At TIFF, Vintage Violence Keeps the Phone On Screen
Eugene Kotlyarenko's Vintage Violence screened in Midnight Madness at the Toronto International Film Festival as an absurd crime thriller built around blood, jokes and screentime.
Cole Sprouse stars as Carter, a disgraced influencer in the MrBeast mold. Kiko Mizuhara co-stars as Izumi, a fan of Carter's. Their connection starts online and is built around a deal. While livestreaming, Carter finds a cache of vintage Levi's. Izumi suggests he come to Tokyo to sell the denim for cash. That trip pulls both into yakuza territory, including an enforcer with a prosthetic middle finger. The Verge
The shooting style is as central as the plot. Vintage Violence keeps phone activity visible alongside the main film. Texts being sent, livestreams being run, and whale sounds being played through headphones all share the frame with physical action. The film does not cut away to the phone. It stays present.
That approach will look familiar to anyone who saw Kotlyarenko's 2020 film Spree. In that film Joe Keery plays a rideshare driver who murders passengers while livestreaming. Spree treated the livestream as motive, distribution channel and alibi at once. Vintage Violence extends the same interest into resale culture, fandom and the logistics of turning attention into money.
The Verge viewed the film on day 5 of the festival. No trailer had been released at the time of that report. TIFF lists Vintage Violence in its Midnight Madness program. TIFF
Two other titles in the same TIFF dispatch approach technology from very different directions. Marie Kreutzer's Gentle Monster stars Lea Seydoux as Lucy, a pianist and mother. The story follows a family torn apart when police seize the father's digital devices as part of a CSAM investigation, a case involving suspected child sexual abuse material. TIFF lists Gentle Monster in Special Presentations.
The third title is archival. The Devils was first released in 1971 and depicts a witch trial in a small town in 17th-century France. It stars Oliver Reed as a priest who defies a powerful cardinal. The version discussed at TIFF is a 4K remaster — a high-resolution restoration from the original film — and director's cut rated NC-17, meaning for adults only.
The broader context here is how directly festivals now treat the phone as basic filmmaking equipment rather than a prop. Concurrent text threads, live viewer counts and background audio streams are editing problems, sound-mixing problems and rights problems. Kotlyarenko keeps them in frame instead of resolving them offscreen. Kreutzer, by contrast, treats devices as evidentiary objects whose removal destabilizes a household.
In my view, that split is worth flagging for people who build these systems for a living. One film assumes connectivity never drops. The other assumes a seizure can erase access in an afternoon. Both assumptions are correct in daily life. The long arc points toward more stories where device state, account access and livestream delay drive plot mechanics, not just set dressing, and where filmmakers have to work with platforms that were never designed as film sets.
