Some dispatches out of Sundance are built around themes, premiere dates, or even locations. Sometimes it’s just three good movies. This is one of those.
An undeniable standout of this year’s Sundance is Max Walker-Silverman’s (“A Love Song”) excellent “Rebuilding,” a timely story of hope and community in the face of unimaginable loss. It’s a film that opens with the sound of flames as sparks fill the black screen, sound and imagery that sent a wave through the Eccles on Sunday afternoon, a theater occupied by people impacted by the Los Angeles fires of January 2025. But as Walker-Silverman made clear in his emotional introduction, this is not a story of loss as much as it is how we figure out how to take the next steps. It’s a nuanced, character-driven drama about a man who almost looks like a ghost trying to find his human form again. It’s not a spoiler to say he will. It’s right in the title. But how this man finds a way to turn the page into the next chapter of his life is the stuff of great cinema, a true empathy machine grounded by a performance I’m going to be talking about all year.
Josh O’Connor (“Challengers”) continues his remarkable career ascendance as the appropriately named Dusty, a cowboy who watched his Southern Colorado ranch burn to the ground. The devastation was so severe that Dusty is told by a banker from whom he’s trying to get a loan to rebuild that it could be eight years or more before the land is really productive again. It was a ranch that Dusty’s great-great-grandfather built by hand, passed down and worked through the years by his family. He knows no other life.
The wildfire has forced Dusty to a FEMA campsite, a place that his daughter Callie-Rose (Lily LaTorre) sometimes visits. The pair have a relaxed, charming dynamic. Callie-Rose’s mom Ruby (Meghann Fahy) notes that they’re similar in that neither of them ever asks for help. Callie-Rose and her dad go to the nearby library and sit outside to jack the wi-fi that they don’t have in their trailer. And they make friends with other displaced people, including a widow played effectively by Kali Reis, and other characters who feel grounded in the film’s place and time.
In both of his films, Walker-Silverman has displayed an acute sense of space and setting, using the big sky of Colorado almost as a character. After all, there’s still an amazing view from Dusty’s ranch. As Dusty says in one of several great scenes, nature and life is cyclical. When a person is buried and put into the ground, they eventually feed it to become a tree again. Callie-Rose asks what happens if that tree burns? The cycle starts again. It may take a long time. But it doesn’t stop.
O’Connor does incredibly subtle work in “Rebuilding,” conveying the kind of cowboy who may have a swirling internal monologue of uncertainty but lives a life of obligation that represses his anxiety. He goes about every day without wallowing in misery, but we can sense it in O’Connor’s inflection and soft-spoken cadence. A monologue in which Dusty worries about what he may have already forgotten about the ranch is an absolute stunner. We’ve all lost people or things and the sense that the memory of them is slowly disappearing is one of the hardest things about grief.
O’Connor is matched by an effective cast from top to bottom, an ensemble well-directed by Walker-Silverman to mostly aim for realism over melodrama. There are times when the plotting reveals some strings being pulled, but never in the performances, especially LaTorre, who looks so natural in this role that you forget she’s acting. She’s just a kid in an chapter of her life she’ll never forget.
Walker-Silverman was inspired to make “Rebuilding” after his grandmother’s house burned in the same region in which the film is set. But it wasn’t the loss that inspired him as much as what grew up out of it: Communities forming through all kinds of support, from food to supplies to a shoulder to cry on. He got emotional when he introduced the film, and one can sense that personal connection to the storytelling in every frame. His grandmother would have been proud of it.
A very different kind of personal storytelling unfolds in Matthew Shanks’ wildly entertaining “Together,” the film that produced the most impressive audience response at Sundance this year. Laughing, squirming, screaming watchers confirmed my suspicion that this very smart horror-comedy could be the biggest hit to come out of this year’s fest. “Together” is a body horror version of a relationship dramedy. With echoes of “The Substance” and the work of David Cronenberg, it is the rare body horror flick that actually delivers, turning viewers into squirming participants in the chaos. What I love most about Shanks’ approach is how playful he is as a writer/director with the audience. We know where this is going more than the characters do, making us participants in the chaos. When a character pulls out an electric saw and says, “Don’t let me use this,” we know we’re going to see it again, and the filmmakers knows we know. Great horror can often be a game between a creator and his audience, something they play together.
