Clement Virgo’s erotic, eerie thriller Steal Away tells the story of two young women — one Black, one white — who form a bond while trying to unravel the secret history of a stately manor house. Virgo, after films like Rude (1995) and Brother (2022), returns to the familiar terrain of examining the impact of racism and inequality. 

In an echo of The Book of Negroes, Virgo’s 2015 historical TV miniseries, which dealt with the transatlantic slave trade, Steal Away centers on Cécile, a young woman played by Mallori Johnson, who arrives as a young African refugee to the privileged home of Fanny (Angourie Rice), a young and sheltered woman whose world barely extends beyond life with her beautiful and benevolent mother, Florence, played by Lauren Lee Smith.

Virgo has Steal Away begin as a feminist drama that eventually breaks conventions by morphing into something of a horror film, with even a pinch of the supernatural.

“It’s partly coming-of-age, but it’s also partly psychological thriller and I hopefully play a little bit with horror elements, and ultimately with an allegory about the past and somewhat about the present and what we may see in the future,” the director explains.

Virgo and script co-writer Tamara Faith Berger never lay out Cécile’s backstory, even if their movie is inspired by Karolyn Smardz Frost’s historical nonfiction book Steal Away Home, in which fugitive slave Cecelia Reynolds escapes to Canada via the Underground Railroad, only to eventually return to Kentucky as a freed woman and renew her complex relationship with her former mistress.

“I wanted to really just use that [book] as a jumping off point and make it about these two young women without trying to be overt with the politics. I wanted to speak about the history, without being obvious,” Virgo explains.

Inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, where the lead female characters have dual roles, Virgo in Steal Away plunges Cécile and Fanny into a sexual tug-of-war for Rufus, the gardener’s son, played by Idrissa Sanogo Bamba. And that foregrounds the erotically charged theme of female empowerment as Cécile falls in love with Rufus, only to ignite Fanny’s jealousy and her own sexual awakening.

Virgo adds that he didn’t give leads Rice and Johnson much direction and exposition on set, but, as is his style, he instead set his actors loose to discover their own emotions and emotional truth about their characters. “As a director, I try not to be prescriptive in terms of how I approach the work and how I relate to the actors,” he says.

Steal Away, as with Virgo’s first five feature films, will get a premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. It’s something he says he will never take for granted. “Look, it’s always a miracle when I make a film and it’s always special when I show it in my hometown,” says the filmmaker, who was born in Jamaica and grew up in Toronto. “I made my first short film in 1991 in my early 20s, and TIFF showed that film. And they’ve showed all my feature films. It never gets old.”