Love and Death at Sundance

Toxic daddies, shifting identities, yearning for the dead, aching for connection. The only certainty at Sundance this year was uncertainty—disorienting childhoods, unsettling adulthoods. If you can survive the patriarchy’s pervasive corrosions and technology’s seductive illusions, you might just stand a chance. Maybe.

The festival’s top winner was In the Summers, Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio’s well-acted and heartfelt but dramatically unremarkable portrait of two daughters and the periodic encounters they had visiting their deadbeat dad—alcoholic, estranged, and adrift—in small-town New Mexico. This memory piece, based on the director’s own life experiences, is like a Sundance Bingo card: latino characters, cis-male dominance, underage drug use, female director, an LGBTQ subplot. What it lacks is an auteurist sense of vision—which is peculiar for a film that won not only the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize, but also the U.S. Dramatic Directing Award.

You want bad parenting? Look no further than Good One, India Donaldson’s lo-fi gut-punch of a drama, using a father-daughter camping trip to expose how oblivious, craven, and pathetic the male psyche really can be. Imagine Old Joy remade by Eliza Hittman and you’ll get a feel for this finely-tuned character study that blends nuanced confessions in the great outdoors along with an undercurrent of low-boil feminist indignance towards the XY chromosome.

Fathers are the worst! Just check out Daniel Hoesl and Julia Niemann’s chilly Austrian satire Veni Vidi Vici, where a moneyed Euro Zaddy uses the unwashed masses as target practice while local authorities turn a blind eye. His two younger kids are oblivious, although his ennui-ridden teen daughter picks up on his nihilist vibes and picks outs one of his showroom rifles for her own nefarious purposes. Droll and dry in equal measure, the low-hanging indignity isn’t so much outrageously shocking as it is just finely polished highbrow mayhem.

If you’re lucky enough to avoid death from the double-barreled blast of the one percent, you’ll still probably long for your loved ones after they die. Ghosts left their mark on Sundance this year, most potently in Steven Soderbergh’s crafty haunted-house spook-a-thon Presence. Arguably the first poltergeist creepfest told entirely from the point of view of the deceased—no, I’m not counting a certain blockbuster Shyamalan shenanigan—this inverted spectral melodrama makes the viewer literally see through the eyes of the deceased. And what the dead witnesses is a very troubled family coming apart at the seams. Who needs to scare the living when they’re already freaking themselves out?

If you want to get really freaked, watch Eternal You, Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck’s creepy-AF look at the imminent and unavoidable technological death industry, where LLM A.I. chatbots and VR avatars that simulate interactions with the deceased based on their own voice recordings, photos, videos, social-media profiles and any other digital footprints they left behind. Comforting, right? Not when your dead boyfriend starts talking about how he’s in Hell.

When it comes to the afterlife, it’s best to stick with a human touch. Lana Wilson’s Look into My Eyes is her deeply empathetic, quietly powerful study of the psychic community in New York City. Real people, with real grief, seek comfort, and the psychics impressively strike the right balance between the supernatural and the empathetic to communicate sentiment we all want to hear: you’re not a bad person, you deserve love, you can let go and find peace.

Some folks never find peace. In the sweetly gonzo drama A Different Man, Sebastian Shaw plays lonely-heart New Yorker Edward with a face covered in swollen tumors because of neurofibromatosis. When his new neighbor, aspiring playwright Ingrid (Renate Reinsve) showers him with kindness and stirs up new emotions, he undergoes an experimental procedure to correct his looks. The treatment works all too well, and Edward soon discovers—through some wonderfully wild plot twists—that looking good will never really exorcise those deep feelings of insecurity. And that life will only hold a mirror back up to all his own ugliness. It might be a pat life lesson, but writer-director Aaron Schimberg captures it all with a seductively peculiar and wildly empathetic sense of the absurd.

One documentary that richly reflected life’s strange journeys, while also offering a panacea to all the other Sundance cinematic agita, was Eno, Gary Hustwit’s sumptuous deep dive into the creative life of seminal musician-producer-guru Brian Eno. Spanning five decades of febrile experimentation, using a myriad of synthesizers to literally synthesize new modes of melodizing, Eno regales viewers with a panoply of anecdotes that celebrate the discovery and invention he experienced while working with groundbreaking artists like Roxy Music, David Bowie, Laurie Anderson, Devo, Talking Heads, and U2.

His ambient-music philosophy even inspired the film’s form: using A.I.-assisted software, the documentary remixes and reforms for every showing, swapping out sound bites and B-roll so that no two viewings are ever the same. Admittedly, it’s a bit of a gimmick that arguably takes the “you never step in the same river twice” mentality to an extreme. But Eno’s embrace of variation, chaos, serendipity, and the unknown all feeds into the pop-philosopher’s greatest insight: only in relinquishing control can we open up ourselves to the sublime. Sometimes the best way to unlock serenity—and even enlightenment—is to just let yourself surrender.