There has been substantial ink spilled on the typical “Sundance” movie. Having attended SXSW for several years now, I’ve found that trying to typecast films emblematic of the Film and TV Festival is much harder.
The three films in this dispatch are perhaps the best sample size of what I might call the typical “SXSW” movie. That’s a compliment, as each of these visions plays with form and genre in ways I find wholly interesting, bending the rules of convention just enough to be interesting while offering enough familiar story beats to make them digestible.
Ultimately, it’s their inventive filmmaking and commitment to the silly and sentimental that make them most appropriate for premieres at these festivals. They’re all, in some form, about navigating the hardships of love, be it that between friends, partners, or loved ones, but they’re also united by a hard truth that gives them more emotional heft. Secrecy and lies can destroy and build a relationship, and each film makes the case for where suppression might just be one of the most loving dispositions one can take.
One of the most impressive features of director Dempsey Bryk’s “Crash Land” is the way it summons feelings of melancholy out of scenarios that, for all intents and purposes, should be riotous. It’s a unique type of skill to exorcise despondency from a story about three wannabe stuntmen who wish to create a film to honor the life of one of their fallen friends, but it’s a testament to Byrk’s skill. The noblest of pursuits can serve as masks for deeper pain, and the release of long-gestating secrets can be both painful and cleansing. His film embraces all of those registers to propulsive effect, and is a lively, touching story of friends who have to contend with the seasonality of their friendships.
We meet aforementioned wannabe stuntmen, Clay (Noah Parker), Lance (Gabriel LaBelle), and Sander (Finn Wolfhard), as they reel from the loss of their fourth Musketeer, Darby (Billy Bryk), who suffered a brain aneurysm shortly after completing a daredevil stunt that may or may not have involved a bicycle and a flaming tire. Determined to honor his legacy, the trio set out to make a movie in Darby’s memory, serving as a showcase of his most impressive work.
It chafes against the buttoned-up members of the town, who wish to remember Darby differently and who view the boy’s stunts as a nuisance. The boys recruit Jemma (Abby Quinn) as their lead actress, and as they work on their project (“A real movie … like with words,” Lance says excitedly), the act of creation unearths latent emotions they all hold about masculinity, friendship, and identity. Art has a way of doing that to you.
It’s evident that the boys struggle to articulate how meaningful Darby was to them, and rather than risk feeling the fullness of their emotions, they try to bury them through stunt work. Byrk and co-writer Ben Snider-McGrath allow the boys’ awareness of their own avoidance to take shape naturally; it’s understandable that, at their age, they find it easier to endure splinters and sprains than an emotional rupture. It showcases how the physical connections young men primarily engage in can make them feel both close and isolated.
Abby Quinn is a delight in everything she’s in, and her effusive charm is at its highest powers here. She acts as the film’s truth teller, the one who questions the relentless drive of men around her and invites them to tap into the pain they are trying desperately to flee from. Her firm conviction and yet soft-spoken voice disarm easy avoidance. Cinematographer Kristofer Bonnell shoots much of the film with a handheld camera, in a meta way, mimicking the home video that group is trying to make, but it also makes everything that unfolds feel much more intimate, like this is the last hurrah of a friend group that may never speak again.
“Crash Land” taps into a unique type of disruption: the moment when we realize that not all relationships are meant to last, and that being best friends forever with someone is a shorter time than we may think. That’s not to say that the time spent with people doesn’t matter, but at the age of Lance, Clay, Sander, and Jemma, relationships matter because of their eternal nature. There’s a safety in knowing someone will always have your back or that you can call someone no matter the time or season. “Crash Land” celebrates how we grow in and out of relationships, and that sometimes moving on from people isn’t indicative of our immaturity but a sign that we’re growing and changing. If we’re blessed, our growing can encompass the stories of those who have been with us since day 1.
Dario Russo’s “The Fox” can boast of featuring one of Jai Courtney‘s most normal performances, but the film around him is anything but. A twisty, witchy tale about a marital relationship gone awry, it mines discomforting gasps and full-bellied laughs in equal measure from unrealistic and oppressive expectations couples often place on each other. It’s inventive in its savagery, almost always perturbing, but succeeds at the kind of absurd genre blend that made Yorgos Lanthimos a household name.
