For clarity, “Shakespeare” will be used in reference to playwright William Shakespeare, William to the husband and Agnes will be referred to by her first name.

Inspired by Maggie O’Farrell’s novel of the same name, co- written and directed by Chloe Zhao, the film carries arrives carrying considerable weight. After receiving the Oscar for Best Actress for her role as Agnes Shakespeare, Jessie Buckley is all over the media. Critics have described her performance as “devastating” and called it a “radically feminine take on Shakespeare’s family life” — both of which are true. As Buckley said herself, the role offered her a chance to counter a common narrative about the playwright’s wife — that she had “kept [Shakespeare] back from his genius” — and instead to “give the full landscape of what it is to be a woman.” Despite an impressive performance from Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare, I am of the opinion that Buckley steals the show

Set in 16th-century Warwickshire, the story follows Agnes’ navigation of child loss, the shifting dynamics between parents, and both Agnes and William’s journeys traversing their grief, as William writes the play Hamlet about their deceased son. The film opens with a breathtaking shot: a dense forest canopy, an overhead camera slowly tracking down through the foliage to find Agnes positioned at the base, in a fetal position, alluding to Mother Nature. In this, motherhood immediately takes centre stage.

The costume design sustains this theme throughout the film. She is dressed almost entirely in red, set starkly against the dark greens of the forest and the navy blues of Shakespeare and the children. Colours in the film have symbolic messaging: the bedroom covers shift from orange to blue after Hamnet’s death, signifying the turn from familial joy to grief; and the boy himself wears both orange and blue in the scenes before he dies, subtly distinguishing him from his siblings. When Agnes appears in red again at the final reconciliation, it reads as something quietly triumphant. The cinematography by Łukasz Żal reinforces her centrality at every turn — from prolonged close-ups on her face, to wide shots that place her at the centre of the frame while William Shakespeare recedes behind her.

When William Shakespeare decides to move to London, Zhao makes a poignant directorial decision to keep the camera, and thus the story, with the family that stayed behind, framing Agnes’ encouragement as a genuine, costly sacrifice, rather than a passive acceptance

The two birthing scenes are extraordinary in their contrast. The first has Agnes alone in the forest, gripping the roots of a tree in her red dress, giving life as Mother Nature does: in solitude, and in pain. The second, set at home, is stripped of any musical score, the silence making it almost unbearable. The film’s treatment of motherhood is among its most striking qualities. The solidarity between women across generations receives equal care in its portrayal: Agnes’ stepmother’s support during the birth of the twins, the quiet “you can and you will,” and the flashbacks of Agnes as a child having lost losing her own mother to childbirth. Her cry “I want my mum” is one of the rawest lines in the film.

Shakespeare’s absence at the moment of Hamnet’s death is handled with the same weight: the later line, “you should’ve been there,” lands with quiet devastation. Furthermore, Jacobi Jupe, who plays young Hamnet, deserves serious recognition. The farewell scene between Hamnet and William is shot with remarkable composition: an expansive wide angle shot that almost divides the frame between them, both turning back to look at each other laughing, unwilling to leave after saying goodbye.

Hamnet’s death scene devastated the entire cinema. It is rendered with an almost expressionistic, poetic quality: the boy walking away into death, surrounded by painted trees that echo the forest of the movie’s opening scene, the circle of his life quietly closing. The line “I’ll be brave,” delivered with tears barely held back, by candlelight and with Max Richter’s score beneath it, is the film’s emotional peak.

There are moments that feel overly indulgent. The close-up staging of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy, although brilliantly performed by Mescal, disrupts the narrative momentum and feels like a gesture toward theatre enthusiasts rather than something the film has earned. It felt like an attempt to anchor this loose adaptation back to canonical Shakespeare. The final scene also overstays its welcome, the sustained violins drawing out emotion that has already been fully brought out.

As Peter Bradshaw has noted for The Guardian, “on one level, the narrative is a fallacious misreading,” relying heavily on a name coincidence that could be simply that. But he is equally right that it represents a “thrilling act of creative audacity, reaching back through the centuries to embrace Shakespeare and Agnes as human beings.” That is the film’s genuine achievement. It is a story about grief, parenthood and ultimately the unheard characters behind one of the most recognized plays ever written.

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Make no mistake, fanfiction has always existed in mainstream spaces. More romance novels tha you might think are actually Rey/Kylo Ren fanfiction disguised by unsubtle name changes and superficial editing. Fifty Shades of Grey started off as a Twilight fanfiction. Even the Game Changers series (you might know it better as the books from which Heated Rivalry was adapted) is rumoured to have been a “stucky hockey au” [Marvel fanfiction of Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes]. The current problem comes from the shift away from bottom-up decision-making to top-down, from authors deciding to monetize their work to publishing corporations asking for it. Most of all, the problem is the visibility that comes with it, which opens up fandoms to potential outside threats, like angry authors or toxic
nternet users.

Capitalism…
The best thing about fanfiction is that it is a gift from the author to the reader. The first unspoken rule when entering online fandom communities is to respect and appreciate the work that is done. Fanfiction authors write for free in their own time, during their very (infamously so) busy lives. Maybe the story is bad, and the grammar non-existent; there might be no punctuation, or capital letters every three words, but it was written by someone who was passionate and experimenting, and it is frowned upon to criticize them for it.

To someone who has only experienced mainstream online spaces, smaller fandoms can be extremely welcoming. There is a reason for that, (weirdos sticking together if you want to be sappy, but, from a more cynical and realistic point of view): compensation — or the lack thereof. The basis for most of the discourse opposing disparaging comments is that fanfiction writing is a hobby shared out of the goodness of one’s heart. No one owes anyone anything, and one only needs to be kind in return. Yet now, a precedent has been set; money has entered the equation. If once is happenstance and twice a coincidence, it only needs to happen again for money to become enemy action, to become a pattern. And who knows how this new business model will impact the community’s ethos of mutual respect.

But, why are publishing companies picking up fanfiction? The answer — it might surprise you — is also money. Fanfiction, even scrubbed of every trace of the original world and characters, still offers the enormous advantage of a built-in audience, thus guaranteeing automatic return on investment. Fans familiar with the work will buy it, and people, morbidly curious, having heard of the story and its origins by word of mouth, will want to get a glimpse.

A risk for the Harry Potter fandom

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if the original author can no longer maintain plausible deniability about fandom activity, bad things happen. Although a lot of authors, such as George R. R. Martin, operate under a kind of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy regarding fanfiction, others like Anne Rice are not so kind. The author of Interview with the Vampire is infamous in fandom circles for threatening to sue fanfiction writers and going so far as to send a cease-and-desist letter to Fanfiction.net, asking them to remove everything related to her work.

The risk of dragging Harry Potter fan-created content into the mainstream is that it might force a confrontation with the author. As of yet, there have been no such incidents, but how long will that peace last? There has rarely been a fandom with so much genuine, blinding hatred for the original author as the Harry Potter fandom. Most of the time, hate geared towards the original creators of works comes from disappointment with the source material: the ending of Game of Thrones, the blatant queer-baiting in Netflix’s Wednesday, or Veronica Mars’ entire fourth season. People hate the directors for the choices they made. Meanwhile, Harry Potter fans hate J.K. Rowling for personal and political reasons, and that hatred runs deep.

J.K. Rowling’s views about the LGBTQ+ community are very problematic, and if there is one thing to know about fandom, it is that it is queer. Writing fanfiction is not just teenage girls shipping male characters. It’s marginalized audiences reappropriating symbols and characters. It’s incorporating queer themes into originally cis heterosexual media, creating trans plotlines, and discussing internalized homophobia, intersectionality, and the intricacies of consent. Rowling has, historically and with great emphasis, denigrated such social issues. It raises concerns about her potential reaction to an army of fans who curse the ground she walks on. Will she continue to close her eyes and allow fandom communities to operate? That seems like a best-case scenario, but far from the only one. Rowling can decide to co-opt the more supportive and ‘acceptable’ branches of the movement, or even retaliate and wreak destruction on a scale only permissible to billionaires like herself.

Outsiders looking in
Original content creators, authors, and directors are not the only threat that heightened visibility brings to fandom. A more insidious, though no less dangerous one is judgmental internet users who feel entitled to fandom spaces, and refuse to adapt to these spaces’ rules and culture despite having chosen to enter them. Fandom spaces are being forcefully gentrified by individuals who refuse to interact with the more alternative parts of the community. Most people know that fandom is weird, but they don’t really understand it. How are you supposed to explain “Dead Dove, Do Not Eat” to someone who’s never heard of it before? People might like the cute couple or the hot, slightly-but-not-too-problematic relationships, but they might not necessarily be prepared for works that go beyond what is usually socially acceptable.

This is not new: it is happening – and has been for a while – to the fandom and LGBTQ+ communities as a whole. Who is the most relevant? The most marketable? Such debates arise as people discuss the inclusion (or exclusion) of more marginalized sub-groups. Hence, internal hierarchies are created and certain groups deemed ‘other’ by the broader community and audience. In queer circles, underground practices like BDSM get slapped with the label of “sexually deviant” and are excluded from some queer spaces they’d historically been a part of.

