Autumn not only marks one of my favorite times of the year—meaning spooky—but also Moira Rose's favorite season, "Awards." This time of year brings high-profile fall film festivals, including the Venice Film Festival, the Telluride Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival, which often mark big films' initial campaign push with a splashy premiere and early buzz.
The Toronto International Film Festival is the fourth major season marker, which just kicked off on the heels of Venice and Telluride. TIFF runs Sept. 10-20 and lands the awards conversation in North America.
This year's slate features several auteurs, some debut directors, and a few actors moving behind the camera. The People's Choice Award has predicted many Best Picture Oscar nominees over the years, so watch that, too.
Here are five premieres we've got our eye on and what we think we can learn from them.
Carrie
Maybe this is a bit of a cheat, but dang it, Halloween is closer every day, and we're always eager to see more work from Mike Flanagan. Carrie is an eight-episode Prime Video limited series that will close the Primetime slate.
The story of the unfortunate high-schooler with telekinetic powers has been adapted from Stephen King's story a few times now, but never by a contemporary master of horror like Flanagan, who often gives us deeply developed characters in grounded situations.
Summer H. Howell plays Carrie, with frequent Flanagan collaborator Samantha Sloyan as her mother, Matthew Lillard as the school principal, and other Flanagan regulars like Kate Siegel filling out the cast.
Speaking at San Diego Comic-Con this summer, Flanagan talked about his approach to traditionally disliked characters.
"Chris Hargensen or Margaret White, the second you open that book or turn on any of the previous adaptations, they are monsters. Our show doesn't have any monsters. None! They are people who have their own pain and their own patterns," he said (via TV Insider).
And that's Flanagan's strength on display. All his characters are human, even if they're terrible. Don't forget to develop your villains, too.
Evil Genius
Courteney Cox is best known for Friends and Scream, but she's been directing on the side for years, including the 2014 indie Just Before I Go.
Evil Genius, which world premieres at TIFF, is her second feature as a director. It's a dark comedy true-crime thriller based on the 2003 story of Brian Wells, a pizza delivery driver killed by an explosive collar after being forced to rob a bank by Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong (Patricia Arquette) and Bill Rothstein (David Harbour). Courtenay Miles wrote the script.
Danielle Macdonald, who plays a supporting role, told Collider that Cox found the humor buried in the horror.
"If you know the story, if you've seen the documentary, or just know the story from the news, it's crazy what happened, and it's dark, but Courteney brings a lot of comedic energy to it, truly," she said. "Because it's so absurd, it's almost funny. We were on set, and we're like, 'Why is this funny?' Because it's so crazy. So, it's nice when you have something dark and awful happen, but you can find levity in it, because it's sometimes the only way that you can sit through it and process it and experience it."
That tonal balance is difficult, and we're excited to see how it's pulled off.
Possible Love
Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong co-wrote and directed Possible Love, his first film in eight years. It gets its North American premiere at TIFF.
Two married couples on opposite sides of a class divide become entangled when documentary filmmaker (Cho Yeo-jeong) turns her camera on a laid-off welder (Sul Kyung-gu), and his wife (Jeon Do-yeon). South Korea has selected the film as its submission for Best International Feature at the Academy Awards, so it's definitely one to keep an eye on.
Speaking to Variety at Venice, Lee said, "When we think about a love story, usually the most typical love story we think about is love that cannot come true."
Lee has made seven features in 30 years, which is an effective reminder that sometimes the work is gradual, and it's okay to wait until you have something important to say before you put it to paper.
Closing Night
Actor Cody Fern makes his feature directing debut with Closing Night, world premiering as a TIFF Special Presentation. Fern co-wrote the script with actor Devon Bostick.
Sarah Paulson stars as an actor whose life comes apart on the opening night of her Broadway show because she's invited her difficult family to attend. Naomi Watts is her estranged sister, and Dianne Wiest plays the family matriarch. Fern describes the film as "emotionally autobiographical, but narratively fictional" (via The Hollywood Reporter). If that's not a reminder to writers to come from a place of emotional truth, we don't know what is.
Fern told IndieWire that he wrote the lead for Paulson. "Sandra was written for her," he said. "When I presented her with the script, it was very much, 'I have something I would like you to look at and like you to do. I think we can go places together.'"
Bunker
Florian Zeller's third feature as a director follows The Father (which won him a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar) and The Son. Bunker, a psychological drama, is at TIFF for its North American premiere.
Real-life partners Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem play Sofia and Miguel, a couple whose marriage fractures when Miguel accepts a job building a survivalist bunker for a paranoid tech billionaire (Paul Dano).
Bardem pointed out how timely the film's metaphor is in Venice.
"The more I was thinking about it, the more I realized that all of us, to some degree, we are all tempted to live in a bunker—not a real bunker, but an invisible bunker," he said (per Deadline). "The lifestyle that we are embracing more and more, without questioning it, the lifestyle that is basically the one these billionaires are promoting, is a world of illusion where you believe that somehow you don't really need the others anymore."
Bunker is also Zeller's first screenplay written directly for the screen, rather than adapted from his own stage work.