Michael Mejia

Building on their excellent, award-winning feature Sin señales particulares (Identifying Features), from 2020, Mexican filmmakers Fernanda Valadez and Astrid Rondero return to Sundance this year with Sujo, the tale of a young man’s journey toward a transformative adulthood amidst the violent landscape of rural Michoacán.

The titular character Sujo is just four years old when his father Josue, a cartel hitman, disappears, leaving the child in the care of his aunt Nemesia, a virtual hermit, living on a mountain above their town. The terroristic power and dominance of the cartel that controls the region (known as Tierra Caliente, a potent, infernal sobriquet) is apparent in the timidity of the townspeople, particularly women, and particularly at night.

Throughout the film, the deadly potential of men and the cruel work they do on each other is often viewed from a distance or kept offscreen. Of course, this curtails any celebration of violence, but it also imparts something like mystery on those works, a dark magic whose evidence, when it comes to light, is both repulsive and sublime. Each wound, that is, each clandestine meeting is an embodiment of an institution so vast, so organic in structure, so complex and obscure that it seems as inevitable and eternal as it is incomprehensible. In this remote place, so far from the city, from help or concern (“These people don’t give a shit about us,” insists one character about the denizens of the capital), the cartel is a condition of life. More than a governing or social entity, it is an angry and suspicious, or paranoid, god and all his creation. The bang of fireworks can never not be mistaken for the reports of the actual weapons that one is certain are always about to open fire.

The imperial persona of the local boss, Aurelio—who is only ever heard or seen from the back, remaining a shadow in light—lends itself to the first part of the film’s tones of fable or myth. His initial orders are that the son must be destroyed for fear of what he’ll become, but, as mentioned, his sage aunt is allowed to raise him on tales of immortal stones and animal guardians in what she hopes is innocence, apart from the violent world. What has Nemesia promised, one wonders, in order have such power, and how has she acquired it? 

Whatever influence she may have, she doesn’t live so far from town that its lights and blaring music won’t reach Sujo, who is also provoked by the temptations and curiosity of adolescence that he shares with his friends Jeremy and Jai. At some point Sujo will want to know more about his father and what legacy he’s left his son, dangerous questions that can only draw him into the orbit of the power that for its own preservation must co-opt and then destroy young men. 

To make one’s entry into even the outer edges of Aurelio’s court requires ambition. The key to survival—always an illusion—is learning how to curb that trait, to accept a subservient position and to never look up. This was Josue’s fatal destiny. But it was his bold capture of Aurelio’s restless horse that first brought him to the boss’s attention. That opening scene provides a trio of possibilities, of paths for Sujo to strive for: master, servant, runaway. If he were to break free, like the horse, what would that look like? What route would he take and where? And is there really any chance some other Josue won’t appear to rein him in and return him to captivity?

Sujo is a deeply moving film of discovery, surprising without flash, but nevertheless visually and aurally stunning, featuring complex, understated performances from a stoic Juan Jesús Varela, in the title role, Yadira Pérez, as Nemesia, and Sandra Lorenzano, playing another guide to Sujo in the film’s final part. Alongside Sin señales particulares, Sujo testifies to the consistently high-quality cinematic and narrative talents of Varela and Rondero. They are definitely a creative team to keep an eye on.

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“Sujo” is the winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic award at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

What interested me most in the first 20 minutes of Greg Jardin’s noisome bro-mean girl-sci-fi-freakout It’s What’s Inside, was the rather ingenious and layered moment in which the film’s nominal heroine, Shelby, scrolls through Instagram, accumulating information and anxiety in connection to the upcoming wedding of her friends Reuben and Sophia, collectively known as “#reuphia.” On their way to a pre-wedding bash, Shelby (Brittany O’Grady) and her live-in boyfriend Cyrus (James Morosini), in the passenger and driver seats of their car, respectively, are confined to inset frames as the screen gradually becomes overwhelmed by popup windows showing their friends’ breathless posts about how excited they are for the wedding, their accompanying text voiced by the various characters we’ll soon meet. It’s a brief clip, but its frenetic and hilarious energy, its simple solution to depicting a chaos of image, text and emoticons, while clearly defining the rising tide of Shelby’s inner turmoil, demonstrate early on Jardin’s smart comic sensibility and the deftness, accessibility and modishness of his cinematic vision.

