Sundance Film Festival round-up — exquisite yearning, body horror and a hilarious hot mess

Some of the loudest noise at the Sundance Film Festival can come from the quietest places. In a line-up of movies where you could find Anne Hathaway as a seductive prison psychologist and Mia Goth as a sadistic gun-toting vacationer, it was the unassuming drama Past Lives that won a loud chorus of praise. Celine Song’s debut feature is the kind of sensitively wrought, sneakily devastating story one hopes to stumble on at Sundance — fresh where so many indie films felt formulaic.

Past Lives is an exquisite chronicle of a missed connection between former childhood friends in South Korea whose lives diverge. Nora (Greta Lee) heads off to the US with her family and then pursues her ambitions as a playwright in New York; Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) studies to become an engineer. Nora settles down with another writer, Arthur (John Magaro); Hae Sung pines after her, remembering the girl who was miffed when he earned better test scores.

Song skilfully stretches and compresses her storytelling as the two find each other online, take a break, then have the opportunity to cross paths again. It’s a movie that understands how yearning lives in your body even when you think you’ve set it aside. Lee’s wondrously controlled performance, with a serene dash of wit, anchors Song’s brand of romantic realism, which soars further by resisting the easy answers we’ve come to expect from other movies.

Another festival highlight, Rotting in the Sun, is definitely not a shrinking violet; it’s a hilarious hot mess. Sebastián Silva, a criminally under-appreciated Chilean satirist, directs and stars as a hapless film-maker in Mexico City who just might quiet-quit and become a painter. He contemplates suicide, gets zonked on ketamine and is besieged by aimless, horny men. One of them, a motormouth influencer named Jordan Firstman (played by comedian Jordan Firstman), insists on developing a project with Silva, who eventually agrees despite regarding Instagram as a pathetic void.

A marvel of comic timing shot in deft handheld, Rotting in the Sun is full of unpredictable turns as it mocks the state of perpetual distraction that afflicts Silva and his friends. When the plot lurches in a wild direction (best left unrevealed), the focus switches to Silva’s bewildered cleaner, Vero (Catalina Saavedra), who finds herself in hot water. As always, Silva isn’t afraid to ruffle feathers with jabs at classism and solipsism, or with comically rampant male nudity. But his healthy sense of life’s absurdity has far more heart than bile.

Silva’s risky verve was rare; several character studies at Sundance seemed convinced of their boldness but felt oddly similar. Fantasy sequences — especially deadpan visions of dying — were rife in Eileen, Cat Person and Sometimes I Think About Dying — all imagined by young, lonely female protagonists. Eileen and Cat Person — which do have their mercilessly funny moments — make third-act dramatic swerves that seem self-defeating, while Sometimes I Think About Dying restricts Daisy Ridley to a bonsai-like state of emotional constriction as a taciturn office drone.

Relationship dramas cut more deeply when marriage was involved, as with one of the festival’s biggest acquisitions, Fair Play — bought for $20mn by Netflix. Two hedge fund analysts are about to get married, when one (Phoebe Dynevor) unexpectedly wins the promotion coveted by her fiancé (a weaselly Alden Ehrenreich). It’s a lacerating and violent look at toxic male resentment and finance-bro chest-thumping, but some unforced plotting errors show that the dark delights of Succession aren’t so easy to replicate.

Sundance veteran Nicole Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a novelist who overhears her therapist husband dismissing her book. The admirably concise premise blooms into a sticky dissection of trust, though the flat storytelling takes its sweet time. Holofcener’s comedic powers of observation remain sharp, but the cynicism — about church charity, therapy, interior design, you name it — leaves a sour taste.

While You Hurt My Feelings sticks to well-trodden stretches of New York, Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt takes a supremely tactile approach to the lives of two sisters growing up in rural Mississippi. From the flair and colour of the clothes, the setting looks to be the 1970s or 1980s, but Jackson’s film is a memory piece that shifts freely forwards or backwards in time. A mother’s death and an intense teenage romance change the courses of the sisters’ lives, but this is a film of gestures that dwells on clasped hands as much as faces, or simply sits with the sound of rain and insects. It achieves a level of total stylistic commitment more common in European art cinema than American indies, but with a voice all its own.

Sundance also knew how to let loose and have fun with its genre films this year. A raucous tale of two sisters, Polite Society, bops along with 16-year-old Ria, an aspiring stuntwoman who is catastrophically loyal to her older sibling Lena, due to be married off to a surgeon. The repartee is peppy and clever, and the scheming, fighting and colourful design delightful. Birth/Rebirth stars a mordantly funny Marin Ireland as a tunnel-visioned hospital pathologist experimenting with bringing the dead back to life in her home-turned-lab. An equally strong Judy Reyes plays a nurse who is the mother of one such revived child and turns her grief into action.

Infinity Pool was a much-hyped title, not for the faint of heart. Director Brandon Cronenberg crossbreeds two differently squirmy scenarios — vacation nightmares and dystopian cloning — to birth a bloody, nihilistic beast. Alexander Skarsgård plays a tourist who starts running with a fast crowd led with gleeful perversity by Mia Goth’s louche thrill-seeker. It is a self-conscious but effective midnight movie, with strobe and bad-trip sequences that make you want to stay at home for spring break.

But perhaps nothing is quite as daunting as the vision of mortality confronted by A Still Small Voice — my favourite of Sundance’s annually anticipated documentary selection. Luke Lorentzen’s breathtaking film joins Mati, a hospital chaplain in training, as she counsels patients and their families and lends a sympathetic ear to those facing illness or death. But this isn’t a pious, dutiful look at end-of-life planning: Mati struggles mightily under the emotional weight of her job. She isn’t afraid to voice her fears — about God, work, herself — and so becomes a vessel for reflecting on our own. A Still Small Voice is one of several standouts at Sundance that one hopes will find an audience beyond Park City, Utah.

Festival to January 29, festival.sundance.org

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