At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, one could count at least 25 films that involved characters navigating unfamiliar environments, from two British teenager’s misguided trip to Syria in search of independence (Brides) to a romantic getaway gone wrong (Oh, Hi!) and everything in between, like the historic trip to the moon documented in SALLY and a young girl’s dangerous adventure with a new friend that propels Isaiah Saxon’s The Legend of Ochi. It’s a common, endlessly-broad framework that doesn’t always provide an overwhelming return on your investment – see Atropia or Omaha, for example – but there’s often plenty to love about the journey that each film asks viewers to go on as it treks through uncharted territory, placing you directly inside the story with just as little information and beckoning you to learn as you go, just like its subjects. I, for one, would rather expect the unexpected than know precisely what I’m getting myself into when it comes to a new film; that’s why I appreciated By Design so much. It tells you exactly what it’s about – a woman who becomes a chair, as one does – but keeps you on your toes as it unfolds, the significance behind this woman’s strange transition becoming more and more clear as its brief runtime unwinds.
But novel premises don’t always deliver in this genre-fluent structure, even when the cast and crew’s tireless commitment to the bit can evidently be seen in what occurs on screen, and especially when that commitment is put to the test in something as aimless and baffling as Evan Twohy’s Bubble & Squeak (D+). Premiering in the festival’s U.S. Dramatic Competition, Twohy’s feature film debut – which takes its title from a hodgepodge English dish made from potatoes and cabbage, often mixed together and fried along with beef and eggs, occasionally – centers on newlyweds Declan (Himesh Patel) and Delores (Sarah Goldberg) who are forced to run for their lives after being accused of smuggling cabbage into a country in which the vegetable is banned. A bonkers Steven Yeun plays a police officer who states within the film’s first few minutes that in order to go on with their day uninterrupted, they must hand over the cabbage they’ve obviously hidden inside their pants and agree upon which one of them will be publicly executed for this crime, despite insisting that they are innocent.
Over the course of 97 minutes that should have felt blissfully-brief yet become more taxing as they pass, Declan and Delores encounter a cast of characters that bring splashes of life to an otherwise-grating gag, like What We Do in the Shadows’ Matt Berry, the aforementioned Yeun, and Dave Franco, the liveliest of the bunch and the most welcome. (Though as ever, while Dave Franco should be in every Sundance movie, that doesn’t mean that every Sundance movie deserves Dave Franco.) It’s a Jason Schwartzman here and a Willem Dafoe there away from feeling like a blatant Wes Anderson rip-off – down to its meticulously static camerawork, shot in 4:3 by Anna Smoroňová – yet it’s the unrelenting tone and the insistence on making cabbages its Chekhov’s Gun that make Bubble & Squeak enough to make a viewer wish they’d never given it the chance in the first place. When a film is willing to take you somewhere you’ve never gone before, it’s worth the effort; when it takes but a few seconds to make you realize you never went there for a reason, tapping out is all too tempting.
Perhaps the only things in this life that I’ve entertained less than cabbages are the infinite worlds offered by virtual reality, yet Flora Lau’s LUZ (C+) does its best to make the unknown confines of a semi-imagined world an alluring land for common ground to be found amongst its dwellers. The film, a diptych debut for Lau, focuses on the fractured relationships of two separate parties, the first being that of a con man named Wei (Xiao Dong Guo) and his estranged daughter Fa (En Xi Deng), who the former watches livestream not unlike the way a “cam girl” might – fans of fellow Sundance entry Bunnylovr may balk, though, as Austin Amelio is nowhere to be found in this online dynamic. The other relationship LUZ follows is between Sabine (Isabelle Huppert) and Ren (Sandrine Pinna), a stepmother-daughter duo who come back together after Sabine receives a daunting medical diagnosis. If you weren’t already hooked by the idea of an indie family drama co-starring one of the world’s greatest living actresses, seeing her operate in chic Parisian fashion, all inside a virtual world, should reel you in.
These two remarkably different relationships only connect within “Luz,” the titular virtual reality realm that affords these characters to face their problems head-on. At various moments, 2024’s Sundance-premiering The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (then named Ibelin) came to mind, as that documentary’s subject turned to a virtual world in order to be his true self. Lau’s imagined environment doesn’t quite mimic the “World of WarCraft” we see in Benjamin Ree’s film, and its virtual reality comes dangerously close to becoming indistinguishable from the real world of Chongqing, China, in which LUZ begins. The more hallucinatory the film dares to become, the more difficult it is to pin down; are we being subject to a transcendental meditation on the impact our parents have on us, or merely a unique look at the fascinating ways we can reconnect with them on our own terms? That Lau doesn’t necessarily seem too fixated on either plane allows us room for our own interpretation, a net positive for an introspective film unfolding entirely in a land we couldn’t ever begin to understand without inhabiting it ourselves. LUZ might not be one of the World Cinema Dramatic Competition’s major standouts, but it stands out in and of itself by placing an emphasis on how drawn people can be to the images that populate our purview, even if those sights are more rooted in fantasy than in truth.
In a way, something similar could be said of Vladamir De Fontenay’s Sukkwan Island (C+), its titular setting slowly paving the way for the fantastical rather than the literal. Yet revealing just how much truth there is to what we see unfold throughout much of De Fontenay’s psychological drama would be an act of cinematic cruelty. Sure, not everything that Roy (C’mon C’mon’s Woody Norman) and his estranged father Tom (Anatomy of a Fall’s Swann Arlaud) endure during their remote getaway feels quite right as it happens, and it certainly seems like Tom is losing his mind the longer he and his son suffer without proper nutrients, basic hygiene, and meaningful contact with other human life. But De Fontenay’s focus is more on how an already-fractured connection between father and son can weather the storm of isolation and forced connection rather than how much wood either man can collect, or how difficult it may turn out to be for Tom to win back Roy’s mother Elizabeth (Tuppence Middleton).
Problems are abundant here, not merely in regards to how Tom and Roy get on after the latter agrees to join the former deep in the Norwegian fjords, but in cinematic form, as the overlong survival drama toys with its audience a bit too freely, not misleading so much as it deliberately (and unsuccessfully) attempts to pull one over on how much you’ve clocked over two hours. Based on David Vann’s 2009 autobiographical novella of the same name, Sukkwan Island is a filmmaker’s dream on paper, the sort of drama that eagerly embraces its location and allows its actors – both of whom are given plenty of room to play here as the only two people on screen, save for the occasional visits from Alma Pöysti, playing the pilot who flew them to deliverance – a dual showcase, which they run with. But in the words of R.D. Laing, “Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through.” As good as Norman and Arlaud may be, and as effective as their foreign dwelling may be in forcing them to go mad, Sukkwan Island – like the other films here – is too reliant on its sole bit to break any new ground. Merely traveling somewhere new doesn’t make for the feeling that you’ve discovered something profound, nor more affecting than agonizing.
