TIFF 2026 Days 4-6: THE DEBUT, WILD HORSE NINE, & MORE

by Joel Edmiston

If you read my first round-up, you may remember that beyond this year's TIFF, I have been busy this week. This has not stopped.

More things have come up and I have been running around all over the city doing this and that, all while keeping the same pace of movie watching as I did in past years, give or take a few movies. What I have fallen behind on is keeping up the same pace in writing these round-ups. As I write this intro, it is day 10, but as you may notice from this article’s title, I am doing some time-traveling to a few days ago, and so are you because I expect this will be published a couple days after I send it in. I am a bit insecure about this, but really I shouldn’t be. If you are mad about the lateness here, I am sorry. Also, I don’t think you are mad. Are you? All this pressure has been bestowed upon me by no one other than myself and I should probably stop talking about it. Running around like this on such little sleep or social interaction causes some questionable thoughts and if I wrote all of them down for publication, I predict you’d believe me to be an unwell man. A bit of time and sleep will make me feel fine about the lateness at which I am getting these articles to you readers. It’s not as if any of these movies are coming out in the next few days anyway, so it is fine. Time doesn’t matter (at all at any time, time is meaningless, everything is movies, movies is life). OK, enough of this. Time for you to read about the movies I saw.

The Debut (dir. Jesse Eisenberg)

Here’s a movie I think people will be talking about a lot in the next few months. It’s got big stars (Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti) giving big performances, directed by a famous guy (Jesse Eisenberg) taking a big swing, and is, at times, deeply surreal and committed to the bit, big time. I don’t want to spend this whole capsule predicting how people will react to this movie, which I fear I do too much in writing these. It’s hard these days. Online discourse around movies is so loud to me, and when I’m seeing the movies early, it’s tough for me not to hear imaginary voices of the Discourse to Come. I really wish I could never think about it. Sorry, that’s a tangent, but it’s OK, because this movie is no stranger to tangents.

It stars Julianne Moore as Mona, a housewife who auditions for a local musical called Nosy Neighbors. She gets the role and turns her life upside down getting into character. It reminded me of an episode (not a particular one, just any old ep) of one of my favourite shows, Stella, where a character will go down an intense rabbit hole, fully devoting themselves to whatever new job or subculture they’ve stumbled into. At times, the humour and situations are just as ridiculous and weird as Stella and other David Wain projects, but The Debut stays grounded, keeping the characters centre stage, never fully tipping into the full-on parody for which David Wain is known. Eisenberg gets very specific about the world of community theatre, and has a lot of love for it while acknowledging the silliness of it, too. As Mona gets more into character, she starts to push back against the triteness in the script of Nosy Neighbors. “My character wouldn’t do that.” There were huge laughs at this from the premiere audience. It’s simultaneously a poke at method acting and the sugarcoatedness of musical theatre. The songs in the show within the movie pull off a great balancing act of being appropriately mawkish, while having vocal showcases and catchy choruses that would believably make for showstoppers in a long-running and successful show. They provide some pretty breathtaking moments in the movie, and some huge laughs. I gasped aloud when I saw the credit “Music and Lyrics by Jesse Eisenberg.” I had no idea he had that in him. There’s clearly been a lot of work put in here, which is what makes the surreality of it so interesting to me. I’ll admit I raised my eyebrow at some of the tangents it went on, but it never lost me. The commitment all across the board, from the script, to the direction, to the performances helps to earn its lovely ending. And you know what? I don’t care what the discourse will be about this or what my most cynical friends will say… The more I think about it, the more I write about it, the more I like The Debut.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney (dir. Matt Rankin)

