Sundance is one of the few major film festivals that provides a virtual option. While not every film is available (including some key exclusions from the very buzzy ‘Premieres’ category), more than half of the films at Sundance are available virtually. So I took a couple of days off from work, hunkered down on my couch, and spent a long weekend watching interesting movies. I’ve already shared full reviews for Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!, The Incomer, and Josephine, three films that I feel screenagers will want to keep an eye out for as they release this year. But I also unearthed several hidden gems of the fest. The following is a summary of the remaining narrative features I saw at this year’s virtual Sundance Film Festival.
The Cream of the Crop
BURN
This is perhaps the best thing I saw all week but be warned: it is bleak as hell. A girl who is physically abused by her parents leaves home and joins a gang of homeless kids. The way some of the tough subject matter is handled reminded me of Mysterious Skin, where it wants you to look at something terrible but it is depicting that thing with a lot of care. It’s incredibly stylistically innovative, and very structurally interesting too with the way it weaves its characters and story to hammer home its message. It gives some brief respites, too, that are much needed—but sometimes the respites are twisted into more pain later in the film, so it keeps you on your toes. Many influences are being blended here: Hirokazu Kore-eda, Lukas Moodysson, Nobuhiko Obayashi, and the aforementioned Gregg Araki. But they are combined into something tonally consistent and wholly unique.
The Friend’s House is Here
Despite its throwback name, this film feels like an evolution in style for Iranian cinema, which is often bold and formally effective but rarely this fun. We follow Pari, an underground theater director who has just premiered her latest play, and her best friend Hanna, a social media influencer who is planning to leave the country. It’s built on the foundations of Iranian style, to be sure—lots of long takes, a humanist bent, quests to solve problems that bring its characters into contact with many people. But it also has a looseness and playfulness that makes its characters and themes all the more affecting. The Friend’s House is Here is a great movie about friendship and struggling to express what we feel, as well as the perils of creating political art under an oppressive regime.
Worth a Watch
Extra Geography
This is a stylized and somewhat satirical view of high school friendship. The lead characters in Extra Geography, Minna and Flic, are committed to doing everything exactly equally. Humorously, they also decide to apply this rule to falling in love, so they decide to fall in love with the same person – their odd Geography teacher from New Zealand. I enjoyed it as a commentary on the ways we expect our friends to be doing as well or as poorly as we are, and can grow jealous or disinterested in continuing friendship when our interests diverge. I enjoyed the cast of characters the girls are surrounded with, but I did wish the movie was just a bit funnier.
Filipiñana
Sundance is a very narrative-first and plot-first festival, so on my last day of screenings I was looking for some variety. Enter Filipiñana, a slow cinema film that definitely scratched the itch. It is an effective visual-first look at income disparities in the Philippines by way of a golf course for wealthy patrons run by lower-class residents. It chooses its moments where it goes big wisely and shoots them well. A couple of late reveals and events hit hard without sacrificing the slow-burning beauty. The eerily faux-natural beauty of a golf course comes to the fore, and the colors and costumes are all meticulously chosen.
Hot Water
This film follows a mother and her troubled teenage son on a road trip across the country so that he can go live with his father. The central relationship here is well done—there’s genuine affection there, but time has led to annoyances taking over their relationship due to their differences. One big blow-up moment of argument doesn’t quite land, but mostly this has a sense for quiet interpersonal moments that shine. It has the complexity to understand that the 19-year-old son might have something of value to impart to his mother, in addition to the other way around. Tremendous use of recurring props to signify emotions and progress.
How to Divorce During the War
The world doesn’t wait for our personal issues to resolve to throw a whole new set of issues at us. How to Divorce During the War follows a Lithuanian couple who decide to divorce a day before Russia invades Ukraine. I mostly enjoyed this look at the way that problems compound and mutate with each other, and the war as backdrop is used cleverly in a number of ways. There is a child actor whose weight changes significantly over the course of the movie; I have some ethical concerns and would like to learn more about what the child was asked to do for the film.
If I Go Will They Miss Me
This wasn’t on my radar until it started getting some festival buzz, so it was a late addition to my list. I had a mixed reaction. It primarily concerns a formerly incarcerated father as he struggles to connect with his 12-year-old son. A lot of care goes into the portrayal of the father here – his actions are indefensible but he definitely has a depth to him beyond the stereotypes. The expectations and pressure placed on you as a father and husband when you’re released from a long prison stint would be a lot to bear. Both father and son begin having mysterious visions of kids around their neighborhood, which makes the film a lot more interesting, but I wanted a lot more of it. The film ends up as 95% family drama and 5% weird supernatural visions, I would have preferred a 70/30 split to make this stand out more from the crowd.
Lady
Lady contains lots of interesting themes—in fact, I’d say it has too many, and in attempting to tackle all of them it loses some focus. It follows a Nigerian taxi driver named Lady who begins shuttling sex workers around at night, including her childhood friend Pinky. It covers the relationship of sex to both empowerment and exploitation, as well as themes of revolution and protest as a collective action of empathy versus the impulse to escape and just take care of yourself. With that much to cover, a couple of the third-act plot points feel underbaked. But it’s got some style, which carries it along nicely.
The Duds
Carousel
Rachel Lambert’s follow-up to Sometimes I Think About Dying was a disappointment. It feels like an attempt to show what ordinary people are like—after all, what could be more ordinary than Cleveland, Ohio? It is a mostly competently made film, but in striving to be ordinary, it ends up being uninteresting. Subplots aren’t quite given their due, and the central romance between Chris Pine and Jenny Slate falls flat. The centerpiece argument scene works pretty well (though it would work better if some of the things that were talked about were set up more effectively). Abby Ryder Fortson escapes unscathed, and perhaps gives a more impressive performance than her effort in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
The Musical
This movie has one really funny idea that I shall not spoil, as the reveal of the idea is the best moment in the movie. However, one funny idea does not a feature make. Will Brill isn’t very compelling and he is in every scene, which means that none of the other characters (not even Rob Lowe) get enough screen time to get any depth. The Musical is very broad but doesn’t have nearly enough laughs to justify it – though a few jokes land really hard, many do not.
Night Nurse
Night Nurse follows a caretaker at a retirement community who forms an unusual psychosexual relationship with her far older patient. It is successful in building an unsettling eroticism, but is ultimately a lot less transgressive than it thinks it is. It feigns at surrealism but never really hits a groove there either. There’s some interesting stuff around power dynamics and what turns us on, but it feels half-baked.
Rock Springs
The premise to this film was very intriguing, concerning a family that moves to a town where a massacre of Chinese immigrants occurred one hundred years earlier. But the execution left much to be desired. There’s a subplot about a dead husband, which muddles the message about a ghost town and the systemic racism and killings of Chinese in the West, and how that carries over to the communities today. I also think it would have been better served by cutting between the different stories rather than separating them out into chapters. There are a few things that are pleasing about the ending thematically, but most of the third act is a mess. It goes for it in a nice way on the gore but doesn’t really land any of its scares beyond that.
Zi
Kogonada’s latest film is a visual treat with questionable plot elements. A young woman sees visions of the future as two strangers try to help her understand what she’s seeing and get her the help she needs. It’s got a very defined voice, and Hong Kong is shot beautifully. The lingering quality of Kogonada’s films plays really nicely with a mystery element. It sort of falls apart as it goes on though – it gives clarity in the wrong places and leaves ambiguity in the wrong places, so that it just sort of leaves a mess. But here’s to guerrilla filmmaking that’s trying stuff out with creatively talented people – we need more of that.
