As difficult as it is to cover everything that hits TIFF during any given year, but here are three strong-looking titles that have flown a bit under the radar. They are Families, a Mathieu Amalric-led feature that marks Jean-Paul Rappeneau‘s first in twelve years; Ben Rivers‘ A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness follow-up (deep breath) The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers; and a Swedish thriller, The Here After, from Magnus von Horn.
It’s clear that the first will be the lightest of this bunch, what with the beloved French star at the center of a sex-filled family crisis. (Families at least looks like an ideal version of what that would entail.) The stunning footage from Rivers’ piece has a bit of a travelogue character to it, with Cine Maldito saying it’s set amid “an amazing Moroccan landscape which explores his dream of filmmaking,” along with “abandoned sets that reveal the artifice of cinema and trigger our memories of imagined spaces means of family films from decades past.” The Here After certainly has that “chilly European thriller about troubled youth” quality (à la Benny’s Video) to it; if that’s your thing, this should have something to offer.
Watch them all below: