2025’s Sundance is here! As the first major film festival of the year, we got an early taste test of what 2025 has to offer. Check out our full coverage of the fest after the jump.
Films
BRIDES
(Written by Intern, Miranda Zampogna) Brides proposes a cautionary tale of two young Muslim girls, Doe (Ebada Hassan) and Muna (Safiyya Ingar), who romanticize jihadism after facing islamophobia in England and decide to travel to Syria. Their trip is fraught with danger and crossroads, while a flashback narrative depicts the hostility and ostracization they felt back home. Director Nadia Fall and writer Suhayla El-Bushra hope to question the factors that can lead young girls to extremism and the dangers of seeking solace in simplistic solutions. However, this message, along with its flashback structure, feels underdeveloped. An orange and teal color scheme, intended to impress ideas of warning and disillusionment, is sparsely used, creating less of a thematic impact. Reverent images of bazaars, traditional dances, music, and mosques are desaturated, not allowing an audience to relate to the girls’ emotional rationales. Momentum stalls during these sequences that forfeit plot and character development. Moreover, past scenes interrupt the current throughline with overwrought backstory, draining suspense. Their connection to jihadism in the premise is not fully explored, and character motivations suffer. Doe’s fragmented romantic subplot with an unsatisfying conclusion obscures her goal. Muna’s motivation to join Doe, her troubled homelife, and her personal connection to Islam feels unexplored. A satisfying wrap up of the girl’s conflicting desires and necessary character development, influencing a final action onto their goal, also seems to be missing. Nevertheless, the dialogue is subtle, with false thematic statements and a clear unreliable narration, that manages to subvert some expectations. Doe’s complex relationship with her mother, played by Yusra Warsama, also manages to surprise and compel. A brief yet stand out performance by Cemre Ebuuzziya (Zeynep), a Turkish woman whom the girls meet along the way, is crucial in delivering thematic undertones and a contrasting viewpoint that deepens the story. Brides, as confusing as its title’s relevancy may be, manages to briefly shine with a commendable message, but a loose structure and underdeveloped characters weaken its emotional impact.
DIDN’T DIE
(Written by Intern, Alecia Wilk) Didn’t Die is not just untraditional for the genre, it seems unconcerned with it. Director Meera Menon’s slow, slice-of-life approach to the apocalypse backs away from its labels as horror/thriller and takes on grief instead. Menon’s zombies, denoted “biters,” loom as a backdrop for protagonist Vinita’s (Kiran Deol) family reunion while she podcasts the end of times. Vinita and her two brothers (Samrat Chakrabarti and Vishal Vijayakumar), sister-in-law (Katie McCuen), ex-boyfriend (George Basil), and an orphaned baby spend most of the runtime cohabiting her childhood home and carrying on domestically. It is cozy, dim, and perhaps most thrilling aesthetically. Black and white cinematography elevates every shot into something worth staring at, but the lingering camera also tells of a lack of excitement. Scenes of smoke billowing out of an old brick chimney, sunlight scattered across a creek, or snowfall on the countryside transition back to back while the biters go unmentioned. Taking inspiration from George Romero’s work where his monsters approximate current social issues, Menon channels the tediousness of quarantine with her iteration of the zombie movie. The household evokes sentiments of familiar lockdown cliches about everyone being ‘in the same boat’ and missing restaurants, and podcasting Vinita struggles more to care than to survive. Rumination is a major theme, and the living dead plot grows weary at times. Macabre and visually stunning, Didn’t Die will more likely bring catharsis than a good scare to horror fans.
KHARTOUM
(Written by Intern, Alecia Wilk) Khartoum does not spare much of a lesson to those unfamiliar with the civil war in Sudan. Filmmakers Anas Saeed, Rawia Alhag, Ibrahim Snoopy, Timeea Ahmed, and Phil Cox take their time getting comfortable with their five interviewees, leaving historical context to be desired. Forgoing the responsibility to case study the Sudanese conflict itself is unexpected, and ultimately does a greater service in connecting viewers and participants. All displaced by military violence, Majdi, Jawad, Khadmallah, Lokain, and Wilson take turns sharing their stories in front of a green screen. Erecting their home state in memories and reenactments, props and visual effects are used to illustrate their experiences rather than raw footage. This style definitely makes it unique among refugee documentaries. What is also distinctive is a seeming lack of political motivation in the storytelling. While this initially felt like a shortcoming, the intent is worth appreciating. Proceeding without a clear agenda or narrative discards the impulse to process Khartoum as news content, instead offering people on either side of production the equally refreshing opportunity to hear and be heard. Sudan has undergone the most coups in modern Africa. In a condition of continual revolutions, Jawad says it is as if the world is always supporting the dictators but never the people. This is, in his words, “another coup.” Too often, the interest extended to crises like that in Sudan tends towards exploitation. Khartoum is a documentary which is more concerned with the personal than political. Made from a position of displacement, it is by necessity that the directors do not focus on capturing combat. Rather, they join Khartoum’s citizens in the quest to remember and rebuild the everyday lives stolen by state violence. While not especially provocative, Khartoum successfully brings its subjects and audience together for an honest exchange.
