As our coverage of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival continues, our critics encountered a few of the event's less remarkable, or at least less memorable, offerings.
Krazy House
They can’t all be winners at Sundance. From what I’ve read, Krazy House writers-directors Steffen Haars and Flip van der Kuil are wildly successful comedy filmmakers in their native Netherlands, but their fifth film marks their English-language debut, and they’ve come into the market guns ablazing and jokes a-bombing. The film starts out as a 1990s American sitcom (called Krazy House) about a God-fearing father named Bernie Christian (Nick Frost, with an American accent), his wife (Alicia Silverstone), and their two kids. Bernie offers a series of terrible dad jokes that slowly turns into a tale of his faith being tested when a group of Russian workers come into the Christian household to do repairs, though it’s clear they’re searching for something buried somewhere within the floors or walls of the home. And as they tear apart the dwelling itself, they also destroy the foundation of the family through vice, temptation, and bad manners, turning Bernie, his family, and even the TV studio where they work into a fiery pit of hell.
Krazy House goes from bad to chaotic, which is only a smidge better, because at least the chaos comes with blood, gore and no small amount of depravity, to the point where I was annoyed by its tone, but certainly not shocked or offended. At a certain point, we’re simply waiting for Bernie to finally blow his top and start taking people down, and that’s exactly what happens. I truly didn’t like the film, but I could also see it taking hold with certain late-night audiences and becoming a cult hit, which it clearly seems designed to do. And that’s part of the problem: it all feels calculated, predictable (although not the newborn made entirely of swallowed bubblegum), and incredibly obvious in its approach to humor and shock value. It’s fun seeing Silverstone cut loose so completely and sink deep into madness, but the rest of this commentary on religion, the sanctity of the family, and bad television is a blood-soaked dud. — Steve Prokopy
Love Me
There are plenty of wonderful aspects of film festivals, but the best is perhaps that programmers have the space to include artists doing interesting, unique things in their filmmaking. Sundance has a whole category dedicated to films of this sort, and this year's NEXT program was certainly full of risk-taking and ingenuity. Love Me, written and directed by duo Sam and Andy Zuchero, is in the festival's U.S. Dramatic Competition, but it might have felt more at home in NEXT, as it's unlike any romantic comedy or relationship drama you've encountered. A cast of two, Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun, carry the 90-minute film through literally billions of years as two Artificial Intelligence programs fall in love and explore the most intimate of interpersonal relationships. At least, as best they can as they make up what they think that means based on the seemingly endless amount of data they can access.
The scale the Zucheros achieve in the film is actually quite impressive, as they start on a post-apocalyptic Earth where New York City is underwater and there's no sign of life as far as the eye can see, and end hundreds of lifetimes later when there's still no sign of organic matter and the planet has morphed and changed in ways even the most knowledgable scientists probably can't predict. What happens in between is mostly engaging, if a bit exhausting. Both Stewart and Yeun essentially play smart technology, all that's left on the barren planet. The former is a buoy set adrift in an ocean; the latter, a satellite orbiting the Earth waiting to be pinged by life on the surface, when it can connect and download to them all of the world's data—media, knowledge and every silly YouTube video ever uploaded. The buoy and the satellite connect, and soon they both begin to evolve in their communication and, in ways that I can't really describe succinctly, they become...a couple.
As interesting as the film's central question of consciousness and life's purpose may be, with a cast of just two and not much more to do than watch the different iterations of the buoy and the satellite navel gaze their way through their rocky relationship, it does all starts to wear on one a bit. Credit to the Zucheros for swinging big with a film that is unlike anything else out there; and credit to Sundance for programming it. But big swings, unfortunately, aren't always home runs. —Lisa Trifone
My Old Ass
With My Old Ass, actor-turned-writer/director Megan Park takes on an entirely different tone and style compared to her debut, The Fallout, which tackled the aftermath of a school shooting. This film is a quirky romantic comedy set in the summer before Elliott (Maisy Stella) heads to college, hanging out with her best friends in their lakefront resort hometown. She identifies as a lesbian, and even starts up a relationship with a young woman working at a store near the docks. But when she meets a visiting teen guy (Percy Hynes White), she starts to have deep feelings for him. The twist of the film is that when she and her friends trip on strong mushrooms, Elliott meets the older version of herself (Aubrey Plaza), who specifically warns her off this particular guy (for reasons older Elliott won't divulge, but Elliott assumes they are dark).
From that point forward, Elliott somehow manages to do her best to stay away from this potential love interest while also finding herself inexplicably drawn to him. She tries to get back in touch with the older version of her, with no luck, so she relies on her friends to guide her through this dilemma, without sounding crazy for switching teams or having visions of her older self. A combination of a coming-of-age comedy and finding-yourself drama, My Old Ass doesn’t really do either very well, and even Plaza, who tends to improve most things she’s a part of, can’t save this flailing Canadian Lifetime movie. The scenes that work best are between Elliott and her parents, who are clearly not going to handle the empty nest well and are looking to bond with her daughter this last summer. But the whole "peek into one’s future" idea should result in something either more insightful or more fun, and I found the film to be frustratingly devoid of both. — Steve Prokopy
Winner
Only a year after they made Sundance audiences supremely uncomfortable about modern dating with Cat Person, director/co-writer Susanna Fogel and star Emilia Jones (CODA) return with the docudrama Winner. The film is another look at the real-life case of Reality Winner (Jones), a brilliant young woman who was an armed services veteran and translating contractor for the NSA with high enough security clearance to find secret reports confirming Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, even when publicly, the government was denying any such hacking. This story has been retold via a documentary and last year’s fantastic Reality (starring Sydney Sweeney), which only focused on her initial arrest and first interrogation. Winner covers everything else, including her childhood growing up with mixed-message parenting (provided by mom Connie Britton and dad Zach Galifianakis) and a sister (Kathryn Newton) who seemed to get everything right in their parents’ eyes.
Reality was not raised to be a whistleblower, but she was encouraged to be a radical thinker and someone who not only sought out the enemy but learned to speak and think like them in order to better understand them. This made her invaluable as a translator and government analyst, but it also made her live her life beyond politics, which in her mind had abandoned telling the truth—something she thought to be correct. Jones’s performance is electric, embodying a person with conviction but also someone young and not completely aware of the consequences and possible repercussions of her actions. It’s a surprisingly vibrant, heartfelt, human telling of Reality’s journey, and like all of the other tellings, it seems designed to make you very angry at the powers that be/are. — Steve Prokopy