It’s been 15 years since the sweet, shaggy slacker romcom Adventureland played at the Sundance film festival – and if that may seem a mere blink of an eye to the small but ardent cult of millennial filmgoers who took the film intensely to heart, its two stars returned earlier this month to the snowy mountains of Utah to remind everyone just how long it’s been. With four films premiering between them, actors Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg were separately the talk of this year’s festival: at the opening ceremony he presented her, at the grand old age of 33, with the festival’s career-achievement Visionary award.
If it seems a bit premature to be handing gold watch prizes to Stewart, she made some sense of the award’s name by heading up the most gobsmacking vision of the Sundance lineup. The much-anticipated second feature from British writer-director Rose Glass, Love Lies Bleeding is a big, bruising, red-meat fever dream of a film, awash in the lurid 80s Americana of mullets and muscle trucks.
It stars Stewart and bodybuilder turned actor Katy O’Brian as small-town loners who find love in the most hopeless of places – a beefcake gym in the New Mexico desert – and seek a violent escape from the various vile men trying to hold them down, chief among them a beetle-eating Ed Harris, rocking a repulsive Afghan hound coif. Equal parts Titane and Thelma & Louise, it’s as luridly, excitingly untamed as Glass’s debut, Saint Maud, was tightly wound, and gifts Stewart with a role where she can finally own her out-and-proud, don’t-give-a-fuck queerness.
It made Stewart’s other film of the festival look rather wan by comparison: the fussily conceived AI romance Love Me pairs her with Steven Yeun as two android life forms who meet and bond several billion years into the post-human future, only to find avatars for their relationship in the excavated videos of a picture-perfect Instagram influencer couple. It’s all an unnecessarily cosmic setup for a tired critique of social media superficiality; its stars deserve better, and in Glass’s film, Stewart at least got it.
Eisenberg, for his part, turned up in another of the festival’s most bizarre big swings, though quite unrecognisably so. In Sasquatch Sunset, an absurdist meditation from fraternal auteurs Nathan and David Zellner, he and Riley Keough appear in vastly hairy full-body prosthetics as members of a Bigfoot family in the idyllic wilds of California. Light on story and devoid of dialogue, it imagines the everyday Sasquatch routine with a mixture of Malickian magic-hour serenity and visceral bodily function detail.
The result is unexpectedly touching for something so heavy on primate fart gags – but Eisenberg served himself better in his own directorial effort, the winningly tragicomic road movie A Real Pain, in which he and Succession’s Kieran Culkin star as estranged Jewish cousins tracing their ancestral roots on a Holocaust tour of Poland. It’s a loose premise for an emotionally cutting, mordantly funny examination of faith, family and that peculiarly American conception of sacred European heritage. As a study of Jewish identity in crisis, it made a fine Sundance double bill with director Nathan Silver’s hugely endearing farce Between the Temples, starring a wonderful Jason Schwartzman as a flailing synagogue cantor coaching a septuagenarian music teacher (Carol Kane, never kookier but also tenderly human) as she prepares for a late-life bat mitzvah.
A Real Pain sold during the festival to Searchlight Pictures, Disney’s indie arm, for $10m, a notable coup at a Sundance where the deal-making side of things was quieter than usual. The biggest buy of the festival came from Netflix, which paid $17m for It’s What’s Inside – a nasty, conceptually clever horror film from first-time director Greg Jardin, which arrived with little advance hype, and for which critics were told by anxious PRs that even its very premise must remain embargoed. Yet the sale came with a simultaneous announcement that the film would be skipping cinemas and released directly to the platform. As cheerily as the festival proclaimed the virtues of the communal big-screen experience at every screening, dark signs were rife for the future of theatrical releasing.
My favourite film of Sundance this year was certainly enhanced by the collective gasps of a captive, unprepared audience. Aaron Schimberg’s ingenious satire A Different Man, which will also play in competition at Berlin next month, stars a never-better Sebastian Stan as a shy, isolated New Yorker living with facial neurofibromatosis – until experimental treatment offers him a miracle cure. Yet with his new, conventionally handsome mug, he finds that he’s still the same unwanted outsider as before – a cruelty underlined when a charming Brit with his former condition (hilariously played by Adam Pearson, the facially different actor first seen in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin) enters his life and proceeds to steal it bit by bit. It’s a wickedly caustic, increasingly surreal reflection on that current hot potato of onscreen representation and ableism, without a hint of sanctimony or self-importance.
But the best performance of the festival, finally, came in something rather more conventional. Nora Fingscheidt’s BBC Film-produced The Outrun may seem a familiar addiction-and-recovery drama, but it’s lifted by the novel beauty of its Orkney setting, and given raw grace by a sensational Saoirse Ronan, fully graduating to adult roles as an alcoholic isolating and self-healing with volatile results. At a Sundance heavy on wild provocations, it was proof that traditional indie grit still has its rewards.
