TIFF24 Dispatch: “The Shrouds,” “On Swift Horses,” & More
This review was originally posted on Film Obsessive.
With the last days of the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival behind us, be sure to check out Film Obsessive’s coverage of the People’s Choice Award winner The Life of Chuck, Midnight Madness People’s Choice Award winner The Substance, People’s Choice Award runner-up Emilia Pérez, and People’s Choice Documentary Award runners-up Will & Harper and Your Tomorrow.
To celebrate the end of the festival, News Editor Tina Kakadelis provides her final thoughts of one more group of films. In her last dispatch, check out her thoughts on Young Werther, On Swift Horses, The Shrouds, The Girl with the Needle, Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara, and Jane Austen Wrecked My Life.
Young Werther
Courtesy of TIFF
While this festival has had its fair share of book-to-movie adaptations, Young Werther may take the prize for oldest and most obscure source material. In 1774, Johann Wolfgang Goethe wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther, an epistolary novel loosely based on his own life. The modern-day Young Werther sheds its Germanic roots and sets itself in present-day Toronto.
Werther (Douglas Booth) finds himself in Toronto to retrieve a horse. Not an actual horse but a statue of his horse that his mother wants back from a family member. Werther is accompanied by his best friend, Paul (Jaouhar Ben Ayed), who is afraid of being in the big city and leaves Werther alone to sightsee. In his travels, Werther comes across Charlotte (Alison Pill) and instantaneously falls head over heels in love. The two talk until the early hours of the morning, and it’s only as they’re parting that Werther’s crush hits a snag: Charlotte is engaged to a successful lawyer (Patrick J. Adams). Ever the optimist, Werther refuses to let this stop him or his affections.
Young Werther is unavoidably quirky in a way that should be off-putting, but instead, the film is utterly charming. Booth and Pill are lovely dual leads whose chemistry is sparkling and vibrant. Booth looks like he was plucked out of history and dropped into the 21st century, and it’s a crime that Pill is not in every single movie ever made. Writer/director José Avelino Gilles Corbett Lourenço takes the heart of The Sorrows of Young Werther and modernizes them in a lovely manner that never loses the essence of the source material’s philosophical waxings. Those same ideas are now debated over ice cream and in neon-drenched bars. Young Werther takes the genre of the romantic comedy and turns it on its head, with delightful results.
On Swift Horses
Courtesy of TIFF
Jacob Elordi starred in two films that played at the Toronto International Film Festival. He was a younger version of Richard Gere in Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, and now he plays a young, queer man searching for some type of meaning in On Swift Horses. The film is another adaptation, this time coming from Shannon Pufahl’s 2019 novel of the same name. It follows the intertwined lives of Julius (Elordi), his brother Lee (Will Poulter), and Lee’s fiancée, Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones), with the backdrop of Eisenhower’s America. Lee wants to move west with Muriel and Julius, pooling their money together to buy the white-picket-fence-suburban-dream. Muriel and Julius aren’t as sold on this idea, as they both have unresolved desires they’d like to explore.
There’s inherent romanticism in this era of the United States when the American Dream was still being bought and sold and it’s interesting to see the differing opinions of Julius, Muriel, and Lee regarding what it means to fulfill that dream. On Swift Horses feels reminiscent of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, which will also soon be adapted into a film. The two share the idea of queer characters not wanting some grand, beautiful life, but simply to be able to exist quietly and openly with the people they love. In On Swift Horses, cinematographer Luc Montpellier‘s camera is rigid for much of the movie, a proper feeling that matches those of the characters. Yet when Muriel is alone with Sandra (Sasha Calle) and Julius with Henry (Diego Calva), the camera is finally free to move around. To dance, to be shaky, to simply exist without any preconceived notions. Once again mirroring its characters.
All pieces of the film are intriguing, but there’s an unshakable feeling that On Swift Horses needed to more time to explore itself. The stories of Muriel and Julius are immensely complicated because of their desires and the time period they exist in. Lee, too, has an interesting experience as someone so desperate to hold his family close to him, but who is forced to reckon with the fact that his idea of life doesn’t appeal to those he wants to share it with. It’s no fault of the film that On Swift Horses is too large to contain within the standard runtime of a movie. The young cast make their characters feel so rich and real that the thought of spending more time with them is enticing.
The Shrouds
Courtesy of TIFF
Beloved Canadian father of body horror, David Cronenberg, has returned with The Shrouds. The film feels like a spiritual follow-up to his 2022 Crimes of the Future, a movie that was over twenty years in the making. The Shrouds centers on Karsh (Vincent Cassel)), CEO of Grave Tech, a company that wants to revolutionize the burial process. Karsh and his company have created a burial shroud that’s covered in thousands of cameras so the still-living can essentially be in the coffin with the dead. The idea came to Karsh after the death of his wife (Diane Kruger) and, during the funeral, his only thought was jumping into the grave with her. Karsh’s Grave Tech cemetery is vandalized one night, which launches him down a destructive, paranoid path that sees him taking his dead wife’s sister, Trish (also played by Kruger), along with him.
As personal as The Shrouds so clearly is to Cronenberg, it feels devoid of emotion. The film was written after the loss of his wife and describes the specific kind of devastation it is to lose a lover. Like the rest of Cronenberg’s filmography, The Shrouds has an obsession with the body. The entire basis of Karsh’s technology company is to watch the deceased person’s body for as long as possible and to mourn the physical touch. All of these are worthwhile themes and ideas to explore, but there’s simply too much going on without the film ever feeling purposeful in its execution. Like grief, it’s confusing, sprawling, and difficult to understand. Originally, The Shrouds was envisioned as a miniseries, and that might have given each of the ideas time to fully breathe. As it stands, there are single episodes of Black Mirror that more deftly show the ways technology can influence grief.