Fandoms — fanfiction maybe especially — are close to such subcultures and might face the same progressive sanitisation if shoved to the center stage. When something exists as a subculture, it is easy for it to be more diverse because everyone is equally threatened by the public majority. In recent times, fandoms have grown more visible and attractive; yet only certain facets of them are deemed appropriate to the mainstream public. This can have a negative impact on its internal dynamics, based on trust and respect, as newcomers become influenced by public discourse or are simply ignorant of the community’s culture. Hence, safe spaces previously designed for marginalized communities to exist and thrive are gentrified, becoming another pawn from which capitalist entities can profit.

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The above vignette forms the opening scene from Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, FX’s newest show that has quickly become a sensation. Speaking to the public’s enduring infatuation with the couple, it is now the platform’s most watched limited series to date, just a month after its release. The limited series tells the story of America’s reluctant “it couple” of the 1990s. Love Story curates the details of Kennedy Jr. and Bessette’s notoriously guarded relationship. Drawing from friends’ anecdotes and media footage we see Bessette fitting Kennedy Jr. for a suit in the Calvin Klein show room, to a proposal on a boat at Martha’s Vineyard, or a fight in Battery Park where Kennedy Jr. pulled off Bessette’s ring. This collage of moments is depicted in the show, with certain shots taking on the grainy quality and square framing of a ’90s era camera, making the restaging obvious of a moment captured by the press. Other production choices appeal to cultural memory, such as the costuming. The show’s crew went to pains to source archival pieces from Yohji Yamamoto and specific items like a green Valentino coat to evoke the image of Besette’s looks, as seen in paparazzi images.

With the series’ clever blending of fiction and reality, it’s easy to believe the iconic couple’s real relationship is finally being revealed. The chemistry between the two leads (Sarah Pidgeon and Paul Anthony Kelly), close-up shots, warm lighting, and the “behind closed doors” setting develops a captivating intimacy. After watching the first few episodes of the show, I had a feeling of hollowness I couldn’t place. Only to discover, I was mourning the couple’s death, over 25 years later.

The intense public investment which Love Story depends on and re-evokes was significant to Kennedy Jr. and Bessette’s relationship. The public’s adoration and collective grief for his father as well as a life in front of the cameras made John F. Kennedy Jr. America’s son, as well as its most coveted bachelor. Any woman Kennedy Jr. dated was held to high standards by the public. The same went for Bessette, who was put under intense scrutiny by the media. She had claimed the man who belonged to America, and these were the consequences.

Having never been in the public eye, Carolyn Bessette was different from all of the women Kennedy Jr. had previously dated. When the show begins, Kennedy Jr. is still dating actress Daryl Hannah. Hannah is adept at handling the paparazzi, as she poses for a few good pictures to get them to go away. This juxtaposes Bessette, who refuses to give any of herself away to the media. She’s the perfect enigma. Her style is the epitome of minimalism. There are only two clips of her voice that circulate online, each under two seconds long. Her attitude defied the public’s insistence on a stake in her relationship. The tabloids called her an “ice queen.”

As the couple’s relationship got more serious, so too did the American public’s investment. In Love Story, Bessette and Kennedy Jr. are swarmed and harassed by reporters who block the entrance to their apartment upon their return from their honeymoon. A few days later, the couple’s car is climbed on and surrounded by photographers, making them unable to drive away. More and more tabloids speculate about Bessette, commonly circulating rumours about a pregnancy based on her appearance. As a result of the intense media attention on the couple, the scope of Bessette’s world becomes smaller. She quit her job as publicist at Calvin Klein, and began to limit public appearances. Love Story imagines the press as anxiety-inducing for Bessette, with close-up shots of her fidgeting hands and slowed camera flashes across her worried face.

This is referenced in the show’s opening. Bessette is first seen being hounded by the media and nervously conforming her appearance to their expectations. Meanwhile, Kennedy Jr. is introduced on his way out of the offices of his magazine George. In contrast to Bessette, he confidently strides down the halls, undisturbed; followed only by his assistant. This immediately establishes the couple’s differing relationship with the media, showing it as particularly crippling for Bessette.

The aggression of the media in Love Story is particularly striking. In another scene, Bessette is pushed into a car door by a mob of reporters. If this is how Love Story sees the American media of the ’90s, then how does it see itself? This is a fine line for the show to walk. The vicious portrayal of the media invites recognition of Love Story itself as equally aggressive and intrusive. Not to mention, with questionable ethics. Despite providing narrative form and an empathetic lens, the show can be deemed as no less invasive than the ’90s tabloids it scrutinizes.

Love Story dramatizes the inner lives of a couple who were notoriously private, undoubtedly adding to the appeal. Its main character is Carolyn Bessette, a woman who never gave a public interview. However, the show often aligns the viewer with Bessette to develop pathos, focusing on her hesitation and nerves as she meets the Kennedy family and faces the paparazzi for the first time. Viewers are invited to identify with Bessette’s position as an outsider to the life of America’s royalty. “They feel like they know us,” says Jackie Kennedy in the show. Her and Kennedy Jr. sit in her apartment, reflecting on their relationship with the American public. Her statement is immediately uncanny, the show’s staging of this intimate conversation giving it a self-reflexive resonance.

A similar moment speaks to me. In the show’s seventh episode, “Obsession”, Bessette opens up to Kennedy Jr. about her struggles with media attention, admitting that it was much harder to handle than she had thought. Overcome with heaving sobs in Kennedy Jr.’s arms, Bessette relinquishes her strong exterior. It is one of the most heart-breaking and vulnerable moments of the show. As their apartment buzzer sounds, she cries out: “They won’t leave us alone.”

The post Another Doomed Love Story: The American Media & Carolyn Bessette appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Anya Kasuri, TVM President and Post-Credits Editor-in-Chief, attended the event dressed in a sparkling gown and touted the magazine’s sole physical copy. The magazine, which she co-founded alongside TVM’s graphics coordinator, Sascha Siddiqui, encourages authors to thoughtfully analyze their favourite films. Kasuri is in her third year, studying International Development with a double minor in Political Science and World Cinemas.

In an interview with The McGill Daily, Kasuri says, “Film is the medium that influences our everyday character and aspirations.” Not only does it influence you, it allows you to understand yourself: “Critiquing film is a social activity, an intellectual engagement, and at its core, is a self-assessment of your values and beliefs…the meaning you derive from it can be really telling of your character too. ”

Her favourite part of the magazine is the graphics: “[Unlike writing, graphics] provide visuals to cinema…to perfectly complement the [article’s] argument. Sascha [Siddiqui], our graphics coordinator, did an incredible job bridging the gap … When I saw the final [magazine] it was her creativity that grounded the writing back to its roots — an appreciation of cinema.”

“Films should always be critically analyzed this way. I feel like that’s a value that I’ve derived from my film classes, particularly with Professor Ara Osterweil,” she replied when asked about the vision behind the magazine. “The process of watching and experiencing a film is not only viewing it, then going home and going to sleep. It’s about watching it with your friends, watching other people, reacting, [and] hearing everyone’s reactions in the crowd. Afterward, [the experience is about] discussing it as you understand it — because when you come out of a movie, you’re not going to know exactly what you have to say; it’s not a fully fleshed-out thought. When you spend time discussing it, you learn more about it.”

The key difference, for Kasuri, between short- and long-form analysis lies in its depth: “[Long-form analysis] offers full fledged evaluations of films’ formal elements: cinematography, mise en scene, visual tone, colour palette, acting, narrative — being able to evaluate that in a longer form analysis lets you see each film individually…and its directors’ vision apart from one another because you get into the depths of each films’ elements’ meaning[s].” To conclude: “It’s a better, more engaging, intellectual, and educational alternative to short-form media.”

However, she notes that many people forget the core of analysis: what the film wants to be. “A lot of people misjudge pieces of media by applying the same expectations to all [of them]. It’s important to judge a film based on what it’s striving to be…they all have different standards of their visual language, their pacing, their acting, their sets,” said Kasuri.

I encountered Elena Degas at a bar table next to the DJ booth, listening intently to the live band. As TVM’s music composer, she wanted to “provide insight from a musical perspective.” Writing to the Daily, she highlighted how the score was integral to the story: “Sinners was by far the film that impacted me most from the last year, and I felt that it was special in the way that the score/music was so integral to the story and the conversations that were happening around the film.”

Degas got her start in film scoring when she watched Euphoria in 2019. The music was what made her love the show; she found that it could tell a poignant story on its own.

Her favourite part of the article she wrote for Post-Credits was her analysis of the use of blues at the centre of Sinners. It gives the viewer insight into the film’s characters and their struggles. Especially the song “Pick Poor Robin Clean,” demonstrates the turn from oppressed to oppressor in Remmick, an Irishman. It opens up a “space for a larger conversation about the history of predominately Black genres of music and how they’ve evolved and continue to live on today.”

