Notes From a Smaller Sundance

Muted but bustling, slimmed down but still delivering a respectable crop of indie revelations, the 40^th Sundance Film Festival finds itself continuing to regain lost ground from an online-only 2021-2022 pandemic heart attack as it aspires to recapture the swagger that defined its ’90s heyday.

Park City’s storied event has gone through some uncharacteristic belt-tightening, dropping a few venues and cutting back its roster of features—80 this year, down from 110 in 2023. It doesn’t seem the worse for wear, except for the bone-headed logistical monkey wrench of limiting the bus service that shuttles audiences from venue to venue. The dearth of vehicles has made people think twice about the institution’s general health. If you don’t want people to whisper that Sundance is on the ropes, make sure the buses run on time—and often.

The cavalcade of celeb-driven projects is missing, too, as is the festival fever for starfuckery, leaving Kristen Stewart to represent the high-wattage actors that otherwise counted less-electric boldface names like Pedro Pascal, Jesse Eisenberg, Will Ferrell, Aubrey Plaza, and Kieran Culkin among their whittled group. A double-whammy symptom of Covid-era production restrictions coupled with the one-two punch of SAG-AFRTA and Writer’s Guild strikes? Probably so.

The crowds are here for it, though, since ticket demand remains high and the venues are packed. The movies are pretty great too—best of all Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, a hilarious and emotionally incisive look at two estranged cousins who want to honor their dead grandmother by visiting her Polish childhood home during a so-called Holocaust tour. Eisenberg, who also wrote and directed, casts himself as David Kaplan, a neurotic but affluent married Brooklynite, while unemployed singleton misfit Benji Kaplan (Culkin) is an emotionally oversharing charisma bomb.

The duo re-connect on the sober European tour, where first-hand experiences of Jewish ghettos and a concentration camp mix with David’s own anxiety towards the relative he always considered the brother he never had. Layabout Benji has a manic but admirable ability to connect with anyone he meets, making David simultaneously resent and envy him.

A Real Pain takes a very Jewish tale about honoring the dead and refracts it through a painfully universal story about familial duty and personal shortcomings. The film delves into a generational divide between ancestors who persevered under oppression and guilt-ridden descendants who struggle to reconcile their unimpressively soft-shelled existence. It’s a rare gift to make blood-bond connections so funny while also making them so unbearably sad, and Eisenberg weaves his tale of emotional strife with a wise strain of empathy. Making it all so unbearably relatable is Culkin, who plays his stoner savant with such an endearing bipolar intensity that it’s impossible not to root for such a messy jerk. Searchlight agreed, picking up the tender broheim buddy flick for $10 million and a self-evident guarantee to position Culkin for next year’s Oscar race.

If this year’s edition of American indies reveals anything, it’s a deep-seated unease towards identity and one’s place in the world. Romantic comedy My Old Ass is essentially a CODA retread about 18-year-old Elliott (Maisy Stella) who learns lessons in life and love—not to mention familial appreciation—during the summer before college. The twist here is that she’s a lesbian who stumbles into a dick-sex tryst with a boy—and that a mushroom-induced hallucination somehow connects her with her 39-year-old self (Plaza), who offers warnings against an unarticulated heartache. The What If? omen from a future self rattles Elliott, who has to thread the needle towards avoiding future pain by reconciling her present-day longings. Megan Park’s cheeky, warm-hearted slant on modern love won a standing ovation from adoring crowds.

But the biggest applause came for two flicks that reveled in their grindhouse roots. Freaky Tales is Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s love letter to ’80s Bay-Area shenanigans, a quartet of interconnected narratives spurting hard-boiled, blood-squirting ultraviolence that plays like a Northern Californian Pulp Fiction. You want punk rockers trading crimson blows with Nazi skinheads? Or maybe a collection-agent goon fulfilling one last gig while picking out a date-night VHS rental for himself and his pregnant wife? How about a Salt-n-Pepa rap duo holding their own against misogynistic digs in an impromptu rap battle, or an all-star local basketball legend wreaking slice-and-dice vengeance against racist home invaders?

Freaky Tales has it all, including film-geek fetishizing of aspect ratios and celluloid cue marks along with a shot-out cameo from favorite son Tom Hanks. The whole portmanteau is a sloppy-silly joyride that never takes anything seriously except for its drop-dead adoration of Reagan-era time-capsule cultural madeleines.

For truly hard-boiled thrills, look no further than Midnight-movie highlight Love Lies Bleeding, Rose Glass’s lez-ploitation neo-noir about butch gym manager Lou (Stewart) and her fatal attraction to bisexual competitive bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’Brien). The duo confront toxic masculinity personified: Lou’s brother-in-law JJ (mullet-sporting Dave Franco), and in doing so accidentally cross Lou’s cold-blooded gun-running dad Lou Sr. (Ed Harris, haloed by impressively long hair extensions).

Expect ’roid-rage body blows, a pulverized jaw, eager finger-fucking, voracious carpet-munching, a corpse-filled ravine, jilted lovers, a sausage-sized insect larva and impromptu munching on a horned beetle. And don’t even try to explain the super-sized fantasy climax of happy-ending female empowerment. It’s a lot, right down to the crimson-bathed cinematographic slo-mo excess. But Glass’s expressionistic primal scream of sapphic love is a wily wonderment of gleeful transgression. Expect A24 to roll out this cinematic Molotov cocktail later in the year.

Sundance isn’t all candy-colored lasciviousness. A pair of films tackle the challenges of race from outside and in. Kobi Libii grapples with white discomfort in The American Society of Magical Negros, an uneven but winningly wry fantasy about how black people play psychological Twister to navigate the minefields of Caucasian discomfort. Their solution: a secret organization of mystical African Americans who use enchantment and clever persuasion to grapple with “white tears” anxiety from the casually racist entitled Caucasians surrounding—and perpetually threatening—them.

Titus Kaphar’s Exhibiting Forgiveness takes a more melodramatic and intra-racial route, illuminating the father-son fissure between successful fine-art painter Tarrell (André Holland) and the violent-prone recovering crackhead dad (John Earl Jelks) that Tarrell’s forgiving mother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) insists he needs to confront. Though maudlin and at times overwritten, Exhibiting Forgiveness glows with a fiery indignance and deserved resentment that suffuses the elegantly wrought tale of familial tension with cathartic melancholy.

Both are hard sells in today’s distribution marketplace, which is why Sundance continues to be a vital haven for such personal visions—especially when sex and violence are such perennial draws. One clever thriller milks both, but really delivers its genuine thrills from a plethora of unexpected twists and turns. Greg Jardin’s wickedly clever It’s What’s Inside leans heavily into Gen-Y gender fluidity and identity dysphoria with a delicious bleeding-edge tech conceit.

On the eve of his big wedding, a future groom invites some post-collegiate friends to his luxurious home for a chill hang-out—as well as a parlor game that goes terribly, terribly wrong. Secrets bubble to the surface no matter whose identity you’re wearing, and the truth will out no matter who gets reamed. The darkly delightful romp announces a new talent in Jardin, whose slick filmmaking chops and narrative slight-of-hand will give Rian Johnson a kindred soul in the art of deceptive dramatic flourishes. Netflix nabbed the midnight-movie entry for $17 million, a shrewd move uniting this new talent with the Knives Out director—who also got his start at Sundance with 2005’s Brick.