{TIFF 2026} Back in Black (2026): End Stage Capitalism For The End Stage of Life

Christopher Walken plays a lot of eccentrics over the course of a career, but Clyde, the failing small-town funeral director at the center of Back in Black, might be his most purely, gloriously irritable creation yet. Here’s the premise. The wellness craze has finally gone all the way, everyone in town is juicing and meditating and bio-hacking their way toward something close to immortality, and the one industry that can’t survive people refusing to die is the death industry. Clyde is going broke. His business is going under (no pun intended). The only hope is a daughter who is too old to ignore her parents problems but not old enough to do anything grown up to help.

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Walken plays that curmudgeonly exasperation to perfection, and the film is smart enough to let him. Watching him swing from despair to fury to something like manic delight is genuinely one of the year’s great pleasures. There’s a Death of a Salesman quality humming underneath all of it too, that specific post-boomer american male whose whole identity is tied to a trade the world has quietly decided it doesn’t need anymore.

The plan to save the family business comes from Clyde’s granddaughter Sam (Ella Ballentine), and here’s the thing about Sam. She doesn’t speak. Not a word, most of the entire film. It’s a strange choice, genuinely provocative, and one that could easily have sunk the whole enterprise in lesser hands. It doesn’t. Ballentine says more with her face than most actors manage with their entire bodies, and by the film’s midpoint she’s quietly become the most compelling performer on screen, silence and all. If you caught her in Monster or The Dark and the Wicked, you already know she has this kind of control in her. The film showcases her subtly in a movie that doesn’t neccesarily celebrate small performances.

Jane Curtin, playing Clyde’s wife, is a gem in a role that could have been a thankless straight-woman part and instead becomes one of the film’s quiet but hilarious highlights. And the nephew of the first victim, Ricardo (Cooper Levy), is an absolute riot, a total buffoon seemingly allergic to any form of self-awareness who somehow remains likable anyway. He charming in a completely cluess kind of way.

Back in Black carries the youthful whimsy and energy of something like Tragedy Girls or Happy Death Day, but there’s a much darker, nihilistic edge running underneath it, which complicates the fun considerably. You laugh, and then you feel a little guilty about laughing, and then you laugh again anyway. That’s the film operating exactly as intended. It’s legitimately funny in places but in that I need to laugh so I don’t cry kind of way.

There’s a version of this movie that condescends to its setting, that treats small-town, middle-America life as an easy punchline, and Back in Black is careful never to become that movie. It reminded me quite a bit of other suburban dread entries, Chili Finger being a prime example. It has a Fargo patina that continues to treat its subjects in a relatively tender manner. It’s a delicate line to walk, and the film’s bleakness actually helps it avoid the derision that could so easily creep into this subgenre. Back in Black isn’t interested in mocking the people who live in towns like this one. It’s too busy killing them, and finding the film’s dark comic engine in the ways an entire town’s institutions, the funeral business very much included, break down once people stop finding use in them. End stage capitalism, it turns out, eventually comes for every profession.

There’s also a line early in the film, “we need help,” that lands with a weight the filmmakers probably didn’t fully anticipate landing this hard given where American culture sits in September 2026. It’s a small moment, but it sticks while also announcing that no help is coming so you better create your own.

Visually, Murphy occasionally slows down to let the craft breathe, and it pays off. There’s a tracking shot moving between two funerals midway through the film that’s genuinely gorgeous, controlled and restrained in a way that trusts the walk itself, and the characters’ body language along it, to tell the story rather than reaching for dialogue to explain it. It’s the kind of confident filmmaking choice that makes you take notice and smile.

Back in Black is a confident, bleak, authentically funny piece of art, anchored by a confident and seemingly timeless Walken performance and a star-making, mostly wordless turn from Ballentine. It knows exactly what kind of ugly laugh it wants to evoke and does a tremendous job of providing lots of those oppurtunities.