We're sitting in the hotel room, Molly Parker and I, here at the Molly Parker International Film Festival, and we're finishing her latest movie, The Five Senses.
    The film, directed by Canadian Jeremy Podeswa, was done months ago and had its gala première screening in Toronto last week.  But for Molly Parker, a movie isn't really finished until she's talked to reporters about it and reached what she calls a sense of closure.  It's something about the way she works as an actress.
    "I find that in doing press it's the chance to articulate well," she says.  "You're forced to see what it is in a way that, as an actor, I never think of.  You just play a part and tell a story and then later you, 'Oh right.  Maybe that meant that I was going to do that.'"
    That intuitive approach to acting results in a heartfelt performance in The Five Senses.  Parker plays Anna, a woman whose three-year-old child goes missing.  The movie concerns the interlocking tales of five characters, each of whom represents one of the five senses: touch, taste, hearing, smell and vision.  Anna is the one who is the most whole, who loses the most and who gets the most back at the end, and it is possible that her missing child is a metaphor for the loss suffered by the others.
    Or maybe not.  "It's Jeremy," she says.  "Jeremy is the metaphor man."
    It's Parker who is the toast of the Toronto International Film Festival, which is the real name of the event going on here this week, because she is in three films, including Michael Winterbottom's Wonderland, in which she is a pregnant English woman, and Istvan Szabo's three-hour epic Sunshine, in which she plays Ralph Fiennes' wife, although she is quick to point out that the movie is so sprawling three different women play the role.
    Still, playing in that exalted company is a big step up for the 27-year-old Canadian performer.
    Born in Vancouver, Parker moved to Toronto three years ago after her big break in Lynn Stopkewich's Kissed.  In that film, which won Parker a Best Actress Genie, she played a necrophiliac funeral-home worker who has several romantic moments with the unresponsive clientele.  Afterward, she said, she got more than a few scripts that were either along the same lines or contained strange sex scenes, although Parker admits that she's never been offered another necrophiliac funeral-home worker role.
    What she is offered is interesting in its own way, however.  The Five Senses, an ensemble piece, is (now that Parker has seen it and is getting to talk about it) a difficult role that reflects a mother's worst nightmare, and therefore has to be played carefully to avoid the inherent melodrama in a lost-child story.
    "It's interesting to see it and see how that balance is.  It was our instinct to get as far away as we could from that kind of Movie Of The Week I've Lost My Child kind of thing.  But when I watched the movie I see that was not the tone of the film.  It was a very deep but narrow emotional register."
    Parker talks about the movie like a film-goer experiencing it for the first time.  She says she noticed in seeing the movie both at Cannes and Toronto film festivals, that there is although it was shot in Toronto, a kind of universal landscape to the movie, "any place where people feel lonely," she says.  She also empathizes with a scene where Anna says she prayed for her daughter's safety and that she just knows that her little girl is going to be all right.
    "I think it happens that mothers have that connection to their children.  My mother always knows.  Whenever I call my mother says, 'Oh, I was just thinking about you.'"  It's a kind of parental sixth sense, which would be an interesting movie on a double bill with this one, come to think of it.
    Motherly intuition was also an insight that came later.  At the time, she says, it was just "here's who this person is.  Here's the terrible thing that happened.  How is she going to act? "
    Going through the intellectual post-production on The Five Senses this way is just one of the pleasures Parker is enjoying at the festival.  She's pleased - with all due modesty - about all three movies she has at this year's festival.
    "All of these films I really like, and that's not always the case.  I just feel terribly fortunately."
    She's also choosy about her scripts - no more necrophiliacs, for instance - but she's returning to where her career took off with her next movie.  She's back with Lynn Stopkewich, this time in a film called Suspicious River, "and it's not that I can't tell you what it's about, but to me right now it's about a whole bunch of things, I find it hard to pin it down."
    It's suggested that she won't know exactly what it's about until she's made it, seen it, and then sat down with the press to talk about it.
    "Exactly," she says.