TORONTO - Uli Edel came to the Toronto International Film Festival with a movie that sounds, on paper, like a domestic squabble blown up to absurd proportions. In practice, the German director told a packed Q&A audience, it's something closer to a war film fought in a living room, and the troops are children.
The film, which premiered at the festival this week to strong reactions from critics, revolves around two siblings caught between divorcing parents who have turned their separation into a scorched-earth campaign. The movie has drawn notice not just for its brisk comic timing but for the way it lets its young leads push back - a dynamic that Edel said took shape only after months of rehearsals with his cast.
"I didn't want to make another movie where the kids sit in the hallway and cry," Edel said through a translator. "They should be the ones doing the crying and fighting at the same time. That's how it actually goes."
Edel, best known in America for the 1999 western fantasy Purgatory, in which an outlaw gang stumbles into a town populated by famous dead gunslingers looking to atone for their sins, said the tonal leap from ghost-town morality tale to divorce comedy was less dramatic than it sounds. Purgatory, after all, was about people trapped between two destinations and forced to choose. The new film, he said, is about people doing the same thing, only with custody schedules.
"Purgatory was a western and this is a comedy, but the math is the same," he said. "You have people who want to move forward and people holding onto old business. In one movie it's Wild Bill Hickock. In this one it's a woman who won't return her ex-husband's phone calls."
That deadpan comparison drew a laugh from the audience, but Edel's interest in the material is clearly not purely comic. He said he was drawn to the script because it refused to make either parent a villain, and because it handed the film's emotional engine to a young girl whose loyalty shifts scene by scene.
The film's young lead, making her feature debut, has already become a festival talking point. Several attendees described her performance as the anchor of the movie, capable of holding a long take while adult actors lob insults over her head. Edel said he cast her after seeing more than two hundred auditions.
"I needed someone who could be angry and still be likable," he said. "That's a hard combination for an adult. For a kid it's almost impossible. She did it on the first day."
That girl-power thread - a phrase festival audiences have attached to the film without much prompting - led to one of the more heated exchanges during the Q&A, when an audience member asked whether the movie risked turning its young heroine into a therapist for the adults around her. Edel pushed back.
"She's not holding them together," he said. "She's deciding whether they're worth the effort. That's different."
The film arrives at a moment when festival audiences have shown an appetite for messy family stories that don't resolve neatly, and its dark humor has been a selling point in early screenings. It has no release date yet, and buyers were still circling as of Thursday.
One thing Edel made clear: he isn't interested in sequels, and he isn't interested in softening the ending for awards season. He was asked directly whether a certain ambiguous final shot would be explained in a director's cut.
"No," he said. "You can figure it out. You've been doing it for the whole movie."
Whether audiences will do the figuring when the film reaches theaters remains the open question. For now, Edel seems content to let the argument run.
Source: Hollywood Reporter
