So I have mixed feelings about nearly everything I saw today at TIFF. It interesting to get a day like this halfway through the festival but each had something that I found fascinating, even when bad.
Hell of a Summer
Your teen’s first slasher movie, Hell of a Summer is a great entry for younger audiences to get into horror. Finn Wolfhard and Billy Bryce acquit themselves very nicely as first time directors here and the first half of this is incredibly fun from a retro slasher perspective. However, the main twist of the movie really renders the whole thing kind of inert and robs that movie of some of the fun vibes it had before then.
The Promised Land
Do you like beautifully acted and shot movies that make you wade through nothing but harshness? If so, this is the movie for you. Mads Mickelson is so excellent in this film and it looks incredible but it is kind of off putting in a way historical period pieces can sometimes be, from the sexism, racism to just the harshness of the climate.
All the Light We Cannot See
This cannot be the premise of the story that won the Pulitzer Prize. I simply refuse to believe it. It feels almost like a Mad-Lib of a World War 2 project. All the Light We Cannot See is about Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a blind French girl who takes refuge in her uncle’s house in Saint-Malo after Paris is invaded by Nazi Germany and broadcasts to anyone tuned to their frequency and Werner Pfennig, a genius German soldier who was accepted into a military school because of his skills in radio technology, who listens to her broadcasts. There’s also a whole subplot about a jewel that may or may not have magical powers and it’s just so…saccharine and silly. Louis Hoffman is very good in the two episodes I have seen but I was pretty unmoved by what I saw.