Tristan Wheeler has a simple question: How do you make movies in a city where the cost of rent might kill you first?
“We live in a city where it’s quite expensive to live. So most of your time is spent trying to cover basic needs: having a job, having a roof over your head. That just takes more time away from being a creative person,” the filmmaker says of Toronto, the setting and inspiration for his madcap dark comedy Toronto Apartment, about a tenant who subleases his place by the hour to make rent.
Wheeler spoke to THR after the film world premiered at the Mammoth Lakes Film Festival in California in May and just before its Canadian premiere Wednesday night at Toronto’s Paradise Theater as part of the Bleeding Edge showcase. The city’s chronic housing crisis — which mirrors that of other costly creative hubs like New York, L.A. and London — provided the film’s absurdist premise, but its real-world impact on Wheeler’s community is no joke.
Tristan Wheeler wrote, directed and stars in Toronto Apartment.
Tristan Wheeler
For him, it’s a class issue. “I’m from a working class family. I don’t have a huge bankroll or anything like that. So I have to create very DIY art at a very low budget and I have to use those limitations to my advantage and lean into them,” he explains, pointing to a growing divide between Toronto filmmakers who can afford to sustain creative careers and those who can’t.
Toronto Apartment opens with Lock O’Hara (played by Wheeler) being dumped by his girlfriend Ava (Jessica Grossman), who moves out and leaves him unable to cover the rent alone. Facing eviction, Lock hatches a scheme: sublease the apartment by the hour when he’s not using it. Before long he’s doing brisk business with a ragtag cast of nomadic Toronto renters — an asexual platonic dating group, a feminist book club and a “knitting group” that turns out to be a clandestine terrorist cell — all paying for use of his “community space.” His landlord (Neal Armstrong) is less charmed.
A budding romance complicates things further. Multimedia artist Thalia (Alex Jodi Verge) wants to install a green screen in the apartment; Lock resists the renovation but finds himself drawn to her. The film’s central dilemma gradually comes into focus: is Lock a benevolent community provider, or just another landlord cashing in on Toronto’s soaring rents?
Toronto Apartment was shot in 2024 just as a real-life property market bubble in the city began to burst. That came as Wheeler had hopscotched from sublease to sublease to stay afloat after moving to eastern Canada from the west coast.
Toronto Apartment has its Canadian premiere Wednesday night at Toronto’s Paradise Theater.
Tristan Wheeler
“I had ended a relationship and I had to move out and I needed a place to stay,” he recalls. “So I was jumping from weird sublease to weird sublease, just trying to live as a creative person, trying to live, period, in this city. And I was thinking about every day waking up and having to struggle to figure it out.”
That struggle included Toronto Apartment being directed by Wheeler on a budget of $10,000, using a $200 camera with the collaboration of local DIY filmmakers over 11 shooting days on weekends. His crew included Braden Sitter Sr. as cinematographer and executive producer and Austin Birtch as an associate producer.
The lo-fi aesthetic is entirely intentional. “When you see this film, it looks very low budget and that’s on purpose,” Wheeler explains. “I can’t make my film look like it’s by Christopher Nolan or Ari Aster or anything like that. I have to know it’s a piece of art by someone who’s trying to make it work.”
He also bypassed the Canadian government funding on which many local filmmakers depend, which brought its own freedoms. “It’s both you can’t screw up a film day because we don’t have the money for a reshoot, but also it’s only $10,000. I don’t have to give someone $1 million at the end of this. I don’t have investors in that intense way. So we could have a little more fun and be experimental and find excitement in moments.”
“That’s both a blessing and a curse, because it allows you to create art, to create an expression of yourself that is so narrowed down and pure, and has to fight to reach the surface – versus all those resources that make that process a little easier,” Wheeler insists. He also had creative freedom when making Toronto Apartment.
“It’s both you can’t screw up a film day because we don’t have the money for a reshoot. But also it’s only $10,000. I don’t have to give someone $1 million at the end of this. I don’t have investors in that intense way. So we could have a little more fun and be experimental and find excitement in moments,” Wheeler recalled. And with Toronto in its title, the dark comedy continues a recent trend in Canadian film where directors use cities they live in as characters, and no longer disguise locations as anywhere U.S.A.
These include Sophy Romvari’s own debut feature, Blue Heron, which was shot in and around Vancouver, the Toronto-set Nirvana the Band, the Show, the Movie by Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol and Chandler Levack’s Mile End Kicks, a Barbie Ferreira-starring romantic comedy set in a fashionable Montreal neighborhood. “These movies are very big right now in Canada… They’re not trying to be like New York City. And my movie is about a guy who lives in Toronto, because I’m a guy who lives in Toronto,” Wheeler insists.
Ultimately, he made the film for young artists feeling the same squeeze he has — and facing new threats from AI on top of old ones like rent.
Says Wheeler: “My movie is for people like myself. I came to this city because I wanted to be a creative person, and I knew there was a lot of fun, interesting stuff that has happened here. And I also didn’t have and don’t have a lot of money. But I was able to figure it out and hopefully people that watch this movie will say, ‘okay, I can just do it.’ As long as you understand your movie and your budget, you can make something people will connect with.”