Which is also to say that I pretty quickly hated most—maybe all—of the film’s subjects. Loud, boorish, privileged, self-satisfied, effete, pretentious…shall I go on? When I feel this way, even after the momentary pleasure of the scene I’ve described, for another ten or fifteen minutes, it seems natural to begin wondering if maybe this film isn’t for me. Am I supposed to identify with anyone here? Are they designed to be repellent? Maybe it’s a generational thing, or maybe it’s genre? What is the genre? Do I even know yet? Someone’s going to show up with a suitcase with a mystery, so, okay, give it another couple of minutes and see what happens. (Jardin does provide some cagey closeups of the device right at the beginning, just to get us interested, but one still has no idea.) Anyway, I think I’m supposed to hate these people?

The party to which Shelby and Cyrus are heading, for just Reuben and his college gang—Sophia, the bride-to-be, nevertheless inexplicably (ahem, conveniently) absent—is set to take place at an immense pile, like an English manor house, in some spooky, misty forest somewhere—are we heading into Ari Aster’s Midsommar imaginary? [*scratching chin emoji*] Nah. The place, it turns out, now belongs to groom-to-be Reuben, whose (conveniently) recently deceased mother’s large-scale, vaginally focused artworks still remain scattered around the grounds and the mansion’s interior. The sculptures are dangerous, more physically than aesthetically, which is what gives them purpose in the script. Keep in mind (if I haven’t already made it clear) that much of the backstory in It’s What’s Inside is tissue-thin, absurd and merely functional, to create easy exigency for this or that. 

[Does anything in the present of the film, other than a couple of lines of dialogue, really make me believe that the characters went to college? Studying what exactly? And supposedly they have jobs now? The assumption, or, in a couple of cases, direct statement that these late-twenty-somethings already have all the money they’ll ever need is supposed to resolve most concerns, I suppose, because, as we know, or so I’ve heard, possessing a fortune pretty much eliminates a need to justify anything, c.f….oh, whatever.]

[Wait, but does the film even need to take place at this huge mansion? It certainly provides atmosphere and spaces for the characters to secret themselves away, as necessary, to work out a variety of unresolved emotional and erotic issues. But then, the spooky structure also may remind us of something like an Agatha Christie or Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes show, something both gothic and mind-twisting. Or maybe this is going to turn out more like an old horror film? The Haunting of Hill House? But funny? Whatever, it’s good atmosphere, it’s fine. Go on.]

And so, yes, it turns out that that one friend, alienated from the group after being expelled from college [*rolling eyes emoji*] because of an incident involving his sister and another friend and his former girlfriend—now also present at this party—but who’s made good anyway, becoming a big tech guy, does arrive after all with that suitcase, which, yes, allows them to bodyswap(?!?) and wouldn’t it be a great party game to slip into each other’s bodies and then try to guess who’s who, while continuing to get drunk, high, etc.?

Okay, so there’s something of the teen sex comedy here, too, but, you know, this atmosphere stuff is kind of working for me, now, and it seems like Jardin is consciously engaging with that treasured genre of the comic whodunnit, such as Murder by Death (1976) and Clue (1985), and, honestly, despite some carelessness with the writing (I know you can do better, Greg!), I was pretty entertained by the performances. The whole gag of the film’s actors taking on each other’s mannerisms is fun and confusing, like the film is a game for the viewer, too, which Jardin obviously intended because, without breaking the spell, he introduces a clever and effective device of reminding us which cup the bean is under in case we’ve gotten lost in the who’s who, and it totally works as the stakes get higher in some unexpected ways, and we finally arrive, through yet another left turn, at a rather satisfying denouement, or coda, as the film would have it. So, yes, while It’s What’s Inside has flaws, ultimately it’s an entertaining and frequently smart, media-savvy debut that makes me curious to see what Jardin will come up with next.

