At this year's Sundance Film Festival, disconnection reigns and rabbits rule

Los Angeles Times

27-01-2025

PARK CITY, Utah — It's been nine months since the Sundance Film Festival announced it was exploring the potential of a new home beginning in 2027. For some longtime attendees, the idea of resettlement hits like a snowball to the back of the neck. Mastering Park City is like learning to juggle: The curve is steep, but you move nimbly once you know whether to wait for a shuttle or walk, where to find the best legroom at the Library Center Theatre and that the grocery-store sushi by the Holiday Village Cinemas is actually pretty good. Will Sundance fans really have to start over in Cincinnati?
Maybe it's just the premature homesickness in the air, but the first stretch of films I've seen this year have shared the theme of being a stranger in a strange land. Take Evan Twohy's 'Bubble & Squeak,' in which American newlyweds Declan (Hamish Patel) and Delores (Sarah Goldberg) fly to a fictional, formerly war-torn nation to honeymoon on the cheap. This country once forced its citizens to survive on cabbage. Today, the vegetable is outlawed and the punishment for cabbage smuggling is public execution. But Delores has stuffed a dozen-plus leafy heads down her pants simply because she doesn't feel obliged to respect another culture's rules.
Her flippancy forces the couple to go on the run from a customs officer (Steven Yeun) and his boss, Shazbor (Matt Berry), who is locally famous for slicing off criminals' fingertips. They have a zero-tolerance policy for cabbage. The audience, on the other hand, has to be more receptive. If you took a shot of vodka every time someone says cabbage, you'd be hospitalized by the end of the first act. At one point, Declan and Delores tell their entire love story in vegetable form. It's my favorite scene of anything in this festival to date.
Twohy's arch tone can make this comedy feel like 'Midsommar' minus the trauma. But as the couple attempts to escape across the border, fault lines crack open in this fledgling marriage, especially when Dave Franco appears as a fellow fugitive disguised as a bear. The natives are colorful and ridiculous, but the film's target is disaster tourism. (I'll shoulder that attack as someone who once did some sightseeing in Chernobyl and came home with a souvenir T-shirt.)
Meanwhile, Justin Lin returned to Sundance with 'Last Days,' his sensationalized dramatization of true-life travel turned tragic parable. In 2018, 26-year-old American John Allen Chau died when he illegally sailed from Port Blair, India, to the forbidden North Sentinel Islands. He wanted to bring the Bible to the island's remote tribe. They were unmoved. Chau (Sky Yang) has been called a martyr, a hero and a nut job. You hear all three opinions before the end of the opening credits.
Lin launched his career at Sundance 2002 with the indie heist film 'Better Luck Tomorrow' and then went on to direct five 'Fast & Furious' blockbusters. This film clumsily splits the difference: Its tiny narrative engine can't keep pace with its visual extravagance. 'Last Days' barely engages with religion or piety. Instead, it plays out like a globetrotting action film about a kid who doesn't realize he's in over his head. When Chau befriends two thrill-seeking Christians (Toby Wallace and Ciara Bravo) in Kurdistan, the tone is less 'Passion of the Christ' and more 'Point Break.' His backpacking adventures are filmed with a jaw-dropping glamour that both makes and sabotages the movie. We're conscious that the point is to lament an idealist whose life was cut short. Instead, we leave impressed by all the cool places he went.
'Rabbit Trap,' a confident debut from Bryn Chainey, is about London couple Darcy and Daphne (Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen), who decamp to rural Wales to record an experimental noise album. (It's the 1970s and Daphne's last album cover has her painted up like Ziggy Stardust.) The pair are inspired by the sonic sounds of this otherworldly land: swooping flocks of birds, squelchy moss, water drops drizzling down an ancient stone wall. Then an eerie figure (Jade Croot) appears at their door clutching a freshly killed rabbit. These city slickers will learn to respect the local myths.
I've seen 'Rabbit Trap' twice now and both times I sank into the vibrations of every scene. The craft is first-rate. Still, if you asked me to explain how all the scenes fit together into a story, I'd be struck mute, just as Darcy is every night during his bad dreams. But I can call it the most optimistic of the culture-clash movies I've seen at Sundance so far. These outsiders haven't arrived to insult and evade, nor to barge in and convert. Instead, they learn to sing the local language in a lovely faerie hymnal.
Katarina Zhu's 'Bunnylovr' also hinges on a gifted rabbit. (Is there a magician somewhere here in the snow pulling them out of his hat?) The giver is a Pennsylvania man (Austin Amelio) with a fetish for furry animals; the recipient is a broke New York City cam girl named Rebecca (Zhu) who is so focused on satisfying him that she's unplugged from her own wants. When her online patron asks her to dangle the rabbit by its ears while he pleasures himself, she doesn't have the backbone to refuse. (Be warned: You'll hear the rabbit scream.)
Yet as confused and vague as Rebecca is, Zhu makes the character feel concrete. The debuting feature filmmaker has managed to make a sculpture of mist. Rachel Sennott, playing Rebecca's bossy best friend, groans that forming an intimate bond with her is impossible. Nevertheless, we come to care about Rebecca — even when she decides to meet her rabbit-loving admirer in person and we want to reach into the screen and grab her by the ears.
Almost that exact same scene happens again in Rachel Fleit's documentary 'Sugar Babies' when a cam girl tromps into the woods for a rendezvous with a paying stranger. The film follows the teenager for several years as she flirts with online men to cover her college tuition. Bright and brazenly manipulative, Autumn graduated high school at 16 — she's no dummy. In her heavy, charming drawl, she calls herself 'a sugar baby without the sugar,' one who vows to avoid any IRL dates until she's 25. Eventually, she breaks her own rule.
The film can feel like listening to a young and chronically online TikToker monologize about her big plans to get that money and get out of Louisiana, where the minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 since she was in grade school. Alas, Autumn's struggle to leave town becomes Sisyphean. Cellphones have given her a way to make contact with the outside world — but how is she ever going to get there?
Technological disconnection is a vibe at this year's festival, both onscreen and on the ground. There are three fewer Park City theaters in use than there were in 2020 as Sundance is continuing to offer attendees the option of staying home to stream the movies online. People participating in their pajamas may get an extra kick out of pressing play on Albert Birney's 'OBEX,' a cheekily lo-fi, black-and-white art-house movie. It's the kind of film with a random shot of a chicken.
'OBEX' is about a recognizable modern type: a screen-obsessed shut-in named Conor (Birney). The twist is that the movie takes place in 1987 with Conor pecking away at ASCII art and karaoke-ing Gary Numan on his Macintosh 128K. One day, he pops in a game about a soul-gobbling demon and the demon emerges to suck Conor's adorable mutt, Sandy, into the screen. As Conor enters the game to save his dog and his insular world expands, the film itself tends to amble. Still, I admired its imagination as it toggled between people and pixels, and shivered when Conor chirped, 'Maybe someday we'll all be living in computers — even dogs.'
Definitely computers. Maybe even in Cincinnati — if only for a week of indie movies.