Karen Shute and Sachin Hingoo give their top 3 hot picks (each) for this week’s Toronto After Dark Film Festival!
Karen
As a scuba diver, it’s probably not the best idea for me to risk developing a debilitating lifetime phobia by watching a movie like Whalefall (which has its premiere TONIGHT at 7pm!), but if nothing else, it will help me prepare for a worst-case scenario situation that nobody ever thought to cover during my certification training. Everyone’s favourite scream king, Austin Abrams (Weapons, Resident Evil) stars as a young diver who gets swallowed whole by a sperm whale while searching for his father’s remains and finds himself in a race against the clock to find a means of escape before his oxygen runs out. The wild premise of the film strains credulity, but it makes me think of a movie like The Descent, where the dangers of the sport itself provide plenty of nail-biting tension long before the fantastical elements are introduced. I’ve only found myself in a circumstance where my tank ran dangerously low on air once, and if Whalefall can manage to capture that level of panic and anxiety, then I think the audience is in for one hell of a ride.
I have a particular fondness for genre films set during Christmas. They’re the perfect antidote to the cheesy, uber sentimentality of the season, and I’m always excited to find a new one to cycle into the rotation of films I watch every holiday season in an eggnog and tryptophan stupor. In Ilja Rautsi’s Red Snow (Punaista lunta), a young woman’s hopes that her Christmas wish for a handsome vampire lover are dashed when the vampire that arrives at her door is more Kris Kringle than Edward Cullen. After all, what better way for a vampire to score an invite into someone’s home than to come dressed as everyone’s favorite home intruder? Finland has already given us one amazing evil Santa movie in Rare Exports, so I will admit that my expectations are high for this one. Will Red Snow earn its place amongst my unconventional Christmas favorites like Silent Night, Deadly Night and Trancers? I’m ho, ho, hoping that it doesn’t disappoint.
Following in the footsteps of lo-fi, sci-fi bangers like Coherence and Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes, where regular people in relatively unremarkable situations find themselves doing the time warp again (and again), 5 More Minutes (5 Minutos Más) (which premieres Thursday October 15th at 6:45pm) takes a feuding couple trying to repair their relationship and throws them for a (time) loop. Can they put their differences aside and work together to escape their five-minute-long time prison, or will old grievances and resentments spiral out of control to prevent them from moving forward? As much as I enjoy a good science-focused time loop movie like Predestination, which was a standout of TADFF’s 2014 lineup, I think the genre offers interesting opportunities to explore the human condition when filmmakers don’t spend too much time worrying about the “why” of the looping phenomenon and allows us to see ourselves reflected in the struggles of normal people in an abnormal situation.
Sachin
I was entranced by the mere title of Casey Donahue’s My Love For You Is Deep But The Devil Loves Me Deeper long before I knew any details about the film itself. The beloved video producer of the Doughboys podcast managed to rope me in even before I found out that this one hits many of my horror buttons at once – Faustian bargains, Los Angeles sleaze, abstract visual design, and analog filters. Ahead of its premiere at the appropriately late hour of midnight on Friday October 16, I’m already very thirsty for this story of a woman who makes a demonic bargain to collect “all the love in the world,” opening her up to all sorts of unwanted attention and going way out of control. Even without the marquee-ruining long title, I’d be so seated for this.
Speaking of hitting my buttons, setting a vampire found-footage horror against the setting of a music documentary and the high price of fame?! Yes please, I say, to Nicky Murphy’s I Love Paris, which premieres on Friday October 16th as part of After Dark’s Vampire Night. Looking like a gritty backstage travelogue of an ambitious pop star named Paris, but also documenting her slow turn to vampirism, Murphy’s film sounds right up my alley and that of anyone who’s into found footage. I Love Paris was just the recipient of the Gold Audience Award for Best International Feature at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal this summer, and also won Best Feature Film at Melbourne’s Monster Fest in Murphy’s hometown. With the film picking up those and other accolades as it makes its way through the festival circuit, you’ll definitely want to sink your teeth into this one.
It’s the story you’ve heard a million times before. A snarky, sarcastic talking fox counsels an unhappy man to dispatch his domineering wife. Dario Russo’s The Fox looks like one of the funniest, most beautiful films of the year and is absolutely packed with talent, including Olivia Colman and the late Sam Neill. Russo’s film isn’t the usual fare I’d expect at After Dark, but I’m looking to close out my weekend with this one in a big way.
Oh, and because After Dark has always been a big supporter of short films and filmmakers, especially Canadian ones, I’d like to give a special shoutout to one here. It might only be 12 minutes, but not only does it have an incredible title, but Lee Lawson’s Man Eating Pussy features a couple of my favourite Canadian talents in Grace Glowicki (of Dead Lover and Honey Bunch) and Julian Richings (whose IMDB listing is too long to even scratch the surface, but is also featured at After Dark in Turn It Up!). I generally like to go into these shorts relatively blind, but this one’s picked up a ton of awards from SXSW to the Overlook Film Festival and Fantasia as well, so sign me up. Man Eating Pussy is part of the Canadian Short Film Showcase on Saturday.
These are only a few of the films on offer at the festival, and we have a rundown of the entire lineup over in this post. I can say with some certainty that if you’re a genre fan who loves sci-fi, action, horror, and generally offbeat cinema, there’s something (or, likely, multiple things) in this lineup for you to grab onto. Join us After Dark this week!
The Toronto After Dark Film Festival runs from October 14th-18th, 2026 from the Scotiabank Theatre in downtown Toronto. To purchase passes or for additional festival information, head on over to www.torontoafterdark.com. You can also check out the full schedule, ticket info, and film details at this link!
