Neighbors Violette and Florence are in parallel ruts. Violette is tied to her Montreal apartment, on maternity leave. At the same time, her husband rushes off to work in another town for days at a time, with no time for intimacy when he’s home, and anyway, as he says, Vivi’s pregnancy and the arrival of their son have kind of killed his libido. He’s not even in the mood to listen to her comic conspiracy theory about the couple on the other side of the wall taunting them—or maybe just lonely Vivi—with the sounds of their crow-voiced sex. 

Florence, meanwhile, has grown accustomed to being neglected, physically and emotionally, by her live-in boyfriend, with whom she’s raising a ten-year-old wiseass. Her libido has been suppressed, too, for real, by anti-depressants that, according to her boyfriend, keep her from excessive drinking and suicidal thoughts. She’s got a son to raise, he reminds her. But after an awkward, funny, and ultimately revealing tête-a-tête over coffee with Vivi, Florence begins to wonder if maybe it’s time for a change, time to drop the guardrails she’s put up around herself (that she’s let others put up around her) and start cutting loose, living more fully in her body again, having fun again, even if this does flirt with some emotional and physical risks. 

Recognizing their shared needs and ambitions and rejecting the limitations placed on them by their partners, Vivi and Florence quickly form an intimate alliance and embark on a shared quest in search of liberation. Under the cover of their performances as homebound mates, they begin to feature themselves in a hackneyed male sex fantasy, playing the randy housewife throwing herself at the exterminator, the plumber, the handyman, et al. But the men’s expectations and pleasure, of course, is not the point in director Chloé Robichaud’s remake of Claude Fournier’s original, 1970, apparently (unsurprisingly) more male-oriented sex comedy of the same name. (It was a hit in Canada, it seems, but I haven’t seen it.) Rather, Robichaud’s Two Women is a thoughtful, relentlessly funny, and finally moving consideration of relational dynamics, emotional intelligence, and how attention modulates once the honeymoon is over. It’s a visual and verbal discourse on what distinguishes the male gaze from the female, including some frank and hilarious exchanges about what women, or anyway one female character, consider in choosing a sexual partner and whether or not women wearing revealing clothing actually want to be looked at and why—this is the proposition of another female character, confronting a man. It’s risky material, not really risqué, making Two Women a generous and humane film about ideas and emotions, about what couples can provide each other in the living room as much as the bedroom, gestures of loving not just sex.

The two leads are necessarily excellent, Laurence Leboeuf rather bird-like and guileless as Violette, producing great flair in moments of comedy and drama. Karine Gonthier-Hyndman is brilliantly free as Florence, the more wounded of the two, more in need of some new sense of stability. And the two are very well-complemented by their co-stars, particularly Félix Moati, Mani Soleymanlou, and Juliette Gariépy, all perfectly modulating to the needs of the moment. Catherine Léger also deserves a loud shoutout for her smart and snappy script, without whose nimble wit such a talky film couldn’t fly. If I have one quibble it’s that a character who provides a late and important emotional beat feels a little thinner than he should early on. But this really is a minor point given what, for me, was a rather unexpected and (intellectually) provocative delight.

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A quirky, charming throwback to no-budget, homemade indie films

At its core, OBEX is a film about a man who goes into a computer RPG in 1987 to save his dog who has been kidnapped by the demon antagonist of the game. It’s a simple, black and white, low-fi indie film about not only the importance of companionship but the need to occasionally go outside and touch grass. I’m sure there is a deeper read of the film, but part of its charm is its relative simplicity. 

When reading through descriptions of the films on the Sundance slate, I kept coming back to OBEX. The logline seemed weird and oblique and intriguing. It didn’t sound like anything else playing at the festival. And while it didn’t have the emotional gravitas or polished skill of most of the films playing, it felt like watching a film at the festival thirty years ago.

