TIFF Teaser: Cloud Atlas, which will either be epic or epically confusing

It’s no surprise that David Mitchell‘s 2004 novel Cloud Atlas was once called unfilmable—it has six storylines that leap from a mid-19th-century Pacific voyage to interwar Belgium, California circa 1975, present-day London, dystopian Korea and post-apocalyptic Hawaii (whew!). To knit together those narratives, which spill forward into one another and back again, the film’s stars take on multiple roles: Tom Hanks plays a ship’s doctor and a post-apocalyptic tribesman; Halle Berry plays a journalist and a member of a technologically advanced but shattered civilization; and Hugh Grant plays the CEO of a nuclear energy firm and a cannibal. In each of the settings, everything is different, yet eerily similar, which is exactly the point. The sheer scale of the film could result in it becoming a philosophical dog pile, but then again, its three directors, Tom Tywker (Run Lola Run) and Andy and Lana Wachowski (The Matrix trilogy), have all successfully navigated ambitious projects before.