Sundance 2022 Film Review: Festival Dispatch

Capsule Reviews From This Year’s Sundance Film Festival

Welcome to my first dispatch from this year’s Sundance Film Festival. As usual, I won’t be writing full reviews of everything I see at the festival, but there are plenty of great films in this year’s slate that deserve attention. Here are the capsule reviews for Sundance’s cavalcade of one-word titles: The Princess, Fresh, Master, Dual, and Watcher. Minor spoilers ahead…

The Princess

Ed Perkins’ Princess Diana documentary, aptly titled The Princess, is built a little differently. Entirely forgoing talking heads and interviews, it’s constructed solely from archival footage of the late royal. It’s an evocatively experimental approach meant to condemn the haranguing media circus that surrounded the Princess of Wales and her marriage all the way up to her untimely death in 1997, but at a certain point, the line between inquisition and perpetuation begins to blur, especially when diving into increasingly voyeuristic muck. The Princess mines plenty of clever pairings between footage and audio, but in the end, it has very little new to offer when it comes to one of the most-scrutinized public figures in human history. C+

Fresh

Mimi Cave serves a fine rug-pull with Fresh, an on-the-nose allegory for the horrors of dating with a sinister swerve. After a string of failures dating online, twenty-something Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones) seemingly ends her rut when she meets charming doctor Steve (Sebastian Stan). A whirlwind romance sweeps her off her feet into a premature getaway, but things take a nasty turn when Steve reveals his true, dark nature. Cave directs the hell out of this thing; from its nimble camerawork to its thumping soundtrack to its late title card á la Drive My Car, Fresh is a stylistic blast, even if it never lives up to its queasy potential or its electric performances. There’s opportunity to lean into its telegraphed grotesqueries and Fresh skirts that line with manic, suspenseful energy, but it’s too often caught up in toothless catharsis. B-

Master

Mariama Diallo’s Master has a million different things on its mind, but this harrowing slice of Black horror is as affecting as they come. What could have been another blunt-force lecture on racism is expertly subverted by a terrifying portrait of an institutional miasma stretching back centuries. Through the lens of the prestigious Ancaster College’s new - and first - Black Master (a powerful Regina Hall) and a fresh-faced student (Zoe Renee), Master explores issues such as colorism, racism in academia, and micro-aggressions with a complex brush. Its mix of real-life terror with an unspooling ghost story is at times less than elegant, but its explosive denouement is bracing in its refusal to pull its punches. Master finds immense power where most social horror films can’t or won’t these days: in its own contemplative ambiguity. B+

Watcher

Chloe Okuno, who directed one of the most batshit segments of last year’s V/H/S/94, returns with her feature debut, Watcher. More technical exercise than full-blooded horror, the film follows a young woman (Maika Monroe) in the throes of existential crisis, having recently relocated to Bucharest with her boyfriend (Karl Glusman). When she discovers a figure (an effectively creepy Burn Gorman) peering at her from the building across the street, her life quickly spirals into your standard narrative of stalking, paranoia, and gaslighting. Okuno proves to be one to watch with artfully creepy compositions reminiscent of Polanski’s great paranoiac thrillers, but Watcher is ultimately undone by its clench-fisted resistance to budge from textbook tropes. Even its ending, which flirts with a subversive edge, walks back its daring with a baffling shrug. C+

Dual

Those familiar with Riley Stearns’ (The Art of Self-Defense) oeuvre will have no problems vibing with the purposefully stilted awkwardness of Dual. A thoughtfully demented pastiche of “Greek Weird Wave” cinema (think Yorgos Lanthimos), the film centers around a young woman’s (Karen Gillan) decision to clone herself in the wake of a terminal diagnosis. When she’s miraculously cured, she must grapple with a court-mandated duel to the death with her double. Detached, darkly funny performances jangling around in a heightened reality, Dual won’t be for everyone, but its bleak absurdism makes for a refreshing jaunt through its bone-dry humor. B-