Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother will make you forget all about Marvel’s Blade disaster

Marvel’s stalled Blade reboot is presented in the piece as a notable misstep, but the story emphasizes a brighter outcome: Ali and director Bassam Tariq repurposed their collaboration into Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, a hitman thriller screened at TIFF. The film follows Latif (played by Mahershala Ali), a devout Muslim and principled contract killer who refuses to use guns and targets only those he deems deserving. When his wife dies and he becomes a single father to three children — including a newborn — Latif’s moral code and faith are both strained as elements of his violent past reemerge. The reviewer praises the movie as a character-driven drama where action is sparse but resonant, and singles out John Cho as a compellingly unhinged antagonist who leads a right-wing church group.

Also on the TIFF docket was In Alaska, co-directed by Jaap van Heusden and Vinnie Karetak. That film centers on Woody (Leo Matthew Temela), a suicidal teen implicated in a catastrophic accident that damages an oil pipeline and attracts FBI attention, and Susan (Noomi Rapace), a veteran agent who suspects the incident was not eco-terrorism. The reviewer characterizes In Alaska as a moody, slow-burning crime thriller that interrogates its protagonists’ motives and ends on a more hopeful note than it begins.

Anna Biller’s The Face of Horror translates the Japanese ghost story Yotsuya Kaidan to a 14th-century English setting and renders it in the visual idiom of Technicolor-era horror. The piece describes the film as a stylistic pastiche with campy theatricality, pronounced makeup effects, and strongly theatrical performances; Kristine Froseth and Jonah Hauer-King are highlighted for their roles as the betrayed wife Eleanor and the morally questionable knight Edward, respectively.

The roundup concludes with two lighter entries. Babies, written and directed by Lauren Miller Rogen, is a comedy about a childless couple, Annie and Aaron (Anna Kendrick and Seth Rogen), confronting questions of parenthood; supporting players include Issa Rae, Zach Cherry, and Ed Helm. By contrast, Drifter, directed by and starring Sung Kang, is an underdog drifting-and-crime film about Tree, a janitor and driver who yearns to compete with the world’s best drifters. The reviewer finds Drifter’s formula predictable and its character work thin, though they note that the driving sequences are visually striking.