From 'Orwell 2+2=5’ to 'Frankenstein’: TIFF's Films on Power, Creation, and Survival Are a Warning#

Some of the most urgent films at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival aren’t here to soothe. Together, Orwell: 2+2=5, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, and Frankenstein play like sizzle reels of caution, and at their best, they’re award-worthy symbols of alarm. These films, the first two of which are documentaries, don’t just entertain—they confront fractured humanity, closeness and distance under Israel’s siege of Gaza, and a creation we’ve set loose, growing beyond our control. That’s the one muscle of film—to interrogate rather than facilitate.

Orwell: 2+2=5#

Director Raoul Peck, who gave us 2016’s I Am Not Your Negro, didn’t make Orwell: 2+2=5 to feel like a documentary in the usual sense—it’s a dare, the sort of blunt truth authoritarian regimes treat like contraband.

The film portrays a slow-creep march around authoritarianism, not from an academic distance, but as an unsettling, visceral lesson in the here and now. Picture British actor Damian Lewis reading George Orwell’s final musings—his letters, essays, diaries—with an almost clinical cadence. These reflections are layered over raw, jarring images: Gaza in ruins, Donald Trump’s distorted truths, and the online mechanics of misinformation that enable our tendencies to ignore the unimaginable.

“That’s unfortunately our capacity … to forget, our capacity to repress,” says Peck, who was born in Haiti, a country shaped by authoritarian rule.

“Hitler wrote a book, Mein Kampf. He said exactly what he was going to do, and he did exactly what was written there. And yet the whole German society, the whole European society, did not believe him—they felt he was a joke.”

“They thought, well, we will control him. They thought, well, our modern world cannot go that far down. We cannot imagine genocide going on. But it was written,” he continues.

To that end, the film is less of an appeal to our sense of what we might already know than a critique of our numbness to it. Optically, it’s haunting. Words such as “doublespeak” (language designed to obscure or mislead), “newspeak” (a controlled vocabulary to limit thought), “thoughtcrime” (the criminalization of dissenting ideas), and “freedom is slavery” (the manipulation of truth to enforce obedience) populate the screen, overlaid on contemporary images of conflict, political spectacle, and media manipulation.

Peck discovered Orwell through a kindred perspective. “Orwell grew up in the exterior of that world,” he says. “So his view and his analysis—I could find myself through that. I discovered Orwell as a brother, and that was an important connection because it was visceral. It was human.” For Peck, Orwell’s essays, particularly “Why I Write,” revealed a writer’s consciousness of his role in confronting injustice—a sensibility that informs every frame of Orwell: 2+2=5.

Infographics lay bare uncomfortable truths: the widening gap between the rich and the rest, and the contrast between government promises and Gaza’s destruction. But it’s not just about relaying facts—social media and AI shape what we believe and forget.

Peck frames Orwell in the digital age: “It’s basically Orwell’s world with the instruments to do it easier today. How can you manipulate? How can you gain power and control everything? Authoritarian terrorism means that you want to rewrite history. Now, with fake news, you rewrite history with a click. Just give a prompt and you’ve created a different path.” He stresses that Orwell’s analysis was grounded in real regimes, not prophecy: “You just apply it to your current situation, and redo the analysis.”

In other words, the film forces us—beautifully, uncomfortably—to face what we’d rather deny: that a writer, equal parts truth and fiction teller, could imagine a future that now feels like our present. Our self-portrait is stitched not just from Orwell’s sly warnings about power, but from the nightmare we still insist is only fiction.

“They flood you with information, with lies, action, arresting people in the streets, make you afraid,” adds Peck. “They terrorize, and you know, it’s working. That’s an incredible assault.”

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk#

Where Orwell: 2+2=5 warns us about the apathy toward authoritarianism, Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk forces us to confront the daily realities of living under military control—specifically, in Gaza.

In early 2024, Iranian-born director Sepideh Farsi arrived in Cairo, notebooks of intention in hand, only to find Gaza’s gates closed to her. A Palestinian refugee suggests she call Fatma Hassouna, a 24-year-old photographer in Gaza. Through her camera and voice, Farsi discovered the only window she could open.

“I have never had such a deep relationship with someone whom I’ve never met … this feeling of being blocked in a country you cannot leave,” Farsi tells WIRED. “Then it’s just the magic of encounter, the human alchemy, and her smile was contagious.”

Put Your Soul plays out as more than a record of someone’s life during the course of a brutal military siege; the war and the persistence of a single life are one and the same. It purports that genocide, and all that enables it, always seeks one thing: erasure. But Hassouna’s smile, threading its way entirely through video calls and fractured connections over the course of 112 minutes, renders that goal impossible.

The opening shots of Hassouna and Farsi introducing themselves anchor the film in this perspective, which not only feels personal but very social. There are talks of dreams, of travelling to fashion shows, her hopes of the war ending, while Farsi occasionally interrupts and muses to Hassouna about the wanderings of her own household cat.

