TIFF 2025: obsession, honey, white tail | Festivals and awards

It almost looks like Fantastic Fest North this year in Tiff, with a number of films that could have been scheduled in the Austin affair centered on horror which takes place just a week after the end of it. (In fact, a film of this dispatch makes a double service in the country of Putin and the country of barbecue.) Maybe there is something in the air while more and more filmmakers are struggling with the uncertain moments in which we live, or perhaps everyone continues to see that it is one of the rare genres still assured of removing people from their couch in the theater. Two of the films of this dispatch are worth it.

Curry Barker “Obsession” is constantly F-ED Up, and I mean that as a compliment. I see so many horror films that threaten to become bizarre and knotty, only to punch when the shit becomes real. Barker shoots NothingBecoming darker, more frightening and bloody to each scene that passes in this study of extreme dependence. Some of the performances are a bit awkward, but that makes it almost more charming, a reminder of the quality of it when a horror film sneaks from nowhere and strikes you in the face. I did not know the previous work of Barker. I intend to look for it now. With the right studio, this film should break it big.

If this is the case, he will make comparisons with the excellent “set” earlier this year, another film that uses a supernatural hook to examine the problems of relatable relationships like an unrelated love or a partner which is a little too committed in the pair. Bear (Michael Johnston) suffers from the first because he was in terminal phase by the magnificent Nikki (India Navarrette). The film opens with him practicing with his friends on how to tell him what he feels. Then he returns home to find that his cat died. In this emotional spiral, he stumbles in a boutique in Curio and finds an old toy called an Willow One Wish. Make a wish, take the toy and see what’s going on. No refund. He should have looked at more “crypt stories”.

Of course, Bear wants Nikki to fall in love with him, what she does afterwards, although he convinces herself is just a coincidence at the beginning. Maybe it would have happened anyway. When he wakes up to find her around looking at him, he begins to suspect that something much darker happens, and then things Really weird. There is a festive scene (in which Nikki’s unbreakable obsession dates back to the surface) which is one of the most captivating genre scenes of the year, a full -fledged disarticulated action game of navarrette which deserves a kind of trophy.

Barker undoubtedly leans a little too strong on genre tropes like the jealous girlfriend, but it allows us admirably to ask ourselves what we think of Bear as he does. Bear should know that it is not fair, but he advances with Nikki far beyond what looks like a responsible end point, essentially compromising his autonomy for his own needs. The genre comment in “Obsession” is intelligent without feeling exaggerated, but it is the really gore end and a remarkable end that will be talked about.

Gender fans are also likely to gab about the fascinating of Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli “Honey Bunch”, “ A ride on the right of the brutal “violation” of the filmmakers who clearly shows that they are directors with a large set of skills. “Honey Bunch” is a wonderfully strange film, a film with the language of Gothic horror of the 1970s but also a darkly vicious vein of humor, especially since it becomes more and more ridiculous in the final act. As “obsession”, this is also a comment on gender roles and bodily autonomy, a theme that continues to be one of the most widespread in the genre of horror of the 2020s while the government removes so much from our control over our own body.

It is to say how the ambitious “honey group” is that the traditional recap of the plot that would go here is difficult to start. When the film opens, we know that there was a car accident. Diana (Grace Glowicki) and her husband Homer (Ben Petrie, with the most stache of the 1970s of the year) are in an old Canadian campaign house which was straight out of “innocent” or “The Haunting of Hill House”, but it is not a ghost story. Diana is treated for her injuries with a daughter by the name of Josephina (India Brown), who is there with her father Joseph, played by the candidate for Emmy Jason Isaacs, doing a project with echoes of her “under-stake for well-being”. Call this “a remedy for masculinity”.

Since the first scenes of the film demonized by the sepia, we know that Diana is in difficulty. Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli use the language of films as “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Wicker Man” as a weapon, knowing that we will not be enriched by hospital personalities played by great performers like Kate Richie and Julian Richings of their introduction. I laughed aloud when, after having taken a note on the clear influence of the film “Rebecca”, I heard Diana literally quoting the text. The filmmakers left us on the joke. They know that we will see the references. This is part of the experience.

When Diana begins to have terrifying visions in the house, the film’s onion begins to peel, but what is most surprising about “Honey Bunch” is how much he allows himself to become remarkably clumsy. The tone is always a little left, exaggerated line readings of Petrie to the abundance of zooms that draw attention to themselves.

It is the consistency of the tone that impresses me. It is not a film that flirts with oddity; He joined the relationship, integrating a social and sexual commentary in a story that plays like a nightmare or a dream of death after a fight with your beloved leads to a car accident. It may not be the punch that the “violation” was, but that is almost what makes it more remarkable. Sims-Frewer & Mancinelli has not repeated itself, and it is an even greater proof that they have a lot of impressive work in front of them.

Finally, there is the slow burn of Nanouk Leopold “Whitetail”, ” A film so flooded with real estate trauma that it flows under monotony. Natasha O’Keefe is effective in carrying the weight of the sorrow that defines this film. However, it is one of those works that seems too directed, manufactured and manipulative instead of organic.

O’Keefe plays Jen, whom we meet at a younger age, played by Abby Fitz, as she is with her boyfriend Oscar (Sean Treacy) in the woods doing the kind of thing that young people do while they are supposed to hunt deer. After consuming their relationship, they spot a white tail, and Jen hesitates to draw the beautiful creature, only succumbing to Oscar’s pressure to do it and shoot too quickly, without really seeing what is in its speeds. Jen made a mistake that opened the world to anyone, creating a chasm between the person she was before and the person after. It is a truly traumatic prologue for the film, which defines the temperature of the atmosphere of the following misery.

Jen has lived his life, taking care of his father and even becoming an ecologist, but everything is shaken when Oscar (Aaron McCusker now) returns to the community. At the same time, he raises pain and horror in Jen’s heart. A poacher tracks down the region, angry with Jen while the local authorities seem to be entirely interested in doing anything on this subject.

Jen’s trauma is unimaginable, but she is also a deeply unmanageable character, aggressively pushing everyone around her while she slips into her own pain. Of course, the “white tail” only exists if it presents Jen with an arc at redemption, but the brutally incessant sustainability of its history becomes numb. Through all this, O’Keefe makes choices interesting enough to hang certain viewers, but it simply was not caught.