Ekin Koç in Alireza Khatami’s The Things You Kill (2025)
The forty-first Sundance Film Festival opens today, and it may be the penultimate edition before the event picks up and leaves Park City, Utah, for a new home. Listing twelve films he’s looking forward to seeing, Ty Burr notes that he’s “expecting the festival vibe to be weirder than usual,” perhaps owing to the fact that the launch is occurring two weeks after the Los Angeles fires broke out, a few days after Trump was sworn in, and just hours after the Oscar nominations were announced. “Let’s see how the movies live up to the challenge; Sundance 2025 seems relatively low on A-list star power (and the often middling films that accompany them) and longer on new moviemakers, topical hot buttons, and oddball plot lines.”
For oddball plot lines, we can turn to two films starring Juliette Lewis. “A woman swaps bodies with a chair, and everyone likes her better as a chair,” reads the first line in the festival’s synopsis for By Design, directed by Amanda Kramer (Ladyworld, Please Baby Please). “I just wanted to do and be a part of anything she creates,” Lewis tells Chris Gardner in the Hollywood Reporter. Kramer is “one of those filmmakers who, when you get involved, you enter her world in the universe.”
In Opus, Mark Anthony Green’s A24-backed feature debut, Lewis plays “a pop art journalist and not the most respectable kind,” she says. “Gosh, it was so fun. I love my character—she’s very sassy. That’s such a silly word. She’s a blend of Wendy Williams and Megyn Kelly.” Headlining Opus are Ayo Edebiri as a less sassy journalist and John Malkovich as what the festival describes as “a deified global phenomenon making a dramatically malevolent reintroduction.”
Evan Twohy’s Bubble & Squeak is one of fifteen Sundance features the staff at Letterboxd has eyes for. “As someone still thinking about Sarah Goldberg’s centerpiece monologue in Barry and Himesh Patel’s powerhouse Station Eleven performance, I’m ready,” writes Annie Lyons. “Adapted from his absurdist comedy play and former Black List script, his idiosyncratic debut stars the pair as newlyweds accused of smuggling illegal cabbages—yes, you read that right—in a fictional European country.” At ScreenAnarchy, Ryland Aldrich is all in for Touch Me, the first feature from Addison Heimann and a “gloriously well-crafted horror-comedy about two BFFs who become addicted to an alien’s drug-like touch.”
“What would a feature-length director commentary look like for a film that was never made?” asks Jordan Raup at the Film Stage. “This is the slippery, fascinating conceit for Charlie Shackleton’s rather brilliant Zodiac Killer Project, which finds the director walking through his failed attempt to make the first major documentary about the infamous unsolved case, based on Lyndon E. Lafferty’s book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge. What emerges, one could argue, is an even more intellectually stimulating project than the original intentions: a sui generis, often humorous stream-of-consciousness journey highlighting the ever-mounting mass of repeated clichés of various true-crime documentaries and series.”
Programmer Tom Hall recommends Kim A. Snyder’s The Librarians, which focuses on the battle for intellectual freedom in the face of book bans in states such as Texas and Florida. Snyder “makes powerful documentaries that have sought to track the quest for justice among the families and young victims of gun violence,” notes Hall. “Beneath her work is a justifiable rage, a refusal to allow inaction by hypocrites whose pieties cynically contradict their refusal to enact common sense changes. How perfect, then, for Kim to take on the same cynics who crow about individual freedoms while seeking to strip them away from the rest of us.”
IndieWire’s Chris O’Falt reports that Jesse Short Bull and David France are hard at work on a new ending for their film, Free Leonard Peltier. To a limited extent, Joe Biden did just that in one of his final acts as president on Monday. Fifty years ago, Peltier, one of the surviving leaders of the American Indian Movement, was convicted on two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment. The conviction was, as the festival puts it, “contentious,” but Peltier has been behind bars ever since. Biden commuted the sentence to indefinite house arrest. At Hyperallergic, Dan Schindel has written up an overview of more standout nonfiction films.
IndieWire’s got a most-anticipated list, too, and it includes first impressions of Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day, with Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall; Eva Victor’s feature directorial debut, Sorry, Baby; and Max Walker-Silverman’s Rebuilding, starring Josh O’Connor. In Magic Farm, directed by Amalia Ulman (El Planeta), a film crew heads to Argentina to profile a local musician. But they end up landing in the wrong country. “Chloë Sevigny, Alex Wolff (in easily his funniest performance as a petulant but endearing man-child with a crush on his boss), Joe Apollonio, and Simon Rex round out a hilarious ensemble in this satire of cross-cultural clashes and media exploitation that blends genres and tastes (the good and the bad) with a playful absurdity,” writes Ryan Lattanzio.
Lattanzio also has the trailer and poster for The Things You Kill, a psychological thriller set in Turkey from Alireza Khatami (Terrestrial Verses). “With shades of Abbas Kiarostami in its self-awareness and Lost Highway in flipping the narrative (and a key cast member) halfway through,” writes Lattanzio, “The Things You Kill is shot with cool precision as Ali (Ekin Koç) befriends an enigmatic gardener who opens the door to jumpstarting his flatlined life. It’s hard to say too much about this mesmerizing film without spoiling it, but Khatami, who lives in Canada, exhibits calm control over a story that’s inexorably hurtling toward doom. Until the story turns inside out yet again.”
For Variety,Ben Croll talks with Chloé Robichaud about Two Women, an adaptation of screenwriter Catherine Léger’s 2022 play—inspired by Claude Fournier’s 1970 comedy Two Women in Gold—centering on two housewives stuck in moribund marriages. They decide to spice up their lives, fidelity be damned. “Reclaiming female desire became my entry point,” says Robichaud, “exploring how to present two women reclaiming that desire on their own terms. We talk about the ‘female gaze,’ but showing women’s desire for men from their perspective is still quite rare, and thus, very creatively stimulating.”
Vulture’s Fran Hoepfner and Bilge Ebiri are looking forward to Hailey Gates’s first feature, Atropia, “starring Alia Shawkat and Callum Turner as actors on opposite sides of a military role-playing simulation who fall in love by accident. Gates is a fascinating emerging figure in the industry, recognizable to cinephiles for her brief turns in Twin Peaks: The Return, Uncut Gems, and Challengers . . . as well as being the granddaughter of screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury. Atropia is kind of giving something between Black Mirror and Westworld, sure, but with a supporting cast that boasts Tim Heidecker, Chloë Sevigny, and Ivy Wolk, there’s room for Gates’s debut to be one of the fest’s funniest flicks.”
The laughs will be welcome. Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr. talks with Meera Menon, who’s bringing Didn’t Die to Park City. The low-budget thriller is set against the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse, and it was shot in the home in Los Angeles she shared with her cowriter and husband, Paul Gleason. That home has since burned down. Screen’s Jeremy Kay notes that Michelle Satter, the founding senior director of the Sundance Institute’s Artist Programs “and a cherished figure in the industry, and her producer husband David Latt, are among the many who have lost their homes to the fires.”
“I’ve been chatting a lot in recent days with filmmakers, industry, audiences, and staff who were displaced or much worse in the past week,” Sundance director Eugene Hernandez tells Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times. “Folks who’ve lost so much. Everyone continues to tell me that they need this festival right now, to come together as a community and look ahead.”
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