get swept up in. Even as the cast can capture some genuine emotional moments, the writing remains far too stiff, relying on the half-sketched idea of a podcast becoming the driving point of conflict.

As for who is responsible for said writing, that’s part of a larger controversy surrounding the film. “The Deb” is currently at the center of a nasty legal dispute between Wilson and its producers. It’s a mess that’s more interesting than the film itself. 

This context is unavoidably part of the conversation surrounding the film, though the situation should not influence one’s evaluation of Wilson’s debut and whether it works on its own merits. After all, plenty of films have had wildly messy behind-the-scenes disputes that spill out into the public eye and still manage to work. “The Deb” just won’t be remembered as one of them. 

At best, the film is only occasionally fine. There are brief flashes of what could be a fun musical, but it never strings together enough of them to truly soar. By the time you get to the more contrived conclusion, you’ll find yourself straining to remember memorable musical numbers or which characters really stood out and which faded into the background.

It’s not a complete disaster by any means, but it’s still a diversionary, ultimately disposable musical that lacks the necessary sense of delight necessary to hit the high notes. 

The post ‘The Deb’ Review: Rebel Wilson’s Messy Musical Directorial Debut Is No ‘Pitch Perfect’ appeared first on TheWrap.

Accompanied by Lia Ouyang Rusli’s stellar score, the title card gently appears then quickly disappears. It’s as if we’re getting a fleeting snapshot of youthful joy we already feel is coming to an end. Their world is getting bigger just as it does smaller as they must face down adulthood while grappling with the growing repression all around them. 

Though Seo notably doesn’t freeze a moment in time like this again until the very end, the way his quietly moving film shifts into being about surveillance, scrutiny, sadness and the attempt to find liberation in it all instills everything with a similar sense of more weighty thematic substance. Though few of his characters appreciate it now, these moments in time are precious ones that become more upended by the changing forces of the world. As we observe this along with them, the film becomes a poetic portrait of youth as well as a truthful encapsulation of the way the pains of life disrupt the slivers of joy. 

The film, which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, takes place in a near-future Tokyo where the potential of getting hit by devastating earthquakes has everyone rattled. Alongside this, government surveillance is growing more present in the lives of youth, with the most targeted being those who are considered outsiders. Even if they have lived there for years, much as is the case anywhere in the world where xenophobia gains a foothold, anyone who doesn’t fit in a narrow box of what it means to be Japanese is scrutinized. This extends to cameras being installed in their school.

Caught in the middle of this are best friends Yuta (Hayao Kurihara) and Kou (Yukito Hidaki) who, along with their charming posse, Tomu (Arazi), Ming (Shina Peng) and Ata-chan (Yuta Hayashi), must navigate this ever-changing world just as they must make sense of their futures. Where many films about young people can be woefully out of touch in how they capture their characters engaging with each other, “Happyend” is astute and insightful, never overplaying its hand. The film just lets us spend time with the characters as they play around with a prank proving to be a central component of the story and ponder what comes next when school is over. It’s a coming-of-age story with a more relaxed pacing that’s then injected with an existential urgency. 

There are some, like their classmate Fumi (Kilala Inori), who begin to fight back against the new surveillance, but “Happyend” is never some sort of conventional thriller. Instead, it’s often profoundly funny, like in an early scene where Ata-chan flips off the camera or when they begin resourcefully tricking the system by finding its blindspots. Its speculative fiction grounded in the authentic lives of these youth as, once the cameras become more normal, we start to see the way they reshape the dynamic of the school.

Without ever spelling things out, Sora captures the way this surveillance is no neutral way of discouraging bad acts or catching troublemakers. Instead, it’s something that starts to weigh on all of the teens in a world already heavy enough with looming goodbyes and constant earth-shaking.

This is all often shot from a literal physical distance by cinematographer Bill Kirstein, who has worked with Seo on his prior films, with key revelations coming in conversations where characters are far from the camera. We hear them talk about things with their backs to us and each other, as if they can’t face their friends when talking about painful subjects. Critically, this doesn’t distance the audience from the characters as they’re actually taken more into their corner of the world when shown roaming the beautifully shot streets trying to piece together what their future will be. Be it in the abandoned hiding spots they retreat to or the cold hallways of their school now perpetually under the eye of a camera, there remains an earned warmth that sneaks up on you.

Seo excavates universal truths that transcend all generational and cultural divides. The many geographical, social and emotional pains these young people are grappling with are ones everyone faces down. As they find ways to fight this, coming to realize all the many ways they may not be so easily able to, there is something both genuinely heartfelt yet quietly haunting about it. We see so much in each of these scrappy young kids that is being smothered yet still bursting free, with all of the ensemble giving some of the most naturalistic youth performances you’ll see in a film all year.

