{"id":25589,"date":"2025-01-27T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-01-27T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=25589"},"modified":"2025-01-30T18:11:44","modified_gmt":"2025-01-31T02:11:44","slug":"sundance-2025-dispatch-all-thats-left-of-park-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/sundance-2025-dispatch-all-thats-left-of-park-city\/","title":{"rendered":"Sundance 2025 Dispatch: All That\u2019s Left of Park City"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cJust cruel,\u201d read a text that I glimpsed from my watch during an early-morning Sundance screening. A pit in my stomach grew as I awaited the inevitable link to a news story, and then the headline hit: \u201cTrump Bars Transgender Women From U.S. Prisons for Female Inmates.\u201d To say it felt a bit jarring to re-immerse myself into Jimpa<\/em>, Sophie Hyde\u2019s gentle drama about embracing the fluidity of sexual and gender experience, is a bit of an understatement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Heading up into the mountains of Utah in January to take in a new crop of independent cinema premieres has always felt like an escape. But in 2025, the Sundance Film Festival also felt like a retreat \u2014 both the verb and the noun. Unlike the festival\u2019s 2017 edition, where pink pussy hats made resistance visible in the wake of Trump\u2019s first inauguration, the chatter inside the queuing tents was marked by a mix of dread and guilt. One gentleman ahead of me in line spoke the subtext by mentioning how weird it felt that we had the luxury to disappear into the silver screen \u2026 while everyone else absorbed the parade of horrible news accompanying regime change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two films in Sundance\u2019s premieres section seemed promising as titles that could meet this tense political moment when hard-fought gains for marginalized people seemed at risk: the aforementioned Jimpa<\/em><\/strong> and Cherien Dabis\u2019 intergenerational Palestinian drama All That\u2019s Left of You<\/em><\/strong>. Within their scopes, each offers the opportunity for reflectiveness on the successes and setbacks inherent in confronting a world reluctant to recognize a group\u2019s full humanity. While both are well-meaning, especially for viewers who might be encountering these stories and voices for the first time, they each dwell disappointingly in conventionality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jimpa<\/em> was the more aggravating of the bunch because Sophie Hyde lays her cards on the table early through her surrogate character, Olivia Colman\u2019s filmmaker Hannah. She insists that she can make a film about queer history that stays above true conflict, as embodied by her father Jimpa (John Lithgow) and his late-in-life coming out story. The intention to move beyond the trauma plot in \u200b\u200bLGBTQ+ narratives is commendable, and Hannah\u2019s nonbinary child Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde) tries to live that out by requesting they move in with Jimpa to bring biological and chosen families into closer proximity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Jimpa<\/em> maps too closely to the hallmarks of a conventional family drama to showcase Hannah\u2019s lofty aim. A film without conflict, in this case, is just mouthpieces discussing issues. When coaching an acting seminar, Hannah mentions that intimacy in acting comes from noticing detail. Shame Hyde couldn\u2019t also take that advice as her bloated, unfocused film drowns in a shallow pool of good intentions as it belabors the distinctions defining three generations\u2019 worth of attitudes toward the ongoing sexual revolution. (But to her credit, this film is how I learned about the concept of compersion.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All That\u2019s Left of You<\/em> at least gets more of the basics down in narrative style. Dabis\u2019 film opens with an act of Palestinian teenager\u2019s resistance in 1988, only to have the director appear as a matriarchal figure explaining to us that we need to go back to his grandfather\u2019s struggles four decades before to put his actions in context. This intergenerational drama plays out across the years since the establishment of Israel as a state creates ripple effects disrupting the life of a family from Jaffa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film occasionally flirts with some interesting thematic ideas, such as the grandfather figure Sharif beginning to struggle with dementia in a way that mirrors the wider world\u2019s amnesia for the Palestinian cause. Dabis\u2019 depiction of how political courage can skip a generation also makes for some intriguing tension within the family. But more often than not, the nearly two-and-a-half-hour film feels like visiting a living history museum. All That\u2019s Left of You<\/em> seems more concerned about flattening a tricky, multidimensional conflict into a pat narrative box than it is with maintaining a sense of spikiness or urgency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As always, be careful what you wish for in a festival context. What you pine for in one set of movies will often appear in another \u2026 just not how you want it. Two titles took a more animalistic approach to understanding human emotion: Midnight title Rabbit Trap<\/em><\/strong> and a Premieres bow that wishes it could be in the genre sidebar, The Thing with Feathers<\/em><\/strong>. Both were reminders that abstraction and obliqueness do not inherently make a movie better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019d