A prime-minister documentary won the midnight crowd — here is how Matthew Rankin did it

Midnight Madness is the section where a Toronto audience rewards a slasher, a body-horror provocation, an action film that leaves the room hoarse. It is not where anyone expects a documentary about a Canadian prime minister to win the audience vote. That Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney did exactly that is the festival’s oddest headline, and the explanation is entirely a matter of form.

Matthew Rankin did not make a biography. He assembled a fever dream — a collage built from decades of Canadian television, campaign footage, talk-show clips and pop-cultural debris, cut into what its own producers call a doomscroll through the mind of a master politician. The film treats the archive the way a horror film treats a haunted house: as a space where the familiar turns menacing the longer you stare. That is why it played at midnight and not in a staid documentary slot. Rankin found the genre hiding inside the news.

The craft is in the assembly. Rankin, whose The Twentieth Century and Universal Language made him one of the most distinctive stylists working in Canada, treats editing as the whole argument. A politician’s smoothest sound-bite, looped and recontextualized against the culture that surrounded it, curdles into something uncanny. There is no narrator explaining Mulroney; there is only the accumulation, and accumulation is a horror strategy — the dread of too much, arriving too fast, refusing to stop.

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Beating Paolo Strippoli’s The Spiral and Sabu’s Arrested Memory — two films that came to the section by the front door — a political essay out-scared the genre entries at their own event. The vote is a verdict on showmanship: Rankin turned a subject with zero midnight-movie appeal into the room’s most propulsive experience, which is the only currency Midnight Madness recognizes.

The National Film Board, which first announced the project as a four-part series, ended up backing something far stranger and more cinematic. What the win unlocks is a wider audience for a film that could easily have been filed as a niche Canadian curio. A Midnight Madness prize travels; it tells programmers abroad that a documentary about a politician most of the world has never heard of works as pure sensation. Rankin has spent his career proving that the archive is a genre. Toronto’s rowdiest crowd just agreed.

Tags: documentary, recap, Toronto Film Festival, Midnight Madness, Ladies and Gentlemen Brian Mulroney, Matthew Rankin

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