Knives Out in Toronto

Death is in the air at the Toronto International Film Festival — or at least it was at the world premiere of Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery on Saturday night. The latest installment of the Netflix franchise screened at the sold-out Princess of Wales Theater, the exact same packed venue where both 2019’s Knives Out and 2022’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery made their wildly successful debuts.

“We’re going back to the roots of the genre,” said a giddy Rian Johnson in his opening remarks, name-checking Edgar Allan Poe’s darker taste for the macabre before invoking G.K. Chesterton and his series of Father Brown mysteries as inspiration for this star-studded holy whodunit. And while the plot machinations whir just as efficiently as its predecessors, Wake Up Dead Man is an old-fashioned affair, much less flashy than Glass Onion and, with its literal sermonizing, much more soulful too.

Josh O’Connor is Reverend Jud Duplenticy, a former teen boxer turned priest from Albany assigned to a parish in a remote New York town where the burly monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) delivers fire-and-brimstone sermons that radicalize his small but devoted flock—until he shows up dead on Good Friday in an altar-adjacent closet with a dagger in his back. Glenn Close, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, and Thomas Hayden Church round out the suspects, while Mila Kunis pops up as the local police chief trying to unknot the murder.

Of course, the movie can’t get deadly serious about its sneaky sleuthing without Daniel Craig reprising his role as renowned detective Benoit Blanc, whose devotion to logic makes him allergic to religion, and whose self-aware sense of narrative quickly deduces this movie’s scenario as a locked-room mystery. Craig brings the requisite drawl-dripping delivery to his vocalized ruminations, but it’s Josh O’Connor’s guilt-ridden priest who gives Wake Up Dead Man an unexpected gravitas that the film’s predecessors lacked.

Expect just as many hairpin plot twists as there are quippy zingers, as well as nods to Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, J.D. Carr’s The Hollow Man, and a crypt that only Lazarus could open. There’s even a grotesque scene in a suspect’s basement where Johnson delivers bone-chilling imagery that skirts the edge of pure horror.

Basements are a leitmotif this year at TIFF, playing key roles in a number of movies here—most obviously in the Man in My Basement, Nadia Latif’s eerie but unfocused adaptation of Walter Mosley’s novel about a strange rich white man named Anniston Bennet (Willem Dafoe) who pays a small fortune to rent a cellar in the historically black neighborhood of Sag Harbor, New York. His hesitant landlord is Charles Blakey (Corey Hawkins), who is flat broke and fighting foreclosure on the family home that stretches back eight generations.

Anniston is cryptic about his intentions, which eventually shock Charles and border on the masochistic, while Charles grapples with his family’s deep roots in the house and the fact that his desperate straits are forcing him to forsake his own heritage. White guilt, black exploitation, and the burden of memory suffuse Latif’s dark drama, an impressively mounted film that uses lowbrow horror tropes to explore and confront serious questions of identity and privilege.

Basements also come in handy in Bad Apples, Jonathan Etzler’s darkly funny satire about a well-meaning but meek grade-school teacher named Maria (Saoirse Ronan) who can’t control uppity student Danny (Eddie Waller). He’s a rageaholic 10-year-old brat whose outbursts make it impossible to teach the other kids, but Maria gets all the blame for not neutralizing the wild child.

So, one rain-drenched evening, she tackles him in a fit of pique and ends up making matters even worse. But her solution — let’s just call it containment — means she can finally teach in peace, allowing her and her class to thrive. And when an unexpected visitor compromises Maria’s secret, the situation gets even more outrageous. A wickedly silly satire, Bad Apples is a keen indictment not only of unruly hooligans but of submissive teachers, absentee parents, and compromised institutions that whitewash hard choices with easy fixes steeped in immorality.

But enough about supine characters. A pair of righteous films at TIFF also featured two of this year’s strongest female performances. Sydney Sweeney comes out swinging in David Michôd’s uneven Christy, an overlong boxing biopic about professional boxer Christy Martin and her horrific domestic abuse at the hands of her trainer husband Jim (Ben Foster). The monstrous husband — soft-spoken but furiously violent — has a too-familiar dramatic arc, but Sweeney is completely committed to her gruelingly physical pugilistic role, bringing the title character to bristling life with all the conflicted anger towards a world that wants to control her every move.

Amanda Seyfried brought another strong-willed woman to TIFF with The Testament of Ann Lee, Mona Fastvold’s sprawling true story about the founder of the Shakers in 1700s England and their eventual immigration to America. Leaning into the songs and dance that defined the religious sect’s prayer meetings, Fastvold dazzlingly evokes 18^thcentury Manchester and New York with her sumptuous production. But it’s Seyfried whose riveting performance as the vision-kissed vessel for Christ — twirling, lunging, hyperventilating, and raising her voice to the rafters — that makes the movie an absolutely hypnotic experience. At its best, TIFF can offer such moments of transcendence.