A ghostly atmosphere pervades Ancestors, David Turpin’s first feature, which screened at the Toronto Film Festival. The film centres on a young gay man, portrayed by Éanna Hardwicke, who embarks on a search for a missing friend; the search becomes a vehicle for reflecting on mortality and the long shadow of the Aids crisis.
Turpin, who was born in 1982 and did not experience the epidemic at its height, frames the story as an act of intergenerational remembrance. He attempts to convey how the trauma, shame and fear of the 1980s have been transmitted to later generations of gay men — men who did not live through those worst years but who nonetheless carry their echoes.
Visually and tonally the film is often striking: its spectral flourishes and moody compositions create a sense of persistent unease that suits the subject matter. Hardwicke, noted as a standout from Saipan, gives a soulful performance that anchors the film’s emotional core and renders the protagonist’s grief and searching with conviction.
Yet Ancestors is not fully coherent. The narrative’s ghost-story elements and its ambitions as a historical reckoning sometimes pull in different directions, leaving the film feeling intermittently muddled. Moments of real impact occur, but they are unevenly distributed amid sequences that struggle to connect theme and form.
Despite its flaws, the debut is a thoughtful attempt to reckon with a difficult past and to explore how memory and loss are lived by subsequent generations. Turpin’s film may not resolve all the tensions it raises, but it marks a notable, if imperfect, contribution to contemporary cinema about the Aids era.