Ten years is a long gap between films, even by arthouse standards. Anna Biller last put a movie in front of audiences with The Love Witch back in 2016. She's back now at the Toronto International Film Festival with The Face of Horror, which premiered in the Midnight Madness slot, and by most accounts she hasn't lost the eye for colour and camp that made her name.

The film takes the Kabuki staple Yotsuya Kaidan, a centuries-old Japanese ghost story about a wronged wife's revenge, and drags it into medieval Europe. Kristine Frøseth plays Eleanor, whose father refuses to let a knight named Edward marry her because the man's a known thief. Edward's answer, per Deadline's review out of the festival, is to kill the father, lie to Eleanor about avenging him, and marry her anyway under the pretence of protection.

It gets worse from there. Months into the marriage, with Eleanor recovering from childbirth, Edward starts sniffing around a recently widowed noblewoman named Isabel, played by Bella Heathcote. Isabel, in turn, starts plotting to get Eleanor out of the picture so she can have Edward to herself. The back half of the film reportedly turns into a bloodier, ghost-haunted reckoning as Edward's conscience and Eleanor's survival collide.

Jonah Hauer-King plays Edward, described in the review as a thoroughly unlikeable medieval opportunist who spends the film outrunning both his own guilt and something considerably more supernatural. Ellie Bamber, playing Eleanor's sister Beatrice, is singled out as something of a find, her arc built around avenging her sister rather than mourning her.

What's drawn attention at TIFF isn't just the plot, though. Biller has built a reputation on production design and colour work that recalls old Hollywood technicolor, and this one is being described in similar terms, an operatic register that sits somewhere between camp and full Shakespearean tragedy. That's been the throughline of her career going back to Viva and The Love Witch, films that treat pastiche as a serious tool rather than a joke.

The cast list also includes Leo Suter and Ben Radcliffe, though their roles haven't been detailed in early coverage. Embankment Films is handling sales on the title, and the film runs two hours.

No distributor has been announced yet, and there's no word on a release date beyond the festival run. For a filmmaker whose last movie took a decade to follow up, the bigger question hanging over Toronto right now isn't whether The Face of Horror works. Early reaction suggests it does. It's whether Biller gets a faster route to her next one.