There’s discussion and discourse on the state of the modern festival in Park City. This is not the place for it, but a lot of people have questioned the mainstream nature the festival has adopted over the years. Many of the films showing already have distribution deals and/or were financed by larger studios. Films without are often snatched up in bidding wars (these days mainly from streamers desperate for content and prestige). What is shown at Sundance often has the polish and look of a major studio film. 

OBEX reminds me of a time where Sundance was home to weird, low-budget indie films like Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, or Christopher Nolan’s The Following (which was actually screened at Slamdance, at alt-alternative festival to Sundance), or Shane Caruth’s Primer. Movies made with borrowed money from parents and dentists, shot as cheaply as possible, assembled using every friend and family member and favor a filmmaker had. OBEX feels like a film a bunch of friends made in their backyards and houses over weekends for a year. 

And in that context, it’s pretty great. 

OBEX follows Conor—an isolated introvert who doesn’t associate with the outside world. It’s 1987 in Baltimore and there’s a large influx of the once-every-seventeen-years Cicada population, which represents the loud, oppressive and scary nature of the outside. Conor has his computer, his massive collection of VHS tapes and his dog Sandy. By day, he creates digital portraits of people using characters and wingdings, dot matrix printed across the page like a pixelated mosaic. He has someone named “Mary” who delivers his groceries every week. They talk through the door but never face to face. He advertises his work in a computer magazine. It’s in this very magazine that he sees an advertisement for a new computer RPG called “OBEX.” They boast that if you send in some pictures of yourself with some personal details, they will customize the gaming experience for you. 

He does this and the game he gets back is very simple and unsatisfactory. So he deletes it and moves on. But the game won’t stay deleted. The main antagonist of the game, the demon Ixaroth, comes out of his computer and steals Sandy. The only way to save her is to go into the game and come find her. And so Conor does. We transition from black and white scenes of suburban loneliness to black and white scenes of “epic” (read: some costumes and shot out in the woods) adventure. 

OBEX is shot entirely in grainy black and white with a charming synth soundtrack with a cast of only a handful of people. It has the DIY look and feel that makes you say “I could do that!” but in a way that inspires you to make a film, not in a condescending “I could do it better” way. And while the overall aesthetic is very low budget, the stakes and escalations of the characters aren’t very dramatic, and the scenes sometimes drift from idea to idea without the clearest direction, OBEX is a delightfully quirky piece of indie cinema that I’m glad exists and found its way to Sundance. It reminds me of bad Saturday afternoon cable access movies, but with more charm and care put into it than you would expect. Things like Stranger Things pull on the nostalgia of the 1980s VHS culture, but OBEX feels like a true love letter to that era, instead of a spectator sport. 

Watching OBEX made me want to make my own small indie film. And while I can’t say if that’ll happen or not, just watching something that inspires you to create is a true gift. As a movie, it’s not great. But as an experience presented to you by a group of indie filmmakers at a festival that, at its core, was about finding and promoting indie voices, it was very inspiring and exciting.

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Director and Brigham Young University graduate Cole Webley said his debut feature, Omaha, has been met with emotion from audiences, especially dads.

Omaha premiered at the festival on Jan. 23. Webley, a father of four himself, said he has had men crying on his shoulder after seeing it. At first, he thought the film reminded them of a past traumatic event. Actually, it touched on emotions they carry deep inside as fathers. 

“The movie just kind of triggered something in them,” he said. 

After the festival, Webley hopes the film can maintain that effect. “We’re at a place where people love movies, which is Sundance, and I am holding out hope that even when this is shared with that cynical world outside the bubble of Sundance, there will be some softened and warmed hearts,” he said.

Before Omaha, Webley directed short films and commercials. He said a feature film was a learning curve. “You just have to give yourself the patience of having a longer period to figure out the movie,” he said. “That could be three weeks, that could be six weeks, there’s no timeline for that.”

His patience paid off. The film has become an audience favorite.

