VIFF 2023 starts tomorrow and I wanted to follow up my documentary reviews with a couple narrative films that I had the honour of pre-screening for the festival.

WHEN ADAM CHANGES – JOËL VAUDREUIL

Adam is a 15-year-old boy with a strange condition that causes his body to change based on the negative comments of other people. This all starts with his hateful grandmother who never misses a chance to comment on Adams’s weight or his “long torso.” The film opens in the hospital, and Adam’s family is gathered around Grandma’s death bed when she sits up, scans the people in the room, sees Adam, and says, “I always said that boy had a long torso,” before she keels over and dies. Her last words. Adam’s torso, already bent, long, and uncomfortable-looking, stretches a bit more.

What follows is a delightful, off-beat coming-of-age story about the power of words and the pain of growing up different in 90s Quebec, all told through janky, hand-drawn cartoons reminiscent of the same era’s MTV Animation style. Full of cringe-inducing nostalgia and awkward teenage confusion, When Adam Changes is a surprising and hilarious film that had me laughing and crying in equal measure.

Following Adam through his summer break, we witness him nervously navigating the horrors of adolescence. He gets a summer job looking after his father’s boss’ home, while their family is away on vacation. The young rich boy of the house takes him on a lazy tour, showing him all the cool stuff he owns and reminding Adam that he’s not allowed to touch any of it. He’s mostly left to clean the house and tend to the limbless cat, who spends her days carefully propped between her litter box and food bowl. He sneaks peeks at a dirty magazine he finds wedged between the rich kid’s mattress and fixates on a particular photo that reminds him of his crush, the most popular girl at school.

It’s all an embarrassing mess and it’s also painfully relatable. Adam is wracked with guilt over an experience he had with a younger, neighbourhood boy that ended with the boy getting severely injured. Now with a permanent, disfigured grin, the young boy wordlessly roams the streets at night, a long metal pole in his hand, scraping on the sidewalk, a constant reminder that haunts Adam. There’s also the question of who keeps throwing bags of dog droppings into the trees across the street…

Somehow director Vaudreuil manages to tie all these bizarre, silly ideas together into something that’s both hilarious and profound. The grotesque aesthetic and the deadpan voice acting perfectly fit together to match the extreme ends of banality and horror in the teenage experience. When Adam Changes is a one-of-a-kind debut from a Canadian animator that I hope to see much more from in the future. I was completely floored from the moment I saw this film and I’m so excited to have a chance to talk about it with people, now that it’s been released.

I DON’T KNOW WHO YOU ARE – M.H. MURRAY

Benjamin is a queer, black man who lives in Toronto and makes ends meet by teaching private music lessons in his home. After a night out with friends, he meets a man on his way home and things escalate quickly, as he is sexually assaulted and left bleeding in the streets. The next morning, wracked with grief, he tells his best friend what happened and she suggests he get some HIV-preventative medicine.

We follow Benjamin as he tries to acquire PEP treatment at a clinic, having to answer uncomfortable questions and racist comments, he finds himself at a dead end when the expensive meds are too much for him to buy from the pharmacy. The rest of the day Benjamin does what he can to scrape together the money he needs and slowly resorts to more desperate and embarrassing measures, all while pushing back against a broken system.

Intense and urgent, I Don’t Know Who You Are explores barriers to access to medicine and the paranoia, fear, and mistreatment that victims of sexual assault have to deal with in the days following their trauma. There is a risk in exploring such heavy themes that this film could come off as trauma porn, but director M. H. Murray incorporates soft, delicate cinematography and a strong ensemble cast that resonates warmth and love throughout. In the end, we are left with a calm and forgiving experience that doesn’t pull any punches or offer any easy-outs yet offers a possibility of hope and grace.

This was one of the first films I screened for VIFF this year and set the bar very high for every Canadian feature that I’ve watched since.