Zack Snyder’s The Last Photograph premieres at TIFF: early reviews are poor

Zack Snyder’s The Last Photograph premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, a project he’d been developing since the mid-2000s, and the first reviews and reactions out of TIFF were brutal.

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If you were waiting to hear how it played there, the early critical response tagged it as bloated, dull, self-indulgent, grim, and violent, and the overall reaction was muted.

Those reviews point to the same problems over and over: the screenplay, the pacing, the oppressive tone, the long runtime, the lack of momentum. Even Snyder’s visual style, critics say, can’t pull it out, and the absence of studio oversight seems to have made things worse, not better.

And yes, this is the real The Last Photograph, not a rumor and not some mix-up, the same Zack Snyder project that was shelved in 2016 before he eventually self-produced it through his company, The Stone Quarry; it follows ex-DEA operative Ethan Black (Stuart Martin) in South America as he searches for his missing niece and nephew alongside war photographer Fra Fee after his diplomat brother and sister-in-law are murdered, before the story takes a surreal turn.

If Snyder’s maximalist style is usually your thing, this more intimate detour doesn’t sound like one to go out of your way for yet, and some critics are already calling it one of his weakest films, which only adds to the rough stretch after Rebel Moon, even with the stronger backing he got for Dawn of the Dead and Zack Snyder’s Justice League.

You can’t watch it after TIFF yet, though, because The Last Photograph still doesn’t have a distributor or any release plan.

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