In Omaha, a father (John Magaro) takes his children, Ella (Molly Belle Wright) and Charlie (Wyatt Solis), on a road trip across the country after a family tragedy. Despite the father’s efforts to make the spur-of-the-moment trip seem like a vacation, Ella begins to realize not everything is as it seems.

“They are headed to Omaha. What waits for them? We don’t know,” Webley said. “We experience the reality of what this journey might mean through the eyes of Ella.”

A number of scenes were filmed in Utah, where Webley said he came of age as a filmmaker.

Filmgoers might recognize scenes in Helper, Utah, and the Bonneville Salt Flats, where Webley recalls working as a film loader on one of his first commercial shoots.

As he made his way to the cast and crew party after the Omaha premiere, Webley rode through Kamas, where he shot his first short film. “I was immediately transported,” he said. “I was like, ‘Oh, I had an actor out in that field digging with a shovel.’ ‘Oh, look at the gas station we shot at there.’” 

Webley and director of photography Paul Meyers, ASC, were given permission to use the Helper home featured in the film after knocking on the owner’s door. “He made it usable for the shoot,” Webley said. “He just bent over backward, and now he’s so tickled that the movie is in Sundance.”

Along with familiar locations, Utah audiences will see powerful performances.

Webley said Magaro gives the father new life every time he’s on screen. “He plays this father who really has to walk this tightrope act of empathy and grief and torment and dwindling mental health if you will, and this crisis of moments,” Webley said. “And he does it so eloquently.”

Wright and Solis were the ages their characters are in the script, 9 and 6, during filming. Both deliver emotional performances. “I think these kids will look back on this experience not only being proud of the movie but as one of the best five, six weeks, hopefully, of their young lives.”

Robert Machoian, known for his 2020 Sundance film The Killing of Two Lovers, wrote Omaha. While a fictional story, it was inspired by actual events. “Robert is so gifted when it comes to getting down to intrinsic humanity,” Webley said. “He doesn’t care about your social class. He strips away all those things that society has placed on you, on us, and he just gets to the core of everybody’s humanity.”

Outside of Omaha, Webley has several projects in the works. His next film will be larger in scale and, for a change, feature only adults in the principal cast.

Webley said Omaha will stay in the minds of audiences for a long time. “I just want it to be a movie that can wash over you, and you can feel our concern, our love, for fathers,” he said.

Magaro’s last words will especially resonate. “Remember that, and see what it means to you,” Webley said.

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While waiting to see director Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover at its Sundance Film Festival’s Midnight showing in Salt Lake City, some filmgoers who didn’t read much about it ahead of time wondered what they were in for: comedy, horror, horror-comedy? The short description in the festival’s program might even trigger memories of the recent teen film Lisa Frankenstein.

While definitely a horror-comedy, turns out, Dead Lover isn’t what anyone expects. As Glowicki introduced it at the screening, “It starts wild and gets progressively wilder.”

It’s like a lucid dream where the imagination runs wild and inhibitions are lost. Inspiration comes from German expressionist cinema and, most noticeably, black box theater, where so much relies on strong acting. Minimalist backgrounds, over-the-top characters, all the stuff that will gross out Mom.

While Gravedigger (played by Glowicki) stinks of putrid corpses, she dreams of finding a lover. She regularly tells the moon about her feelings of loneliness. After all both are “pale white dots surrounded by nothingness.” Gravedigger even creates a perfume she hopes will help her attract a mate, but nothing seems to work until her fowl, sickening stench draws in Lover, a young dandy attending his sister’s funeral. The two share a romance until Lover sails away to seek a fertility treatment for himself to fulfill Gravedigger’s dream of starting a family. But when it seems he’s lost at sea, can Gravedigger resurrect her lost love, or will something else come from her morbid experiment?

The music, which made an impression on the audience, came from the band U.S. Girls and old wax cylinder recordings. The story was a collaborative effort between Glowicki and her small “troupe,” and that digit was about a meter long (see film for reference).