Through the film, Hassouna comes alive not just as a photographer but as a witness to life insisting itself into being. She sings, writes, and frames the world in small, stubborn flashes of beauty—sunsets, gestures, moments that flicker and hold. Israel’s weight presses in, but in her eyes, and in her lens, you feel resilience not as heroism, but as a relentless survival.

Their conversations flicker in and out—bad connections, cut-offs, pixelated resolutions. Farsi embraced the glitches as part of the film’s life, letting audiences feel her frustration and the strangeness of connecting with Gaza. “By keeping these pauses and disconnections, I’m conveying something very strange about the way we connect to Gaza, because Gaza is not reachable, and yet it is. It’s like another planet.”

Making the film for Farsi was much like living in two worlds at once: recording Hassouna from afar, sure, but also being closely present as a friend, witness, and human being. “We were both in the process of filming and being filmed, kind of,” she reflects. “I had to remain natural, but also somehow controlled as a filmmaker. Because, of course, I needed to be able to react in the right way to her.”

The film, in that sense, is a strong picture of Palestinian humanity—something mainstream media outlets have historically failed to portray—as shown through Hassouna. But it’s a reckoning film as well. As months pass, Farsi and Hassouna’s conversations confront the harsh realities of life under siege: constant bombings, sniper fire, days without food, as told by Hassouna. Sometimes she forgets the questions, her attention slipping due to the toll of hunger, with Farsi always keeping her at the center.

“I did not want to include graphic images in Gaza or raw footage in this film. I had to concentrate on the human facing me in a different way,” says Farsi. “There is a virtue to show, and if we do not, how would people find out about it?”

Farsi remembers Hassouna’s smile—playful, melancholy, in poetry or sunlight. Even in hunger or fatigue, she would smile. “Absolutely unforgettable, her smile,” adds Farsi.

Put Your Soul offers no tidy closure by the end of its run time—because there is none to give.

On April 16, 2025, just a day after the film’s Cannes selection, Hassouna was killed with 10 family members, including her pregnant sister, in an Israeli airstrike on their home in Gaza City’s Al-Tuffah neighborhood. Her death renders the film both as a memorial and an indictment.

As Farsi reflects, “When the film was finished, I thought that together we had achieved something. And then she was taken away and killed in a targeted and horrible way. I really travel a lot with the film, and it’s weird to be presenting it alone without Fatim to talk about her in such an intense way. I’m there to kind of represent both of us.”

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein#

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein puts creation under the microscope. Frankenstein isn’t just about science and monsters; it’s a haunting intersection of ambition and humanity. Like Mary Shelley before him, del Toro revives a tortured genius, where monstrosity and humanity are kin. Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein sheds the simplicity of villainy, revealing the messy truths of a man who is both creator and creature.

As Del Toro told Variety at Cannes in May: “Somebody asked me the other day, does it have really scary scenes? For the first time, I considered that. It’s an emotional story for me. It’s as personal as anything. I’m asking a question about being a father, being a son … I’m not doing a horror movie—ever. I’m not trying to do that.”

Del Toro reanimates the well-worn tale of science gone unchecked and ambition outpacing our capacity to reckon. Gothic-darkened labs and ornate wardrobes frame the creature (Jacob Elordi), whose scars are smoothed, jawline sculpted—calibrated for sympathy. Del Toro doesn’t revive Shelley’s horror; he asks viewers to feel for a creation that should repel them.

To be clear, much of Frankenstein is theatrical as hell, balancing Shelley’s lessons with the sentimental flourish of a Del Toro signature. It leans on familiar motifs of forgiveness and our capacity to self-correct, sometimes without fully earning these moments.

Again, Frankenstein is not an explicit message movie like the two above, but it is in Hollywood form, sounding an alarm during the in-between flashiness of a big studio film. Like Frankenstein, who stitched life from what should not live, we now hover on the edge of our own experiment, with AI promising to remake the world in ways that terrify, seduce, and elude our moral imagination.

Like Victor, who’s warned about the dangers of his inner Prometheus by love interest Elizabeth Lavenza (Mia Goth), the architects of our artificial minds—the Sam Altmans, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musks—move in a space between awe and terror, crafting intelligences that mirror us back with uncanny precision, and with a threat that feels both abstract and immediate. They are our modern Frankensteins, not in horror but in the quiet, insistent way their creations compel reflection.

And yet it’s the film’s insistence on the creature’s interiority that lingers. Elordi’s Frankenstein is alive not only in body but in feeling, in gesture, in the way he occupies space as both product and probe of his maker’s ambition. It forces us to reckon with the weight of creation, to sit with the responsibility of what we bring into being.

Frankenstein doesn’t lecture on AI whatsoever. But in the shadow of ChatGPT, AlphaFold, and Neuralink, it’s hard to miss an allegory that wouldn’t apply to any other decade: the exhilaration of invention, the seduction of power, and the precariousness of a life—artificial or otherwise—that escapes our grasp, demanding we consider what it means to make, to care for, and to witness what we make and enable.