TIFF 2025 Review: Karmadonna Is a Splatterpunk Descent into Divine Mayhem

Jelena Djokic in Karmadonna, TIFF 2025 Midnight Madness.

From co-writer-turned-director Alexander Raddy Vojevic comes Karmadonna, a rage-fueled, neon-drenched odyssey that made its world premiere this Tuesday in the Midnight Madness section of TIFF 2025. Featuring Jelena Djokic in a truly unhinged lead role, the film doesn’t waste time with subtlety—opting instead to drop us directly into a frenzied night of carnage, paranoia, and divine punishment.

The premise? A pregnant woman receives a call from a god who demands that she carry out a series of brutal murders. That’s the entry point, and the rest of the film only spirals further into madness. Vojevic doesn’t concern himself with traditional narrative beats; Karmadonna plays more like a blood-stained road trip guided by chaos, punctuated by run-ins with trash-talking gangsters, sleazy cab drivers, and coked-out femme enforcers.

Comparisons can be made to Collateral, or more recently, Locked In with Bill Skarsgård—but there’s a grungy, early-2000s Euro-horror energy here too. Think Baise-moi by way of Gaspar Noé, with flashes of Mads from last year’s fest circuit. There’s a punk pulse running through Karmadonna—and while the film may be incoherent at times, it never once loses momentum.

The violence is constant, the set pieces absurd, and the tone often feels like a bad acid trip through Eastern Europe’s criminal underworld. It’s also layered with heavy symbolism, though whether that adds up to anything coherent by the end is questionable. Still, the experience is undeniable.

Verdict: 3 out of 5.

You won’t leave this one unmoved—just maybe a little dazed and stained in blood.

Written & Directed by: Aleksandar Radivojević

Cast: Jelena Djokić, Sergej Trifunović, Milutin Karadžić

Produced by: Predrag Popović, Miloš Djukelić