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Steven Soderbergh’s latest, Presence—his 36th feature, premiering at Sundance 35 years after sex, lies, and videotape, his first—opens with a handheld point-of-view shot, looking down from a second-story window onto a driveway. After a moment, the camera turns and moves rapidly, dizzyingly through the empty, darkened rooms of a 100-year-old home, upstairs and downstairs, returning, finally, to settle in a closet in the room where the journey began. On the one hand, this long opening shot provides a map of the film’s site, which will be restricted to the interior of the home, an intriguing formal constraint that is a further condition of the initial choice of camera perspective, one that will never change: the first-person POV shot. 

Soderbergh says he’s been adamant that such a condition would never work for narrative media (particularly for VR projects), insisting that the viewer will always require a reverse shot at some point, revealing the subject of the POV, the looker who the camera’s eye represents. The viewer will want an expression, an emotion in response to what’s seen. (Think of Jimmy Stewart’s reaction shots to his voyeuristic peeps at his neighbors in Rear Window.) But what’s already occurred to us, after the opening minutes of Presence, is that our feeling of disorientation, even as we’re becoming oriented to the house, is not ours: this feeling belongs to the camera, to the point of view, or character, it represents, that of the film’s titular presence. Its anxiety and confusion is palpable in the camera’s rapid panning and tracking, which is not jittery, so much as slithery, maybe slippery, a condition that sometimes made me worry for the cameraman—Soderbergh himself—as he goes flying up and down the old hardwood staircase. (He was wearing martial arts shoes for traction.)

In Presence, Soderbergh has made a rather novel ghost story. Novel not just for its technical constraints, but also in the sense that the ghost is not a ghost. It’s never referred to as anything but a presence. There are narrative reasons for this, a distinction that’s being made between a ghost, a thing that remains behind, a figure defined by the past, and a presence, an entity that inhabits, a thing of the present and maybe also of the future. While Soderbergh leans into several of the conventional capacities of a traditional ghost, not shying away from a few old-timey, actually unexpected, effects, the nature of the presence and particularly its identity contribute substantive mystery to the film, which is less a supernatural thriller than a family drama shaded by another definition of the title.

The presence in Presence, as it turns out, ends up cohabiting this old house with a deeply unsettled family, Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan playing parents to Ty (Eddy Maday) and Chloe (Callina Liang). Ty is his mother’s favorite, a vigorous and aggressive high school swimmer with big ambitions. Chloe, headstrong in her own way, is suffering from the shock and grief of recently losing a close friend, a strange death with extenuating circumstances. As the family takes a tour with their realtor, the presence immediately develops an interest in Chloe, prompting a hint of awareness from the girl that sets in motion themes of haunting, sensitivity and the nearness of death. 

But it’s not just Chloe’s tragic experience that’s disrupting the family’s life. Mom and Dad are opposite characters, entangled in some kind of shady business that might destroy them, and Ty is prone to violent tirades, threatening that he will not let what he perceives as his sister’s problems derail his dreams. The sources of these destructive tensions are not unknown to the family, but they seem incapable of speaking about them without running up against the obstacle of each other’s certainty that they cannot, or should not, be the one to compromise or attempt change. Of course, given the film’s constraint, we can know nothing about anything without the presence as a witness, hanging about, taking interest, paying attention, perhaps trying to intervene, perhaps hoping to better understand itself in relation to these four human presences. In this sense, as a proxy for the audience and as our sole conduit of information and drama, the invisible entity, a seeming absence, becomes a metaphor for presence itself, a figure that offers something of an alternative to the lack of presence—concern, trust, transparency, care—that the family members are prepared to offer one another. Can the presence, as presence, effect change?

Liu, Liang, and Maday’s performances are uniformly strong, but Sullivan really stands out, particularly in a heartfelt scene with Liang, essentially a monologue, articulating the depth and breadth of a father’s love. And one should also praise Soderbergh’s performance as a cinematographer. His choreography with and around the actors is both elegant and affecting.