From her article: “It is immediately following [the surreal montage] scene when the people in the juke joint are faced with the vampires, who dauntingly perform an upbeat, folk-inspired rendition of ‘Pick Poor Robin Clean’ for the group.” The song is “a blues song that [embodies] someone trying to survive by picking apart and taking everything they can from a dead robin.”

For Degas, “this jolly folk rendition exemplifies the white vampires’ inability to engage empathetically and thoughtfully with the community they are attempting to infiltrate, and recalls a common pattern in genres such as blues and jazz, in which white musicians have historically appropriated and overshadowed Black artists.” Remmick’s positionality is especially striking because of his Irish heritage and experience with colonialism. His desire to completely consume the music is shaped by a selfish desire to preserve it the way he was unable to with his own heritage. However, in doing so, he reproduces colonial violence, with music becoming a tangible symbol of culture.

TVM has allowed Degas to explore her passion for the soundscape of a movie: “Film is now one of the main cornerstones of my life, I have found a huge love for making music for films at TVM, and have found a great community of other film-lovers here; I now plan on attending film school next year for sound design in hopes of a career in film audio/music!”

McGill’s distinct lack of a creative arts programme is no secret. However, student initiatives like Post-Credits Magazine are working to allow student film lovers to think critically about the art they are passionate about.

TVM will be hosting its largest event of the year, FOKUS Film Festival on Thursday, March 26 at Cinema Du Parc. For more information, visit TVM at tvmtelevision.com or @tvm.television on Instagram.

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In class over the past few months, we have examined the backlash modern artists received for going against the grain — the “grain” being the expectations set by the Art Academy, the Salon where they would show their work, their audience, and, of course, critics. Modern artists like Manet, who portrayed purely modern scenes without conforming to the “grain,” provoked viewership fury. French critic of the time, Émile Zola, argued in an essay titled “Édouard Manet”, originally published in 1867, that public outrage simply reveals how tightly audiences cling to expectations of what art ought to resemble. The public, up until this point, had maintained neoclassical values in art: to flatter, narrate, and moralize. Manet refused all three of those familiar imperatives by producing art that felt uncomfortable and bluntly new — a choice that is now heavily applauded. True art, a point Zola returns to time and time again, does not come from a desire to conform to norms or follow the “grain” but from individual temperament and personal vision. 

Nearly two centuries later and across the Atlantic, my girlfriends and I visited the Cineplex on Rue Sainte Catherine to watch Emerald Fennell’s 2026 “Galentines” adaptation of “Wuthering Heights”. The reaction to the film was generally varied. Some praised it, while lovers of the novel jumped to Twitter and Reddit to vent their anger over yet another inaccurate adaptation. To give credit to these bibliophiles, Fennell abandons many of the themes that make this story so impactful by portraying a narrative based on her initial impression of the book as a 14-year-old girl. In depicting this youthful interpretation, Fennell centres the film around a glorified toxic romance between Catherine and Heathcliff. Frustrated viewers were appalled at Fennell’s tone-deafness in foregrounding obsessive love while sidestepping and softening the harsher themes of the novel, particularly those pertaining to Heathcliff’s racial marginalization and the systemic class violence in the setting. 

In reading tweets alleging the film’s negligence, just as I did in December when choosing my winter semester electives, I turned to modern art history. Two hundred years apart, both Manet and Fennell have something in common: they’ve both committed to their personal visions and rejected traditional expectations. Manet counters aesthetic norms and produces art that depicts the tensions of modern life in a way that is truthful to himself. Similarly, Fennell abandons the expectation that adaptations be reflective of their source material to create a film rooted in her own experience, a decision Zola might have applauded. Whether or not you enjoy or even “agree with” either of these artist’s work, they both made the choice to commit to their personal truths and abandon external expectations. In practicing artistic autonomy, they choose their own temperament as an anchor in their work. 

If these two artists are correct and individual temperament is the “True North” of art, it leads us to question: are there traditions or expectations that artists must uphold, or is personal vision all that truly matters? Between these contexts, “tradition” is understood very differently. For Manet, “traditions” are expectations set by the Art Academy surrounding what defines academically valid (and objectively good) art. For Fennell, “tradition” underlines the source material from which she draws her film: Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Both these artists abandon tradition in their works, making audiences question: where is the line drawn between artistic autonomy and deviations from tradition? 

In deviating from tradition, one can question the difference between innovation and avoidance. 

If artists do have a responsibility to uphold a certain tradition, both Manet and Fennell have failed to do so. Yet we celebrate Manet as a transformative turning point in modern art history. Why? In my opinion, it is because Manet’s work denies the comfort of ignorance and bluntly presents his audiences with uncomfortable social realities, forcing them to analyze their own lives through his work. In contrast, Fennell’s Wuthering Heights does exactly the opposite. While she also deviates from “tradition”, she does so by refusing to inherit the uncomfortable and darker themes of the novel. She allows her audiences to find comfort in the avoidance of difficult themes surrounding the intersection of violence, race, and class. If Manet makes audiences question how closely art should adhere to academic standards, Fennell forces them to question how much personal vision we are willing to accept in interpretations of classic narratives. 

In some cases, we respond well to moving away from tradition when artists depict their personal visions because it feels honest and revealing, confronting you with art rooted in social reality. This is what Manet did in pulling at the seams of academic art to reveal true modern life. On the other side of the coin, moving away from tradition can feel dishonest if viewers don’t feel it is rooted in these social truths — the very social truths that made Emily Brontë’s novel so impactful in the first place. 

Now, as I wrap up this article in my student apartment a few streets from campus, I have to conclude that this argument is somewhat of an open-ended question. I think that is because there is no universal line that separates avoidance from innovation in art. That line is unstable by design, and artists have always toed it by pushing their own personal vision forward while balancing a respect for tradition. Perhaps this tension is what produces great art. That being said, in my art history class, we are still marveling at Manet’s impact on the evolution of modern art two centuries later. But as I left the Cineplex on Sainte Catherine after seeing Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, I got the impression that this particular adaptation might not make it onto the syllabus of a film class in another two hundred years. 

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Emerald Fennell’s much anticipated “Wuthering Heights” has hit theaters just in time for Valentine’s Day. The film is based on the beloved novel by Emily Brontë, which tells the tale of Catherine Earnshaw, Heathcliff, and their families. Though this film is marketed as a romance, the original text is anything but that. It is a tragedy that unfolds due to classism, racism, and cyclical abuse. Though many filmmakers have attempted to translate these events from words into film, Brontë’s raw and incisive novel has been said to be “unfilmable.” Unfortunately, Fennell’s film proves to be no different in this regard. Starring Margot Robbie as Catherine and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, the film does have its strengths, such as the stunning cinematography of the English countryside and the surrealist and dreamlike sets. However, the film not only fails to do Brontë’s novel justice, but also completely disregards the story’s central conflicts and themes.

One of the most controversial aspects of the film is Jacob Elordi’s casting, which caused outrage on social media as audiences were rightfully upset about the whitewashing of Heathcliff’s character. Though Brontë never specifies his race in the book, she does describe Heathcliff as being “dark-skinned,” which causes him to be discriminated against and abused by Catherine’s brother, Hindley — a character noticeably absent from the film. The racism that Heathcliff faces leads to the start of the cycle of abuse within his and Catherine’s families, which is eventually dismantled by Catherine’s children and her nephew. Elordi being cast as Heathcliff not only takes a role away from actors of colour, but also erases one of the central and extremely pertinent conflicts in the story. Heathcliff has been known to be played by white actors — the only exception being Andrea Arnold’s adaptation in 2011 — yet it is still upsetting to see that nearly no progress has been made in the past century ever since filmmakers have been adapting Wuthering Heights for the screen.

In turn, the depth of Heathcliff’s character was diluted in Fennell’s film. Rather than being a victim of racially motivated discrimination who eventually torments those around him, he is boiled down to an archetypical sexy bad boy. Though he acts cruel at certain moments in the film, the sheer villainy of his character has been completely removed, rendering him incredibly underdeveloped. Instead of presenting a flawed and sometimes evil man who, despite his faults, is seen as an object of desire to Catherine, Fennell removes all of the complexity from his character in favour of making him a palatable love interest.

Wuthering Heights revolves around Catherine and Heathcliff’s torrid relationship, as it curses everyone around them, including their own children. Rather than presenting a doomed but passionate bond that lasts even beyond the grave, their relationship in the film is presented as nothing more than a typical enemies-to-lovers situation. Catherine and Heathcliff are friends as children, but are not very fond of each other as adults and are always arguing. However, after Catherine has a sexual awakening of sorts, the two suddenly cannot keep their hands off one another. Their supposed love for one another appears out of nowhere and is given no room for growth, making it seem like an afterthought instead of one of the story’s main threads.

Another disappointing aspect of the film was Fennell’s treatment of Isabella Linton, played by Alison Oliver. In the novel, Isabella marries Heathcliff, who takes her to live with him at Wuthering Heights. Isabella becomes a prisoner in Heathcliff’s house and is abused by him: he verbally threatens her, throws a knife at her, and kills her dog. Eventually, Isabella manages to escape the house, settling down far away from the dreary moors to raise her son alone.

