It’s easy to roll one’s eyes at nostalgia, so often is fondness for the past used to cover a lack of anything to say. The market is flush with reboots, redos, reunions and the Eras tour, content mining our natural affinity for (and thus, the bankability of) things that shaped us.
What a joy, then, that this year’s Sundance film festival featured not one but several films that accomplished the rare and difficult task of employing nostalgia without feeling cheap, that pulled us backwards to sharp, smart, devastating and illuminating effect. Megan Park’s My Old Ass conjured the excitement and overwhelm of leaving home via a bittersweet, mushroom-induced meeting between an 18-year-old girl and her 39-year-old self. Jane Schoenbrun’s buzzy, word-of-mouth hit I Saw the TV Glow resurrected the thrill of analog TV fandom via its own Buffy the Vampire Slayer-esque TV show, for a haunting tale of obsession, identity and fandom. Both film-makers understood that when done well, there are few things more powerful in art than our feelings around the passage of time.