There is room for joy in Seo’s vision, with the score doing wonders for this, right alongside the melancholy. When we then get one more frozen snapshot moment in time near the finale, you only wish that you could bottle up all of what was captured. Life’s many pains come from this being impossible, but that only makes films like this that much more essential. We can’t ever pause time in our own lives, but cinema like “Happyend” can do this in small ways, never skipping over the suffocating parts of existence just as it does the sublime.

Seo’s feature debut is then similarly one worth cherishing and what we can only hope is the first snapshot of many.

The post ‘Happyend’ Review: Neo Sora’s Fiction Feature Debut Is a Poetic Portrait of Youth in Crisis appeared first on TheWrap.

As is required with any overly-familiar template, it’s the specifics that stand out. “Superboys of Malegaon,” which premiered on Friday at the Toronto International Film Festival, is based on the true adventures of amateur director Nasir Shaikh, the star of Faiza Ahmad Khan’s 2012 documentary “Supermen of Malegaon.” Khan’s doc captured some of the fairy-tale qualities of Shaikh’s story, and now director Reema Kagti expands them further with her uplifting fictionalized biopic.

The film begins in 1997, when Nasir (Adarsh Gourav) is an unfocused young man living in the small Indian city of Malegaon. He works in his family’s dilapidated video store, which he’s also turned into a makeshift movie theater. None of his neighbors have money to spare, but they still turn out for his hand-spliced mashups, which blend Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton with Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. Things fall apart when the corrupt local police shut him down for piracy — but in the grand tradition of inspirational dramedies, this only motivates Nasir to push his passions further.

The solution, he decides, is to make his own movies. He and his friends are loom workers, fruit sellers and “professionally unemployed,” so they figure they have nothing to lose. Their first effort, a satire of the 1975 Hindi classic “Sholay,” is overseen by Nasir and written by his buddy Farogh (Vineet Kumar Singh). And to everyone’s surprise but their own, it’s a hit. But — perhaps you can guess where this is going — success is not the cure-all they’d imagined.

The crew fights over vision, money and next steps before breaking apart in anger. Both Nasir and Farogh have big egos and big dreams, and confidently pursue solo careers as a director and screenwriter respectively. But they each learn the hard way that Mumbai’s movie industry isn’t as warm as the one they built in Malegaon. By 2010 the video store has turned into a restaurant, the men haven’t talked in years, and the whole experience feels like a dream. Until, that is, the soft-spoken Shafique (Shashank Arora) gives them one more reason to get the gang back together.

There’s a delightful symmetry to the fact that in the end, the real Nasir and his friends got their own Bollywood-style picture about their Bollywood-style spoofs. Kagti pulls us into their world so convincingly — with a big assist from Sachin Jigar’s enchanting score — that we can’t help rooting for them even as we know exactly where they’ll wind up.

Not everything works seamlessly: Swapnil Sonawane’s subdued cinematography doesn’t match the soulfulness of the characters’ ambitions. The halfhearted romances fall somewhat flat, with the female characters given particularly short shrift throughout the film’s 127 minutes. And sure, much of the actual movie is as broadly earnest as Nasir’s homespun films within the film.

But even the ragged edges add some extra charm. The actors are so committed, and Varun Grover’s script so heartfelt, you’d have to be as cold as one of Farogh’s villains to resist this group’s superpowered sincerity.

The post ‘Superboys of Malegaon’ Review: Bollywood Dreams Make and Break Filmmaking Friends appeared first on TheWrap.

However, there is always a big tent for horror and just because each shares a similar premise doesn’t mean that they can’t find their own joy in their respective executions. This is especially true as there’s something uniquely silly about “Shell” near the end, but it takes quite a while to get there. Even with a more gleeful performance by Kate Hudson, “Shell” is merely a fine film that’s far too tame to completely pay off.

Ultimately getting tangled up in itself and pulling its punches at key points, it’s a work that’s actually closer to “Nightbitch,” which screened a few days prior to it, in how it wants to offer serious observations while flirting with body horror. Alas, despite taking a far bigger plunge into absurdity in the final act, “Shell” falls short of that lower bar too, never finding the necessary layers in terms of craft or theme to make their peeling back into something fully entertaining. 

The film, which premiered Thursday at the Toronto International Film Festival, takes place in the not-too-distant future and follows TV star Samantha (Elisabeth Moss) as she tries to continue acting in an industry mostly interested in casting her aside. She’s keeping at it, but even when she gets asked to come out for a role where she was told the director would be there, she loses it to a younger influencer who, in addition to being wrong for the part, doesn’t seem to care about acting except as a way to expand her brand. Frustrated with the whole thing, Samantha is told she should try out a treatment from the immediately evil-seeming company Shell that will give her back some of her youth. Though initially skeptical, she does it — and suddenly begins finding her life completely turning around. She’s getting roles and also makes a new friend in Shell CEO Zoe Shannon (Hudson), who becomes an integral part of her life. How great is that?

