Following the rare footsteps of Nicolas Roeg, Mario Bava, Barry Sonnenfeld, Zhang Yimou, Jack Cardiff, and more, cinematographer André Turpin also tries his hand at directing every so often. After beautiful work on Mommy, Tom at the Farm, Incendies, he recently returned to TIFF with his first directorial work in 14 years, the mystery drama Endorphine. We now have the first trailer following the premiere, which has us highly intrigued with its evocative imagery and plotting, and hopefully U.S. distribution will follow soon.
“The intricately crafted script keeps us constantly uncertain whether what we’re seeing is present, past, future, or alternate reality,” TIFF’s Magali Simard says. “Turpin compounds the complexity with an extraordinary editing technique, putting the images through an obsessive process of repetition that reveals layer after layer of meaning. From its mysterious opening sequence to its absorbing conclusion, Endorphine is a relentless intellectual stimulant, inducing an altered state whose challenges are more than matched by its rewards.”
Check out the trailer below for the film starring Sophie Nélisse, Mylène Mackay, Lise Roy, Guy Thauvette, Monia Chokri, Stéphane Crête, Anne-Marie Cadieux, Théodore Chouinard-Pellerin, and Fanny Migneault-Lecavalier.
Twelve-year-old Simone (Sophie Nélisse) feels painfully disconnected from the world after witnessing the brutal death of her mother. Simone (Mylène Mackay), a solitary multimedia artist in her twenties, is struggling to control her crushing panic attacks and keep her day job in an underground parking lot. And Simone (Lise Roy), a sixty-year-old physicist, is giving a conference on the nature of time. The three Simones’ lives are intertwined in a labyrinthine meta-world where timeframes overlap, characters multiply, and storylines repeat and expand. But, for all its shuttling forward and back through time, Endorphine remains grounded in the Simones’ inner lives — it’s an artistic examination of scientific phenomena that also poignantly explores how people deal with trauma.
Endorphine is currently screening at TIFF.
