Like Crossing, Toll looks at queerness through the eyes of the non-queer family members who alienate and marginalise them.

The synopsis implied a gritty, unpredictable crime caper, perhaps with some light and dark. Or maybe I just didn’t read it carefully enough.

Sueellen (Maeve Jinkings) is a perhaps well-meaning single mother to Antonio (Kauan Alvarenga), a happy young gay man. He has a neat line in rainbow coloured videos where he wears day-glo and make up and lip syncs. He’s like any teen, creating his life, falling in and out of love, happy with himself.

Suellen in a bid to ‘protect’ him from a cruel homophobic society, decides that conversion therapy by a charlatan priest (Isac Graça) is the best decision, even if it means putting aside her morals to afford it. That it is suggested by workmate Telma (Aline Marta Maia), whose moral code is flexible, should have been a red flag.

There are a succession of adults in Sueellen’s sphere who are accepted by society but are variously cheaters, liars, thieves and thugs. Sueellen can’t seem to see she and they are the ones needing conversion, not her son. The therapy is deliberately ludicrous with families drinking the ‘genital juice’ of the opposite gender – it’s ok it’s been pasteurised – and young gay people having to turn plasticine penises into vulvas and vice versa.

Perhaps we are supposed to see this as a social critique but it is so relentlessly dour that any redemption is elusive. The final scene is so heartbreaking that I was looking for the moment of love and humility that we got from Lia in Crossing. Some light in the dark. But no.

I don’t really read up on MIFF films before I see them (which can lead to some happy and unhappy surprises) so I realise only now that director Carolina Marciewicz also made Charcoal (2022) which left me with a similar sense of disappointment.