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The Sundance Film Festival officially enters middle age this year, celebrating its 40th anniversary in the snowy mountains of Park City, Utah. Four decades is an impressive span to carry the banner of US independent film and, true to form, the line-up of 83 feature films includes no fewer than 40 first-time directors. Getting attention for those movies — much less getting a coveted distribution deal — remains a challenge in a fast-changing industry, but Sundance is here to help.
Stars and, in the auteur-friendly festival environment, directors tend to draw the spotlight even here. Kristen Stewart headlines not one but two offbeat tales of star-crossed lovers, Love Me and Love Lies Bleeding, while Sundance royalty Steven Soderbergh (Sex, Lies, and Videotape) returns with the thriller Presence. Yet the festival also keeps up with filmmakers who are more under the radar, such as David and Nathan Zellner (Sasquatch Sunset, apparently about a family of bigfoot creatures) and Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow, a tantalising midnight selection).
By some measures, Sundance’s documentary slate tends to be its most successful: nearly half of this year’s Academy Award non-fiction shortlist premiered here. One of 2024’s most ambitious docs is Yance Ford’s Power, part of a robust Premieres section. Ford directed a previous Sundance film, Strong Island, an unsettling account of their brother’s murder and the spectre of racism; Power pulls the camera back for a big-picture analysis of policing in the US.
Ford marshals a roster of deep thinkers to argue that law enforcement has some unsavoury systemic tendencies. Their ideas — about social control, racial profiling, the quashing of protests — elaborate on arguments familiar from several generations of activism. But the film’s lucid presentation of these ideas makes it feel like seeing a gun being taken apart and put back together again. Its focus on Lyndon B Johnson’s Kerner Commission, which diagnosed the urban unrest of the 1960s, and its far-reaching implications, continues the valuable work of 2022 Sundance entry Riotsville, USA.
★★★★☆
On the fiction side, Stress Positions unleashes a raucous comedy of bad manners within an incestuous circle of friends and lovers in Brooklyn. Set in summer 2020, it vibrates with the frayed nerves and combustible politics of that first pandemic year, centring on a milquetoast (John Early), his bedridden Moroccan nephew (Qaher Harhash) and his chaotic trans ex (Theda Hammel, who also directs). Most of the action consists of the comings and goings from a stir-crazy brownstone, amid much mask-splaining and food home delivery.
With its wrecking-ball approach to sensitivities around identity issues, the film is a spicy antidote to the pieties that can bog down some Sundance selections. (The title somehow references a 9/11-era torture term without really drawing attention to the fact.) Nobody comes off as a saint, falling prey to personality flaws and run-of-the-mill selfishness. But Hammel, a New York performer directing her debut feature, is also not after mean-spirited caricature (at least, not exclusively), and seems genuinely stimulated by the general mess of coexistence.
★★★☆☆
Last year’s Midnight section offered Talk to Me, Infinity Pool and Polite Society, and the 2024 batch has already premiered one twisted adventure, It’s What’s Inside. Greg Jardin’s jittery debut feature joins a recent series of thrillers set among friends confined (or condemned) to a sprawling manor, here a gathering of university pals hanging out before a wedding. The head-spinning premise, however, springs out of an unusual party game brought by one guest who purports to work for a tech company: an experimental machine that swaps the bodies and identities of participants.
To absolutely no one’s surprise, the game wreaks havoc on friendships and long-nursed crushes as the friends work to identify one another in their different guises. The strong personalities present — an Instagram influencer, a bickering couple, a trust-funder, among others — fuel the confusion and revelations that unfold, ripe for a game midnight crowd. (Minus the whirling camerawork and modern slang, it’s all maybe not that far from Shakespeare’s classical gender-swap comedies.)
It’s definitely a movie that requires audiences to keep their wits about them, and the reach of its plotting might exceed its grasp, but, as with any Sundance movie pushing its vision to the hilt, the gusto is gratifying.
★★★☆☆
To January 28, festival.sundance.org
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