Demi Moore arrives for the Closing Ceremony at the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in southern France, on May 25.SAMEER AL-DOUMY/Getty Images
Ghosts, monsters, time-travellers, Paul Rudd and Demi Moore are coming to the Toronto International Film Festival this September, although regrettably not in the same movie.
On Thursday, TIFF announced the lineup for its perennially popular program highlighting unconventional genre cinema.
Leading the charge this year are Coralie Fargeat’s Cannes-certified shocker The Substance, featuring Moore as an actress desperate to revitalize her youth at any cost, and Joseph Kahn’s new creature feature Ick, starring Mena Suvari and Brandon Routh. Both Fargeat and Kahn are no strangers to Midnight Madness, having previously knocked Toronto audiences out with their respective films Revenge and Bodied back in 2017, the year that marked the first Midnight edition overseen by current programmer Peter Kuplowsky.
Now eight years into his role, Kuplowsky has built a Midnight Madness program varied in sensibilities, language and star power.
In addition to Kahn and Fargeat’s new English-language films – which both seem to be firmly in the body-horror camp – this year’s slate includes a Taiwanese paranormal comedy (John Hsu’s Dead Talents Society); a time-travel adventure from China (Yang Li’s Escape from the 21st Century); a dark American indie character comedy (Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship, starring Rudd, Kate Mara and Tim Robinson); a Japanese thriller (Kenichi Ugana’s The Gesuidouz); a gritty American mystery (Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy’s Dead Mail); an extreme French stomach-churner (Thibault Emin’s Else); and an Indonesian action-adventure (The Shadow Strays from Timo Tjahjanto, director of the bloody Netflix hits The Night Comes for Us and The Big 4).
And while The Substance already sparked intense reactions during its world premiere at Cannes this past spring – with many singling out Moore for her audacious performance alongside Margaret Qualley and Dennis Quaid – the secret weapon of this year’s Midnight Madness just might be the new horror movie It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This.
Directed by Rachel Kempf and Nick Toti, the film has been winding its way through genre festivals for the past several months, garnering comparisons to The Blair Witch Project for its inventive blurring of the lines between fact and fiction. What’s more: The film is near guaranteed to be a hot TIFF ticket, given that the filmmakers have promised audiences their work will never be made available digitally – the only opportunity to see it will be either festivals or one-off screenings.
TIFF, which runs Sept. 5-15, will announce more films from its Centrepiece, Docs, Wavelength, Classics, Short Cuts and Primetime lineups next month.