Real-life couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco play Tim and Millie, a pair at a formative chapter in their story. Even Tim’s friends know that Millie, for lack of a better phrase, wears the pants in this relationship, and it’s starting to eat away at Tim. They’re moving far from the city, which isn’t great for Tim’s career as a musician—he can’t even drive to gigs since Millie has the car that they share most of the time. She’s taken a new job as a teacher, but the real work is going to need to be done at home, figuring out how to connect two people who have drifted apart physically and emotionally.
All of this set-up comes after a crucial prologue wherein we learn that another couple recently went missing in the area that Tim and Millie are moving to. A pair of dogs assisting in the search finds what looks like an ancient pool of water. Later that night, they, well, become one. It’s a terrifying image that sets the tone of “Together” perfectly because it feels like a warning. Is that “Substance”-esque dog creature the fate that Tim and Millie are going to meet? Oh no.
Without too much spoiling, Tim becomes inexplicably attached to Millie. First, it’s from afar, including a phenomenally directed scene in which Millie drives away from the house and Tim’s body gets thrown around the shower at home as she gets further away. It’s co-dependency meets body horror. Before long, every time they touch, it becomes harder to separate. Violent, gooey, creepy, and unforgettable imagery follows as Brie and Franco fearlessly throw themselves into very physical performances.
Couples who have been together as long as Tim & Millie (or Alison & Dave, really, giving the film a personal energy that’s foundational to their performances) start to question where one person ends and the other begins. “Together” turns that concept into physical horror in a way that’s unforgettable.
The complete other end of the filmmaking spectrum unfolds in Ira Sachs’
“Peter Hujar’s Day,” a delicate study of how daily mundanity exists even in some of the most impressive intellectual and artistic times in history. In 1974 in New York City, writer Linda Rosenkrantz had the idea to record conversations with artists of that incredibly vibrant scene to really just see how they go about their days. The book never surfaced, but the conversation she had with famed photographer Peter Hujar eventually became a standalone release, capturing life in the mid-‘70s in NYC in a fascinating manner. When Sachs read the book on the set of “Passages,” he had the idea to film the discussion between Hujar & Rosenkrantz, featuring that film’s co-star Ben Whishaw as Hujar. He cast Rebecca Hall as Rosenkrantz, and the resulting project is a two-hander between these two excellent performers as Peter talks about what he did the day before, including photographing Allen Ginsberg and name-dropping icons from the era.
The result is something that can sometimes feel like a side project for the very talented Sachs. It runs around 75 minutes, takes place entirely in Hujar’s apartment (or on the roof), and features no recreations of anything discussed. It’s not even as much an interview as a monologue—Whishaw had 55 pages of dialogue; Hall had 3. But there is an artistry to Sachs’ choices here too, including sometimes breaking the wall to reveal elements of the film’s production, or taking a moment to really just let the camera rest on these two stunningly beautiful faces. There are clear visual echoes of Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, giving the project connection not just to the intellectual/photography scene of the era but the cinematic one too.
And, of course, it’s a showcase for Whishaw, who finds a way to make Hujar’s conversational speech sound genuine. The actor noted the difficulty of that in his post-screening Q&A in that ordinary scripts have dialogue beats that can be much easier to dissect than the free flow of conversation. He’s excellent, as he almost always is.
“Peter Hujar’s Day” sometimes feels like an extended short—some episodes of prestige TV are longer—which can make it seem like a diversion between “bigger” projects for Sachs, but I do think it’s an important entry in the filmmaker’s career. He spoke in his intro about all of the gay-themed works that have premiered at Sundance over the years, connecting them to Peter Hujar and Linda Rosenkrantz in a manner that feels essential to understanding what he’s attempting to do here: Not just taking us back to 1974, but bringing Peter Hujar to 2025.