In contrast, Fennell’s version of Isabella can be characterized as a weird girl, whose youthful naïveté leads her to marry Heathcliff even after he insists that he does not love her, will never love her, and will treat her horribly. Hence, it is not only uncomfortable to watch Isabella’s complacency in tolerating Heathcliff’s degradations but also trivializes the abuse she faced from him in the novel. The film presents her as willingly participating in this degradation, whereas the original text makes clear that Heathcliff’s treatment of her was abuse, not something she consented to. The romanticization — or rather the sexualization — of abuse in the film is vile to say the least, as it absolves Heathcliff of any wrongdoing and instead suggests that Isabella enjoys being dehumanized. Rather than accurately portraying the realities of abusive relationships, Fennell turns Isabella into Heathcliff’s lap dog, so that their relationship fits nicely into her oversexualized rendition of a brutally torturous tale.

The most important thing to know about Brontë’s work is that it is not an easily digestible story; it is gruesome, calamitous, and sickening. Her novel has long been considered a masterpiece due to its portrayal of racial Othering and exclusion in colonial England, the lasting effects of intergenerational abuse, and the link between obsession and violence. Conversely, Fennell’s adaptation is messy and watered down, all tied up in a pretty little bow that fails to mask its disingenuity.

Some may argue that the quotation marks around the film’s title suggest that it is merely an interpretation. However, Fennell’s film borrows too much from the source material to be thought of as anything other than an adaptation. As much as I tried to see this film as its own entity separate from the novel, at the end of the day it cannot be totally removed from the context of the original work. As hard as Fennell tried to depict Wuthering Heights in her own way, she missed the mark entirely, making a mockery of Brontë’s magnum opus.

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Something is in the air in the movie world, and it isn’t love. For decades, romantic comedies were a Hollywood staple, drawing audiences in to laugh, cry, and believe, even just for a couple hours, that love could conquer all. When Harry Met Sally, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Sleepless in Seattle, Love Actually; these movies did more than just entertain, they contributed to a genre of classics that is becoming relatively historic. 

There’s something about classic rom-coms that make us feel overwhelmingly comforted and happy. Viewers are transported to a dream-like reality: charming bookstores, cozy cafes, and picturesque city streets. Many of the aforementioned iconic rom-coms emerged in the 80s, 90s, and early 00s before the era of smartphones and social media, before the digital age reshaped meet-cutes from run-ins at grocery stores to matches on dating apps. Seeing as peak romance seemed to exist in movies at this time, was love somehow easier, or was life simply better before technology took over our lives? This is a question I find myself returning to often, along with a certain nostalgia for a lifestyle I never experienced. I think this is partly why that era of rom-coms is so widely loved. In many ways, they are windows into a version of life that no longer feels easily accessible. Whether or not the past was truly more romantic, these films offered audiences a vision of connection that felt warm, hopeful, and deeply human — qualities becoming increasingly rare in today’s cinematic landscape.

In contrast, recent additions to the romantic comedy genre have been wiped of this dreamy quality. Films like Anyone but You and Ticket to Paradise did achieve streaming popularity, yet few have embedded themselves into our long-term cultural memory in the way that earlier films did. Today’s romance movies often lean into the drama of it all, emphasizing emotional conflict, messy “situationships,” or the toxicity of modern dating rather than the hopeful escapism that once defined the genre. Visually, many share the now-familiar “Netflix lighting” making movies feel interchangeable and somewhat bland, contributing to the sense that these films lack the sparkle they once were admired for. 

These changes in production might reflect a change in audience preferences, indicating perhaps that people find cynicism more entertaining than romance itself. However, even more compelling is the question of whether these films simply reflect the realities of modern dating, where traditional grand gestures such as sending flowers in the mail, running through a city to confess love, or showing up unannounced to express one’s romantic feelings have become increasingly rare; or whether the media we consume is quietly steering audiences away from imagining romance in these ways at all. 

Theatrical rom-com releases have declined significantly, in part because the genre typically falls into the mid-budget category ($5-50 million) that studios now consider financially risky compared to blockbuster franchises. As fewer of these films are produced and promoted, their cultural influence also diminishes. What are the effects of this decline?

Rom-coms help keep classic romance alive and have historically functioned as social examples for courtship, modeling communication, vulnerability, and intentional actions. Audiences may therefore lose exposure to the emotional openness and thoughtful gestures that are the backbone of a healthy relationship. These are especially important for youth to internalise, as they lack romantic experience at a young age and might require models of healthy relationships outside of their immediate families. 

More simply, rom-coms are fun to watch. They’re the perfect thing to wind down to after a stressful day at school or work. While psychologically compelling romantic dramas can be entertaining at times, they just do not produce the same warm, cozy feeling. 

Psychological research on romantic media suggests that its influence is complex. Some scholars argue that romance films can reinforce unhealthy expectations, encouraging the belief that individuals are “incomplete” without a partner and even reinforcing stigma around being single. Others argue that romance movies are sometimes overly unrealistic, accelerating processes of emotional intimacy that in reality take much longer to develop or solving deeply-rooted problems that only years of therapy can fix. Melanie Maimon, a professor of psychology at Bryant University, explains that films tend to emphasize passionate love, dramatic confessions and intense attractions, while overlooking the quieter forms of love that actually sustain long-term partnerships. Rather than dramatics, long-lasting relationships are built instead on companionate love, defined by friendship, emotional support, and shared routines. Since these aspects of companionship are not deemed as cinematically interesting as passionate love and grand gestures are, audiences are often left with an incomplete picture of how relationships actually endure. 

At the same time, other research highlights the constructive potential of romantic storytelling. Many rom-com conflicts arise from miscommunication, showing how failure to properly express feelings can block connection and emphasizing how successful relationships require vulnerability. These movies have also historically gotten humans through difficult times, thriving during crises like the Great Depression and wartime as a reliable form of escapist entertainment. Romantic films act both as a key to a transportive world of relatable characters with easily identifiable struggles, and as a warm security blanket we can wrap ourselves in when we need comfort and/or a laugh. 

Rom-coms once gave audiences a place to believe in grand gestures, awkward meet-cutes, and the possibility that love may be just around the corner. Today, as the genre grows quieter, perhaps the real question is not whether the rom-com is dying, but whether we are ready to lose the kinds of stories that once reminded us, albeit a little cheesily, that love could be all we need. 

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The most recent addition to Rian Johnson’s Knives Out franchise, Wake Up Dead Man, shows Daniel Craig reprising his role as detective Benoit Blanc, who visits a neo-Gothic church where this film’s victim, Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin), was murdered. Like the two previous films, we are presented with an ensemble of characters who were close to the victim and were present at the time of his death. The ensemble consists of Father Jud (Josh O’Connor) as well as a small group of Wicks’ devoted supporters who remain by his side despite his extremist behaviour and off-putting nature.

Let’s begin with the positives. Films — especially murder mysteries — are only as strong as their characters. I believe that this film created two characters who were well-rounded; namely, Father Jud and Benoit Blanc.

Father Jud especially is a convincing suspect the entire duration of the film: a boxer turned priest who turned to religion after accidentally killing a man. He comes to the church to revitalize it, yet he immediately distrusts Wicks. The two men don’t get along, as Wicks leads aggressive church services that effectively scare away new parishioners. Father Jud recognizes Wicks’ flaws, as well as the church’s flaws, and is dedicated to changing how things are run, even if it means making an enemy of Wicks. When Jud is accused of murdering Wicks, he still does everything he can to help those around him. In one scene, he puts the investigation on hold to talk to a distressed woman, Louise (Bridget Everett), whose mother is dying. Rather than focus on clearing his name, Jud instead spends hours talking to Louise and praying for her mother. Despite his own troubles, Jud remains a caring man dedicated to being there for the people around him. He represents the ideal hospitality of the church, accepting everyone who walks through its doors and doing his best to remain patient despite the obstacles being thrown at him.

Similarly, Benoit Blanc was also given room to thrive, as shown through his relationship with religion that develops over the course of the film. At first, he cannot understand the benefits of a religion that has a history of exclusionary practices. As the film moves forward and Benoit works alongside Jud, he begins to understand why people turn to faith in difficult times. He is present for Jud’s conversation with Louise and becomes aware of how benevolent the members of the church can be to those in need. By the end of the film he is a believer: not in God, but in Father Jud and his caring nature.

Despite the film’s success in its development of characters such as Father Jud and Benoit, it is not as successful in its characterization of the rest of the ensemble. Potential suspects are not fully fleshed out , namely Vera (Kerry Washington) and Lee (Andrew Scott). The film spends so much time and energy on the protagonists that it cast aside many of its side characters, despite the fact that they too were suspects in the crime at hand and played by various famous actors.

Namely, Vera’s storyline is never properly handled or developed, even though she was one of the few who ended up speaking out against Wicks, condemning his harmful treatment of others. Despite the gravity of this, her rebellion does not go any further, and she is never convincingly portrayed as a possible suspect. Instead, after her brief moment of defiance, she retreats into herself and is shown alone in a dark room, smoking a cigarette. Vera sitting practically motionless in this scene seems indicative of how the writers seemed to give up on her character. Rather than playing an active role in the remainder of the story, she is left in the dark, with no other purpose but to stare off into the distance. She should have been given a more meaningful conclusion, or at least a more potent contribution to the events of the narrative. While she does receive fifteen minutes of relevance when condemning Wicks, her fall from the spotlight lasts the entire second half of the film.

