Jane Levy in River. Photograph: Shudder View image in fullscreen Jane Levy in River. Photograph: Shudder First look review Toronto film festival 2026 Review 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
Benjamin Lee in Toronto Fri 11 Sep 2026 20.08 CEST Last modified on Fri 11 Sep 2026 21.17 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google I t 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.
Read more 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.
It’s a shame as I do have a soft spot for the rare horror films that centre siblings over romantic pairings or friends, adding a different kind of emotional texture and more intense dramatic stakes to films like Ginger Snaps, House of Wax and, especially, Jeepers Creepers. In River it’s two sisters and a brother, all coming together to scatter their father’s ashes on the, you guessed it, river where he spent most of his days. A more bonded younger sister and brother (Jane Levy and Max Mattern) are still living at the family home and they are joined by their somewhat estranged older sister (Jessica Rothe) who has less fond memories of their late dad. There’s the expected tension before they even get on the boat and through a convoluted set of circumstances, the trio find themselves stranded in the middle of the river. Bad enough without a bloodied guy in a skin mask standing on the bank.
Giuliano starts with a surprisingly artful cold open that expands upon a nifty idea he had for a 2019 short film , which shows us the bloodied aftermath of an abandoned car and plays the sound of what led up to that scene. It’s incredibly effective and, for the genre, incredibly unusual although it does suggest that we might be heading somewhere equally as inventive and as the film unfolds, we find ourselves drifting backward rather than forward. It’s not that River needed to reinvent a very rusty wheel but even when going through the motions, Giuliano can’t quite find the right pacing or energy level to get us inching toward the edge of our seats. It’s just never scary or propulsive enough and despite the tease of some character development at the start, itself a rarity in a slasher, there’s not enough specific…