“Just cruel,” 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: “Trump Bars Transgender Women From U.S. Prisons for Female Inmates.” To say it felt a bit jarring to re-immerse myself into Jimpa, Sophie Hyde’s gentle drama about embracing the fluidity of sexual and gender experience, is a bit of an understatement.
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 — both the verb and the noun. Unlike the festival’s 2017 edition, where pink pussy hats made resistance visible in the wake of Trump’s 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 … while everyone else absorbed the parade of horrible news accompanying regime change.
Two films in Sundance’s 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 and Cherien Dabis’ intergenerational Palestinian drama All That’s Left of You. Within their scopes, each offers the opportunity for reflectiveness on the successes and setbacks inherent in confronting a world reluctant to recognize a group’s 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.
Jimpa was the more aggravating of the bunch because Sophie Hyde lays her cards on the table early through her surrogate character, Olivia Colman’s 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 LGBTQ+ narratives is commendable, and Hannah’s 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.
But Jimpa maps too closely to the hallmarks of a conventional family drama to showcase Hannah’s 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’t 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’ worth of attitudes toward the ongoing sexual revolution. (But to her credit, this film is how I learned about the concept of compersion.)
All That’s Left of You at least gets more of the basics down in narrative style. Dabis’ film opens with an act of Palestinian teenager’s 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’s 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.
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’s amnesia for the Palestinian cause. Dabis’ 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’s Left of You 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.
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 … just not how you want it. Two titles took a more animalistic approach to understanding human emotion: Midnight title Rabbit Trap and a Premieres bow that wishes it could be in the genre sidebar, The Thing with Feathers. Both were reminders that abstraction and obliqueness do not inherently make a movie better.
I’d try to explain what Rabbit Trap 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’s 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.
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’s needed to make anything that precedes it click into place. Chaney’s 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.

The opposite tonal issue holds Dylan Southern’s The Thing with Feathers 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’s sudden death at 9:45 PM on a Saturday, though I’m convinced the film would be just as aggravating to sit through at any hour of the day. When the soft strums Fairport Convention’s song “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” usher this adaptation of Max Porter’s novella Grief Is the Thing with Feathers 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.
For all the different angles from which Southern’s film approaches grief, it never presents any moment or scene that doesn’t feel incredibly familiar from movies of the same ilk. (Heck, even the wonky-looking crow that comes to embody a broken family’s collective trauma recalls a similar avian plot device from last year’s A24 release Tuesday.) 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’s performance full of physical and emotional contortions goes for naught. What good is a go-for-broke performance inside a work that’s already in such deep debt to its forerunners?
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’s Main Street seems to make it even less likely the festival remains in Park City beyond next year.
It’s 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’s The Ugly Stepsister, takes a clever new angle on fairytale mythology like a Disney princess retcon simply could never dare. By exploring Cinderella 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’s no wonder someone allegedly blew chunks in the aisle at the premiere.
I’m 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’s If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You. 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’s last line is a half-heartedly offered “I’ll be better, I promise,” and there was odd comfort in hearing someone articulate the sentiment and not believe it either.
The Sundance Film Festival continues through February 2; follow our coverage here.