Well, as it turns out, not so great. In addition to the treatment having troubling side effects, it seems as though there may be more at play at the shadowy company. Just as she begins experiencing major skin problems in the form of painful lesions, another woman she knows who went through the treatment disappears. The film is then an occasionally odd little caper of sorts where we go along with Samantha as she must take part in car chases in slow self-driving taxis, butt heads with Zoe who wants nothing more than to silence her, and find out the truth of Shell.

Despite an opening scene that gestures towards embracing slasher shenanigans, this film ends up being mostly straight-faced for a good amount of its runtime. Every time Hudson comes into a scene, “Shell” gets a welcome jolt of energy, but Moss is stuck in neutral as her character remains perpetually both one step behind the audience and the counterbalance to the chaos. What provides its biggest kick in the pants is the ending when all this is thrown out the window. 

The exact manner of this throwing is best left to the film as it’s a pretty sizable shift. It basically becomes a creature feature and gets a fair bit of mileage out of this, though the film had still been struggling to maintain full steam before getting here. That it gets appropriately squishy and violent is a nice reward to cap off the whole thing, though this alone can’t redeem the entire affair. For all the broadly amusing bits, this ending chunk is where it feels like the film is, finally, actually breaking out of its shell to get into some more madcap, meatier fun. One can only wish that the whole ride had been able to bottle up this energy and willingness to have things truly go off the rails. Many films need to start slow and then build to the madness, though “Shell” takes its sweet time getting there. It is perhaps worth the wait once, but the meandering route is unlikely to be worthwhile on a second viewing. 

If you consider “Shell” the B-side to “The Substance,” you’ll probably come away feeling a whole lot less crabby about its many shortcomings and find yourself willing to wait for the much bigger swings that it takes. At the same time, you’ll likely wish it was a great deal snappier far sooner. After all, time is of the essence for a film like this, and none of us are getting any younger.

The post ‘Shell’ Review: Elisabeth Moss’ So-So Body Horror Wishes It Were ‘The Substance’ appeared first on TheWrap.

“The important thing to know is that we actually sowed the field that you saw that we harvested,” Tsangari told TheWrap’s Joe McGovern at TheWrap’s 2024 TIFF Studio sponsored by Moët & Chandon and Boss Design. The film was shot in Scotland. “It was an entire process of actually sowing the seeds.”

“Which hadn’t been touched in like 400 years, or something,” actor Caleb Landry Jones, who plays Walter Thirsk in the film, said.

“Harvest,” adapted from author Jim Crace’s 2013 book of the same title, follows the story of an uncharted village that disappears, where a townsman-turned-farmer named Walter and manor lord Charles Kent (Harry Melling) brace for an invasion from the outside world.

Tsangari, who was also joined by her other film’s star, Harry Melling, opened up about the film’s production process, saying it was a privilege for the crew to get the ability to rehearse prior to filming as independent creatives.

“We rehearsed and had lots of fun for a couple of weeks before we started shooting. It was a great experience because it’s very rare for producers for a film like ours to be given the luxury of rehearsing time,” Tsangari said. “So this was actually very important to me, to always rewrite the script after I cast and then while rehearsing. We completely emerged ourselves in this world that we built and we stayed there for a couple of months.”

Tsangari added that “Harvest” cast and crew were completely in sync with the help of rehearsals, which assisted with her decision to shoot scenes “without stopping.”

“It was a decision from the beginning to shoot on film, and because I always shoot the entire scene without stopping, so we’re not really doing coverage,” Tsangari said. “It’s just shooting everything from the beginning to end. There was a total immersion from all of us, kind of like choreography between camera [and] actors.

The post ‘Harvest’ Production Crew Sowed the Very Field Seen in the Movie Prior to Filming: ‘It Was an Entire Process’ | Wrap Studio appeared first on TheWrap.

This isn’t for lack of trying on the part of lead Sarah Paulson, who throws herself into the role and comes out covered in dust for her efforts as the rubble of the film nearly swallows her whole. Neither a successful psychological thriller nor a compelling work of horror, it’s all built around the steady unraveling of a matriarch who finds herself facing a variety of threats while isolated with her two daughters. It’s a promising hook, similar to “The Wind” from 2018, though the film never gets a handle on what to do with it. All the threats bounce between being terrifyingly real or potentially more slippery, robbing the experience of oxygen as you are stuck waiting for it to find something approximating an emotional heart.

There isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with having unreliable characters and us having to find a grounding point as an audience, though “Hold Your Breath” leaves us adrift without one. The characters are underwritten, the pacing oddly impatient, and the moments of what could be genuine fear undercut by an overcranked score that never settles down for more than a second. 