It should be noted that, while we may wonder about the nature of the presence, there is also a truly disturbing monster in the film, and fair questions have been raised about the detail with which that figure’s atrocities are shown. Again, given the formal constraints of the film, witnessing seems simply to be playing by the rules. Then again, the film’s genuine moral sensibility, constructed and played out through the ambiguities and actions of the presence, also seems to require it, and us, to see in order to know. And once we know, rather than suspect, whether and how to act—character, in a sense—becomes clear. 

At any rate, Presence is an intriguing and challenging new experiment by a master filmmaker, making it well worth a watch.

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Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden return to Sundance this year with a pretty delightful, action-packed romp through late-80s Oakland, Freaky Tales. The film takes its name from a rap by Oakland legend Too $hort, who serves as our narrator and also has a brief cameo. (Keep an eye out for Marshawn Lynch, Sleepy Floyd, Tim Armstong and that guy from The Money Pit.) Though Oakland’s rap scene does play a role here, the film’s four chapters intertwine storylines traveling through the diverse socio-cultural landscape of the city at the time, which, as one cast member noted after the premiere, has been severely disrupted in recent years by gentrification. To that point, Freaky Tales’ nostalgia doesn’t overly fetishize fashion or music or objects, though all of these contribute to a more or less authentic feel. Rather, the film is interested in a lost and obviously beloved community. It’s interested in the ways in which, particularly perhaps from Fleck’s perspective, a sector of young Oakland at that time shared a dogged resistance to forces that wanted to crush and humiliate it. 

The underdog is a central metaphor in Freaky Tales, and nothing characterizes this state-of-being better than the event that frames the whole film: Game Four of the Western Conference Semifinals, featuring the Golden State Warriors (remember, they used to play in Oakland?) and the Showtime Los Angeles Lakers. On May 10 that year, the Warriors were down 3-0 in the series, but, as we’re reminded early on in Freaky Tales, Golden State point guard Eric “Sleepy” Floyd scored 51 points in Game 4 to ruin a Lakers series sweep. Something was in the air that night, Too $hort tells us, signified by a weird green light that appears in a variety of forms throughout the film. 

Before we get to the full implications of this seemingly supernatural event, however, Fleck and Boden lead us through some preliminaries, including an epic battle for existence between the denizens of a punk club fighting a band of neo-Nazis, and two young women, the rap duo Danger Zone, braving their fears to take the stage and battle a local idol. These first two chapters are certainly entertaining, wild and gory, but they do feel a bit light, even predictable, as we begin to wonder when the love, friendship and heroics we’re seeing will meet up with some true challenges, giving the whole project more substance.

Chapter 3, the longest to this point and featuring an engaging Pedro Pascal, delivers both tragedy and even greater stakes as some of the Tarantino-like path-crossing we’ve seen earlier begins to add up. The grand finale pushes Sleepy Floyd’s heroism to unimaginable heights, confirming the film’s central premise that its most generous and community-oriented figures, those who work to lift others up without regard for profit, will always come out on top. At least in fantasy.  

More than an easy nostalgia trip, Freaky Tales is a pretty fun comic book, set in something like an alternative present, made, quite nicely, to look like the past. (The gore meter registers high, however, so be warned.) It doesn’t matter that many of the film’s moves are familiar. (There actually are some great surprises in the final chapter, and the use of animation throughout is both practical and clever.) Rather, Freaky Tales’ entertainment lies in its goofy and eager desire to expand on the joy of that one great night in the Coliseum, when the underdog knocked the bully cold, made the impossible possible. And even though the forces of darkness, with all their money and power, always seem to come back stronger to finish the job (and to take your team across the Bay), maybe that green glimmer of hope will be enough to encourage you to mount a resistance one more time.