Lee is another character whose story was ill-conceived from the start, with his role somehow even less significant than Vera’s. Viewers are told he is a failing author who is writing his comeback novel, which is basically the only thing we learn about him throughout the entire film. Every other time he is on screen, he either contributes very little to the plot or is doing unhinged and inexplicable things, like building a moat around his house. He is not close to Wicks, nor is he given any motive that would lead him to commit the murder. In short, he does not advance the narrative in any way and is not necessary to the story.

It seems like this film created more characters than needed and did not spend enough time developing equally significant character arcs for all of them. They simply threw together an ensemble for the sake of the plot without fleshing out many of the characters into the story. The murder mystery aspect of the film was not very compelling, since half of the suspects seemed to have no clear motive and their potential guilt was seemingly disregarded by the screenwriters themselves. As much as I adored this film, it could have either spent more time developing the characters or gotten rid of some of them altogether, therefore providing the audience with more convincing suspects and a balanced story.

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As one of North America’s leading documentary festivals, the Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM) seeks primarily to “promote and reflect on the most stimulating and diverse visions of documentary cinema.” Last year, the festival was held from November 19, 2025 and November 29, 2025. Their selections bring a newfound renewal of the audience’s relationship with the world and with documentary as an art form. On November 27 and November 29 RIDM screened Partition at the Cinémathèque Québecoise, in collaboration with Festival International Du Film Ethnographique Du Québec (FIFEQ).

Allan is an anthropologist by trade, who has worked for the duration of her professional and scholarly career with Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The focus of her work has been documenting histories of displacement and dispossession in the camps across Lebanon, focusing on the testimonies of first generation refugees, dating back to the Nakba.

Partition has been in the works for many years in collaboration in camps across Lebanon. At the time the footage was filmed, the British Empire shot a number of films to document their colonial operations. However, much of this footage is not quite clear, and the images do not appear to be originals. That is because Prof. Allan filmed the footage from her own laptop, shot from digitized archives. The videos were then edited alongside resistance songs and the voices of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon — culminating in a project that challenges colonial authority. 

Partition is not concerned with preserving a linear narrative. In true oral history fashion, it recalls over a century of occupation and displacement through the sounds of echoes and overlaying  perspectives. It was described by the festival as “an invitation to rewrite Palestinian history through a decolonial lens, reflecting on the logic of the colonial gaze and the image’s complicity in its development.”

Partition is the fruit of much beautiful and creative labour, with the editing initially taking place in Lebanon and ending in Canada. Mahmoud Zeidan, a Palestinian refugee residing in Ain-al-Helweh camp in Lebanon, was co-editor on this project. Zeidan and Allan also worked together to co-found the Nakba Archive project in 2002, which comprises over 1,100 hours of footage with first-generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Julian Flavin, associate director of Critical Media Lab (CML) at McGill University, worked closely with Professor Allan on Partition as the project’s sound designer. Finally, Lisa Stevenson, co-director of the CML, also played quite the role in the film’s making. 

On November 29th, it was revealed that Partition won the Grand Prix of the national competition at RIDM.

On January 19, The Daily sat with Professor Allan to know the woman behind the lens, and understand the documentary’s ultimate goal. 

This interview had been edited for clarity and conciseness.

Youmna El Halabi for the McGill Daily (MD): How did the idea come about to make the documentary in the first place?

Professor Diana Allan (DA): All my work as a filmmaker and as an anthropologist has focused on histories of dispossession and displacement and exile. In addition to testimonial work, I’ve also worked as an ethnographer for many years with Palestinian communities, also in [Tyre,] Beirut, mainly in [Palestinian refugee camp, Sabra and] Shatila in Beirut and in Jal al Bahr, [attending] one of these informal gatherings called the tajamua’at in the South. 

My work has also been about memory, about processes of memory, and ephemeral forms of memory; highlighting the kind of narratives that maybe don’t form part of these canonical narratives of displacement, but are to do with childhood and love and labor, that are maybe less politically resonant, but are very important. I’ve been very interested in the processes of memory, and how photographs shape it. So this film kind of grows out of that, and is about what it means to encounter a kind of colonial archive from your past, from which you’ve been denied access, and what it means to experience that past, re-experience it, and reinvest it with Palestinian history and experience.

So it’s really about re-temporizing the Nakba as something that has been going on for 100 years, not 78, and scrutinizing the role that the British have played. I guess also as a British scholar, and filmmaker, I am scrutinizing my own formation within this imperial imagery as a British citizen, and it has periodically come into my work, but in a very marginal way.

As a British citizen, Allan had to consider her own relationship to these histories of Palestinian dispossession, and the fundamental role that the British have played in this history, which is often forgotten. The Palestinian plight is normally considered to have begun with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, often referred to as the Nakba, which means catastrophe in Arabic. However, Palestine has been under a nakba long before the established Israeli state, with British rule beginning in the 1910s.

MD: You mentioned that your work revolves a lot around memories and preserving memory. The movie is shot from the actual archives, and the zoom lens conveys that they are not original shots. How does the preservation of memory manifest in the way you chose to present the documentary? 

DA: Who do these histories belong to? Who do these materials belong to? These silent films were shot between 1917 and 1948 so I came across this collection sort of randomly. I’d heard that they’d just digitized their films. I came across this material that was amazing and revelationary to me in many different ways. When I contacted the archivist, and they quoted me a really exorbitant sum for use of this material, even after I’d explained that it was for an educational project — that it wasn’t for broadcast on television —  it was still exorbitant. At that point I was just like, I’m not paying a British government institution a huge amount of money to make a film about their dispossession of Palestinians. And one has to ask, well, who are these materials being preserved for? They should be preserved for stakeholder communities. 

This is a decolonial project. This is about bringing these histories back into contact with Palestinian communities. And so, I felt entirely justified in reclaiming them, exhuming them from this collection, and then bringing them back into circulation, bringing them back into relation with the people whose histories are being held in these collections. 

MD: How has winning the Grand Prix changed people’s perception and reception of the documentary? 

DA: It has made my work more visible to my colleagues, both in my own department and in the Faculty of Arts. They sent out a notice about the award in the arts newsletter, and that was very nice. The screening at the CML [on January 16] was really packed. Partition is the first fully-fledged film that has come out of the lab, in which a community of people who are working in film and sound is really being built. It was exciting to feel the force of that community and that kind of commitment.

—

Partition was more than just a documentary reclaiming Palestinian history. In a way, it works as a sort of epic, told through blurred images, and the enchanting voice of a woman singing Palestinian folkloric songs. While tragic in its reality, it is also a story on the importance of resilience and preservation of memory – and it is a must-watch.

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*Spoilers ahead!*

My 2026 New Year’s resolution is to read more books. While I love purchasing new ones, I decided that while home during winter break, I would gather the collection I had already bought but had never read and bring them back to McGill with me. One of those books was Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation, and I rang in 2026 while reading the story. 

When I started the book, the movie had just been released on Netflix, which further compelled me to read it quickly. People We Meet on Vacation was a well-anticipated film by Henry’s fans, and reached 17.2 million viewers in its release weekend. News of the book’s movie adaptation was announced in 2022, a year after its publication, and audiences were given a trailer in July 2025 to much buzz. However, after reading the book and, directly after, watching the film adaptation, it’s clear to me that the mixed reviews of fans and critics met by the latter were warranted.

A quick summary of the plot for those who are unfamiliar: Poppy Wright and Alex Nilsen, polar opposites, meet at the University of Chicago and grow to become best friends. Each summer, they go on a trip together, travelling to places like Squamish and New Orleans, and grow even closer. Two years before the story’s main events, on a trip to Croatia, something happened that caused them to separate for 2 years only to reunite for one more trip, which the story’s events center around. Would this summer allow them to work things out? A classic storyline. It was an entertaining read that gave me a break from the theory I’d been reading for my classes. 

To begin with my positive impressions of the film version of People We Meet on Vacation, I think that it is visually pleasing. The various gorgeous vacation spots, the bright colors, and the casting all contributed to a visually easy watch. The storyline on its own was interesting, but its utter differences from the book are the basis of my criticism for the film as an adaptation.

As a reader, I have a few strong opinions about the book itself. I personally believed the tension and yearning between the best friends was frustrating because it was so obvious to me they were in love with each other throughout the entire book. It’s annoying to think about the romantic partners they didn’t ever feel “right” with. How their failed relationships weren’t the wake-up calls needed to realize they  wanted each other the whole time. While I know that’s the whole point of the romance novel, I found it hard to fully grasp the idea they had been holding out on each other  for so long despite all of their history, physical, and emotional affection.

