TIFF 2025: Frankenstein, Knives Out 3, and all the biggest movies from Toronto

Well, I was wrong, and I did manage to make it to one last day at the Toronto International Film Festival. One of the movies I wanted to see the most this year was Scarlet, the latest from Mamoru Hosoda, whose most recent film was the metaverse fairy tale Belle. Whereas that film was a reimagining of Beauty and the Beast, Scarlet is a twist on Hamlet that’s full of bold, creative ideas. I mostly enjoyed it, but unfortunately it’s saddled with an ending that doesn’t really fit.

I also managed to squeeze in two other films: a Korean revenge / heist thriller, and a Norwegian film about connecting through art. You can read my thoughts on all three below.

Few video game adaptations understand their source material quite like the Exit 8 film. It takes the rules and structure of the game — which strands players inside of a looping hallway in a Tokyo subway station — and then builds on them with actual characters and a story. And according to director Genki Kawamura, one of the reasons that the movie feels so fresh could be because of how he approached it. “I wasn’t necessarily thinking about a film adaptation of a video game,” he tells The Verge. “I was thinking about how to create a new cinematic experience that blurs the lines between video game and cinema.”

The two are very similar, and the film even starts out with the game’s first-person perspective. And like the game, the movie features a person stranded inside of a hallway that repeats itself, and the only way to get out is to spot “anomalies” — basically, weird shit that changes in each loop — and then switch directions. Kawamura says that he discovered the game because he plays a lot of indie titles, and he was immediately attracted by just how much like Tokyo the space felt. But he also realized the premise could make for a much more universal story. “I felt like a lot of people who live in cities have had that experience of getting lost in a passage like that,” he explains. “I felt like combining the Tokyo design and the very universal experience could create something cinematic.”

Like the rest of the Knives Out movies, Wake Up Dead Man is full of extremely fun revelations — the kind that can turn the whodunit story on its head and, as was the case for many of those attending the film’s premiere in Toronto, Canada, produce audible gasps. Those shared moments of surprise are part of what makes the movie such a great theatrical experience, so it sucks that most people won’t get the opportunity to see it in a theater at all.

Wake Up Dead Man isn’t alone. Netflix was very present at the Toronto International Film Festival this year, with films like Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Edward Berger’s Ballad of a Small Player, and Sundance darling Train Dreams. And while each of those movies will be heading to the big screen, they’ll only be in select theaters for extremely short windows, the minimum necessary for awards eligibility. Unless they live in New York City or Los Angeles, the average person won’t have any options aside from waiting for the films to hit Netflix and stream them from home.

When you have children of different ages, finding stuff to watch together can be a big challenge. Both of my kids — aged 10 and 12 — have a budding interest in horror, and there’s not a lot of scary stuff that’s appropriate for all of us. That’s why I was pleasantly surprised while watching Dust Bunny on day 6 of the Toront oInternational Film Festival (TIFF).

It’s the feature film debut from Bryan Fuller, a TV veteran best-known for Hannibal and Pushing Daisies. And even though Dust Bunny is technically rated R, the violence is pretty restrained, and much of the darkest stuff is implied rather than shown explicitly. I actually had a chance to talk to Fuller after I saw it, and he mentioned the original Gremlins as a big inspiration. (Expect more from our conversation closer to the film’s theatrical release.) That movie had plenty of blood and gore, and yet it remains a family classic, and I think the imaginative Dust Bunny might fulfill a similar role in my household.

Frankenstein is one of those stories that’s been retold countless times. And yet, Guillermo del Toro has managed to make a version that not only feels true to Mary Shelley’s original, but is also imbued with the trademarks the director is known for.

Maybe that shouldn’t be too surprising — when presenting the film at its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this week, del Toro explained that he has been thinking about Frankenstein since he was seven years old, but it wasn’t until he became a father that he truly understood how to tell the version of the story he wanted to. Well, all that time paid off.

The best part of going to a film festival is finding something new. Sure, it’s great to find out that movies you’re excited about are in fact good — I’ve had luck so far with Exit 8, No Other Choice, and Wake Up Dead Man — but it’s so much more exciting to be surprised by something when you had no expectations going in.

That’s what happened to me when I walked into a theater to watch Arco, an absolutely gorgeous animated film from director Ugo Bienvenu, on day 4 of the Toronto International Film Festival. For the animation nerds out there, it’s sort of like a cross between Scavengers Reign and Time Masters, with a hint of Castle in the Sky. And yeah it’s as good as that sounds.

When director Rian Johnson introduced the new Knives Out film on the third day of TIFF 2025, he exclaimed: “we’re going back to church.”

By that he meant that Wake Up Dead Man, the latest Benoit Blanc mystery, would harken back to the origins of the whodunit, and in particular the gothic vibes of Edgar Allan Poe. And now that I’ve seen it, I have to say that Johnson pulled it off: the new movie has a darker and more spiritual feel than its predecessors, and yet it’s still distinctly Knives Out, which is to say twisting and hilarious. I gasped a few times, as did the rest of audience, at the many reveals. I’ll have a full review in the coming days, but you can read my initial thoughts below.

At my second day at TIFF 2025, the longest line I saw wasn’t for a movie: it was for the Criterion Closet. The space is housed in a van so that it could make it up to Toronto, and honestly, it felt a little wrong to see the outside of it after watching everyone from Michael Cera to Hideo Kojima spend time in its cramped interior digging through Blu-Rays.

The line was long enough that I didn’t even bother trying to get inside, which is probably a good thing since I’d just be overwhelmed anyways. Besides, standing in that line would cut into my movie time, which is already a precious resource given there are so many things to check out.

Greetings from Toronto, Canada! I’m braving long lines and busy streets for the next week or so to attend the Toronto International Film Festival, better known as TIFF, and I’m planning to take you all along with me. Each day I’ll be publishing a dispatch covering my time at the festival, including thoughts on every single movie I watch. As of now, I have more than 20 different features on my schedule so, uh, expect a lot of thoughts.

TIFF is historically a nice preview of the fall and holiday film slate, featuring a mix of awards contenders, indie flicks, and blockbuster-adjacent movies from big-name directors. In recent years, that has included everything from The Substance, to The Boy and the Heron, to whatever Megalopolis is. One of my favorite TIFF memories is watching the world premiere of Glass Onion in 2022, and seeing The Verge make a guest appearance that I couldn’t talk about with anyone until it started streaming months later.