Interview by Rafy Mediavilla w/ “Roost” Director Amy Redford & Star Grace Van Dien at the Red Carpet Premiere from the Toronto International Film Festival 2022.
In this immersive thriller directed by Amy Redford, a young love affair becomes a menacing game of cat and mouse. Nothing and no one are as they seem….
A teenager and her cellphone. It’s a worrying combination for many parents, and when Anna (Grace Van Dien) tells her mother, Beth (Summer Phoenix), that she’s met a boy online, Beth goes on full alert. It turns out Anna’s new crush is not a boy but a man — 28 years old, and saying all the right things to a girl on the verge of 17 as she cradles her phone in her bedroom. Then, without invitation, there he is, on the family’s doorstep.
Amy Redford’s Roost has a terrific starting premise, drawn from the experiences and anxieties of so many families. But it twists beyond that to take the film into territory that’s both thriller and thoughtful moral drama. The familiar conflicts between a mother and her adolescent daughter get ever more complicated by the presence of Anna’s boyfriend Eric (Kyle Gallner), who seems nice but is disturbingly persistent. Beth, a single mother, may need to call on her fiancé, Tim (Jesse Garcia), a cop.
Van Dien (Chrissy in Season 4 of Stranger Things) is compelling as Anna, with both the openness and the ferocity the role demands. This is a leap forward in her growing stardom, as she shows an onscreen grit similar to that of her great-grandfather, Robert Mitchum. Phoenix, from another famous film family, plays Beth with depth and a necessary sense of mystery, revealing new sides to her character as the story takes turn after turn.
Redford, daughter of Robert, plays delightfully in Roost not just with genre, but with the traces of family legacy. One moment we think we know where these characters are going; the next, all we know for sure is that the intricacies of family often lie just out of reach.
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Criticólogos:
Roost will surely be a conversation starter, what do you expect people to take away from this story?
Amy Redford (Director):
I think that we all are capable of owning things that we did in the past and maybe figuring out if taking that ownership might be liberating to somebody.
In the future. We are all united by digital means. And my hope is that if we stop demonizing and you stop being so polarized and are thinking about each other, then perhaps it will be a more creative and interesting world. And right now we end up, you know, sort of on the other side of the fence from each other. And I think it’s very interesting.
Criticólogos:
In this story your character is in a cat and mouse type of relationship, what can we take away from this type of relationship?
Grace Van Dien:
I don’t think relationships should be about cat and mouse. I think it’s very toxic. I think that it’s very draining for a human to go through a cat and mouse kind of relationship so avoid it.