Here’s another very Canadian movie for me to wrestle over how much context I should give for this American-based site. I’ll tell you this… Brian Mulroney was Prime Minister of Canada from 1984 to 1993. He has a complicated legacy. When I learned about Canadian politics in school, my eyes would glaze over. I thought maybe, as an adult, I would learn to be more interested in all that minutiae, but I still find it quite boring. Luckily, this documentary knows how dull its subjects are and combats that with bright lights, psychedelia, and a sharp, puckish tone. Matt Rankin has clearly sifted through all the footage he could find about this man and has pieced together a cohesive story of Brian Mulroney’s rise to becoming the Leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, with no narration, no talking heads, just old TV footage, B-roll, and some very amusing original animation. Ultimately Brian Mulroney is still Brian Mulroney and you can only make the man so interesting and all the cinematic glitter in the world couldn’t make me fully care about everything being told to me in this movie, but it’s worth watching for the experimentation being done here. There are things in this I’ve never seen done in a movie before. It’s pulling from influences all over: from '60s and '70s Canadian children’s TV to Adam Curtis to YouTube edits by people like Vic Berger and Bad Lip Reading. I find Canadian Conservatives to be a boring, silly, often evil group of men, who perpetually beg to have the piss taken out of them, and I found this to be a fresh, innovative way of doing that.

The Spiral (dir. Paolo Strippoli)

I have been struggling with the ultra grim this week. I love horror, but I like my horror to have some playfulness, some room for me to breathe or chuckle or do anything other than pout. Here is an Italian horror movie that upset me. I will acknowledge it is handsomely-made and I really think the readers (and writers!) at this site will enjoy it more than I did, but I became quite exhausted by all the suffering. Jasmine Trinca plays the matriarch of a wealthy family who, after a traumatic incident, is visited by a mysterious woman who offers her a choice that will have disturbing repercussions. It’s Twilight Zoney, Monkey’s Paw-ish, the type of thing you’d see as a segment in a horror anthology, but stretched out and with a lot more crying, bullying, and caustic family dynamics. There’s a great scene that plays out in the aftermath of Italy winning the World Cup in 2006, but even that made me uncomfortable -- in a fun way, though. Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching too many dramas this week that I just want my horror movies to be horror movies, or maybe I’m just kinda sick of these super serious horror movies. There’s a place for them in many people's hearts. I heard from a friend that Willem Dafoe was in their screening of this and even was sitting next to his girlfriend. Apparently it seemed like he enjoyed it and I’m glad he did. I picture him grinning like the Green Goblin every time something traumatic happens to this family, and his laugh echoing through the theatre, “I love Italians!” he yells, then he retreats back to his coffin and his entourage, dressed in long, black gowns, wheel him out of the Scotiabank Cineplex.

Anchors Aweigh (dir. Matt Barats)

I was not familiar with Matt Barats, but after watching this, I was not surprised to find out his origin in the New York comedy scene, coming up with people like Conor O’Malley and Sarah Sherman, risk-takers as it were, people who swing for the fences, get weird, and often, get laughs. Barats is very funny, and I knew this within minutes of Anchors Aweigh, his bizarre, breezy, feature-length video essay about breaking up, growing up, and shipping out. He’s compiled on-the-street interviews, dramatized scenes, and footage he shot in his late teens and early twenties and presents us with an encompassing look at what I assume is a fictionalized version of himself, a dumb guy with a broken heart who doesn’t really know what his purpose is any more. It’s just barely a movie in length and concept. Had its trajectory been different, I imagine stumbling onto this watching it on YouTube wouldn’t be too different an experience from seeing it in a theatre, but I had a lot of fun seeing this with an audience of people who agreed with me about how funny Barats is.

Wild Horse Nine (dir. Martin McDonagh)

Seeing In Bruges in high school changed my life. I haven’t revisited it in a while. I am afraid, not that I won’t like it, but that I will be confronted with the young man who made that movie my entire personality. Similarly, I would not like to walk the halls of my old high school. Rewatching In Bruges would probably be the more appropriate choice if I ever get up enough courage to greet my teenage self, as it would not have anyone asking me “why are you, an adult man, walking the halls of a high school with tears in your eyes?” and the cops would not be called and I would not have to leave my apartment.

Watching Martin McDonagh’s new film, Wild Horse Nine, is as close as I’ve come to rewatching In Bruges in many years. It is not a repeat, but rather a spiritual sequel. They are similarly plotted, but Wild Horse Nine is far more wistful, thoughtful, and articulate. In Bruges is a young person’s movie and Wild Horse Nine is meeting those young people wherever they might be (for example, 33-year olds living in Toronto). John Malkovich, much like he did in Burn After Reading, plays a CIA agent who is writing a memoir. He and his protégé and friend, played by Sam Rockwell, take a break from their top secret mission in Chile (in 1973, shortly before the overthrowing of Salvador Allende) and go to Easter Island to “see the big heads.” There’s a lot of chatting, yelling, and shooting guns. Steve Buscemi is hilarious as their boss. He and Malkovich have a toxic and combative relationship that gets funnier the more you find out about them. It’s an extremely clever script that keeps things close to the chest for a while. Each new reveal packs either an emotional punch, a big laugh or both. I was so caught off guard by how good this was. I honestly feel as though I am ready to watch In Bruges again. Maybe I will tonight when I’m done writing all of this, or maybe I will go to bed.

Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo (dir. Takashi Miike)

I watched Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant the day before the festival started (feels like that was three months ago). My big takeaway from that was that Bad Lieutenant is one of the most accurate titles of all time. That man is bad. Quite bad. One of the baddest protagonists I’ve ever seen in a movie. He is a reprehensible lieutenant. I am wishing I had time to rewatch Werner Herzog’s 2009 entry, but it’s now the second movie I will watch post fest, after In Bruges. I have little memory of it, other than the primal yells of Cage and the sweat shining on his forehead. I’ve seen a handful of Takashi Miike movies and, from what I’ve seen, he seemed like the perfect guy to give us another transgressive entry in the weird, wonderful franchise that is the Bad Lieutenant movies. I fear I will never recover emotionally from some of the things I saw in Audition and Ichi the Killer.

The titular bad lieutenant in Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo is not as bad as I thought he would be. To be clear, he is bad, but I expected him to be badder. He gambles, snorts cocaine, is a terrible father, colludes with the Yakuza, and sees sex workers, but he is far more likable and rootable than Harvey Keitel is in the original. The transgression is still there. This is a movie with two serial killers; one who fucks men to death, and one who minces their enemies into actual meatballs and feeds them to the crows. It’s a gnarly, delirious, dumb, wonderful movie. It sags a bit in the middle, but its finale is big, brutal and strangely poignant. Lily James shows up as an American FBI agent, mugging with a southern accent, smoking, drinking, punching. It’s an unexpected turn from her, but I found it hilarious, and perhaps that’s not the intended response, but I’m so glad she is in this movie. I really don’t want to say much more about this. This is the kind of thing I think the sickos will really dig. And I hope you know, I say sickos with much fondness, as I am a sicko. I may not be Bad but I am sick and I love to watch lieutenants be bad.

Possible Love (dir. Lee Chang-dong)

I agree capitalism is skewed in favor of the rich and that so much of hard-working, poor people’s struggles and anxieties could be helped if rich people shared more, but when it comes to movies telling me about this, I think I prefer a thriller over a drama. Yes, there have been lots of thrillers about this: Knives Out, Parasite, and No Other Choice, for example. So honestly maybe I don’t need another one of those, but without the genre trappings that allow characters to go to extreme lengths, I feel just simply showing economic disparities can be a little heavy-handed. I guess I enjoy metaphors.

I say all this because I got a little frustrated with Lee Chang-dong’s new movie, Possible Love. It starts off strong, but as it went on, I felt like it didn’t have much more to say in its second half than it did in its first and it is nearly three hours long. To be clear, I liked this movie just fine, but I am by no means falling over myself about it. It’s about a wealthy woman (played by Cho Yeo-jeong) who is filming a documentary about a group of welders who were unfairly laid off, and who takes an interest in a particular worker and his wife (Sul Kyung-gu and Jeon Do-yeon, respectively). She inserts herself into their lives, filming their every move, even introducing them to her husband (Zo In-sung), a successful businessman who also grew up in extreme wealth. The gaping difference between each of their lives is made very clear. Despite this being quiet, observant, and delicately-paced, the points it is making are very loud, obvious, and repetitive. All that being said, the performances by the four main actors did engross me. I cared quite a bit about the less fortunate couple, even when I was getting frustrated with the script. This is one that a lot of people have been talking about on the streets. Most people I’ve talked to are really loving it, but I’ve also met some people like me, who wish it was better.

OK, I am going to get going on my rankings of everything I’ve seen. This will include everything I’ve written about so far, plus everything I’ve seen in the second half of the fest. Stay tuned for that. I am going to treat myself with grace about it, but hopefully I’ll be done soon.