The film, which premiered Thursday at the Toronto International Festival, throws us into dust bowl Oklahoma in the 1930s where Margaret (Paulson) is trying to look after her daughters, Rose (Amiah Miller) and Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins), while waiting for her husband to return from a job. She’s already lost a child and is doing everything she can to make sure that doesn’t happen again. The small community is all struggling as the storms are relentless, the rains nonexistent and the isolation suffocating.

Even attempting to leave can be perilous as the winds can knock over wagons and leave you lost in the storm. This is something we feel via a quite effective opening sequence where Margaret is frantically looking for her children in one such storm with Paulson yelling out in chilling fashion. Though we see this is a dream, this is a great way to start. Sadly, the rest of the film soon gets swept away as the story shifts into being increasingly scattershot the longer it carries on. Dialogue lands flat and reveals don’t carry much of any weight as the whole thing just drags along to what is a lackluster descent into darkness. 

Namely, there is a story that’s read about the sinister Grey Man (not the dreadful 2022 action film) and how he can sneak into the home to torment you through even the smallest of cracks. This is something that Margaret dismisses, though it has everyone more than a little rattled as they begin to contemplate that this being could be everywhere and anywhere, just waiting for you to breathe him in.

Without tipping anything off, “Hold Your Breath” is rather explicit about this being a metaphor, leaving little room for ambiguity or terror to come from the unknown. Instead, it mostly plays as a more confined drama than it does a true work of horror. Everything just feels too narrow in both story and emotion for this to then work. The painfully small setting isn’t the problem, as an actual horror film that also showed at the festival, “Else,” proved that the most creative of visions can come from the most confined of circumstances. The issue is that “Hold Your Breath” is too content to go through the motions that it telegraphs over and over. 

This predictability leaves Paulson having to do quite a bit of heavy lifting to keep us engaged and, the remarkable thing is, she almost pulls it off. The way we see fear start to creep into Margaret’s expressions even as she tries to hold herself together is quite unsettling, but the film will always cut away before we have even a moment to let it sink in.

We can see where this is going, but rarely do we feel anything as it guides us there. Left with little emotional heft, the search for something more engaging on the margins proves futile. There is a small through line about how, when people begin to struggle with the weight of the world, society at large will just take their children and leave them to suffer that could have been intriguing. What would it have been like had the film actually excavated how insidious this can be? Regrettably, this never gets much care or thought, merely serving as a hollow plot device to further cut Margaret off from the world for a series of nighttime scares. Even as some of these scenes can occasionally look striking on the surface in terms of how they are shot, they are all empty underneath. 

There is a good movie wandering through the storm of “Hold Your Breath,” but it gets lost long before we’re able to actually get a good look at it. Even as Paulson is putting her all into the film and can firmly grab hold of you at some moments as her strong-willed matriarch comes undone, much like the dust that is floating around the confined setting, it all slips through her fingers.

The post ‘Hold Your Breath’ Review: Sarah Paulson Unravels in a Horror Movie That Slips Away appeared first on TheWrap.

“Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” centers on Alexandra Fuller, a little girl growing up in Zimbabwe as it’s making the transition from Rhodesia, seeing the white people who have controlled the country for so long losing their grip. It’s based on Fuller’s own memoir of the same title.

The thing is, that memoir spans a total of 21 years. So, as Davidtz explained at TheWrap’s 2024 TIFF Studio sponsored by Moët & Chandon and Boss Design, she decided to hone in on one specific period of time to help her focus.

“I think that the hardest nut to crack was finding — because a 21-year memoir that spans someone’s whole life, which episode am I telling? And to me, the child was the most intriguing aspect of it,” she explained. “And I felt like I finally cracked the code of telling the story when I switched it to her point of view, because then she could say anything.”

“She could say what she really thought. She could say the outrageous things that other people maybe wouldn’t say,” Davidtz continued. “And I thought also, the more intriguing thing is, what happens to a child when they’re put in the middle of that kind of a climate? A climate of conflict, of war, of a troubled home life. I think you get honesty out of children in a way that maybe adults don’t have. And so I thought this is the way into the story.”

Davidtz also noted that using a child’s POV helped make the story a little more palatable and logical for viewers.

“If we are the third-person objective eye watching this happen, I feel like it would be so alienating to see horrible, racist people behaving badly,” she said. “That somehow a child who’s in the middle of it giving her version of things, skewed as they are, you understand where she’s heard the things that she retells. You know, she’s heard from adults around her and by the end, one hopes, she’s come to her own conclusions about what is real.”

You can watch TheWrap’s full interview with Embeth Davidtz in the video above.

The post ‘Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight’ Director Explains Why Using a Child’s POV ‘Cracked the Code’ for the Story | Wrap Studio appeared first on TheWrap.