TOLL (TIFF 2023) – Review by Valerie Kalfrin

Good things have their price, one character says in the nuanced Brazilian drama Toll —but all things do, really. Some involve fees we’re not willing to pay while others have trade-offs, rationales, and costs that go beyond money.

Suellen (Maeve Jinkings, Heartless) seems to know this, but the choices she makes for what she thinks is an honorable cause exact a price higher than she imagined.

Now showing at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Toll is the second feature from writer-director Carolina Markowicz (Charcoal), whom TIFF will honor with this year’s Emerging Talent Award, presented by MGM studios. Previous recipients of the award include Mati Diop in 2019, Tracey Deer in 2020, Danis Goulet in 2021, and Sally El Hosaini in 2022.

This immersive and intimate mother-son story starts with Suellen’s world and motivations, spelled out in lived-in dialogue. Yet Kauan Alvarenga (TV’s Crime Time), who plays her son, Tiquinho, is its shattering heart.

Suellen works as a toll booth attendant, sharing her home with her boyfriend, Arauto (Thomas Aquino, TV’s The Others), and 17-year-old Tiquinho. The gay teen likes making online videos where he lip-synchs in English to oldies, bathed in pink light and colorful strobes. He seems comfortable, happy, and confident, talking to himself in the mirror about how the world needs more divas, and he’s there to get the job done.

Tiquinho doesn’t flaunt his sexuality at school or out on the street, but the videos mortify his mother; coworkers share them, along with insulting comments. Suellen grumbles about how he barely speaks to her while she picks apart what he does, saying he causes her shame.

At first, so does Arauto, who stashes jewelry and watches from a thieving ring in her home until Suellen discovers them and kicks him out. But as her humiliations over Tiquinho add up, Suellen looks at Arauto’s side gig in a different light. Tipping off the thieves about potential marks in luxury cars could earn enough to pay for the conversion therapy at her friend’s church that promises a “cure.”

To his credit, Arauto tells Suellen to forget this stuff. But she insists, saying there’s nothing a mother won’t do for her son’s health. Jinkings, who appeared in Markowicz’s Charcoal, portrays Suellen’s fervent belief that she’s protecting her son from a cruel world—which also would spare her from further disgrace in her eyes. She’s not as religious as her friend Thelma (Aline Marta Maia, Charcoal), who’s hardly pious, but she latches on to Thelma’s talk of God and the powers of Pastor Isac (Isac Graça, Três Mulheres), desperate for a fix that doesn’t involve simply accepting Tiquinho as he is.

For his part, Tiquinho has a more whimsical view of the world. Marcowicz even shoots the industrial smokestacks that mimic the candles of a hillside religious shrine through his rose-colored glasses. He earns money slinging fast food and appearing at parties with a troupe that dresses as animals, handing out hors d’oeuvres as a red-feathered bird.

That’s no accident, as Toll follows Tiquinho through the cringe-inducing “therapy,” where between showing photos of sex organs, the pastor explains how the city’s symbol is a scarlet ibis, a bird born black and “discreet” until its diet turns it red. “It’s possible that we become something we weren’t born to be,” he says, one of several lines that have a double meaning for Tiquinho and his mom’s criminal life.

Therapy isn’t all bad, though, as Tiquinho hits it off with Ricky (Caio Macedo, Cemetery of Lost Souls), a dental student who’s been to this type of thing before. As the film shifts to more of Tiquinho’s perspective, Alvarenga, who appeared in Markowicz’s short The Orphan, holds the screen in long close-ups, showing his growing attraction to Ricky and how his mother’s rejection hurts though he pretends not to care. When Ricky asks why he needs his mother if he can support himself, he doesn’t answer. He just does, with an ache in his eyes no other person can fill, pulling her in for hugs amid awkward silence.

The thievery leads to a not-unexpected twist, yet Toll nevertheless builds to an affecting and ironic denouement, with performances that linger. Some choices carry an unforeseen toll, and the bill always comes due.