Courteney Cox has spent three decades known for a sitcom apartment and a slasher franchise. On Friday she showed Toronto something else entirely: a film about a bomb strapped to a pizza delivery man's neck.

"Evil Genius" premiered as a gala presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 12, according to Variety, marking Cox's return to the director's chair after 2014's "Just Before I Go." The film dramatizes the 2003 Erie, Pennsylvania case that became infamous as the "pizza bomber" heist, in which a delivery driver named Brian Wells was filmed with an explosive collar moments before it detonated in front of police.

Patricia Arquette plays Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, the woman investigators believed engineered the plot. David Harbour plays Bill Rothstein, her former lover turned accomplice. Cox told Variety she wanted the pair to read as more than villains. "You don't want to just hate someone the whole time," she said, adding that she pushed for something "really bright" rather than a straight descent into darkness.

The project traces back to Barbara Schroeder, who made the 2018 Netflix docuseries of the same name and, before that, the true-crime documentary "TalhotBlond," which Cox adapted into a Lifetime movie in 2013. Cox told Variety she had access to hours of unused interview tape from the docuseries, material that fed directly into how Arquette built the character. "I can see Patricia's heart," Cox said. "Every time Patricia laughs, it's absolutely real."

TheWrap's review, published the same day, called Arquette's performance a portrait of "life imitating art" and praised Harbour's turn as Rothstein, though it noted the film doesn't uncover much that wasn't already in the 2018 series. The outlet's critic argued the value lies less in new revelations than in watching a self-described genius manipulate everyone around her, on screen the way Diehl-Armstrong reportedly tried to manipulate Schroeder's cameras from prison.

The real case remains murky even now. Diehl-Armstrong always maintained she wasn't the architect of Wells' death, a claim she kept making from prison until she died roughly a decade ago, according to TheWrap. Investigators disagreed, and the plot she's accused of running, involving a bank heist, a homemade bomb and a contract on her own father, is tangled enough that neither the docuseries nor Cox's film pretends to close every loop.

Cox seems to be banking on that ambiguity working in the film's favour. "The story is so unbelievable, it drives you to want to know more," she told Variety, hoping audiences who never saw the original docuseries walk in without knowing how any of it ends.

No distributor or release date has been announced beyond the TIFF gala slot. Given the festival's track record of pushing true-crime dramas toward wider pickup, that's likely the next thing to watch for.