The Shrouds’ most interesting thematic notion is who a body belongs to when it is no longer living. Karsh believes he has ownership of his wife’s body because he knew it in a way that few others in the world did. He feels this grants him a deeper connection, and that his grief is more profound. The whole conspiracy theory angle takes away from what makes for a compelling narrative arc. Whose grief is most profound? Does it matter? When all is said and done, the person is still six feet under and the body is a distinctly living thing, so does it not lose most, if not all, of its meaning when it can no longer perform its bodily tasks? These are questions Cronenberg examined in Crimes of the Future, and The Shrouds unfortunately doesn’t say more than its predecessor.
The Girl with the Needle
Courtesy of TIFF
Simply put, The Girl with the Needle is far from an enjoyable filmgoing experience. That statement has nothing to do with the filmmaking itself, but with the troubling nightmare the film centers on. Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) is trying to eke out a living in post-World War I Copenhagen by working at a factory. However, what little sense of stability she has disappears when she’s fired from her job. Her path crosses that of Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), who runs an underground adoption service to women in need. Those who have recently given birth can pay Dagmar a large chunk of money for her to take the child and place it with a wealthy family that can afford to care for it. If that sounds too good to be true, you’d be correct. The operation is revealed to be far more sinister, as Dagmar is based on a real woman who murdered somewhere between nine and twenty-five children in Denmark from 1913-1920.
Somehow, The Girl with the Needle’s blend of naturalism and expressionism works perfectly, despite the two styles being distinctly at odds with one another. Perhaps it’s because German expressionism relies on exaggerations and distortions of reality, and the circumstances of that time period are so nightmarish. The Girl with the Needle is deeply uncomfortable because even its haunting, heightened visual imagery can’t hide the fact that these events actually happened. The predicaments of pregnant women who don’t have the money to care for a child haven’t changed much in the one hundred years since the events of the film. In that regard, The Girl with the Needle is a mirror that shows where we are now and where we could be in the next few years.
Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara
Courtesy of TIFF
For queer women of a certain age, Tegan and Sara Quin hold a special place in pop culture. They were outwardly open about their sexualities in the late ’90s and early 2000s, which was extremely rare. The sibling duo was also ahead of the curve in terms of connecting with their fans. They had email newsletters and message boards that they actively used to cultivate a sense of community for a group of people who maybe weren’t able to find that same community in real life. However, Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara shows that their openness had a dark side as well.
Erin Lee Carr helms the documentary and, on the surface, it may seem like an odd pairing. Carr is a two-time-Emmy-nominated filmmaker who is the director behind such documentaries as Mommy Dead and Dearest, At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal, and I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth V. Michelle Carter. All of these films are immensely nuanced looks at complex criminal cases that have been in the public eye. In Fanatical, there is no criminal case and the subject of the film is widely unknown, but as soon as Carr begins pulling back the layers, it’s clear what drew her to making this film.
For over a decade, someone has been pretending to be Tegan on the internet. “Fegan,” as the film calls the catfisher, somehow has access to Tegan’s personal information beyond what the duo has talked about in interviews. Fegan knew about the twins’ mom’s cancer diagnosis, had unreleased song demos, and more. It was enough to convince Tegan and Sara superfans and made them feel as though they were talking to Tegan herself. As interesting as this mystery is, Fanatical also shifts into a critique of the larger topics of parasocial relationships between fans and celebrities that hurt both sides of the equation. At a time when people are more accessible than ever, what does a celebrity owe to those who enjoy their work? Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara is essential viewing for everyone who consumes content in our contemporary culture.
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life
Courtesy of TIFF
The works of Jane Austen have been inspiring those who read them for hundreds of years. Agathe (Camille Rutherford), a self-described Austen lover, becomes an Austen heroine of her own in Jane Austen Wrecked My Life. Agathe is a perpetually single bookseller at the famous Shakespeare & Co. in Paris. She lives with her sister and nephew and commiserates with her colleague Felix (Pablo Pauly) about their lack of love lives. Behind Agathe’s back, Felix submits Agathe’s writing to a Jane Austen writing residency and she is accepted. There, she meets Oliver (Charlie Anson) and the two share a spark. Now, Agathe is torn between these two men and suffering from the worst case of writer’s block she’s ever seen.
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life captures the magic of one of Austen’s works without being a direct adaptation. The silly hijinks and the miscommunication that are the backbone of her novels are present in the film. Jane Austen Wrecked My Life has the whimsical, heartfelt nature of the rom-coms of yesterday with smart, fast-paced dialogue that crackles between the two leads. Is there anything more natural for an Austen-inspired movie than to have the plucky, determined woman and the standoffish but kindhearted man fall in love in the beautiful English countryside?
The film is primarily in French, but because the writing residency takes place in England, many of the characters speak English as well. It’s interesting to pay attention to when the characters, specifically Oliver and Agathe, switch languages. It’s a means of creating depth and connection between them as they switch to French to speak openly about their hopes and fears for their future. It’s a thoughtful layer to an otherwise breezy romantic comedy, but don’t let the lightness of Jane Austen Wrecked My Life distract from its thoughts on modern dating and the often grueling nature of artistic pursuits.
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