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River review – so-so survival slasher offers more of the same and little else

Toronto film festival: strong performances from two experienced scream queens and some surprisingly thoughtful direction can’t elevate yet another stalk-by-numbers horror

It would be unwise and unfair to expect that Toronto’s genre-led Midnight Madness strand would open with quite the same jolt as it did last year with the record-breaking horror hit Obsession. That film was an outlier in almost every respect, both as it premiered and as it was unleashed on wider crowds, the highest-grossing festival acquisition of all time topping out at over $513m worldwide and sparking genuine Oscar buzz.

But it hasn’t curbed the thirst, or wider speculation, over whether anything might come even remotely close to what Curry Barker achieved and whether the festival might start to rival Sundance as the smartest place for new and exciting horror film-makers to premiere their debut projects. The jury is out with the festival having just begun, but the Midnight strand is off to a far less notable start this time around with the mostly unremarkable survival slasher River, a film directed with flashes of artfulness but written with an overwhelm of familiarity. Writer-director debuts have increasingly tended to follow that pattern (it’s OK not to do everything!) and I think Joshua Giuliano has at least shown enough visual potential here to ably steer someone else’s script to screen next time.

River is premiering at the Toronto film festival and will be out in cinemas and available on Shudder in 2027

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