TIFF25 REVIEW: Levers [20XX]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 95 minutes
Director(s): Rhayne Vermette
Writer(s): Rhayne Vermette

May today’s darkness fall away to a world at peace.

A blast rings through the air to shroud the Earth in darkness. It’s not until twenty-four hours later that the sun reappears on the horizon in Australia before the planet turns for it to reach the Red River Valley in Manitoba. There we meet a sculptor (Val Vint) whose newest work has just been unveiled and a civil servant (Andrina Turenne) on the case to discover the cause of the unexplained solar phenomenon. The latter wonders if the former might be responsible, digging through the commission’s invoices to find a smoking gun.

Shot on three broken Bolex cameras with five lights, Rhayne Vermette’s Levers is often shadowed in darkness. The grainy textures lend it a gorgeous aesthetic, though, while moving from these two characters to a security guard, blindfolded tears, bears, mirrors, and more. What does it all mean? That’s in the eye of the beholder as the film itself is born from a script of what the filmmaker describes as “poetry and obscured symbolic events.” Use the tarot-like drawings delineating each vignette to find your bearings or simply let the mood consume you.

I personally wondered if the numbers on those cards were supposed to be sequential—as though the deck had been shuffled so the events on-screen can be revealed out of order. If so, we are able to hypothesize what caused that initial bang from the other instances throughout. Was it the breaking of stone for the sculpture (potentially a piece cleaved from a mysterious wedge discovered by hikers)? Perhaps the crash of a car hitting an animal? Maybe just a perfectly timed shotgun blast as the sun dips below the horizon?

It’s a very DIY production for which Vermette says everyone wore multiple hats. They are all held as equal in the credits too with actors and crew listed in alphabetical order amongst themselves under the statement: “We are all levers.” Each name is an arm working to craft this movie from the raw material of its film. Each scene is a representation of what the filmmaker calls “the act of the human hand which turns rock into stone.” At one point I even saw a person in the frame wearing what looked to be a shirt with the film’s title treatment on it.

Everything was shot silent with sound recorded and synched in post. The effects are done in-camera with double exposures (rockets soaring into the sun or twin moons) and scratches animating faux snow when the real stuff isn’t falling. And the conversations float between the innocuous and the silly (one woman thinks the sun disappeared again only to discover she’d slept the whole day and what she thought was noon was really midnight). There’s a funeral, media scrum, and surveillance footage elucidating, confounding, and simply existing.

Will it be for everyone? No. I was a fan of its atmospheric nature and visual style, but Levers is definitely less accessible than Vermette’s previous film Ste. Anne. It will speak to those willing to listen and surely serve as a subjective tonal poem for which to mine its spiritual and emotional caverns. Just don’t expect any answers insofar as that lost day is concerned. Nor for the tall rock fenced off and turned into a tourist attraction atop its hill. Characters simply come and go, crossing paths and searching for meaning via Death, Judgment, and the Hanged Man.