{"id":893473,"date":"2026-09-12T22:02:13","date_gmt":"2026-09-12T22:02:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/893473\/"},"modified":"2026-09-12T22:02:13","modified_gmt":"2026-09-12T22:02:13","slug":"purgatory-review-coming-of-age-drama-debuts-at-tiff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/893473\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Purgatory’ Review: Coming-of-Age Drama Debuts at TIFF"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s the 1980s and a 13-year-old girl who talks to God returns from summer camp to find her home for sale \u2014 no, this isn\u2019t an update on \u201cAre You There God? It\u2019s Me, Margaret.<\/a>\u201d But \u201cPurgatory<\/a>,\u201d directed by Lindsay Lanzillotta and written by Christine Speer, seems to have taken cues from Judy Blume\u2019s novel and its 2023 film<\/a> adaptation. Decked out in a Halloween-costume version of the \u201880s, this plodding but amiable coming-of-age might be more precisely called a coming-of-agnostic: the tale of a Catholic teenager whose pubescent growing pains shake her faith in the things she once held sacred.<\/p>\n

For Beatrice Gravel (Ruby McGurrin), those articles of faith are not only religious but also familial. After she and her younger sister, Chloe (Lauren MacRae), return from camp \u2014 a religious sleepaway called Camp Many Fishes \u2014 their parents sit them down for a family discussion. They will be selling the house and separating, they gently inform them, with Beatrice\u2019s mother, Marianne (Abby Elliott), moving out of the family home to self-actualize.<\/p>\n

\"Lee<\/a> \"Edward<\/a> <\/p>\n

The rest of the movie tracks Bea \u2014 as her friends and family call her \u2014 as she grudgingly comes to terms with her new reality. She laments her situation in confession with her priest, Father Malone (J.K. Simmons, a great asset to the movie), and in the cafeteria alongside her friends, Nigel (Marcus Ngo) and Margot (Gemma Rosaria Rae). The pals support Bea, and are fellow late bloomers; Nigel enjoys gossiping but recoils at the thought of basement make-out parties. When a cute boy catches Margot\u2019s eye, Bea is unmoved; crushes have yet to register on even the furthest reaches of her radar.<\/p>\n

Additional minor dramas unfold on the home front. Without Marianne to cook and clean, Bea\u2019s dad, Joe (John Reynolds), briefly morphs into a tired take on Mr. Mom, burning fish fingers in the oven and leaving the house a mess. And despite her vehemence about needing space, Marianne hardly disappears; she seems as present as ever, handling school chauffeur duties and frequently dropping by the house to check in. Bea is vocally repulsed to notice a flirtation develop between her mom and the school principal, Mr. Thompson (Jack Innanen), but the mother-daughter confrontations that ensue register more as passing friction than mounting conflict.<\/p>\n

Which brings us to a central issue with \u201cPurgatory\u201d: Nothing much builds. Ostensibly a family comedy, the movie ultimately comes across as little more than a collection of awkward encounters. Without notable insights, unexpected scenarios or memorable humor, the whole thing tends to drag. Its lowest-common-denominator comedy is encapsulated by one scene in which a volunteer safety official makes a presentation to fearmonger about stranger danger. \u201cHow do you stop from getting murdered, kidnapped or dismembered, or worse?\u201d he warns, sending the auditorium into a panic.<\/p>\n

Such sitcom moments punctuate a smattering of stock coming-of-age scenes. In one, Bea practices kissing with a pillow to prepare for a game of spin the bottle. Later, she visits the VHS rental store to check out \u201cThe Parent Trap\u201d as research for scheming her own family back together. Amid the boilerplate beats, the presence of Chloe offers some freshness; the little sister character serves as both an admiring audience for Bea\u2019s antics and a tug on her conscience when Bea\u2019s preoccupations become too self-involved.<\/p>\n

The movie\u2019s best scenes are those that plow through the clich\u00e9s to excavate something deeper and weirder about being a teenager: its injustice. One occurs when Joe has a midday date and hires Margot\u2019s older sister, Jennifer (Nicole Redmond), to babysit. Previously prim and puritanical, Jennifer arrives to reveal that she has discovered a wild side. She smokes a cigarette indoors, then drags Bea and Chloe to meet up with her boyfriend. The outing \u2014 which culminates with Jennifer urging Bea to shoplift a nail polish from the convenience store \u2014 evocatively captures one of the deep indignities of youth: suffering consequences at the hands of adults even when you know, with absolute certainty, that you\u2019re not the one to blame.<\/p>\n

The movie\u2019s Catholic title refers to the liminal realm where souls atone for their sins, and with a divorce looming, Bea imagines herself stranded in this limbo, dreading the hell of a broken family while yearning for some form of salvation. There is indignity in that, too: Bea didn\u2019t choose to be the child of separated adults, and as members of their community \u2014 including a gaggle of employees at Bea\u2019s Catholic school \u2014 cast aspersions on the Gravels, the movie shows how the shame of her parents\u2019 separation follows her around, turning a private rupture into a public sin.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a potent predicament, and one that might have been resonated more deeply had the movie allowed clearer access to Marianne. Elliott, in a blowout and blue eyeshadow, plays Bea\u2019s mother with a pained expression that\u2019s meant to be a window into the difficulty of her decision. But in hewing closely to Bea\u2019s point of view, the movie never lets us much further beneath Marianne\u2019s surface. Scene after scene, she remains more of an enigma than a woman we\u2019re invited to understand, and the few psychological tidbits we do receive fail to coalesce into anything more than fuzzy picture of general wifely malaise.<\/p>\n

That emotional haziness appears in other parts of the movie, too. Take the school Christmas play: Though the movie repeatedly emphasizes its importance to her, the auditions \u2014 which result in a disappointing outcome for Bea \u2014 come and go with barely any fanfare. Where\u2019s the bitterness? The upset? The heartbreak? The sequence\u2019s anticlimax is characteristic of the movie as a whole: charming enough, but never quite as affecting as it ought to be.<\/p>\n

Grade: C+<\/p>\n

\u201cPurgatory\u201d premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s the 1980s and a 13-year-old girl who talks to God returns from summer camp to find her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":893474,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,1554,337,309342,209,15896],"class_list":["post-893473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-movies","tag-purgatory","tag-reviews","tag-tiff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=893473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893473\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/893474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=893473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=893473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=893473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}