VIFF Review: Night Raiders is vital dystopian SF

There are certain conventions in play for end-of-the-world horror films at the moment. Think of movies like A Quiet Place, or A Quiet Place Part II, or It Comes at Night, or Birdbox, for some examples: the world, in these films, is no longer normal. Some fundamental rule has changed, requiring people to reorganize their lives; and we enter the film in the midst of this change, watching people following these rules, living in some, tentative, frightened kind of way that we can't fully understand - because we haven't met the monster yet. We must watch and learn the rules, so that when the monster comes, we are prepared; the nature of the monster is essential to understanding what we are seeing...  

Night Raiders begins in just this mode, with an Indigenous mother and daughter making their way through the woods in what we presume is rural Canada. Everything seems wrecked. Drones patrol the skies, but it is not clear who controls them. There is still a society of sorts - people huddled in alleyways, trying to get by, and the odd heavily-uniformed cop exuding menace - and there is some jeopardy, in particular, for the young, who are at the risk of being rounded up - but by whom and for what purpose, we are not told, at least not right away. It is clear that the film has bearing on the Canadian residential school system, but it is set in the future, not the past, and there's a whole lot else going on as well, dystopia-wise...  

Night Raiders has gotten some stellar reviews; some critics dubbed it "the best movie of TIFF 2021 so far." TIFF reviewer Sarah describes the film "packing more psychological horror into 97 minutes than The Hunger Games did in four movies," and calls the film "a sharp, decisive commentary on the harm of colonization and cultural oppression." Steve Newton interviews the director, here. I am not finished the film as I write this, but am certainly hooked by what I'm seeing! (Oh, and Amanda Plummer is in it. Haven't seen her in awhile!). It does strike me that I haven't seen this strong a sublimated anti-American subtext ("fuckin' Jingos!") in a film since Battle Royale II, and that the whole affair is a bit on the paranoid side, but it's healthy to express your paranoias in cinema, isn't it? And these don't seem the most unreasonable paranoias for Indigenous people to have.

 There are no further VIFF screenings booked, don't know if it is still optional to stream it, but keep this one in mind. You'll get another chance to see it...