River

In his acclaimed 2018 short film In Sound, We Live Forever, writer-director Joshua Giuliano shrewdly split the sound and image of a slasher scenario, so that the violence was heard before its consequences were observed. This eerie dissonance laid bare an insidious undertow inherent to the horror genre, a current that, once one is caught up in it, carries its victims toward a seemingly grisly inevitability from which there is no escape. Such is the current that three siblings find themselves adrift upon in River, Giuliano’s audacious nerve-shredder of a feature debut.

Having convened to scatter the ashes of their late father from a family motorboat, embittered sisters (Jane Levy, TIFF ’14’s Bang Bang Baby, and Jessica Rothe, TIFF ’23’s Boy Kills World), and their younger brother (Max Mattern, television’s Cape Fear) stall out beneath a derelict bridge along a rural waterway. Familial wounds are provoked, and fingers are pointed, first at each other, but soon at the sudden appearance of a strange man (Dane DiLiegro, Prey) eerily staring from the shoreline. Tall and statuesque, the figure’s face is seemingly without features or emotion, just a palpable, anonymous malevolence. And when he stops merely staring, the family must come together and start surviving.

From that anxious fulcrum, the open water becomes oppressively claustrophobic. And as a pastoral surrealism seeps into this dire strait, the suspense is wound with such austere starkness that its naked machinations are wickedly weaponized to play with the expectations of even the savviest slasher scholar. Conducted with the canny confidence of a Carpenter — John to be precise — Giuliano has carved a whole new “Shape” in terror.

PETER KUPLOWSKY

Content advisory: explicit violence, accident trauma, coarse language, mature themes