Like Gravedigger herself, Dead Lover isn’t for everyone. But the right kind of person will love it.

The film screens again at the Egyptian Theatre in Park City on Jan. 30 and the Megaplex Redstone in Park City on Feb. 1. The film isn’t available online. Click for tickets and more information.

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Laura Casabé’s second feature is a worthy engagement with the social-sexual horror fiction of celebrated Argentine author Mariana Enriquez, whose 2016 Things We Lost in the Fire brought her her first acclaim among English-speaking readers. The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is a mashup of two of Enriquez’s fictions, “The Cart” and “Our Lady of the Quarry” from her 2006 collection The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. Benjamin Naishtat’s screenplay extrapolates a boldly specific world around the latter story’s nominal protagonist Natalia, Nati, played by Dolores Olivero, who does smoldering rage and heartbreak with great nuance in her first film role. 

Set mostly in a suburb of Buenos Aires, the film tracks the unraveling relationship between a group of young women and Diego, the one guy they all want to take their virginity, during a blistering summer at the turn of this century, when Argentina tipped into a major economic crisis. The film opens with a brutal encounter between one of Nati’s neighbors and a homeless man, whose lingering presence, in the form of a grocery cart left behind in the street, filled with unknown, probably unspeakable items, sets the film’s tone of imminent chaos, violence, and collapse. Power and water outages are rampant, money is tight, crime is pervasive, and the threat of losing everything puts immense pressure on social bonds, disrupting the everyday generosities one might otherwise extend to a neighbor or family member in need.

That’s the broader social scene. Nati’s focus is much narrower, captured visually in the film’s frequent, claustrophobic use of tight framing and shallow depth of field. Nati and her two closest girlfriends have a high school history with Diego, a history of as yet unfulfilled desire that, as one girl says, makes him “someone that’s always been ours,” someone they’re loathe to surrender to an older woman he’s met online, Silvia, Sil, who has her own apartment in the city and knows more than any of them about everything: bands, clubs, travel. If Diego is drawn to Silvia’s seemingly cosmopolitan exoticism, Nati and her uncanny, witchy squad are in no mood to surrender their crush or to offer the outsider any morsel of generosity. And yet they can’t just conjure Diego’s desire, so what power do they have to stop what seems like an inevitable hookup with Sil, a prospect that’s framed as an existential cliff? “You’re throwing your whole life away on that,” one of the other girls cautions Nati. But, in some sense, Argentina’s, and particularly Nati’s generation’s future feels at stake.

This is to say that, as in much of Enriquez’s fiction, the society crumbling around Nati is not just a backdrop but a deep well of horror and dark power. Nati’s frustrations maybe her own, but the force of her vengeance is fed and even embodied by the rage all around her. The remote, abandoned quarry that gives the film its title and where the gang goes to swim in what Sil guarantees is cleaner water than that at the public pool is one more example of rampant economic failure, haunted, allegedly, by its own specters of greed, exclusion, and cruelty. These might emerge at any time, Sil says. But who are those demons really after and who controls them?

The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is a powerful tale of rivalry and despair that toys at times, almost amusingly, at the edges of excess. Its mystery is, overall, nicely played…until the end, which, sorry to say, takes on a graphic, visual literality that I found disappointing and unnecessary when suggestion and ambiguity had otherwise been so effective. Nevertheless, it’s a pleasure to see Enriquez’s work translated to the screen this way and fans of her writing, as well as fans of psychological horror, should definitely give this one a look.

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With Rabbit Trap, Dev Patel continues his reign as the most compelling and charismatic actor working today.

One of the aspects to seeing movies at Sundance is the unknown factor. As such, when you watch a film, there’s a longer period of grace you allow the movie as it develops before it’s clear what the movie is/wants to be. Once that is clear, you’re able to navigate expectations, feelings and concepts better. This grace period can cut two ways—one, you fall more in love with a movie than you might if you knew what it was going in (the surprise of discovery hits even harder) or two, if the movie struggles to come together with any sense of direction or clarity, you’re left frustrated more so than if you knew, going in, the movie wasn’t going to work. 