There are multiple inconsistencies between the book and the film. From specificities like the university the main duo attend, and the location of their wedding; to larger things like how it was a work trip in the film rather than a non-sponsored trip in the book that brought Poppy and Alex back together, as well as the fact that Croatia was not mentioned in the film, these differences impact one’s perception of the storyline. To go more in depth, readers of Henry’s book would know that Croatia was where Poppy and Alex first kissed, which caused their relationship to fall apart, hence the reason why the story even exists. It’s the event they avoid discussing during the entire summer. To take that away and reduce the plot to the events that take place in Tuscany is to remove crucial contexts and serious plot points from the original narrative.

Another detail being criticised by fans is the fact that Alex’s tumultuous background was neglected in the film. If a viewer hadn’t read the book, they would never know that his mother passed away during childbirth, and that he had to raise his brothers by himself while his father mourned the loss. They would also never know that he got a vasectomy because of Poppy’s pregnancy scare. These are all important to understand Alex’s character and the depth of his and Poppy’s emotional connection.

Henry was inspired by When Harry Met Sally (1989). While I do see the connections between both narratives, I didn’t feel the same while watching People We Meet on Vacation as I do when watching When Harry Met Sally. With the latter, I was satisfied with the couple’s long-awaited happy ending; with the former, I simply felt irritated and a little disappointed. The endings of both films are predictable, but even knowing what is going to happen, the development in People We Meet on Vacation wasn’t strong enough to make me feel relieved about their reconciliation. Viewers of the movie can understand that Poppy and Alex’s relationship is strong, but they are not as privy to its complex development as those who read the book. To cushion the blow, some critics believe that the story is better suited as a miniseries, which would give ample space for the development of the storyline and all characters. Meanwhile, the two-hour-long movie feels rushed, especially in comparison to the book.

People We Meet on Vacation can be considered a classic in the contemporary novel universe, and I enjoyed reading it for the most part. But after watching an attempted film adaptation, my feelings about the entire storyline are more mixed than ever. This review is not to take away from people’s enjoyment of the film; a viewer with a penchant for rom-coms who had never read the book would love the movie’s classic friends-to-lovers storyline. However, if you choose to immerse yourself in the People We Meet on Vacation universe, I recommend either reading the book or watching the movie, but not both. While the endings are the same, there are so many inconsistencies that either strengthen or diminish the plot, so it’s best to choose one version of the story and enjoy it.

The post From Paper to Screen: People We Meet on Vacation appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Six Taiwanese filmmakers came together on November 23 in one particularly insightful panel discussion, “Navigating Taiwanese Cinema”, to consider the unique landscape of documentary filmmaking in Taiwan. They mulled over what it meant to be making films in a context where non-fiction filmmaking was only truly able to develop after the lifting of martial law in 1987.

While many of the panelists’ films handled political questions more directly, such as Wei-Lin Hung’s documentary, K’s Room, which tells the story of a famous Taiwanese English teacher and political prisoner, director Yi- Shan Lo discussed an alternative approach. In her film, After the Snowmelt, in which a young woman returns to the Himalayans to process her grief for a friend who has passed away, the personal comes first.

“For me, it’s an intentional choice not to include the political problems of Taiwan. Me and my friend, we met each other at a protest, maybe 10 years ago when we were high school students […], so actually the story’s background is very political in terms of the Taiwan-China relationship, and yet I didn’t include this background in the story,” Lo said during the panel.

She hopes, though, that the political context might permeate the film anyway, somehow reaching the viewer in their experience of watching the film.

“Through telling the story very personally, I believe that somehow at the end, the historical background will ultimately come out,” Lo added.

Nadia Louis-Desmarchais also found herself navigating the personal-political divide over the course of her seven-year project to document the experiences of biracial women in Quebec. While she initially intended to make the film entirely in the third-person, using sit-down interviews with other women about their experiences, she realized over the course of the project that her own story was also at the heart of her drive to make the film.

“It was through meeting those women that I realized that even if we didn’t grow up together, we all had lived through the same things,” Louis-Desmarchais said during a Q&A after the screening of her film, Recomposée.

By chance, it was returning to her father’s collection of childhood photographs and home videos that sparked the idea to weave her own story into the film.

“Since it was a film that came together over many years, eventually, I looked in my family’s house, with my father and all the tapes he had filmed. The tapes were all still there, in the house, in a very dusty library,” Louis-Desmarchais explained. “And there I found, really, the explanation for who I was. You know, when you see yourself as a child, it’s like seeing the real version of yourself. And it revealed a lot to me, and that was, ultimately, the way in which I began to think about adding my own presence to the film through these images from my past.”

As it turns out, audiences resonated with Louis-Desmarchais’ blend of the personal and the political—the film won both the People’s Choice Award and the Student Jury Award, as well as gaining a special mention in the running for the Magnus-Isacsson Award for socially-conscious filmmaking.

Several films about Palestine also earned awards at the festival, including one from McGill’s own professor of anthropology, Diana Allan. Allan’s film, Partition, combines little-before-seen footage of the British occupation of Palestine from 1917 to 1948 with audio recordings of Palestinian songs and stories. This film, too, weaves the personal in with the political, in moments of direct address from the audio recordings. It was screened by McGill’s Critical Media Lab on January 14.

In the short film category, Momentum, which uses footage shot by the filmmaker’s father during the Second Intifada, won the Special Jury Prize. Nada El-Omari’s film is composed solely of these hand-held video recordings, on top of which she paints and writes her own perspectives. Throughout the film, she wonders what pushed her father to record these moments — why these people? On screen, there are moments of violence, but also scenes of dancing and children playing.

As a representative from the Special Jury summed up, “[We award this prize] to a film that weaves together the intimate and the political, for a daughter revisiting images shot by her father twenty years ago, for time that repeats itself in a loop, a camera that mimics what our spirit could grasp in moments of uprising, and sound that mimics the experience of living under the military occupation of Palestine.”

Over the course of just 19 minutes, El-Omari explores not just the history of the Second Intifada, but also her relationship to her father, and what these images reveal about his experience.

While the festival included films from across the world, it ended with a closing film from much closer to home: Andrés Livov’s quiet, beautiful treatment of the Lac-Saint-Jean blueberry industry in his film Les blues du bleuet. From interviews with migrant workers who live in blueberry camps to sweeping shots of industrial harvesting machines and back down again to elderly inhabitants who now pick blueberries for pies, but remember their childhoods of picking by hand to support their families, the film offers a gently kaleidoscopic picture of Quebec’s famous berry.

Fittingly, for such a soft-spoken movie, Livov opened his speech with a simple statement: “I’m terrified,” which he repeated a second time, louder, at the audience’s request. Despite his hesitancy when it comes to public speaking, Livov obviously has a gift for prompting people to open up on camera, and an ear for poignant stories or remarks. Although the blueberries are the focus of the film, there are also deep windows into the lives of people who have been touched, one way or another, by the blueberry industry — several of whom were present in the room for the screening.

The closing film continued a pattern that was present throughout the festival: directors, editors, cinematographers, and interview subjects were often present in the room, excited to take part in what was often the first screening of their films. Often, when directors thanked participants in their speeches, those same participants stood up in the audience, greeted by thunderous applause from all around them. This intimacy and engagement was truly fitting for a festival where so many of the film — even the ones that dealt with intractable international issues — were clearly so personal to their directors, and where so many of the films blurred the line between filmmaker and subject, or even participant and audience.

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As my stress levels faced a meteoric rise, so too did Heated Rivalry‘s popularity. Originally premiering online on Canadian streaming service Crave on November 28 2025, the show quickly won audiences’, as well as critics’, hearts, becoming the Crave’s most watched original series to date. It was then picked
up by HBO Max to be distributed to American and global audiences.

The sports romance follows two rival hockey players in the fictional Major Hockey League: Canadian Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Russian Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie). The pair first face off in their rookie season, kickstarting a secret love affair that spans a decade as their careers and the perceived animosity between them escalates.

The show’s success might be quickly dismissed and reduced by those who attribute it to the physical attractiveness of the stars and the many steamy sex scenes. However, what has truly captured viewers’ attention is its depiction of the reality of queer existence in men’s professional sports. The closeted players show tremendous vulnerability as they navigate prejudices that hinder their relationship; a moving portrait of the flaws of acceptance and inclusion in our society.

During their press tour, the show’s cast and crew expressed shock over the show’s reception. However, having been an avid TV show watcher since the pandemic (quiz me about matching the show to the
streaming service), I was less surprised. In recent years, the cultural landscape has seen a rise in content about same-sex couples, particularly male ones. Netflix’s Heartstopper and Young Royals series, both about young male couples, have large audiences, despite the latter’s original Swedish dialogue and setting being more foreign to North American viewers. The primary audience of these series tends to lean towards young females, something The New York Times recently affirmed in an article containing Heated Rivalry‘s statistical demographics.

Why would women want to read and watch love stories between two male characters? And why are these shows being marketed towards them? Heated Rivalry’s press tour initially targeted media outlets with a largely female audience, such as Teen Vogue. This is deeply political. Love stories made for women typically offer no reprieve from their societal subordination. In sex scenes, women are often dominated and objectified. When the time comes to be emotionally vulnerable, the woman is relegated to the role of caretaker, tending to her male love interest’s emotional wounds. For female viewers, this is exhausting.