It’s always more interesting to me when characters start from a place of belief in the fantastical and spiritual. Thankfully, that’s the case with “The Fox,” where it’s a given that wild animals can communicate with humans directly. It’s a world where magpies try to trade gossip they hear for chicken, or, in the case of Courtney’s Nick, where a fox tries to get her life spared by offering a solution to relationship problems. In a wordless opening scene, we see Nick propose to his partner, Kori (Emily Browning), and the two aren’t on different pages as much as Nick is watching a movie and Kori is reading a book. Nick proposes to Kori with the pre-loaded confidence that she’ll accept, and Kori’s expression is one of surprise and horror. She agrees to an unknowing Nick, and the film flashes forward to further on in their lives.
The dissonance between them hasn’t disappointed so much as it has widened in scope. Kori engages in an on-and-off affair with her co-worker Derek (Damon Herriman), and Nick is despondent when he learns of it. A fox Nick captures later that night (voiced by Olivia Colman) tells him that if he lets her go, she can help Kori come back to him. All Nick has to do is push Kori into a magic hole in the forest, which Nick does. The Kori that emerges from the hole is much more obsequious than prior, attentive to each need, sexual or emotional, that Nick has.
It’s not hard to see what Russo is critiquing here: the expectations we place on our partners to be perfect and the ways men, in particular, use dissatisfaction as an excuse to lord it over their significant others. Still, it’s a wicked romp that comments on how small towns can enable patterns of abuse. The town in which the drama takes place is the sort where everyone knows each other, one that prioritizes the proximity of relationships over truth-telling. It’s liberating to see Kori (all versions of her) come to the fact that the problem is not her but the environment around her that’s shaming her for not being subservient.
Of note is the score, which Russo also developed. The town’s safety is always in question due to its spectral notes, which incorporate animal wails and other sounds in terrifying ways. Even in moments of tranquility, there’s a sense that a beast may enter the frame at any moment.
It’s been a long time since Chloë Grace Moretz has graced the screen in a lead role like the type she takes on in director Joey Powers’ Chicago-set “Love Language.” Her return is a welcome one for this winsome rom-com about learning to love who and what is in front of you, “what if” scenarios be damned. While the film often tries to make grandiose statements about love and relationships at the expense of fully formed characters, it takes the angst and wrestling of the people in this story seriously. There’s a realism to its plot beats, which eschew the type of overwrought developments that might classify other films in its genre. After all, there’s enough insanity in real life to draw from.
Moretz plays Lou, an author whose career has peaked with her writing social media copy for a tortilla chip company. After writing the vows at the wedding for her best friend, Tilda (Billie Lourd), many are impressed with Lou’s pen, and she quickly builds a side hustle writing wedding vows for couples who “want to say something worthy of [their] love” for their fiancé, but struggle to distill how.
To complicate matters, at the start of the film, we see Lou get dumped by the man she thought she would marry, and she grapples with the irony of living a loveless life while supporting herself financially by scribing romantic declarations. When she’s tasked with writing the vows for Olivia (Isabel May), Lou realizes that her client is marrying a college crush, Warren (Manny Jacinto). To complicate matters, Lou becomes romantically involved with Dash (Anthony Ramos) and struggles with whether to commit fully to him or rekindle what she and Warren weren’t able to consummate earlier.
Consider the way Powers and Cinematographer Andrew Wehde capture Chicago and fold its rhythms into the story’s drama. Some are a bit too overt in comparison to the relative restraint the film itself shows overall (a giant “Chicago Tribune” greets us in the first few frames of the movie), but overall, the film understands Chicago’s intimacy and scope, how one can feel alone in large crowds and fully seen in the underpass of the Wabash station.
While not as busy as a city like New York, there’s a sense that you have to bend and move with the city; life gets complicated through logistics, and the film acts as a celebration of that. A firm sense of place gives life to the drama we see on-screen. More often than not, we don’t get to take our mistakes back, but occasionally, we’re given the grace for a do-over. That may not happen in every city or stage of life, but for a place like Chicago, the film lovingly and slyly suggests it’s more common than you might think.
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