A new year means a new Sundance Film Festival, and a fresh crop of promising original features that could go on to become awards season darlings in a few months. It might be hard to top last year’s festival where Dìdi, A Different Man, and I Saw the TV Glow all made strong showings. But with films like Atropia, Bubble & Squeak, and Didn’t Die on the roster, this year’s Sundance might just do the trick.
Naturally, The Verge is going to be taking in as much of Sundance as we can and posting bite-sized reviews of everything we see. We’ll also be posting longer reviews and sharing trailers, and you can follow along here to keep up with all of the news out of the festival.
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In the fictional country of Atropia (which is actually a training facility in California styled to resemble an Iraqi village), few people take their jobs as seriously as struggling actress Fayruz (Alia Shawkat). She knows there’s something twisted about roleplaying as a chemical weapons expert for the benefit of soldiers visiting Atropia before they’re deployed to fight in the real, ongoing Iraq War. But it’s a paying gig where she happens to be falling in love with a fellow pretend insurgent (Callum Turner). Though Atropia gets unwieldy between its romantic and satirical modes, it nails the Bush era’s “patriotic” madness.
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This film is gorgeous, taking place across a warm and cozy Paris, ultra modern Chongqing, and a virtual reality metaverse where players hunt down a mysterious, mystical deer. Unfortunately its parallel stories of estranged families aren’t particularly compelling on their own, nor do they intersect in a satisfying way. It attempts to throw in some tension through other means – like a surprisingly simple million-dollar art heist, and the search for the virtual deer – but ultimately Luz is too meandering to remain captivating for long.
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Bubble & Squeak.
Set in an unnamed, fictional European country that, due to a long war where residents only had cabbage to eat, has outlawed the vegetable and imposed severe punishments for smugglers. When a honeymooning American couple (Himesh Patel and Sarah Goldberg) gets caught with cabbages in their pants, they end up racing for their lives. The movie is, obviously, ridiculous – and there are some fun comedic performances from Steven Yeun, Dave Franco, and Matt Berry – but it awkwardly tries to mash its humor with a more sincere tale of a couple facing their differences that never really comes together.
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By Design.
It turns out Juliette Lewis makes a very good chair. In this surreal film her character Camille feels overlooked and ignored, until one day she finds the most beautiful designer chair, and the two somehow switch places. While Camille’s inanimate body becomes a strange source of fascination for her friends, she truly feels seen with her soul inside of the chair, which has become an obsession for pianist Olivier (Mamoudou Athie). The movie can drag in moments, particularly because of its lengthy narration, but its strange vision is weirdly charming and eventually pushes towards a surprisingly intense climax.
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Didn’t Die.
A zombie apocalypse isn’t enough to stop Vinita’s (Kiran Deol) podcast ambitions. She hosts the titular show despite the world coming to an end, and a planned live performance for episode 100 becomes a useful way to connect with survivors, who are largely isolated in this dystopic world. Didn’t Die starts out as mostly a comedy, with the scary bits serving as background, but when Vinita’s ex and a surprise baby get involved, it becomes a touching –and tragic – story of family and loss, one that ends on a heartwarming and hopeful note.
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The Legend of Ochi.
A gorgeous adventure in the mold of E.T., the movie has a lot of promise but is missing the spark to truly stand out. It takes place in an isolated mountain community, where ape-like creatures called ochi are hunted by farmers trying to keep their livestock safe. But when a young girl (Helena Zengel) finds an injured baby ochi, she sets off on a quest to return it to its family. The creature design is incredible, and there’s a lot of mystery to the post-apocalyptic seeming world. Ultimately, though, Ochi is a charming-yet-fairly-standard family-friendly adventure. (It hits theaters on April 25th.)