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One benefit to a reviewer of Gary Hustwit’s innovative documentary Eno’s reported 52 quintillion possible versions is that there’s no possibility of spoilers. Practically, the film’s most significant feature is its constant reconfiguration at the digital hands of generative software Hustwit developed with artist Brendan Dawes, assuring that every showing will be different than the last. While Hustwit told his audience at the film’s premiere that this version had been fully rendered in advance, ideally the work should be assembled as it plays in real time. When you see Eno—and you must see it—you will experience a completely different film than I did, and—this is where one might feel some frustration at the process—you’ll likely see scenes that I didn’t see, just as I’ve seen things you won’t. Zooming in from the UK to participate in the post-film Q&A, Brian Eno suggested that the project operates like human memory, following a winding path of unpredictable associations to create a rich and complex but always incomplete, or unfinished, portrait. 

In terms of content, the film is truly one of the most inspiring works on creativity that I’ve seen in some time. It helps, of course, that its subject is a tremendously likeable human being. Eno is pure delight as a guide to himself and his aesthetics, reflecting with great precision on and clear-eyed analysis of his development as a musician, a composer, a producer and a visual artist. Though he’s now in his 70s, Eno’s ultimately positive and relentlessly curious approach to innovation feels as fresh and essential as it would have (to those with ears) in his glam rock period with Roxy Music in the early 1970s. Back then, Eno tells us, his axe was the newly developed synthesizer because the technology interested him and he had no capacity to play any other instrument. That even now the producer of iconic works by David Bowie, The Talking Heads, U2, and many others cannot write with conventional musical notation and has little use for common compositional terms is a testament to the tremendous power and precision of Eno’s creative imagination and his capacity to communicate his original ideas through intuitive and organic approaches to rhythm, melody, sonic mimicry, and metaphor. 

One thing Eno is not is sentimental. There’s a touch of comic, cringing regret as he wades through the material archives of past experiments that Hustwit has asked him to revisit. But there’s also evidence of lingering interest and pleasure, as when Eno finds some of his daughter’s drawings in an old notebook (“this was her abstract period”), or, when flipping over a mini-cassette featuring crude vocal experiments that make him laugh, he suddenly recognizes Bono working out the vocal style for 1984’s “Pride (In the Name of Love).” The rawness and emergent brilliance playing through the recorder’s tinny speaker arrest Eno, as if he’s hearing this music for the first time. 

As we might expect from a more conventional documentary, this moment transitions into an extended, edited sequence of fascinating and revealing archival studio footage in which a younger Eno encourages and mildly provokes a notably shy Bono into the defiant vocal character that defines the song, the very character for which the U2 front man is best known. When Bono complains, somewhat meekly, later in the sequence, that “Pride” no longer feels “grand” due to a reduction in length, Eno’s simple suggestion to slow it down brings a song that’s become nearly unhearable today because of its ubiquity into a renewed focus for the viewer, and the band’s earnest expressions of pleasure and discovery (of themselves) is startlingly moving. This is not solely the doing of Brian Eno. It’s a vision of the joy of collaboration, risk, and emergence.

Given the power and effectiveness of such typical documentary moves applied to this material, one may well ask if the formal experiment with generative processes is as productive as it might be. Does it make the film great or is its most important contribution to evoke, rather than build on, Eno’s approach to composition? In my version—which, to be clear, will never be seen again—the film closed with a somewhat thin consideration of what Eno’s aesthetics offer art made in response to contemporary environmental collapse. There’s obvious and important potential here that simply isn’t as developed as an earlier sequence on Eno’s concept of surrender, for example. But then, in your version, maybe the environmental point will be adequately developed while surrender may not appear at all. That’d be unfortunate for you. But you win some, you lose some, and maybe the most beautiful aspect of Eno’s life-art project is that failure simply doesn’t exist. “Honor thy error as hidden intention,” reads one of Eno’s famous Oblique Strategies. You just keep asking questions—what is art? what does an artist do? what have we never heard before? where have we never been before?—and the work keeps on going, shifting, growing, not becoming better necessarily, just more and more interesting.

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Fair Play, director Chloe Domont’s feature debut, has gotten a fair amount of talk at Sundance, recently picking up the first major distribution deal of the festival with Netflix. There’s good reason for the excitement, in part for the solid performances of its leads, Phoebe Dynevor (Emily) and Alden Ehrenreich (Luke), as well as for its timely depiction of gender politics in a high-pressure corporate environment, where dominating everyone, or trying to, acting as if you can—that is, being not just one of the boys, but the Man—is the only path to success. 

