Vintage Violence is an absurdist crime thriller for phone addicts

Reviews from TIFF 2026: Vintage Violence, Ken Russell’s The Devils in 4K, and Gentle Monster.

There are a lot of movies that have tried to seamlessly integrate modern tech — text messages, livestreams, etc. — into their storytelling. Some of the most novel attempts have been in the genre space, like the Twitch-style horror flick Deadstream . But the most chaotic to date might just be Vintage Violence , an absurd crime thriller with lots of blood, jokes, and screentime.

I was able to catch Vintage Violence , the latest from director Eugene Kotlyarenko, on my fifth day at the Toronto International Film Festival. Kotlyarenko has previously explored our hyper-connected culture in 2020’s Spree , a movie in which Stranger Things ’ Joe Keery plays a rideshare driver who starts murdering passengers while livestreaming the crimes. But Vintage Violence takes things a step further by trying to replicate what it’s like to constantly be on your phone as the movie plays out. It’s a lot to take in, but I really enjoyed it. Unfortunately there isn’t a trailer yet to give you a better sense of how things work onscreen, but I’ll make sure to share it when they do release one.

Vintage Violence was one of three films I took in on day 5 of TIFF 2026; the others were a 4K restoration of a cult classic and a devastating drama that’s on its way to Netflix. Here are my thoughts on all three.

Vintage Violence

From the premise alone you can tell this movie is ridiculous. Carter (Cole Sprouse), a disgraced MrBeast-style influencer, finds a cache of vintage Levi’s while livestreaming, and one of his fans, Izumi (Kiko Mizuhara), suggests he comes to Tokyo to sell the denim for some big cash. When he gets there, just about everyone is running some kind of scam — pretty quickly the yakuza get involved, including an enforcer with a prosthetic middle finger — and things play out like a toned-down, but still brutal and bloody, Takashi Miike film. But what really elevates Vintage Violence is the way it constantly displays what characters are doing on their phones right alongside the main film. That means everything from sending text messages to livestreaming to listening to whale sounds to relax. It can get chaotic and a challenge to follow — at one point I was trying to read the chat on a Kick stream while an action scene played out beside it — but that’s also kind of the point.