The just-wrapped Toronto International Film Festival is where many Oscar hopefuls launch campaigns. But it’s also an excellent platform to discover movies that are wildly different from anything you might see in the multiplex.
Evolution
Noodles like white worms in gray-green sludge, supposedly human flesh studded with suckers like an octopus, and a very unsettling ultrasound — even the seemingly innocuous opening shot of Evolution, of a boy swimming in the ocean, seen from below, is troubling. The prettiness of the image doesn't detract from the fact that he looks spookily like an organism flailing on a microscope slide. Nicolas (Max Brebant) is in fact the subject of mysterious medical tests and treatments, along with every other kid on the remote island in which he lives — one entirely populated by grown women and the young boys for whom they care.
Evolution is only the second film from French director Lucile Hadzihalilovic, whose 2004 Innocence is also singular and haunting. And though this one lingers like a fable impossible to fully understand, it's also gorgeous and disturbing as all hell — part strange adolescent metaphor, part body horror saga, the film builds unease through gradual reveals about life and the life cycle on the island. Rather than trying to parse all the details, it's better to just let the imagery and all of the nightmare biology sink in.
How to see it: Evolution will be released in theaters in the U.S. by Alchemy.
Hardcore
Hardcore is insanely violent, incredibly dumb, and undeniably inventive in the most will-make-you-throw-up-from-motion-sickness sense of the word. It dumps viewers into a dizzying perspective that's familiar from video games, but almost never seen on the big screen — the first-person POV of Henry, who wakes up in a lab to learn he's been resurrected and transformed into a cyborg soldier. It's First-Person Shooter: The Movie, except Henry doesn't just stick to guns as he embarks on a blood- and viscera-soaked rampage to rescue Estelle (Haley Bennett).
The movie is the work of Russian director Ilya Naishuller, whose experiments with first-person POV in music videos for his band Biting Elbows became viral hits. In terms of plot and sensibility, Hardcore makes Crank look like Merchant Ivory, and its need to shock gets tiresome after only a few minutes. But there's something wild and new about getting a practitioners'-eye view of, say, parkour. And star Sharlto Copley's tendencies to chew on the scenery actually work in this context.
How to see it: Hardcore sparked a bidding war at TIFF and is reportedly being picked up by STX Entertainment for a wide release.
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