Sundance 2021 Film Review: Festival Dispatch

Capsule reviews of Sundance’s sci-fi, horror, and Fantasy Titles

Whether it’s the gala premieres or its NEXT and Midnight titles, there’s plenty of genre fare to go around at Sundance. I watched a ton of films at the festival this year, and even though I would like to, it’s impossible for me to write full-length reviews for everything. So, here’s a special edition of Strange Harbors Capsule Reviews, covering the wide range of this year’s genre films at Sundance. Minor spoilers ahead…

Mayday

Ana (Grace Van Patten) is stuck at a dead-end catering job when she’s inexplicably sucked into an alternate universe and conscripted into a never-ending war against men. Led by the charismatic Marsha (Mia Goth), the all-female squadron specializes in laying “damsel-in-distress” traps for unsuspecting targets, using their perceived vulnerability as bait. Van Patten and Goth are standouts in Karen Cinorre’s directorial debut, but Mayday’s world-building ranges from non-existent to flimsy, and its wartime fantasy is remarkably tensionless and inert. The film touches upon issues of gender, self-harm, and the pangs of youth, but there’s a real lack of connective tissue within its scattered narrative. C

How It Ends

What would you do if you knew the world was ending tomorrow? Zoe Lister-Jones directs and stars in How It Ends, a note-perfect representation of Sundance genre comedy. Lister-Jones plays Liza, a young malcontent traversing L.A. the day before an asteroid is due to collide with the planet. Joined by the manifestation of her younger self (Cailee Spaeny, The Craft: Legacy, Devs), Liza aims to tie up loose ends before making her way to an end-of-the-world party. Lister-Jones and Spaeny share a palpable chemistry - their rapport is one that carries the entire film and delivers its best moments, but How It Ends is ultimately brought down by its interminable celebrity cameos. Painfully unfunny and exceedingly grating, the parade of surprise guests is nothing more than a distraction from its striking post-pandemic parallel. C+

Censor

The leanest and meanest of this year’s Midnight selections, Censor is effective horror that perfectly marries its themes, aesthetics, and atmosphere. Writer-director Prano Bailey-Bond tells the story of Enid (Niamh Algar), a tightly wound censor in the 80s - when British authorities were cracking down on exploitative “video nasties” - whose sanity starts to unravel when a new film eerily echoes a personal trauma from her own past. More than just gorgeous facsimile of the types of films it’s commenting upon, Censor has plenty to say - through gore, visuals and a wallop of an ending - about difficult art and its place in society. B+

Knocking

In the aftermath of a staggering loss, Molly (Cecilia Milocco) moves into a new apartment, but soon afterwards, her sanity begins to fray as an incessant knocking begins to haunt her isolated living. Her neighbors dismiss her as crazy, but Molly perseveres in her belief that something is amiss on the other side of her wall. Knocking takes a simple horror conceit and transforms it into a harrowing treatise on gaslighting and mental illness, but even at a brisk 78 minutes, the film still comes across as padded. Director Frida Kempff has impressive command of Knocking’s mounting dread and Milocco carries what is essentially a one-woman show, but it’s difficult to shake that this might have been better off as a short film. B-

Eight for Silver

From its vengeance-fueled hunter to its dated Romani curse trope, there isn’t a single werewolf cliché that doesn’t make an appearance in Eight for Silver. A gorgeously realized but generically overwrought horror thriller, Sean Ellis’ (Arthropoid, Metro Manila) latest finds a 19th century French town besieged by vicious creatures of the lycanthrope variety. Doused with gore, lousy CGI, and largely predictable horror beats, Eight for Silver suffers from its conventional scares and baffling narrative structure, even if it does give us one of the gnarliest werewolf transformations in recent memory - it’s a gruesome testament to the strength of practical effects, but it still doesn’t rescue this film from its less-than-frightful mediocrity. C

Coming Home in the Dark

James Ashcroft’s white-knuckle Coming Home in the Dark explores not ghosts, not ghouls, but the very real and earthly evils of man. Hoaggie Hoaganraad (Erik Thomson) and his wife Jill (Miriama McDowell) are in the midst of an idyllic getaway with their sons when their trip is suddenly hijacked by a pair of psychopaths (Daniel Gillies and Matthias Luafutu). It seems like a random act at first, but soon after, the encounter puts Hoaggie on a collision course with a harrowing act of violence from his past. Coming Home in the Dark is nasty and ruthless business, even if it isn’t entirely successful in balancing its penchant for cartoonish villainy with its genuinely gripping suspense. But look past the veneer of torture porn on this one and you just might find some meaning in its relentless noir. B