Entertainment / TIFF 2022 Review: “Viking” A Profound Film That Shines Among The Stars

TIFF 2022 Review: “Viking” A Profound Film That Shines Among The Stars

Entertainment Sep 19, 2022

by Matthew Currie

Transplant’s Hamza Haq co-stars in a silly, profound, out-of-this-world character study centring on five Earth-bound people sequestered and subjected to the same psychological stresses being endured by astronauts on the very first manned mission to Mars. Directed by French-Canadian festival fave Stéphane Lafleur, we take a closer look at this bittersweet dramedy.

Among the most-buzzed homegrown entries at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival is an out-of-this-world character study with a grounded human heart.

Co-writing and directing his first film in nearly a decade, French-Canadian auteur Stéphane Lafleur (You’re Sleeping, Nicole) embeds the audience with five average people taking part in a most peculiar experiment. The first-ever manned mission to Mars is currently underway — the astronauts crammed together in a shuttle, hurtling towards that mysterious red planet. Though, to be clear, those astronauts are not the focus of this story.

Viking 1 — **TIFF 2022 Review: *Viking* A Profound Film That Shines Among The Stars: Hamza Haq as Gary and Steve Laplante as David, two of the film’s Earth-bound astronauts.** Photo Credit: www.tiff.net

You see, in an effort to head off any mental breakdowns before they happen, the mission’s organizers have recruited a quintet of civilians (including Hamza Haq of CTV medical drama Transplant) who match the psychological profiles of each crew member to a T, sequestering them in the desert for two years to undergo the same isolation and stresses as their counterparts in space.

Receiving daily updates on their surrogates’ sleep patterns, emotional states and interpersonal conflicts, our protagonists live the astronaut life without ever leaving Earth. But much as they and the people in charge believe they’ve planned for every potential scenario, human beings, it turns out, are inherently unpredictable.

Viking 2 — **TIFF 2022 Review: *Viking* A Profound Film That Shines Among The Stars: The astronauts mimic life on Mars in the desert.** Photo Credit: www.tiff.net

A rich, compelling mix of deadpan humour, absurdism and ennui, Viking is a singular sort of character study that crawls inside the minds of its characters by having them crawl inside the minds of other characters. Our ostensible protagonist is middle-aged gym teacher David (Steve Laplante), who here gets as close as he’s ever going to come to fulfilling a childhood dream of reaching the stars. At a farewell dinner with his wife and deeply confused friends before embarking on this top-secret two-year mission, he explains that it’s “just something he has to do.”

A man whom, from the moment we meet him, is beset by surreal, hallucinatory visions (a spaceman at the foot of his bed, a pen floating through the air as if in zero-gravity), David is on his own journey of exploration — one that’s more interior than the astronaut he’s meant to mirror. And indeed, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more apt canvas for a story about existential crisis than the beautiful emptiness of outer space — which Mr. Lafleur takes full advantage of to craft a film that’s as funny as it is profound, as epic as it is intimate.

Main Image Photo Credit: www.tiff.net

Matthew Currie

Author

A long-standing entertainment journalist, Currie is a graduate of the Professional Writing program at Toronto’s York University. He has spent the past number of years working as a freelancer for ANOKHI and for diverse publications such as Sharp, TV Week, CAA’s Westworld and BC Business. Currie ...

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TIFF 2022 Review: “Viking” A Profound Film That Shines Among The Stars

by Matthew Currie

Matthew Currie

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