Hence, it is not only in fantasy stories of princes and dragons that they look for an escape but in the dynamics of Heated Rivalry and other similar shows. When there is no woman in whom the woman might see herself, she can become a passive observer. If she wants to, she can choose to identify with a male, where she can momentarily occupy a position of authority and explore masculine aspects of her identity. “Her sexual fantasy needs not equate to her sexual reality,” Professor of Sociology and Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University, Clare Sears tells The Guardian. In mainstream media depictions of same-sex male relationships, both men are vulnerable with each other, with the role of caretaker and investment in the relationship shifting more fluidly between a couple who occupy the same position in the patriarchal hierarchy. This resonates more deeply in the world of men’s professional sports; an environment that fosters and upholds toxic ideals of masculinity.

The show might particularly score (allow me this one bad hockey pun) for Montrealers and McGill students, being set and filmed in Montreal and other parts of Canada. Director Jacob Tierney and cast members such as François Arnaud, who plays hockey captain Scott Hunter, are both from Montreal and have been making promotional appearances in the city since the show’s release. One of the show’s romantic leads, Shane Hollander, plays for the fictional Montreal Metros team. It was only fitting that the Montreal Canadiens played the trailer for the series during a recent game on Pride Night, an act that received praise as it rebelled against the NHL’s controversial public stance on inclusion in the League.

This is not just an article urging you to watch Heated Rivalry or read Game Changers. If it were, I would conclude by praising its embracing of sexual diversity and the underlying love and longing between its characters. A second season has already been commissioned to be released in the next couple of years, if you find you enjoy it. However, more importantly, I hope to convey that it is ignorant to reduce Heated Rivalry to smut and dismiss any of its viewers as simply insatiable. The series holds personal value for viewers, providing a hopeful escape from harsh realities that women and queer individuals face. Moreover, the show’s popularity has sparked a public re-evaluation among fans of the National Hockey League’s values and self-presentation, something that continues to be incredibly necessary.

The post On The (Not So Surprising) Smash Success of Heated Rivalry appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The next twenty minutes would snap me out of my mildly sleep-addled reverie. 

Directed by Canadian auteur Gavin Michael Booth, Island Life is a drama between neighbours. One neighbour plays deafening house music, which drones on in the background throughout the short film’s entire 23-minute runtime; and its organized crime unit neighbours, our protagonists, struggle to lay low in contention with the noise. Shot in one take à la Birdman in a single apartment, the constant tension in Island Life can be attributed not just to the booming background music, but to the volatile frontman of the organized crime unit. Played expertly by local Montreal talent Ben Peters, our protagonist swings wildly between authoritative pack leader and straight-up psychological dictator. Island Life has been admitted into renowned film festivals such as Festival Regard and Fantasia Festival, and has won awards for Best Actor (Ben Peters) and Best Original Screenplay at the Terror in the Bay Film Festival. 

Island Life has been in the works since 2019, when it was first conceptualized by Andres Cabrera Rucks, the film’s co-producer and writer, when he was still a McGill student. “I woke up in the middle of the night because my neighbour was playing music, and the whole story just came to mind over the next couple of days,” recalls Rucks in an interview with the Daily. At the time, the short film had been slated to be produced in conjunction with TVM, McGill’s resident student production house, which Rucks had been a producer at. However, the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic shut down any possibility of the project’s execution, which would subsequently be delayed. However, Island Life remained in Rucks’s mind, and he would approach Copti, whom he had met at TVM’s training programme, to help produce the film at the end of 2021. The two are now part of PanArt Productions, a production company founded by Copti which helped to produce Island Life.

“It’s hard to meet people who are as crazy about something as you are,” comments Rucks. “If not for that training session, neither this movie nor our friendship would have existed.”

According to Anya Kasuri, President of TVM, the TVM training programme is a mandatory facet of TVM membership, teaching basic technical and camera skills. “Besides taking service requests from other clubs at McGill, part of our mandate is to help students carry out their creative projects,” she explained in an interview with the Daily. “A student can come to us with any script or idea, and from there revise it and put together a production team of our members to help realize their vision. We build a community where we get to make films together, and it’s great.”

The leap from making a student film to an independently-produced one is no smooth path. The film industry is notoriously one of the hardest to break into, especially without prior connections. For one, making a film is expensive. Despite The Brutalist’s critical success last year, director Brady Corbet reportedly made zero profit from it, even with the three-and-a-half-hour-long film’s impressively low budget. Moreover, the film industry is rife with nepotism and labour shortages. These, along with spikes in production costs and growing concerns of artificial intelligence (AI) replacing key jobs in screenwriting and violating intellectual property regulations, has led to many professionals leaving the industry altogether. 

Copti and Rucks’s tenacity thus becomes all the more laudable. “We were basically starting from scratch, without many connections in the industry considering how we are both not professionals,” says Copti. “This was our first time making a movie with a real budget and really playing by all the conventions of the film industry.” Facebook groups became their go-to resource for finding art directors, assistant camera operators, and even their director Booth. In 2022, casting began, and upon reaching out to the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA), the team screened 158 auditioning actors from Montreal and the wider Quebec area for five roles, narrowing them down through a two-step process entailing an online demo and an in-person audition involving chemistry reads. 

Casting and employment was only the first hurdle. More onerously, there was the matter of costs. The team applied for grants from the Quebec Arts Council and, towards the end of 2022, launched a crowd-funding campaign, which raised slightly over $16,000. All in all, the budget came up to a cool $40,000 consisting of crowd funds and investments from the crew’s own pockets.

“It was really about learning at every stage,” muses Copti. “This whole process has taught us a lot about the independent cinema industry in Canada, and now we’re much better equipped to handle future projects.”

“We were the most ambitious that we could be with this project, especially as two non-professionals,” expresses Rucks. “Having that much money to work with, creating a one-take short film and submitting it to festivals with no guarantee of success. We probably should have started smaller, on a smaller scale with a smaller budget and team, but we just didn’t.” 

At McGill, TVM boosts aspiring filmmakers or those simply interested in visual communications by imparting both technical and industry knowledge. “I know many TVM alumni who aren’t currently working in film, but continue to use skills they learned from TVM in their careers,” asserts Nicolas McGuire, former Executive Producer at TVM from 2024-2025. “As a marketing major myself, I feel that TVM has taught me a lot of things about the marketing industry that I wouldn’t have learned otherwise.”

TVM also provides numerous resources for students interested in honing specific applied skills, or just learning about film in general. As the film industry faces a shortage of technically specialized workers, these tools become all the more valuable for aspiring filmmakers. Kasuri, who hopes to work in film, expressed how TVM has familiarized her with the technical and practical side of filmmaking, supplementing the more theoretical approaches of her World Cinemas courses at McGill. 

“The best thing about TVM is that it’s really easy to become a part of it. You just need to want to learn,” states Sascha Siddiqui, TVM’s Graphics Coordinator, who joined TVM specifically to learn how to edit despite not having much prior experience. “We have camera cheat sheets, instruction sheets for editing software, and so much more. Any member who wants to brush up on their technical knowhow can also attend our monthly training sessions or tech director’s office hours.” 

On the note of student filmmaking, Rucks and Copti encourage student filmmakers to be bold in their work and artistic passions, but to be pragmatic about it too. “It all boils down to whether you want to make films as a hobby or as a career,” declares Rucks, whose goal is to live off his work as a full-time screenwriter and producer. “It’s the best time in history to make films as a hobby because you have all the equipment you could ever need and the ability to find like-minded people through the Internet; but arguably the worst time to make films as a career because the market is just so saturated. When it comes to that, you want to make sure that you’re telling a really good story that shows off your abilities in whatever role.” 

“I started out making films with my friends in high school, which gradually expanded into starting PanArt Productions and making advertisements for companies,” recounts Copti. “At the time, I wanted to make a living from production. However, when I started working for a public relations agency, I realized the similarities in both of them — you know, Excel sheets, lots of calls and emails — and I realized I could make meaningful films without necessarily having them be my bread and butter. Now, I mostly make films as an activist; not to make money, but to raise awareness of social issues.”

Film is a visual medium. If a picture speaks a thousand words, then a film, surely, speaks at least a million, and only a small portion of it in dialogue. Despite the pressing concerns that surround film and cinema, there remains a sense of optimism in both Rucks and Copti, as well as the students from TVM. “Art will always have a place in the world,” Kasuri avers, “and I think people are really beginning to appreciate the authenticity that comes with independent filmmaking.” 

And, perhaps they are. Anora, an independent film, swept the Oscars and brought home Best Picture in March 2025. More recently, Materialists, distributed and produced by indie collective A24, surpassed $100 million in global box office revenue. Good films, especially with the appeal of being shown in IMAX, are evidently bringing audiences back to the theatres.

