Wednesday, October 15, 2025

TIFF Experience: The Toronto International Film Festival

The Toronto International Film Festival celebrated its fiftieth anniversary this year, which made me realize that I've never actually attended it, despite the fact that I've heard it's one of very few film festivals that's actually open to the public. 

I attended a single free screening last year, on a random mid-week afternoon, but this year I had suggested attending the festival itself for real with one of my closest friends—specifically because I knew two films that they were very interested in watching were extremely likely to premiere here.

Our entire itinerary was based around those two films: Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (which did it fact get its World Premiere at TIFF, as both of its predecessors once did), and Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein (which had its North American Premiere status stripped last-minute by a surprise screening at Telluride a week or so before).

We saw several other movies, and skipped a lot of things that interested us, but the entire experience was based around getting to see both of those—and we actually succeeded in doing so, despite a few close calls!

I've been slowly working on reviews and commentary on my experiences at the festival, but I've also been very busy with life in general, so these are starting to come out now as the movies they're about are actually releasing.

The films that we saw, and that you can expect to hopefully see reviews or discussion of on here, are as follows:

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (World Premiere screening!)

Exit 8 (I didn't actually watch this one, but I was there for most of it. I won't be attempting to review it myself, but I did ask if the friend I attended with would do so.)

Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein (Second TIFF screening)

Scarlet

Dust Bunny

New Year's Rev

Little Amélie or the Character of Rain

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Film Review: Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025)

Though I've never seen any of the other Knives Out movies, Wake Up Dead Man was actually the entire I went to TIFF 2025. One of my dear ...