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Source: The Hollywood Reporter
“Chariots of Fire” in 1981; “The Big Chill” in 1983; “The Princess Bride” in 1987; “The Fisher King” in 1991; “Life is Beautiful” in 1998; “American Beauty” in 1999; “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” in 2000; “Amelie” in 2001; “Slumdog Millionaire” in 2008; “12 Years a Slave” in 2013; “La La Land” in 2016; “Jojo Rabbit” in 2019; “Belfast” in 2021; “The Fabelmans” in 2022; and “American Fiction” in 2023. What do all of these films (and many others) have in common? Each one of them was their respective year’s recipient of the People’s Choice Award, the highest honor that is annually bestowed at the Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. While a respectable accolade on its own merits, the People’s Choice Award has gained a reputation for singling out features that would later go on to achieve greater success within each of the yearly award circuits they participated in. Many of these films were later recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with nominations (if not wins) at their annual Academy Awards ceremonies, and some of them have even been fortunate enough to achieve the highly coveted Best Picture prize. Regardless of their award success though, many consider the films chosen by Toronto jurors as the best of the films exhibited at a given festival to be among the finest films crafted in recent memory, so winning such a prize can often be very beneficial to a feature film’s long-term appeal. With all of this in mind, it’s safe to say that the future looks very bright for the latest recipient of Toronto’s People’s Choice Award, that being the Mike Flanagan-directed science fiction drama “The Life of Chuck”.
Based on the Steven King story of the same name, one that was first read in his 2020 publication “If It Bleeds”, the film stars Tom Hiddleston (perhaps best known for playing the character known as Loki in the ongoing Marvel Cinematic Universe series) as titular protagonist Charles “Chuck” Krantz, whose appearance on a local billboard gets the ball rolling on a story that’s told in reverse chronological order as it delves deeper into the rather unusual life lived by a man who seems to be anything but extraordinary. Director Mike Flanagan is no stranger to adapting King’s writing into cinema – his 2019 film “Doctor Sleep” is just one instance in he which he translated one of the author’s stories into the medium of film – but never before have any of these features received strong enough acclaim to a point of major awards recognition, so it says quite a lot that the voters at TIFF deemed this particular film worthy enough of its most prestigious honor. In addition to Hiddleston, actors like Karen Gillan, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mark Hamill, and Jacob Tremblay all play vital roles in this peculiar genre-bending feature, but like he does on the billboard that lingers over the people within this film’s narrative, it’s Hiddleston and Flanagan’s direction that seem to be most impressive to those who’ve so far been able to see the film, with the latter enthusiastically accepting the People’s Choice Award prior to the festival’s conclusion. “I’m absolutely overwhelmed,” Flanagan claims in a statement released after his film was announced as the major TIFF winner. “We’re so grateful that The Life of Chuck connected with audiences in such a powerful way, but never expected this.”
While “The Life of Chuck” may have come out on top at TIFF, one shouldn’t overlook the two runner-up features that were possibly very close to snatching the People’s Choice Award for themselves. The first runner-up is a film that had already been making the rounds at many of the previous major film festivals and had even managed to secure the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival just a few months prior; that film is Sean Baker’s comedy-drama “Anora”, which stars Mikey Madison as an exotic dancer who enters a romance with the son of a Russian oligarch, a relationship that soon takes a dangerous turn when those within her new amour’s inner circle catch on to them. Despite losing the People’s Choice Award, the momentum driving “Anora” does not appear to be slowing down in any way, and should it continue to stay up and running, it will most likely be a major contender in the oncoming award season. The same can probably be said for the second People’s Choice Award runner-up, Jacques Audinard’s musical crime comedy “Emilia Perez”; starring Zoe Saldana as a lawyer recruited by the titular character (played by Karla Sofia Gascon) to assist in the faking of her death, this unpredictable musical adventure takes these two, as well as two other happiness-seeking women, throughout the Mexican nation on a ride as wild for the ensemble as it is for the viewing audience. All four of its lead actors (the other two being Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz) shared the award for Best Actress at the most recent Cannes Film Festival (one of the few instances where multiple actors share such an award for the same film), and between that and its acknowledgement at Toronto (among other major festivals), “Emilia Perez” should also not be counted out as a potential award attracter.
Elsewhere at the Toronto International Film Festival, various other features were fortunate enough to receive at least one of the other accolades that the festival had to offer. The prize for Best Documentary, for example, was given to Mike Downie’s “The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal”, while Josh Greenbaum’s “Will & Harper” (which features famed comedic actor Will Ferrell) and Ali Weinstein’s “Your Tomorrow” were each named one of the award’s runner-ups. The Midnight Madness Audience award, meanwhile, went to Coralie Fargeat’s body horror “The Substance”, which stars Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley in its central roles, while John Hsu’s “Dead Talents Society” and Andrew DeYoung’s “Friendship” were respectively named the first and second runner-ups. It’s worth noting that most of these awards were decided by the majority of festival attendees who were given the option to vote on their favorites in each category, whereas other awards like the Platform Prize (which went to Carlos Marques-Marcet’s drama “They Will Be Dust”), the FIPRESCI Prize (given to K’naan Warsame’s “Mother Mother”), and the NETPAC Prize (awarded to Sue Kim’s “The Last of the Sea Women”) were all decided by a select panel of jurors for each accolade. No matter how these awards were determined though, each of the films that received them have proven their worth as stellar cinematic achievements, and one can only hope that they’ll continue to be seen as such within the coming future.
