Sundance Film Festival, held between January 19-29 this year, brought many independent films of the coming year to the audience, as always. Here are the Sundance movies that you are likely to see frequently in 2023 and that you should not miss…
We’ve had a relatively unexciting year at Sundance, where some old themes that were once tried and proven to be successful were put back into circulation, where films that were very similar to other films tried their luck, thus leaving us longing for original ideas and narrative choices. Fortunately, those beautiful movies that appear just when all hope is lost and suddenly accelerate the blood circulation in the middle of the night or very early in the morning are still alive. Their numbers aren’t very high, but they’re there somewhere.
This year, Slow from the fictional world cinema competition, Fair Play from the fictional American cinema competition and Talk to Me from the Midnight program are exactly such films. At a festival like this, where press quota tickets are reserved before the festival starts and our program is sort of engraved in stone with no hope of changing it, our intuitions are our greatest treasure. Or, putting romanticism aside, we can say that we reap what we sow. Here are the films that give a breather to a festival slowed down by the repetition of independent cinema, and all the reasons you need to catch them throughout the year.
Slow
When you put Slow against all the relationship movies that make you memorize that sex is the real starting point and determinant of a relationship, somehow Slow weighs more heavily. In this sense, countless love movies in which the sexual phase has not yet been reached, in which the highest goal is to get together, or in which sexuality is added to the equation as a necessary complement but is not particularly emphasized, differ from Slow in this sense.
In this very special love movie from Lithuania, a couple, tested by one of them being asexual, invents a universe that separates them from others and can only be entered by two people. Since one is a dancer and the other is a sign language interpreter, we can understand that they were looking for a different form of communication in their lives before they found each other.
We watch the most sincere form of love in this universe, where physical contact, bodily harmony and the feeling of unity exist to the fullest, and everything else is nothing more than a technical deficiency in the relationship. There is no doubt that the handheld camera used throughout and the choice of 16 mm played a major role in director Marija Kavtaradze’s success in reflecting the closeness between two bodies talking to each other without using language. Slow is one of those special films that does not lose any of its power even if it is watched silently. The best surprise of the festival.
Fair Play is a thriller that stands against the Hollywood tradition of turning capitalism into an adult fairy tale while telling stories of the “glass ceiling” in the business world together with sweet/hard love stories. In the movie, the entire balance of Emily and Luke, who work in similar positions at the same investment company and have been hiding their relationship from everyone for a long time, contrary to company rules, is suddenly disrupted by Emily’s unexpected promotion. This story, in which everything goes well when the gender roles defined by the system for men and women in both relationships and business life are in place, but when Emily is promoted instead of Luke, the balance of power is suddenly upset, does not hesitate to harass its audience while seeking an answer to the question of why power has a gender. The striking performances of Phoebe Dynevor, who made her debut with the Netflix series Bridgerton (2020- ), and Alden Ehrenreich, whom we will watch in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) after this film, are one of the most important supports for the sense of tension along with the admirable rhythm of the story. We can say that Chloe Domont, who came from TV series directorship, has already made one of the best debut films of 2023. It should also be added that despite its length of nearly two hours, it is one of the “shortest” films of the festival. The perceived time is not more than half an hour.Talk to Me
In the Midnight program, where we have not seen many brilliant films this year, Australian production Talk to Me, which interprets a great idea in an exciting way, can save the honor of 2023 on the independent horror cinema front. Addressing more than six million followers through their YouTube channel RackaRacka, twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou combine teenage fear with evil spirit movies in their first movie. The result is surprisingly good. At a house party, the fun of a group of young people who discover a practical way to communicate with spirits is cut short when an unexpected event occurs.
Talk to Me, which entertains while fulfilling the requirements of the genre but does not neglect to take itself seriously, manages to keep its original idea alive until the end. Its distinguishing feature is that it is based on the one truth that is not often discussed in horror films, but to which the genre owes its existence: the addictive pleasure of being afraid and frightening. Let’s add that Talk to Me was purchased by A24, making one of the best deals of the festival, where most of the films in the Midnight selection found buyers. This means that the film will be released to the audience before any other platform.
Infinity Pool
It is admirable that Brandon Cronenberg, like his father David Cronenberg, has been able to assert his independence as a director even though he focuses on the body horror subgenre. Infinity Pool, the most popular film in the Midnight selection before it is watched, captures an original perspective on the issue of class class of the holiday, which Triangle of Sadness (2022) brought a clumsy and pretentious interpretation.
But this is just one of the expansions of the film. At the beginning of the film, we see James, who has been unable to write since the novel he wrote a long time ago, on a first-class holiday in a fictional third world country with his rich wife Em, whose income he depends on. James, who breaks the biggest ban on guests and gets into big trouble with the advice of his mysterious admirer Gabi, whom he met at the hotel, falls under the influence of a new self that gradually awakens within him in this increasingly strange experience.
This is a chaotic experience that includes unfortunate clones, rebirths, purchasing death, vicarious revenge, bodily fluids and violent games. Cronenberg manages to do many things at the same time without losing sight of the essence of his film. For example, leaning on the satyr while vaguely mocking the pathetic state of holidaying in this artificial paradise, which has walls built between it and the rest of the unknown country; making room for a message-heavy futuristic science fiction in which crimes are covered up not with direct money but with a fake redemption scenario; building a hypnotic body horror that suffers from the zombie-like curse of moving further and further away from one’s old self with each new life after death…
Infinity Pool is a nightmare-movie that refuses to be weird just for the sake of being weird, and can stay in control even while making you think you’ve lost control. Single-handedly the antithesis of the scream queens of the past, Mia Goth continues to create her own subgenre of horror by holding tightly to her haunted female persona.
We don’t remember today how big a part of 80s popular culture Brooke Shields was. Brooke Shields is a former star who has been deliberately left behind, buried in history, as a symbol of a problematic understanding of female representation that can no longer be openly admired. Pretty Baby sheds light on aspects of the actress’s life that we never knew before, while looking back from the present to the past, but it mainly reveals how the world of cinema, TV and advertising systematically exploited first a child and then a young woman in the 80s and 90s. The film, which takes its name from the Louis Malle film Pretty Baby, in which Shields played a 12-year-old child prostitute, focuses on the actor’s relationship with his mother, who is also his manager and makes the most important decisions about him. Shields became the new face of the American youth of the 80s with her extraordinary beauty, the sexuality of a young girl who had not yet emerged from childhood began to be marketed with her, as a Princeton graduate, she buried the so-called inverse proportion between beauty and intelligence into history, and she came to the fore with both her virginity and the postpartum depression she experienced years later. And in both cases, being left alone in front of millions gives Pretty Baby the value of a documentary film about the entertainment world of the recent past. Views: 277