SAUNA
Full review at the link.
TWO WOMEN
(Written by Intern, Miranda Zampogna) Two Women playfully arouses the artifice of domesticity by exposing the fetishistic affairs of two duty-bound mothers in the throes of a sexual reawakening. A breezy, succinct ninety minutes directed by Chloé Robichaud modernizes Claude Fournier’s 1970s French-Canadian film Two Women in Gold. Starring Laurence Leboeuf and Karine Gonthier-Hyndman as next-door neighbors, Violette and Florence respectively, this sex romp follows their bond over a shared madness when untraceable orgasmic moans bleed through their apartment walls. Acting as a calling for both women, they start to question their unfaithful partners, begin affairs, and prioritize their happiness over their families. Robichaud crafts a unique ironic style and tone by combining snappy, wry dialogue with the use of wintry landscapes, as well as a symbolic hamster cage to mirror the bound psyche of the two women. As a raunchy comedy of manners, it optimizes stark contrasts, euphemisms, wiley libidos, and its bourgeois community garden setting. Entertaining sequences of clumsy, randy escapades also strike the right balance between laughing at and relating to its lead protagonists. Despite some reluctant platitudes, Two Women executes the satire of domesticity and monogamy in a strong comedic fashion. Where the story delivers in terms of its premise, the build-up of conflict sags as the protagonists’ moral dilemma in choosing between their desires and family begins too late. As the rushed climax hinges on their partners’ actions, it distracts from the two women’s necessary character development to understand the final decisions they make to resolve their infidelities. Despite a pacing issue and unresolved plot points, Two Women’s solid comedic performances, poignant satirical tone, and entertaining sequences deliver a titillating farce recommended to an audience that appreciates unwavering sex positivity and to fans of absurdist black comedies.
THE VIRGIN OF THE QUARRY LAKE
(Written by Intern, Alecia Wilk) Subtly weaving the supernatural into its fabric, The Virgin of the Quarry Lake enraptures its audience with a delirious portrait of adolescent transition. Meticulously adapted from a short story by Marianna Enriquez, Director Laura Casabé’s narrative is so masterfully immersive it threatens contagion. The story clings tightly to Nati (Dolores Oliverio) and her friends, Josefina (Isabel Bracamonte) and Mariela (Candela Flores), during the summer after senior year, watching them simmer in the calculated longing of late girlhood. Casabé brings Nati’s slice of Buenos Aires to life with suffocating attention, matching the coven of girls’ feelings for Diego, and plunges into a world equally gorgeous and grimy. Misfortune swarms Nati’s neighborhood. There is not enough money, water, and of course, not enough of Diego to go around. This thematic neediness festers and produces a hypnotizingly natural plot progression. The girls are dragged around aimlessly by their desires and envy drives Nati mad. Her teenage emotions are visceral, and the script is veristic. Minimalistic dialogue and faithful performances concoct a realism that makes the spiral to wickedness even more satisfying. The fact that everything in the film radiates a paranoid need to keep watch of it allows evil to slip seamlessly into this reality. Smothering detail and tight focus haunt each shot with trepidation and stillness. Sound design renders diegetic audio like the constant whirring of fans, a television’s neverending sermon, and the trickling of water with transfixing precision. The camerawork gets intimate too, either pressed close enough on characters to smell them or positioned within dynamics like an observer, with fixtures and bodies barely obstructing the frame. The condition of ‘the boy is mine’ grows darker as summertime edges on, and Laura Casabé seduces viewers into a grotesque final act. A definitive must-see, The Virgin of the Quarry Lake embodies its folkloric inspiration with a fresh and provocative edge.
For more information about 2025’s iteration of Sundance including ticketing, head over to the official website.