try to explain what Rabbit Trap<\/em> is, but doing so feels like it would betray the baffling experience of watching a well-mounted film with a staggering lack of narrative clarity. Bryn Chaney\u2019s Welsh-set tale follows a husband and wife (Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen) involved in recording the sounds of their sylvan surroundings. The film head-fakes making their profession the subject of the movie, but the aural textures that could rival Peter Strickland or Mark Jenkin quickly fade into the backdrop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, an odd game of cat-and-mouse plays out between the couple and an unnamed child (Jade Croot) lurking outside their rural abode. This entity of seemingly mythological import introduces a flurry of fantasmagoria that sets the film adrift. Ambiguity and ambiance give way to a blisteringly obvious explanation of its title, a twist that\u2019s needed to make anything that precedes it click into place. Chaney\u2019s sensational sonic experience is simply not enough to make up for the narrative deficiencies; if anything, its precision only exacerbates the scale of the other problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The opposite tonal issue holds Dylan Southern\u2019s The Thing with Feathers<\/em> in a death grip: an over-literalization of its central metaphor. It was certainly a choice for the Sundance schedulers to pick a movie singularly concerned with the fallout from a wife and mother\u2019s sudden death at 9:45 PM on a Saturday, though I\u2019m convinced the film would be just as aggravating to sit through at any hour of the day. When the soft strums Fairport Convention\u2019s song \u201cWho Knows Where the Time Goes?\u201d usher this adaptation of Max Porter\u2019s novella Grief Is the Thing with Feathers<\/em> into the ending credits, I could answer at least for my own experience watching the film. It went into a black hole I can never get back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For all the different angles from which Southern\u2019s film approaches grief, it never presents any moment or scene that doesn\u2019t feel incredibly familiar from movies of the same ilk. (Heck, even the wonky-looking crow that comes to embody a broken family\u2019s collective trauma recalls a similar avian plot device from last year\u2019s A24 release Tuesday<\/em>.) Shadings of horror and a multi-perspectival narrative structure cannot hide the lack of specificity that makes the experience feel like such a painful slog. Even Benedict Cumberbatch\u2019s performance full of physical and emotional contortions goes for naught. What good is a go-for-broke performance inside a work that\u2019s already in such deep debt to its forerunners?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This may seem like a gloom-and-doom dispatch, which may be appropriate given how doom and uncertainty seem to linger over everything on the ground. Several screenings have opened with acknowledgements of the tragic fires that have subsumed one of the major industry hubs. Further, each traffic jam on the festival\u2019s Main Street seems to make it even less likely the festival remains in Park City beyond next year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s only fitting, then, that two of the biggest standout tiles have been films that leaned into the darkness. The Opening Night selection of the Midnight section, Emilie Blichfeldt\u2019s The Ugly Stepsister<\/em><\/strong>, takes a clever new angle on fairytale mythology like a Disney princess retcon simply could never dare. By exploring Cinderella<\/em> through the perspective of a character routinely written off without humanity, Blichfeldt finds a cautionary tale about the perils of beauty culture hiding in plain sight. It\u2019s no wonder someone allegedly blew chunks in the aisle at the premiere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m more surprised no one seems to have had a panic attack at what seems to have been the consensus favorite on the ground: Mary Bronstein\u2019s If I Had Legs, I\u2019d Kick You<\/em><\/strong>. This ruthlessly unvarnished spiral of a maternal caregiver swirling the black hole of burnout is a relentless plunge into the perpetual aggravation of Linda, played with ferocious tenacity by Rose Byrne. The actress brings the full range of her talents to bear as Bronstein throws everything but the kitchen sink at her. The film\u2019s last line is a half-heartedly offered \u201cI\u2019ll be better, I promise,\u201d and there was odd comfort in hearing someone articulate the sentiment and not believe it either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Sundance Film Festival continues through February 2; follow our coverage here.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our first report from Park City includes reviews of \u201cIf I Had Legs, I\u2019d Kick You,\u201d \u201cThe Thing with Feathers,\u201d and more of this year\u2019s Sundance selections.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":522,"featured_media":25590,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1416],"tags":[1419,1809],"class_list":["post-25589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-festivals","tag-film-fests","tag-sundance-2025"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/522"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25589"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25589\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25638,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25589\/revisions\/25638"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}