TIFF 2021: Huda’s Salon, Encounter, & Dashcam | Review round-up

The Toronto International Film Festival is in full swing. Here is a round up of quick reviews for thrillers playing the fest.

Read all of my reviews, including full-length reviews, from the fest here!

Huda's Salon

As someone who both writes and consumes film criticism, there is nothing I hate more than hearing, “well, you just have to watch it.” However, there is so little I can divulge about the plot of Huda's Salon, a new film by Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad, without spoiling the fun that I have to tell you you just have to watch it. But I promise that you'll thank me for my discretion 

The opening scene plays out in a single long take as Huda (Manal Awad) does Reem's (Maisa Abd Elhadi). The women discuss the latest gossip, complain about the men in their lives, and bond over the difficulty of motherhood. Then something happens. Something you don't see coming and that will set off a cascading series of events that puts each of the characters in a pressure cooker that is just waiting to burst.

Abu-Assad allows the story to speak for itself rather than making any specific statements about life under occupation. The pure anxiety of the film is enough to tell you what it's like. The movie struggles with the dichotomy of living in a place where you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Whether it's being a patriot or being a martyr. It plays like a 70s espionage thriller with a Hitchcockian twist as the plot unravels.

Perfectly crafted and shot from beginning to end and full of terrific performances, but particularly Maisa Abd Elhadi, Huda's Salon had me holding my breath from beginning to end.

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Encounter

Riz Ahmed, following his Oscar-nominated turn in Sound of Metal, proves again that he is one of the best actors of his generation in Michael Pearce's Encounter. The sci-fi thriller follows Malik Khan (Ahmed), a marine veteran and father, who goes on a mission to rescue his sons after he becomes convinced that an alien invasion of bugs is controlling people leading them to become violent.

The beauty of Encounter is that it doesn't intend to trick you. It's easy enough to solve exactly what is going before it reveals it to you. Instead, it's more interested in Ahmed's Malik and his struggle with PTSD and his relationship with his two sons (Aditya Geddada & Lucian-River Chauhan). With that storyline, the movie finds surprising emotional depths as the older of the two boys struggles with his perception of his father.

However, the movie is formulaic and a subplot featuring Octavia Spencer as a parole officer takes a lot of steam out of the father/son relationship story that fuels the movie. It's unfortunate considering Pearce's direction is confident and systematically builds up tension around the mystery as different situations create cracks in Malik's carefully structured world and the boys a reason to fear their father.

There is value in the film once you wade through the predictable plot. If anything, come for another terrific Riz Ahmed performance.

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DASHCAM

Director Rob Savage brought the world its first, and to date best, pandemic-era film with his computer screen horror Host. The brilliance of that film is that it took place where our world is currently taking place: on screens and on Zoom, more specifically. Though computer screen films aren't new, Host is the first to feel like it didn't have to stretch the medium to its absolute max to work – something that his new film DASHCAM has to do and more.

Our protagonist — if you could call her that — is Annie Hardy a Los Angeles-based musician who is supporting herself during the pandemic by live-streaming from her car freestyling for tips. This is the medium through which we see the movie. Annie doesn't hide her Covid skepticism or MAGA-supporting tendencies from her viewers, some of whom support her and some vehemently hate-watch her as we see from the live chat that remains in the corner of the frame for most of the film. Hardy, who is playing an over-the-top version of herself and hosts a show called “Band Car,” is crass, rude, and unafraid to voice her opposition to restrictions and etiquette around the pandemic.

Looking to escape the “madness of America,” she hops a flight across the Atlantic to London where she intends to stay with her musician friend Stretch (Amar Chadha-Patel). He is none too happy about her presence, especially when she steals his car and ends up in an empty restaurant where she is asked to bring an elderly woman called Angela (Angela Enahoro) to another location. However, after defecating on herself and then attacking a woman who seems to be looking for her, it becomes clear that Angela may not be entirely human.

From there, DASHCAM becomes a dizzying found footage horror with scenes reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project as Annie and Stretch try to stave off attacks by Angela and the woman after her. And while the horror and gore are repetitive — we have more than one fake-out death involving the same person — it at the very least delivers the kinds of thrills and chills that you're looking for in this kind of movie. However, through it all, it feels like Annie seems to be trying out material for her Netflix standup special. Her brand of combative libertarianism slowly becomes more grating than funny and the film's genre inventiveness wears off. As a subversion of the found-footage monster movie DASHCAM is rough around the edges, but works. Whenever it tries to be something more it makes me want to log off.

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Hey! I'm Karl. You can find me on Twitter here. I'm also a Tomatometer-approved critic.

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