Our latest Sundance Film Festival reviews continue; read all our coverage of the 2024 Sundance film Festival now.
Ghostlight
Once of the most heartfelt (yet not overly sentimental) films at Sundance this year is Ghostlight, the latest from the directing team Alex Thompson and Kelly O’Sullivan (marking her first time credited as a director; she also wrote the screenplay), the pair responsible for 2019’s exceptional Saint Frances. This time around, the character-driven filmmakers give us a slice-of-life look at a construction worker named Dan (the great Chicago actor Keith Kupferer), whose family has suffered a great tragedy that he can’t bring himself to discuss with anyone, occasionally leading to fits of rage that are often directed at those he cares about. This shift in Dan leads his wife Sharon (Tara Mallen, Kupferer’s real-life spouse) and daughter Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer, the couple’s real-life offspring) to feel distanced from him, with Daisy also acting out in school and nearly being expelled.
Unexpectedly, Dan discovers a local theater company near a job-site where he’s working, and the welcoming, oddball members of the troupe invite him in to be a part of their latest production, Romeo and Juliet. He keeps this new development in his life from his family, but the creative arts seem to help Dan feel better adjusted—though soon the film’s themes of dying for love seem to be rubbing him the wrong way for reasons that become all too clear. Dolly de Leon (a standout in Triangle of Sadness) plays a former professional actress who is now the company’s best performer, and eventually she and Dan are cast in the lead roles (let’s just say that age is only a number to these players). It’s so wonderful to see both working-class folks and middle-age to elderly characters front and center in a film that takes their life experiences seriously and gives us fleshed-out, complex human beings whose troubles and anxieties are legion.
The film tackles serious matters, but it’s also quite funny, especially when Dan is with his new acting comrades, struggling with Shakespeare’s dense language and rhythms. Watching him work through that as he untangles the rest of his life is a genuine treat. —Steve Prokopy
Sue Bird: In the Clutch
While I doubt hardcore fans of former WNBA superstar Sue Bird will find much in the Sarah Dowland-directed documentary, Sue Bird: In the Clutch, that they don’t already know, for the rest of us, this is a remarkable story that serves as a parting gift for admirers of her many accomplishments and an exciting look at the field of women’s sports that Bird left in her wake, much of which she had a hand in engineering. Bird played in the WNBA for 21 years, won five Olympic gold medals (in different Olympic Games, just to be clear), and retired as the most successful point guard (for the Seattle Storm) to ever play women’s professional basketball. On her journey, she had to traverse mountains called sexism, homophobia, and a pay gap, compared to the money being thrown on her male counterparts. She even fought hard against any racial issues lingering in her sport in its early years.
While much of In the Clutch has the structure of a familiar sports biopic, Bird’s status as a true trailblazer makes so much of what we’re seeing—from her childhood, college years, and professional career—seem unique, especially when we get into some of the real pay and other labor issues with the WNBA. Because player salaries were initially so low, many had to play in places like Russia in the offseason, where the pay was enormous but the owners were shady and often scary. Bird was also at the forefront of contract negotiations with the WNBA, namely earning players higher pay, maternity leave, and other basic needs. Naturally, we also find out how Bird’s partner, U.S. soccer star Megan Rapinoe, encourages her to be more militant and active for worthy causes both in the sport and outside of it. These are the high points of the film because they get to the heart of Bird as a person, a player, and now an activist.
And by the end of the film, as retirement fast approaches, we start to understand that, for the first time in her life, she is entering a world in which she isn't playing basketball any longer, and her (and our) emotions rise to the surface. Admittedly, I don’t get emotional about sports in general, but Bird’s life encompasses a great deal more than just basketball; her influence goes so far beyond that, and In the Clutch makes that strikingly clear. —Steve Prokopy
The Outrun
One of the most soul-shaking works I saw at this year’s Sundance Film Festival was director Nora Fingscheidt’s (System Crasher, The Unforgivable) adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s memoir concerning the author’s long, painful struggle with drugs and alcohol addiction, The Outrun. Set mostly on the author’s homeland of Scotland’s Orkney Islands (which somehow manages to look both majestic and grim), what separates this addiction story from others is the way the main character, Rona (Saoirse Ronan), uses nature as a means of healing herself. She gets involved with environmental causes, for sure, but also embracing the violent seas, jutting cliffs, and abundant wildlife to supplement her recovery.
The film bounces around in time (more than likely mimicking Rona’s fractured, enhanced mind), with memories of childhood, observing her religious zealot mother (Saskia Reeves) and bipolar father (a nearly unrecognizable Stephen Dillane) fight and her younger days of living in London, where she learned to party and bar brawl with the best/worst of them. There’s also a pass at a relationship with a man named Daynin (Paapa Essiedu), who gets frustrated trying to understand her need to get loaded all the time. Her road through a strict rehab program is no easy one, but all roads seem to lead back to communing with nature, and that’s where the film (and Rona) finds its strength. There’s a sequence in The Outrun in which Rona stands on a cliff's edge, almost conducting the waves as they splash all around her. It reminded me of the best scene in Maestro (also a conducting sequence), but this one is better, and looks more epic in the hands of cinematographer Yunus Roy Imer.
In a career featuring so many memorable performances, Ronan might give her finest one here. When Rona moves into a small shack in the middle of nowhere just to be alone, she’s called up to express major psychological pain opposite no one. But she’s not really alone—she has her biting memories and palpable trauma for company, and she slips in and out of sobriety so many times, you stop tracking it. Ronan can get loud and violent one moment and then turn quiet and contemplative on a dime. It might be terrifying if it weren’t so tragic. Although a wildly different movie, The Outrun shares a bit of DNA with To Leslie; not because it’s about a substance abuser, but because it’s not afraid to show its protagonist at their absolute worst and never ask the audience to feel sorry for them, as we watch them climb up to…a little bit better. This is not a sentimental movie in any sense of the word, and it’s all the better for it. —Steve Prokopy
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