Knives Out superstars, Shakespeare drama Hamnet buoy TIFF | Canada Voices

The frantic, star-studded, chaotic, and largely discombobulating opening weekend of the Toronto International Film Festival’s 50th edition clarified a few key things for both the state of Canada’s glitziest cultural organization and the larger Hollywood ecosystem it seeks to represent.

First: Torontonians love lines. Everywhere you went along Festival Street, the closed-to-traffic stretch of King West, there were glorious, never-ending queues. Lines for free noodles, free chocolate, free sushi, and not-remotely-free DVDs from the Criterion Mobile Closet, which saw bystanders waiting their entire day for the chance to shop and snap some pics for their social feeds.

The realization that TIFF is as much about movies as it is about marketing activations isn’t a new one, but the corporate lovefest was hammered home with a particular fervour. (Not that I’m immune: If you spot me around this week, ask me about my Criterion picks!)

Also getting passions up: the question of just which TIFF title will take home the coveted People’s Choice Award, long considered an Oscars bellwether. This year, the honour is curiously split into two separate categories: the regular award, and an inaugural “International” one, presented to the most popular non-Canadian, non-U.S. film, as voted by audiences.

Yet the guessing game of which movie will take home the prize – and, hopefully, go on to reap Oscars victory – has become overrun with such (justified) cynicism that almost everyone in town currently assumes it’ll just go to the Brendan Fraser-starring drama Rental Family.

Not because the movie is particularly impressive – its story is middling, with no real character at its core and a too-slick aesthetic that treats Tokyo as a tourism ad – but because it checks all the TIFF boxes: It’s a feel-good movie starring a friendly face who has a history with the festival (thanks to the 2022 premiere of Fraser’s character drama The Whale). Most importantly, it’s one of TIFF’s few “world” premieres – meaning it came to Toronto first, before playing any other competing fall festival – that hasn’t totally either fizzled out or crashed and burned over the past 48 hours.

The typically buzzy opening Friday night was especially sleepy this time around, with the First World War Ralph Fiennes drama The Choral instantly fading from any excitable conversations (awards or otherwise), followed by the disappointment of the heist thriller Fuze (whose premiere was missing appearances from stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Theo James, the pair instead sending a video message that must’ve thrilled audience members who paid premium ticket prices). Meanwhile, although the white-knuckle Matthew McConaughey wildfire thriller The Lost Bus certainly got audiences’ heart rates up, the Apple TV+ title doesn’t feel like it will outlast its brief theatrical run.

Saturday night, on the other hand, was billed as an ostensible bloodbath of conflicting high-profile Hollywood screenings, enough excitement to fill two weekends. But that slate, too, felt like a wash. While the audience inside the Princess of Wales theatre was thrilled to see the likes of Daniel Craig, Glenn Close, Andrew Scott, Kerry Washington, and Josh O’Connor onstage for the new Knives Out whodunnit Wake Up Dead Man, the film’s too-clever-by-half script and dreadfully slow pace ensured that it didn’t measure up to the rapturous response its predecessor received in 2022.

That same fine-enough attitude hit the Channing Tatum dramedy Roofman as it played the cavernous Roy Thomson Hall across the street. Ditto the genuinely funny but especially mainstream Aziz Ansari comedy Good Fortune, which has no real need or business playing a film festival. Meanwhile, the less said about the allegedly provocative but in fact dreadfully dull Chris Evans/Anya Taylor-Joy satire Sacrifice, the better.

Again, audiences seemed happy enough to see the stars out in full force. Craig and O’Connor earned a lot of love in the room after Knives Out. Fraser got audiences weeping as he himself edged close to losing his composure during Rental Family’s post-screening Q&A. And Guillermo del Toro delivered a rousing speech noting how Canada offers “hope” in these current times during the TIFF Tribute Awards fundraising dinner on Sunday. But there was little approaching the universally ecstatic receptions that, say, Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans earned in 2022 or Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction in 2023, both titles going on to secure the People’s Choice awards.

The one exception was the Sunday afternoon premiere of Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet, a tear-jerking portrait of the marriage between William (Paul Mescal) and Agnes Shakespeare (Jessie Buckley) following the death of their 11-year-old son. Buckley, who digs so deep into the role that you can practically see the soil underneath her fingernails, received an enthusiastic standing ovation inside Roy Thomson Hall, and rightfully so. (Mescal was only on hand for the pre-show presentation, having rushed back to the U.K. to film his quadrilogy of Beatles movies, another weird scheduling black mark on the festival.)

The screening was such a hit that I’d plunk down $50 on Hamnet nabbing the People’s Choice Award. Yet because the film played the competing Telluride Film Festival the week before, it was only considered a “Canadian” and not a “world” premiere. Meaning that TIFF cannot claim to be the film’s starting line in the inevitable Oscars race. In other words: expect TIFF to give Hamnet a second- or third-place consolation honour, and reserve the top prize for Rental Family or, perhaps, the Sydney Sweeney boxing drama Christie, one of the festival’s few other world exclusives that actually raised TIFFgoers’ collective pulse.

But as uncomfortable as the lack of strong world premieres so far might be, TIFF organizers would likely much prefer to talk about those programming slips than some of the more uncomfortable moments that marked the weekend.

For two days in a row, pro-Palestinian protests sprang up on Festival Street, likely in response to TIFF’s embarrassing back-and-forth decision-making regarding Canadian director Barry Avrich’s Oct. 7, 2023, documentary The Road Between Us. Aside from a brief anti-RBC protest on opening night inside the Princess of Wales, none of the demonstrations penetrated the theatres themselves, perhaps due to some of the strictest security measures in festival history, which made the act of walking into the Lightbox or Roy Thomson feel like going through airport security.

To add to the tension, Toronto filmmaker Blake Williams prefaced the Sunday presentation of his short film Felt, part of the Wavelengths 3 program, by saying that TIFF chief executive Cameron Bailey should be fired for both programming Avrich’s film, and for overseeing the downsizing of the avant-garde Wavelengths program.

For much of TIFF’s opening weekend, then, it seemed that the best, most consistent experiences were found only when the rest of the festival went to sleep.

Following the seismic Midnight Madness opening-night screening of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, programmer Peter Kuplowsky delivered one audience megahit after the other, from the martial-arts madness of Hong Kong’s Furious to the deeply disturbing horror of Obsession, the latter of which sparked the 2025 festival’s first big bidding war, with Universal’s Focus label reportedly close to snapping up the film from the twentysomething American YouTuber Curry Barker for a cool US$15-million.

Someone get that kid some free time in the Criterion Closet.

TIFF runs through Sept. 14 (tiff.net).