Joshua Giuliano’s River is the Opening Night film of the Midnight Madness programme at the Toronto International Film Festival, which began September 10, and the debut arrived carrying credentials most first features never get near: a Shudder Original stamp, a theatrical deal with Independent Film Company, and two of the most recognizable final girls in modern horror.
Shudder and IFC released a fresh batch of production stills to go with it. The film heads to Austin next for its U.S. premiere at Fantastic Fest, which runs September 17 through 24.
The setup is lean on purpose. Three estranged siblings reunite after their father dies and take a boat out to scatter his ashes along a remote river. The boat breaks down beneath a derelict bridge. There is no cell service. Something faceless comes out of the woods.
“I wanted to make the kind of slasher film that I wanted to see,” Giuliano told Variety. “Something that was stripped down to its core elements. For me, slasher films at their very essence are simple and primal. It’s about a cast of human characters being hunted down by a killer. It’s about the relentlessness of death, the pursuit of death, sometimes the inevitability of death.”
Two Final Girls in the Same Boat
Jane Levy and Jessica Rothe play the estranged sisters, with Max Mattern as the younger brother. The genre does not often get to put two leads of this particular pedigree in the same boat.
Levy took the worst beating of the decade as Mia in Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead, then reunited with Alvarez for Don’t Breathe. Two of the meanest survival horror films of the 2010s, and she is the reason both of them land.
Rothe spent two films dying as Tree Gelbman in Happy Death Day and Happy Death Day 2U, which is a stranger résumé line than it sounds. She has been murdered on screen more times than most slasher villains manage to murder anybody.
The Shape on the Shoreline
Dane DiLiegro plays the killer. The six-foot-eight former professional basketball player has quietly become the genre’s most reliable creature performer, and he is the one who wore the Feral Predator suit in Prey. Casting him as a faceless human rather than a monster tells you what kind of slasher this wants to be: something big and patient standing at the treeline, not something with tusks.
TIFF Midnight Madness programmer Peter Kuplowsky called the film an “audacious nerve-shredder” in his programme notes and put Giuliano’s command of suspense in the neighbourhood of John Carpenter, writing that “Giuliano has carved a whole new ‘Shape’ in terror.” Programmers do not reach for that particular capital S by accident.
Six Years and One Short Film
River grew out of Giuliano’s 2018 short In Sound, We Live Forever, and the feature was first announced at last year’s American Film Market, before cameras rolled.
“RIVER was six years in the making, a labor of love that culminated in the most rewarding experience of my life,” Giuliano said when Shudder and Independent Film Company announced the deal. Shudder’s vice president of development and production, Nicholas Lazo, called him “a striking new voice in horror” in the same announcement.
The producing bench behind him is deeper than a debut usually gets. Steven Schneider produced Paranormal Activity. Nick Antosca ran Channel Zero, still the best argument anyone has made for creepypasta as television, and produces here through Eat the Cat with Alex Hedlund. Executive producers Jeffrey and Robert Tinnell run Allegheny Image Factory out of Morgantown, West Virginia, the company that put two movies in Netflix’s U.S. top five at the same time earlier this year.
When You Can Actually See It
River runs 92 minutes and screens next at Fantastic Fest in Austin, September 17 through 24. Independent Film Company handles the theatrical release and Shudder streams it after that. Neither has announced a date, and no trailer has been released yet, so anything claiming to be one is not.