As I sat through Rabbit Trap, I held on for a long time that what I was seeing would find its footing, communicate its tone and engage emotionally with the audience. Once it was clear that it wasn’t going to be able to do that, I felt that wash of frustration come over me. 

Now, that’s not to say that Rabbit Trap was bad—there’s quite a lot working for the individual pieces. The film follows a married couple (Dev Patel and Rosy McEwan) as they’ve moved to a cottage in Wales in 1976.

Darcy (Patel) captures ambient sound from nature while Daphne (McEwan) is an experimental musician/poet who has moved away from London to capture something magical for her next record. While outside, recording any audio he can find, Darcy begins to pick up eerie and haunting noises. As he follows them into the forest, he encounters a circle of white mushrooms and enters the circle. He passes out and wakes up a time later.

When he returns home, the ambient noise that he captured intoxicates both him and Daphne, and a child appears outside their home, drawn by the music. This child (played by Jade Croot, an actress in her 20s, but this isn’t an Orphan situation) doesn’t give his name, traps rabbits (hence the title of the film), and he wants to be a part of their family. His increasing insistence on being included and being present somewhat escalates as the movie progresses. However, the film struggles to establish the child as a felt threat or menace. 

The movie premiered in the Sundance Film Festival’s Midnight category—which is reserved often for horror movies, thrillers or dark comedies. It’s my favorite category because of the level of creativity, experimentation and ambition you can find there. Unfortunately, Rabbit Trap never really delivers on the scares, tension, or a mounting sense of dread. 

The main characters don’t really talk to each other, and never seem to engage or question the world around them, and, as things get more claustrophobic, the threat that they’re facing never really becomes clear. Beyond “make a good album with unique and atmospheric sound” they don’t appear to have any goals or efforts they are working toward. When a child shows up who won’t leave them be, it doesn’t disrupt much of their solitary, individual lives, in a way that causes them to take much action to reorient their efforts toward achieving their goals. 

The movie spends most of its time in what feels like the setup and initial tension—rather than escalating or complicating—until we shift wildly into a third act that, while I could follow easily, doesn’t feel congruous or satisfying with the rest of the film. 

As a metaphor for the haunting nature of trauma—especially childhood trauma—the ideas and images are very powerful. In fact, the final scene of the whole movie is so good, that you wish it were the climax to a very different, very effective drama about a couple navigating the choking, silencing pain of childhood abuse. Unfortunately, the metaphor stands next to Darcy’s story of hidden trauma and doesn’t draw it into the overall plot. 

What I was struck by and reminded of is how incredible Dev Patel is. Every scene he is in, he commands, and you can’t look away from him. His presence is never aggressive or overbearing, but his sheer watchability is undeniable. And it should come as no surprise. If you’ve ever seen him in any of his roles (notably Academy Award favorites Slumdog Millionaire or Lion), you know there is a quiet charm and intensity about his choices. The aforementioned final scene is nearly silent and yet Patel’s choices and presence and emotion on his face brought me to tears. 

The sound design in the movie is incredible—though it starts off very strong and intense and fades/is forgotten as the movie goes on. The production design and cinematography similarly are also gorgeous and well-crafted. The whole movie is a vibe. Just perhaps not a complete, functioning story. 

In talking to another reviewer after the film, they described it as what you find searching for “Millennial fairy cottage-core ambiance lo-fi video” on youtube, to play in the background while you study. And that’s not inaccurate. 

Bolstered by an incredible lead performance, a strong metaphor about trauma, captivating sound design and aesthetically pleasing design, Rabbit Trap can’t overcome its struggles to establish tone and direction, stakes or a clear narrative. 

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