Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is out in Park City, Utah, covering the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Scan through our full coverage of Sundance reviews from this year’s festival as they go live, and check out our full archives of past editions.
It’s that time of year again: Park City’s once again home to the Sundance Film Festival, the inaugural event on the industry’s calendar. For some, this means there’ll be lavish parties, hangouts on the slopes, apres-ski hot chocolate, fine dining, and sightings of – or better yet, conversations with, enough stars to make up a constellation. And for the rest of us, it’s eight days of panic, slushy two-mile walks, Fresh Market fights with CW bit players over the last $10 veggie wrap, and movies good enough to make the entire experience worth the long flights and drives and absurd housing costs.
This year’s line-up is bursting at the seams with fascinating titles, ranging from documentaries about musical icons, gay action thrillers, original horror from masters of the genre, and much, much more. In short, it’s gonna be an awesome festival (and if you’d like to check out some of the festival’s program, a large number of films from the competition slates will be showing virtually, and you should check out the festival’s website for more information on how to get a ticket). Here are five movies that we’re excited to check out this year while we’re in Park City.
Love Lies Bleeding
One of the movies most fucked-over by the pandemic was Rose Glass’s Saint Maud, which was the kind of horror-hit that A24 normally cashes in on in the summer months that was ultimately relegated to a streaming service that practically no one subscribes to (Epix, we think? Is that even still around?). But Glass’s talent and skill was noticed by critics and festival attendees alike, and she’s used that momentum to make what sounds to be an insane motion picture. It’s a gay love story between two women (Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brien) that is also a pic about female body builders that is also a Las Vegas crime movie. And we’ve been hearing some pretty intense buzz about this for the last few months, so it’s only right that we kick off this list by saying that we are so thankful that we were able to grab a ticket to this. Good lord, what luck.
DEVO
Chris Smith’s American Movie is basically required viewing for wannabe filmmakers – no, wannabe creatives of all stripes – and the master documentarian is back with a portrait of one of the most iconic bands of the New Wave era: DEVO. Now, before you say anything, they were more than just LEGO-like red hats and “Whip It” – Smith’s film traces the band’s evolution from punk provocateurs to surprising mainstream success, charting all of the unexpected and bizarre details that informed and complimented their careers. As Hunter S. Thompson once said, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro, and if nothing else, Smith’s film will be a document of what it is sure to be the cinematic equivalent of a Hall of Fame bronze bust.
I Saw the TV Glow
We absolutely loved director Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to The World’s Fair when we saw it at a digital edition of the festival back in 2021, and we were excited as fuck when their name popped up in the Midnight slate once again. Schoenbrun’s a pioneer in the genre of “emo horror,” at least according to the festival program, and we’re inclined to agree. This time around, they’re telling the story of two teens (Justice Smith and Bridgette Lundy-Paine) entranced by a bizarre late-night television show that appears practically beamed in from the darkest regions of the collective unconscious, whose reality begins to collapse around them when details from the screen begin appearing in their day-to-day lives. Is it a dream? A hallucination? Whatever it is, we’re probably gonna be scared shitless.
Presence
You may have lost track of whether or not Steven Soderbergh is currently retired or not (spoiler alert: He isn’t, though one might want to make a site like the “Is Abe Vigoda Dead?” one in order to keep track of his stops and starts), but he’s here at Sundance with something relatively novel for him, even in his long and varied career. That is Presence, a proper haunted house movie, which follows a family as they realize that they may have just bought the kind of lemon that can really fuck up a mortgage agreement, especially if you bought high in the last couple of years. Soderbergh’s work is always fascinating even if it isn’t necessarily always successful, and we’re real hopeful that this blend of subject matter and his honed talent will shape up to be something truly special.
Sasquatch Sunset
We’re living in a golden age of cryptid interest – if only The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot had landed just a few years later – and this film from the directors of Kumiko the Treasure Hunter and Damsel might just be the kind of thing that gives them that true crossover hit they’ve always been hopeful for. That’s right: David and Nathan Zellner have made a movie about a family of sasquatch, with Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg in the Bigfoot suits, and though the Sundance program is rightfully short on details, we’re sure you’re already imagining something that will only be half as weird as this winds up actually being. We’re also curious if this project was responsible for a bunch of the Bigfoot TikTok sightings as of late, even if people KNOW WHAT THEY SAW. It might have just been Jesse Eisenberg doing a costume test.