Seventh Son (2014), an overcooked fantasy-adventure directed by Sergei Bodrov and adapted loosely from Joseph Delaney’s 'The Spook’s Apprentice', was a troubled Universal–Legendary Pictures co-production whose delays, rewrites, and ballooning budget became as notorious as the film itself. Set in a vaguely medieval landscape of witches, knights, and prophetic farm boys, it stars Jeff Bridges (yes, it's a JB double bill on Movie Oubliette!) gargling his way through a swamp of dialogue, Julianne Moore relishing her turn as an evil sorceress, and Ben Barnes looking perpetually bewildered as the titular seventh son of a seventh son. Game of Thrones heartthrob Kit Harington and Tomb Raider Alicia Vikander are also in the movie, apparently. Should this magical relic be sprung from the oubliette or should it be thrown off a cliff and left for dead? Find out!

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Our fourth bonus preview of forthcoming attractions that Conrad and Joe Lipsett caught at TIFF focuses on two British thrillers with a similar theme: children being locked in basements! The first, Good Boy (no, not the haunted house film told through the eyes of a dog), sees an aimless and hedonistic teenager (Anson Boon) get abducted by Chris (Stephen Graham) and Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough), and subjected to their unorthodox approach to parenting. The second, Bad Apples, stars Saoirse Ronan as a primary school teacher in the UK who, though an unfortunate sequence of events, ends up trapping a foul-mouthed, disruptive student in her basement. One is a compelling character drama that recognises and eschews genre conventions, the other is a cuttingly satirical black comedy. Did we like them? Find out!

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Our TIFF coverage continues with two horror-inflected films centring indigenous characters, and using hauntings as a method of exploring generational and personal trauma. In Taratoa Stappard's Mārama, a Māori woman travels from freshly colonised New Zealand to a creepily gothic English manor in the Yorkshire moors to uncover secrets about her family's past. Meanwhile, Bretten Hannam's At the Place of Ghosts (Sk+te'kmujue'katik) follows two estranged Mi’kmaw brothers' quest into the Canadian woods to avenge spirits that haunt them from their childhood.

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