Reviews: Junk World from TIFF 2025

Final Rating: 3.5/5

Junk World is an impressive and novel stop-motion adventure. While the background lore of director Takahide Hori’s world can be hard to follow, the film really takes off once it reveals its hand.

Approximately 150 years after a massive world war, humans live on the Earth’s ruined surface, while the underground is inhabited by artificial beings called Mulligans. The two societies maintain a fragile peace, but when an unusually high amount of radiation is discovered in the underground city of Kaapvaal at the same time as an anti-human cult is gaining power, a joint task force is dispatched to investigate. 

Junk World follows a core group as they progress deeper into the Earth to find the source of the radiation. Along the way, the group – Captain Torys, her robot companion Robin, and the Mulligan defector Dante – encounter cultists, bizarre creatures born from radiation, and a group of powerful beings claiming to be their descendants. The film is initially deliberately vague, the group often simply ignoring things they can’t explain as they push forward. Once they finally reach the source of the radiation, however, Junk World takes a reality-bending turn to explore every element from a new angle. 

Though not a time-loop film in the traditional sense – there’s no DNA from Groundhog Day or Palm Springs here – Junk World centres around a short period of time replayed from four different perspectives as time-traveling characters interfere with the task force’s expedition. At a pivotal moment, Robin is transported into the distant past, where he calculates the best way to ensure the success of his group’s original mission. Where the first act sees Torys and her crew descend into Kaapvaal with minimal distractions, the following three acts show Robin – now a time traveler – supporting the crew from the sidelines.

Everything the group originally ignored is suddenly revealed to be Robin’s doing. A group of robots intervening to save Torys and friends from cultists turns out to be a strikeforce sent by Robin. Many of the irradiated creatures the group encountered are failed attempts at communication by Robin. The powerful creatures claiming to be the group’s descendants? Also ultimately connected to Robin, now omnipresent through time. 

When Robin is blasted into a desert wasteland hundreds of years in the past, he has the tools to appear as a god to the local populace, and the time to simply wait for technology and culture to evolve to be whatever he needs. Should one of his plans fail, he can simply try again, since over time he’s learned how to get back to whenever he needs to. 

Given infinite time and the ability to go back and forth at will, anyone sufficiently smart might as well be omnipotent. Junk World’s primary question is what is done with that omnipotence. Interestingly, an all-knowing Robin isn’t interested in being benevolent. Positioned as a god, Robin deliberately promotes inequality to inspire competitiveness, hoping it will lead to quicker technological innovation. He purposely engineers a grand war and sends a princess to die for the express purpose of getting himself back to his own time to follow his stated directive of “protect Torys.” 

“Once I acted like a god, and led a great many people,” he explains near the end of the film, “but all I did was share my own objective with them.” 

Aside from Robin, Junk World’s memorable cast of characters is woefully underused. Dante is a legal absolutist, a societal outcast due to his defection from the cult, but justifying it because of the greater threat to Mulligan-Human peace. Torys is a pragmatist who doesn’t fit cleanly into human society, having been raised an orphan alongside robots. The military men around both are largely faceless, but enforce a strict authoritarian hierarchy unwelcoming to either character.

The conflict between these philosophies is interesting but too rarely explored. Robin exploits the blind spots of each character’s worldview for his own aims but is never truly challenged by them. A weakness, perhaps, of Robin’s worldview being the most simplistic: he just wants to “save Torys.”

The world of Junk World is unique, strikingly realized as grotesque mounds of metal and flesh. The character designs feel halfway between Henry Selick and Phil Tippett, slick enough to be visually appealing even in a world that’s mostly detritus. The occasional creature stands out as especially shocking even in this world: a major society of what look like long cats with flat, human-like faces; a humanoid with 4 hands and a vagina instead of a head; a mutant priest who takes off his robe to reveal shibari ties before morphing into a giant with dozens of mouths. 

Junk World’s greatest strength is the seemingly boundless creativity of its director. Hori’s world is singularly strange, and his approach to the well-trodden ground of time travel is uniquely his. The main thing holding the film back is, ironically, the same. Hori bites off a little more than he can chew, but the elements he’s able to dive into are fascinating. 

Junk Yard was seen during the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Thank you to GATPR for the screener.