The film opens with a seemingly unexpected proposal, an offer of marriage, Luke to Emily, that plays out, strangely, like a negotiation, not for a mutually desired union, but for something more like a merger. It’s no spoiler to tell you that Emily says yes—though it does seem like there’s a chance she might not. Is it because she’s not sure about Luke? Maybe. Or rather it might be the fact that it’s a professional risk. They can’t tell anyone because revealing such an entanglement, socially sanctioned or not, would give an impression of bias, would introduce an imbalanced power dynamic, a hint of impropriety that might sink them both at the investment capital firm where they work, side by side, pretending they know nothing about each other’s personal lives. There’s a suggestion of ethics here, that the firm wants to provide a “clean floor”—in the words of its mob don-like leader, Campbell—for potential investors. But also we can read Luke and Emily’s caution as a desire to avoid revealing a potential weakness, something others might exploit. To announce their relationship (they already live together), even now, sealed by a ring, might make them prey, they worry, their jobs and their mutual future at risk should one half of the couple stumble into a costly mistake or some snare set by their conniving co-workers.

The computer-lined desks of the company will remind viewers of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. Though the employees gazing into those monitors and gossiping crudely about each other are more diverse than in that 1987 classic, the nature of their dialogue and their jockeying for favor remain virtually the same. This and the fact that we still get mostly white men speaking reflects a telling lack of progress. As we learn, though, Emily has no trouble talking the talk as well as any of those men, and it’s notable that only when Campbell approaches her with his own professional proposal do we learn what a wunderkind she really is. To this point, Dynevor has performed humility as if her Emily has not yet done enough to earn notice, and so we understand her and Luke as relative equals—despite his inherent advantage as a man. But once Campbell recites Emily’s history to her, we understand the character’s modesty as her own performance, as intentional restraint, a strange move in a world that rewards loudly proclaimed, aggressive, masculine ambition. Is she trying to protect herself, Luke, both? Her late-night meeting with Campbell forces a decision that will require Emily to play her hand, in effect to become one of the boys if she wants to move forward.

In the aftermath, Emily and Luke’s relationship is strained to the point of breaking in scene after scene of more or less private shouting matches, full of wounding accusations and seeming truth telling. The emotional pitch hits its peak rather too early, so these confrontations feel almost repetitive well before we reach the last straw, in part because Ehrenreich’s Luke has made us wonder if this is really where we should have ended, in a feminist revenge tale, with Luke as Emily’s ironic antagonist. 

Fair Play seems to want us to see Emily as its sole protagonist, and perhaps hero, but, truthfully, the duo are the more interesting subject. And does Luke, as a character, not as a representative of masculine oppression, really deserve the turns the script gives him in the third act? Even in one of his worst moments (not the worst), stating in a cruel and terrible way that Emily will never be accepted as an equal among the upper echelons of power, we can’t miss that his point is an important revelation of a corruption of character Emily has not seen in herself, and that she won’t subsequently avoid. A couple of glimpses like this, of skepticism about the whole enterprise they’ve committed themselves to, is enough to make us wonder why Fair Play wants to make Luke the scapegoat for a firm and a society that may appreciate what it gains from Emily’s boldness and productivity but that will always exploit and humiliate her far worse than it would her fiancé. In the ending we have, what has Emily actually won? It’s not clear that the film really expects us to ask this question.

Rather, it seems like the more interesting story would have been to examine how both partners, trying to maintain their best intentions for each other, are compelled by circumstances they could walk away from to make difficult and self-destructive decisions over what they value more, each other or professional success in an exploitative industry. That is, while Fair Play’s interest in the injustices and violence of gender inequality is laudable, it’s missed a great opportunity to do that and also to more substantively critique a system—our system, The System—that depends on individuals and communities (colleagues, lovers, larger units of society) alienating and destroying each other for financial gain and shallow prestige.

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