TIFF Review: “Steal Away”

Steal Away (Clement Virgo, 2025) 4 out of 5 stars

Set in a land that exists outside of a specific era and place, yet suggestive of many different locations and moments (including the here and now), director Clement Virgo’s Steal Away plunges the viewer into a simultaneous idyll and nightmare. The freshness of youth—and youthful desire—runs directly into the brutality of human greed, destroying the innocent dreams of our teenage protagonists. “Once upon a time,” it begins, but this is no happy fairy tale; instead, it’s a somber warning about our species’ rapacious hunger for dominance and control.

A loose adaptation of author Karolyn Smardz Frost’s 2017 non-fiction book Steal Away Home, the script, by Virgo and his wife and co-writer Tamara Berger (Lie with Me), presents two young women thrown together by circumstance who find eventual common cause in their resistance to the oppressive system around them. There’s Fanny (Angourie Rice, the 2024 Mean Girls), who lives with her controlling mother, Florence (Lauren Lee Smith, Believer), in a plantation-like compound, and Cécile (Mallori Johnson, Hulu’s Kindred series), who arrives at the start of the story from the Congo, accompanying her own mother, Mary (Isabelle Menal, Le répondeur). Though Cécile is a little older than Fanny, she is immediately placed in a subservient position, expected to tutor the latter in French while her mother works in the kitchen.

With its subtitle “A Tale of Two Princesses,” the film sets up an expectation of either rivalry or friendship, and showcases both. Fanny, yet to realize her sexual fantasies, sends many longing gazes towards hunky farmhand Rufus (Idrissa Sanogo, The Wall Street Boy); once Cécile shows up, however, he only has eyes for her. It turns out that lust might not be the sole cause of his interest in Cécile, but we won’t discover what else might motivate him until much later.

In the meantime, despite being essentially gifted a handmaiden—whether Cécile is happy in this role or not—Fanny is deeply unsettled and often sullen, her hormones all ablaze. There are secrets that she senses yet doesn’t quite know in the world around her, and no one tells her anything. Not even Florence, who mutes the pain of her own inability to conceive more children by overseeing the deliveries of women in the community. But what has happened to some of those new mothers, especially the other immigrants she employed (if one can call it that) before Cécile? That is the primary mystery, and Fanny’s search for answers drives part of the plot.

Concurrently focusing on the developing relationship between the two protagonists, Virgo builds layer upon layer of narrative detail to craft a powerful meditation on exploitation—of bodies and labor—with emphasis on how people of color are among the most, if not only, abused. Steal Away is very much a cautionary fable of our past, present, and (I hope not) future. The result is both chilling and engaging, though with an auspicious twist at the end. Don’t accept your fate; resist.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.