TIFF 2025: Dust Bunny, The Furious, Normal | Festivals and awards

Tiff Midnight Madness has long been one of the most popular programs of all the film festivals, a launch ramp for new talents as well as a pedestal for accomplished gender directors. Where could you see both the best image called “The Substance” and “F * CK My Son!” Of this year? The escape from the MM section of 2025 was undeniably “obsession” by Curry Barker, who sold to concentrate shortly after his first for a superb $ 15 million. But there were at least three other films in the program that had people talking outside the Royal Alexandra, where the noisy public celebrates the cinema on the left which can only be presented after midnight.

My favorite of these three is the first feature of the legend of television Bryan Fuller, which brings the job that fans of shows like “Pushing Daisies” and “Hannibal” to its playful torsion “Dust Bunny”, “ A film inspired by Roald Dahl, Jim Henson and Jeunet & Caro to an equal measure. As a questionable CGI, it is one of those films that trusts children to manage honestly frightening themes in the way he twists the classic tale of “The Monster Under the Bed” to something that should sound true for all generations. It really reminds me of a better time for family entertainment, a time when people like Joe Dante and Jim Henson were allowed to legitimately frighten children. These are the films that create future filmmakers, which are inspired by works like “Gremlins” or “Labyrinth” to make their own fantastic adventures. Hopefully this will reach them when he released in theaters in December.

In a gloriously without dialogue, we meet Aurora (Sophie Sloan), a girl with a monster under her bed. Her nourishing parents do not believe her. Nourishing parents were not before them either, those eaten by said Dust Bunny of Hell. After the new ones have engulfed like carrots, Aurora goes to a neighbor of her building – a wonderfully designed setting that exists somewhere between fantasy and reality, J&C works as “delicatensen” and “City of Lost Children”. The neighbor happens to be a hitman, and he happens to be played by Fuller’s Lecter, the singular Mads Mikkelsen. At first, he tried to speak to Aurora about his reality, convinced that the one who killed his adoptive parents was really after him or his manager (played by Sigourney Weaver). The monster could simply be the way a little girl interprets real human violence. But what if not?

Fuller has fun with “Dust Bunny”, never surviving his themes, choosing to make pure entertainment, first and foremost. And that’s certainly that. Mikkelsen is his wonderfully impassive self, balanced by entertaining performances by David Dastmalchian and Sheila Atim, who find themselves in the inexplicable situation of Aurora. Part of the CGI monster is questionable – there are some photos of obvious puppets, and we want everything to be animatronic instead – but it is a film that really creates momentum when you get its fun and timeless wavelength. It is a fairy tale for children who know that fairies are also monsters.

One of the most buzzing films in Tiff 2025 of all the programs was Kenji Tanigaki “The furious” ” A really crazy showcase of an incredible waterfall and a combat choreography that made comparisons with “The Raid” and “Night Comes for US”. The dialogue is excruciating, the plot is wacky, and no one will care because Tanigaki has designed, choreographed and executed some of the most impressive combat scenes in years. The use of the expertise of veterans of some of your favorite Asian action films of all time, “The Furious” should be an action for the studio intelligent to publish it. Someone should get started so fast.

“The Furious” is about two men who essentially eliminate a massive traffic cycle in which they are attracted for personal reasons. Wang Wei’s silent daughter (Miao Xie) is kidnapped by the cartel at the same time as the wife of Navin’s journalist (Joe Taslim) disappears while studying them. They become a dynamic duo of carnage in this “Taken meets the raid”, striking, cutting the kicks and making their way through waves of bad guys at a remarkably bloody culminating point. Familiar genre faces like Yayan Ruhian (“John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabelle”) and Brian the (a stuntman in everything, from “All everywhere at the same time” to “Bullet Train”) throw all their bodies in sequences made by the action designer behind films like “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled in” and “Raging Fire”.

The conspiracy of “The Furious” is simply silly, and the dialogue seems so badly delivered that I presumed that it was nicknamed, but none of this has that this film is in action mode. And it is not an exaggeration to say that around 3/4 of the execution of the film consists of fighting. Not only is the action well directed and choreographed, which results in how great it is to see long and uninterrupted storage of ACE cascade – but sound design also deserves some flowers. Each snapshot, crackling and pop here looks like it connects, often at the same time.

Finally, there is the relatively lower, especially in relation to the ingenuity of the other two films in this dispatch, “Normal,” The last of the genre surprisingly growing “Bob Odenkirk Kicks ASS”. The star of “Person” is the best thing about this riff “Fargo meets Hot Fuzz”, but it looks like a reflection afterwards for the prolific Ben Wheatley, a gender director who works so often that he has another film in the first in another Film Festival this month. I joked saying that he had done “normal” in a week, but it could be true. It is essentially a 45 -minute configuration followed by a 45 -minute action scene. Some of the latter are certainly pleasant and Odenkirk actually differentiates this “normal guy turned into the killing machine” from his other “normal guy filmed in the killing machine”, but it is a film which is ultimately a tick too forgetful given the talent involved and even the relatively intelligent premise.

Working from a script by Derek Kolstad (which also wrote the films “Person”), “Normal” features Odenkirk like Ulysses, the interim sheriff of a small snowy town. The other sheriff died of a heart attack. Or is it? Ulysses begins to realize that there is something unpleasant about the normal of the viscous mayor (Henry Winkler) to the nervous woman (Lena Headey) whom he meets in a local watering hole.

When a pair of drifters tries to steal the bank, it puts a motion a series of events that lead to mass carnage. It turns out that there is something in the safe that no one in town wants to fly. And then the Yakuza get involved.

There are a lot of booms and fringes in “normal”, but everything is terribly underestimated and a large part is also poorly published. We know that something explosive happens, people die, rinse and repeat themselves. Through all this, Odenkirk slips into his increasingly playful way, an approach that transmits that he knows that everything is ridiculous, but he just wants you to have fun. You will be for stretching “normal”, but not long enough to make it a city that deserves to be visited.