When asked about their hopes for Island Life by way of awards, the PanArt duo are more concerned with the film’s impact on its viewers and staff. “This is the first official film I’ve made that hasn’t had an element of social activism in it,” Copti remarks. “I hope people are entertained, but I also hope to show them that they too can do awesome stuff.” As he puts it, they took many “daring steps” in making Island Life, which created a great deal of uncertainty. However, these also led to many unprecedented, fulfilling outcomes: going to festivals, meeting new people. “This creativity is part of the movie industry, but even beyond that, I hope to inspire people to take steps out of their comfort zones.”

Meanwhile, Rucks just shrugs. “To be completely honest, I’ve never really even cared about an award,” he says. “I just hope that it helps us, the actors and the crew involved gain some credibility in the industry.” As an afterthought: “Selfishly, I hope people think it’s well-written too.”

Island Life is available on YouTube from 22 December on The Film Shortage channel.

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Unfortunately, at the time of its release, the series struggled to gain mainstream recognition. Airing at a time when female-centered narratives were hardly network staples, Gilmore Girls lacked the award-season credibility that buoyed its contemporaries. It lived in the margins of early-2000s television until 2014, when Netflix acquired the streaming rights, and that single distribution shift rewrote its fate. Younger viewers, specifically Generation Z, discovered the fast-talking Lorelai—pregnant at sixteen with her daughter, later best friend Rory—and the imperious matriarch, Emily, who demanded nothing but the best from her lineage. 

Each of these women represent not only distinct personalities but a relatable combination of traumas: the weight of expectation, the impulse toward rebellion, the ache of misunderstanding. Though Lorelai and Rory’s rapid-fire rapport tends to define the show’s public image, its core excellence lies in Lorelai’s volatile relationship with Emily. Halfway through the pilot, the two slip into an argument so expertly rendered that it functions simultaneously as backstory, exposition, and emotional thesis. The scene depicts a mother-daughter dynamic that’s both suffocating and symbiotic—a blueprint for intergenerational tension that still resonates with audiences today.

This resonance, though, extends beyond the series’ portrayal of family. Gilmore Girls has become synonymous with the arrival of autumn, and each year, as temperatures drop, fans queue up its theme song: Carole King’s “Where You Lead I Will Follow.” Paradoxically, much of the series does not actually take place during fall. Its seasonal identity was instead forged through its use of saturated film stock, shot on 16mm and 35mm, delivering a soft, grainy warmth increasingly rare in the modern era of hyper-sharp digital imagery. For millennials and Generation Z, the visual palette offers an aesthetic nostalgia: a retreat into a world without omnipresent screens, unattainable real-estate prices, or the daily churn of political dread. Gilmore Girls exists in a bubble; hermetically sealed, improbably cozy, and forever witty. 

However, nostalgia can only gloss over so much. A product of its time, the series carries the unmistakable signature of early-2000s whiteness.  Its attempts at diversity, while present, are limited and often stereotypical. Lane Kim, Rory’s best friend, is a Korean-American teen, boxed into the trope of a strict immigrant mother and a discreetly rebellious daughter who’d pick a Whopper over kimchi any day. Michel, the only Black character of note, remains largely defined by his arrogance and was only retroactively confirmed as gay in the 2016 revival. The reboot itself did little to address these shortcomings, instead drawing criticism for jokes aimed at faceless plus-sized characters. Even when the show was first airing, creator Amy Sherman-Palladino was not shy about her fervent love for Israel, sprinkling in odes to the country: from a “Welcome to Israel” poster in Rory’s bedroom to a scene in which Rory spouts Zionist talking points while debating another student at Yale. As Sherman-Palladino’s political stances have become more visible, these moments have pulled the series into contemporary controversy it was never built to withstand. 

Still, the show’s appeal relentlessly endures. Each year millions return to Stars Hollow for the same reasons: the sharpness of its writing and the meticulous sincerity of its relationships. In a media landscape crowded with prestige dramas and cynical reboots, Gilmore Girls remains powered by this increasingly rare blend of talents. Its legacy as an autumnal watching ritual persists not merely out of nostalgia, but out of love for the female and family representation it provides.

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Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025) is the newest of many screen adaptations of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel of the same name. Its star-studded cast, consisting of well-known actors like Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, and Mia Goth, has lavished the film with much attention over the past few months, becoming a large hit in both theatres and on Netflix. Frankenstein is my favourite book, so suffice to say I had been looking forward to this movie since I had first heard about it. Before its release, I had been skeptical of the film particularly because of the casting, but decided to give it the benefit of the doubt. 

I was pleasantly surprised by Jacob Elordi’s performance, which was by far the best part of this film. He conveyed the innocence and vulnerability of the Creature even when barely uttering a single word. When he first comes to life, all the Creature can name is his creator,  Victor Frankenstein: the film’s titular character, played by Oscar Isaac, who complains about the Creature’s limited vocabulary. Elizabeth — Victor’s brother’s fiancée, played by Mia Goth — suggests that “for the time being that word means everything to [the Creature].” Elordi’s performance displays  just this, as his acting conveys the creature’s initial attachment to Victor through his facial expressions, bodily gestures, and his emotional utterances of that singular word. Later on, once Victor starts abusing the Creature, Elordi perfectly embodies how love and awe morphs into fear and distrust as he realizes that Victor doesn’t care for him. Throughout the film, Elordi successfully depicts the anger and sadness that the Creature feels towards his doomed existence and the man who gave him life. 

It is obviously unrealistic for adaptations to be entirely faithful to the source material and changes to the original story are inevitable. While I understand that, I wasn’t a huge fan of some of the changes made in this film. At times it felt like del Toro watered down the themes of revenge, grief, and the dangers of messing with uncontrollable forces from the original story. He also removed the complexities of Victor and the Creature. Instead of portraying them as morally grey, he turned them into one-note characters, with one representing good and the other evil. Victor is shown to be a typical ‘mad scientist’ who cares about nothing other than his experiment, rather than a young naïve man who, despite his flaws, cares deeply for his friends and family. Similarly, in the film, the Creature is not a murderous fiend who kills Victor’s loved ones, but an innocent, benevolent being. Meanwhile, in the novel, while the creature is innocent at the start of the novel, the trauma his mistreatment had inflicted upon him eventually drives him to vengeful murder, leading him to become as evil as Victor. His violence and anger is a product of the abuse he endures and the knowledge that he is destined to be feared and abandoned by everyone around him, including his own creator. As much as I adored seeing the Creature depicted as an intelligent being rather than a brainless monster, del Toro leaned too much into solely showing the Creature’s positive traits, consequently ridding him of the complexity which makes him such an interesting character. By depicting  him as innocent throughout the film, del Toro stripped away the most important part of the Creature’s development. 

One of the main things I have learned in every english and creative writing course that I have taken is that one should strive to show, not tell, so that the audience can interpret stories for themselves. Rather than trusting the viewers of this film to independently analyze its themes, del Toro hit them over the head with the original story’s themes. For instance, Victor accidentally shoots his brother, William, who tells Victor in his final moments that “[he is] the monster.” Though I agree that Victor is a monster of sorts, this scene broke the illusion that I was watching a film. I could no longer examine Victor’s character for myself because rather than allowing the viewer to analyze the scene in their own way as Shelley did in the novel, del Toro was directly telling the audience how we were supposed to feel about Victor. Though the film attempts to emulate Shelley’s work, it falls flat at times like these, when viewers are deprived of the chance to apply their own meaning to the scene, as del Toro’s intended meaning is thrust upon them. 

Another scene that reflects this sentiment is, when Victor, on his deathbed, reunites with the Creature  and they forgive each other. In the scene, Victor extends an olive branch by looking directly at the Creature and calling him “[his] son.” Though this was meant to be a vulnerable moment of reconciliation, it made me cringe in the theatre. Once again del Toro was explicitly shoving the story’s themes down his audiences’ throat without providing them the space to come to conclusions about it themselves. Victor and the Creature taking on a (very toxic and abusive) father/son relationship is apparent in the film, so having the characters explicitly make reference to it felt unrealistic and ultimately cheapened the moment. 

This abovementioned ending as a whole rubbed me the wrong way, because it deviated too much from the source material. While the purpose of an adaptation is to show a different side to a particular story, the ending of this film deviated too much from the story’s original message. For one, Shelley’s novel is a cautionary tale against playing God and attempting to manipulate forces beyond one’s control. Her story ends with Victor dying and the Creature running off after insinuating an imminent suicide attempt due to his self-hatred. As grim as the ending is, it is ultimately a realistic conclusion to a story filled with tragedy, murder, and grief and exemplifies why not all stories need a happy ending. Forced resolutions not only feel out of place, but, in cases such as this story, they risk undermining the rest of the plot’s build-up, events and desired atmosphere. 

Despite the many issues I had with this film, I do believe that it is still one of the most accurate screen adaptations of Shelley’s story due to the inclusion of characters such as Captain Robert Walton, who introduces us to Victor and is integral to the telling of his story. The film is also a good gateway to learning about the original story, as although it alters many details from the novel, it does retain the key concepts and supports Shelley’s vision, thereby allowing audiences to easily transition from the film to the novel without having to worry about being lost or confused. I encourage people to see this film if they’re interested in the world of Frankenstein and I hope that through this experience, they will be encouraged to read the novel and discover the origin of this famous and pertinent tale. 

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