TIFF’s Midnight Madness lineup includes Brian Mulroney doc, a variety of horror flicks

TORONTO – What can moviegoers expect from Midnight Madness, TIFF’s celebration of genre film, this year? A bit of everything, says programmer Peter Kuplowsky.

“I don’t want to play 10 films in a row that just feel like they’re the same kind of experience,” he said on a recent video call.

“And so I love that I’m moving from classic horror to experimental documentary, to Yakuza crime movies to martial arts vampires and then concluding with interstellar warfare … I really relish that there is that range and variety.”

Opening the program, whose films all premiere at midnight, is “River,” which Kuplowsky describes as a “John Carpenter-esque slasher.”

The film from first-time feature director Joshua Giuliano follows a trio of siblings stranded on a boat in a country river, as they’re stalked by a masked killer.

Also in the lineup is the latest from “Universal Language” director Matthew Rankin.

The Winnipeg-born filmmaker is bringing his experimental documentary “Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney” to the festival for its world premiere.

The documentary looks at the trajectory of conservatism over time through a Canadian lens, Kuplowsky said.

Kuplowsky described the film is a “culture jam remix” of Mulroney’s rise, “in this context that smashes him against” contemporaneous footage from Canadian media including “Téléfrançais” and the 1970s children’s series “The Hilarious House of Frightenstein.”

Progressive Conservative campaign material combined with trippy Canadiana has “a really feverish hypnotic effect that I also think is illuminating. I’ve described it as kind of like an Adam Curtis documentary if he was overdosing on Canadian Heritage Minutes,” Kuplowsky said.

Kuplowsky, who has been curating Midnight Madness for nearly a decade, also touted director Anna Biller’s hotly anticipated followup to the cult favourite “The Love Witch,” which came out in 2016. She’s bringing her tribute to classic Technicolor flicks “The Face of Horror” to the festival.

The two Yakuza crime movies in the lineup are “Arrested Memory” from director Sabu about a detective with Alzheimer’s disease who finds himself in the crosshairs of the police and the Japanese mafia alike; and “Vintage Violence” from Eugene Kotlyarenko, about a social media influencer played by Cole Sprouse who travels to Japan to try to sell vintage jeans.

“If you’ve seen any of Eugene’s other movies, you’ll know that he is a bit of an internet satirist and he often incorporates a collage of social media elements,” Kuplowsky said.

“That’s also what makes it appealing to gen Z and younger audiences because it really is a film that I think speaks their language.”

The lineup’s closing night film is “Rogue Trooper,” an adaptation of what Kuplowsky calls “one of the most influential cult comic books of all time.”

It comes from a 1981 strip in the British comic anthology “2000AD,” and Kuplowsky said the film from director Duncan Jones really leans into that English sensibility.

“This is a very authentic, faithful adaptation of those comics,” he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 6, 2026.