It’s time to interrupt my irregularly, not-scheduled travel blogging to talk about movies! It’s Sundance time. Miraculously, the online component still exists in some form, which means I still get to partake even though I don’t live in Utah anymore. This year, I watched 11 feature films.
Atropia: Off to a great start! Conceptually, Atropia was super interesting. I liked a lot of things about it. There were some really funny parts, the acting was strong, and I loved the play between reality and what’s scripted. I think that it ended up being a less sharp satire than it could have been. It wanted to say a little about a lot of things, and it also wanted to be more of a romantic story than a satire in the third act, which weakened it for me. That said, I’m not going to punish a movie for being overambitious in its themes, and I did have a good time watching it.
Bunnylovr: As a character study, I think it was decent. Katarina Zhu’s acting was great. It was a little slow for my tastes – I kept waiting for something to happen, and it never really did. I was waiting for it to lean in to the creepiness of her benefactor and go for more of a stalker/horror angle, but that felt a bit underexplored. It had a lot of potential that I’m not sure it lived up to.
The Things You Kill: While it starts as a fairly straightforward revenge plot, it takes a pretty bold turn in the second half. It took me a minute to figure out exactly what was happening but after reflecting on it, I absolutely loved it. The film has a lot to say on the patriarchy, generational trauma, and cycles of violence. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to track down this director’s other work, but that’s on my to-do list. Also, the cinematography and shots of the countryside in Türkiye were stunning!
Sorry, Baby: Incredible. From the very first scenes, I was so drawn in. The acting was amazing, and Agnes and Lydie’s friendship felt like one of the best, most real portrayals of female friendship that I’ve ever seen in film. It was so much funnier than I thought it was going to be, and it paired that with this raw emotion to tell Agnes’s story of healing. Definitely would recommend this one.
By Design: The description of this had me hooked. “A woman swaps bodies with a chair, and everyone likes her better as a chair.” Unfortunately, the reality of the film wasn’t as compelling for me. It was weird, but not in the way that I wanted it to be. I think it has some interesting ideas about the people around Camille projecting their own desires onto her as an inanimate object, but it still never quite hit the mark. There was an animated show about a cult, Praise Petey, that was weird in a lot of ways but had this recurring bit where the main character’s fiancé was a literal wooden board called Brian and no one ever acknowledged that he was, in fact, a wooden board, which was my favorite joke in the series, and I think that’s what I was chasing here. Every so often, I would get a glimmer of what I hoped it would be, but overall it wasn’t for me.
Omaha: So good and so emotionally devastating. There is an action taken about a half hour in and I thought, surely it can’t get sadder than this, and then it did. I haven’t cried this hard at a movie in a while. Really well done.
Rains Over Babel: I really enjoyed this. The concept (gambling years of life with Death in a Colombian nightclub) was awesome, they executed it well, and as a bonus, the set and costume designs were colorful and fun. The beginning introduced a lot of characters all at once, which made me a little worried as we started off on our story, but it did a great job of wrapping up the loose ends. Fun to watch, and hopefully it gets a wider release in the US!
Sukkwan Island: I watched this more or less right after Rains Over Babel and boy, was it jarring to go from Colombian night clubs to an isolated cabin in Norway. A lot of thoughts on this one, most of which can’t be shared without spoiling a fairly major portion of the plot. The ending was very polarizing, if the reviews on Letterboxd are anything to go by. I found the framing interesting, but not necessarily believable. Still, as a thriller in the Norwegian wilderness, it had a lot of tension and very compelling performances by its two leads.
Bubble & Squeak: Similar to Atropia – this one had such a fun idea and I’m not sure it quite lived up to its potential. Great cast, beautiful cinematography, some fun moments. In Sundance 2023, I went to go see Infinity Pool, and one of the funniest things for me is that those two movies have essentially the same premise, a tourist who violates the law in a fictitious post-Yugoslavian country, but could not be more tonally different. I think this could have been a sharper satire but I still enjoyed myself.
DJ Ahmet: This was delightful. It was set in a small town in North Macedonia, and balanced the serious and the comedic quite well. Charming, with a lot of heart, and it offered the most functional father-son relationship of anything I watched over the course of the festival.
The Virgin of Quarry Lake: My final film of Sundance was billed as a coming-of-age horror movie set in Argentina. I liked its witchy, dark vibes and I thought the ending was pretty strong.