\n\tMcGurrin emerges as the movie\u2019s MVP for playing a scrappy 13-year-old left questioning her family and faith \u2014 basically everyone and everything around her \u2014 after her mother chooses to take time away from her family to \u201cself-actualize.\u201d That leaves her father, Joe Gravel (John Reynolds), to pick up the pieces of a fractured family as he cares for Beatrice and her sister, Chloe, played by Lauren MacRae.<\/p>\n
\n\tLanzillotta directed Purgatory from a screenplay by Christine Speer and looked to get into Beatrice\u2019s head as, while naive as a coming-of-age tween, she\u2019s also hyper-aware and traumatized by her disrupted home and school life. \u201cIt\u2019s like when feelings are on top of your skin, everyone does feel a little fake around you and doesn\u2019t feel what you\u2019re feeling and you wonder, \u2018Does anyone see how I\u2019m feeling,\u2019\u201d the director explains.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-hollywoodreporter-2021\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tPurgatory<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tToronto Film Festival<\/p>\n
\n\tBut in a small town where empathy has virtually disappeared to be replaced by heartlessness and even savagery among Beatrice\u2019s high school friends and their parents, the exception and vital opening for tenderness in Purgatory comes with J.K. Simmons as Father Malone.<\/p>\n
\n\tHis Catholic priest character, as he has Beatrice in his confession booth, becomes a kind and assuring mentor for a young girl as he teaches her difficult truths about growing up while her life is under siege. \u201cI wanted him to feel like her friend, her confidante, and her therapist all at the same time, and also this wonderful person to guide her,\u201d Lanzillotta explains, even as Father Malone and Beatrice are separated by a screen in the confessional. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tHere the director also puts her film\u2019s audience in its own confessional chair, should their own dark secrets around familial divorce resonate. After all, during the 1980s when Purgatory is set, family skeletons generally remained deeply hidden in the closet. \u201cI do feel like I\u2019m of the Oprah generation, where we talk about things more. And amazingly, people still don\u2019t talk about things enough,\u201d Lanzillotta insists.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tPurgatory<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\ttoronto film festival<\/p>\n
\n\tOffering the lead role of Beatrice to McGurrin, whose earlier credits were for kids TV series, was a gamble, but one that Lanzillotta felt confident taking after the young actor\u2019s audition. \u201cShe (McGurrin) was clearly the best one to play Beatrice. It\u2019s no best or better. She was her. And her faces with talent. She doesn\u2019t need to say much for you to feel her feelings,\u2019 the director insists.<\/p>\n
\n\tThere are comic touches in Purgatory when a local cop, Officer Boyd Safety, tries to warn an assembly at Holy Trinity Assembly against predatory strangers, or a teacher, played by Mary Walsh, warns her class with a fire-and-brimstone presentation about purgatory. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tMeanwhile, the coming-of-age dramedy has Beatrice pursuing a plan, Parent Trap-style, to reunite her parents as her mother, Marianne Gravel (Elliot) takes a toy boy, played by Jack Innanen. That\u2019s even as she continues to question her marriage and is torn by the push-pull of being a mother and meeting her own emotional needs.<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd meanwhile, a now take-charge Mr. Gravel has found his own girlfriend, which is followed by Beatrice making an outburst against a teacher during a talk on sex education, and her sister Chloe going missing. Lanzillotta insists she has left it to audiences for her bittersweet comedy to judge whether Beatrice\u2019s parents have done well, or not, by their children amid escalating family tensions.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI really want that to be a complex conversation about how you feel about her (Marianne Gravel), because none of us is perfect, right?\u201d the director says. \u201cAnd most people with the dad, they end up falling in love with him, which is really a testament to John Reynold\u2019s performance as Joe,\u201d she adds about the American actor best known for playing Drew Gardner in Search Party and Officer Callahan in Stranger Things.<\/p>\n
\n\tPurgatory, which is being shopped at TIFF: The Market by Gersh\u2019s Jessica Lacey, is produced by Lanzillotta, Simone Kirlew, Aldo Lanzillotta, Denis Gumustas, Mark O\u2019Neill and Gus Murray.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What\u2019s a girl to do when your parents split up and leave your sheltered, suburban home and school…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":889391,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,84397,344,214806,396986,396987,18033],"class_list":["post-889390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-j-k-simmons","tag-movies","tag-the-bear","tag-tiff-2026","tag-toronto-2026","tag-toronto-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/889390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=889390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/889390\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/889391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=889390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=889390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=889390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}