Sundance 2025 shows off its wild and predictable sides with genre gambles and straightforward indies

Our third Sundance 2025 dispatch ranges from the familiar dramedy of Love, Brooklyn to the oddball non-doc Zodiac Killer Project.

By Jacob Oller | January 29, 2025 | 1:00pm

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Sundance 2025 shows off its wild and predictable sides with genre gambles and straightforward indies

The two opposing poles of the Sundance Film Festival are always the overly familiar and the cloyingly offbeat. Too many films fall at the extremes of either side, yet those in the middle are easily written off as “Sundance films” that cram buzzwords together into their own uniquely twee packaging. But even these movies have something to offer as a filmgoer, if only to understand the undercurrent of modern indie (or indie-adjacent, at least) filmmaking. This is the shape of a movie that sells, and this is how up-and-coming directors put their own stamp on it. Sundance 2025 has its own selections that fall into these categories—the predictable and the wacky—with a few films on each end of the spectrum still managing to make their mark.

But first, there’s Love, Brooklyn (C), a well-acted but slight “guy needs to grow up” romance between André Holland’s Roger, his ex (Nicole Beharie), and his new flame (DeWanda Wise). Though helmed by accomplished TV director Rachael Holder in her feature debut, the film’s light drama and breezy New York cinematography zips by like Roger on his bike, leaving little impression after the credits roll.

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Though the city and its apartments look nice in a confined way—think High Maintenance or Girls—there’s not a lot of sexual chemistry or comic zing pulling Roger along his arc. This life is realistic, quiet, and more than a little dull. Part of this is due to Roger having very little character of his own, while the more fleshed-out women split screentime. Beharie and Wise are excellent at carving out small details of a dynamic that’s more complex that it seems on the surface, but in a larger narrative sense, everyone’s making the most out of a thin script. Drilling down into the details which, among other too-cute subplots, gives Roger a half-hearted freelance writing assignment about his changing city (and a painful piece of ending voiceover reading from this essay), does the film no favors. It ends up like every other three-person romantic dramedy ends up, but at least Love, Brooklyn boasts competent players going through its motions.

More intriguing are two documentaries that find unexpected power in their newsy subject matter. Heightened Scrutiny (B) makes a well-argued case, but not exactly against the topic that ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio is fighting in the Supreme Court. As Strangio prepares to be the first trans lawyer to argue in front of the land’s highest court in United States v. Skrmetti, which assesses the legality of bans on gender-affirming healthcare for trans minors, Sam Feder’s intimate film spreads out its purview to better understand how the nation took a hard turn against trans people.

With plenty of moving testimonials and charming talking heads, Heightened Scrutiny draws damning lines between the “just asking questions” opinion pieces published in respected mainstream media publications like The Atlantic and the New York Times and the legal arguments made in our judicial system. The damaging rhetoric in these outlets is directly and immediately echoed by lawyers, judges, and “experts” brought into court—and because of how clicky transphobic stories have historically been, this vicious cycle has recently ramped up. Add in the targeted bigotry of the increasingly radical right, and the legal, cultural, and medical fight for acceptance now waged by trans folks has gotten all the tougher as public awareness has grown. Strangio, charming and dedicated in equal measure, carries us through the rest of the film, even as it loses steam after setting its stage so searingly.

Middletown (B) actually ramps up considerably after establishing its “high school A/V club journalists uncover a Dark Waters situation” premise. Sundance regulars Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine (Girls State, Boys State) take on this extremely ‘90s investigation into an environment-poisoning dumping scandal using a massive backlog of archival footage (teacher Fred Isseks’ kids recorded everything they did, even making an hour-long film called Garbage, Gangsters And Greed) and modern-day interviews.

As endearing as these high schoolers are, with their gelled hair and big jeans and sailor’s mouths and New Yawka accents, the case is even more compelling. As the problem they’ve encountered just gets bigger and bigger, involving local government officials and trash companies and (yep) the mob, their dogged investigation is inspirational. Even if their actions were raging against a machine too powerful to be moved (and even if Middletown gets a little bogged down in all the threads of the scandal), the pride felt by those who returned for an interview is deeply affecting. A compelling piece of straightforward true-crime that makes the most of its throwback form.

A far less straightforward doc that explicitly makes its form part of its subject matter is Zodiac Killer Project (C), which is a self-reflexive exercise in turning lemons into lemonade. Filmmaker Charlie Shackleton almost made a true-crime Zodiac Killer film perfect for half-aware consumption on your streamer of choice. But that film fell through at the last minute, his main source revoking the book rights and leaving Shackleton high and dry. So, instead, he made a film about what that film would’ve been—as cynical about the subgenre and snide about its standard-issue aesthetic as one would expect from someone recently burned by that world.

Zodiac Killer Project isn’t getting Netflix money. It’s no Tiger King or Don’t F**k With Cats. It’s a meta project, critiquing the template of this easy-to-digest fad through Shackleton’s constant narration over the anonymous B-roll and stock footage that make up these kinds of docs. For those who haven’t really thought about the filmmaking behind the glut of true-crime clogging up the streamer carousels, there are some revelatory moments of media criticism in here. But for those more aware of how the sausage is made, it’s simply a light and dry bit of jabbing at a dominant kind of media. If you’re already at your true-crime limit, though, this experimental not-making-of can be more demoralizing than anything else.

Much sillier and much more successful is the delightfully odd documentary Endless Cookie (B). It’s the first time I’ve ever been able to recommend a nonfiction film about Indigenous people in Canada to those looking to get stoned on their couch and watch some Adult Swim animation. A zany, rambling, bustling portrait of a big family’s cramped, loving, chuckling life in icy Shamattawa, Endless Cookie turns the bond between its filmmaker brothers—white Seth Scriver and his Indigenous brother Pete—into a chaotic storytelling session.

Leaping from the screen in bright baroque colors, the film is somewhere between Superjail! and Richard Scarry, with a community’s smallest moments in constant motion (and probably making a fart sound effect for good measure). It’s all a little overwhelming, but in an enjoyably maximalist way that fills the background with middle fingers to the man—be they the cops, the government, or the very financiers of the film you’re in the middle of watching. As tales about free pizza, animal traps, chicken-stealing, and blacked-out nights drinking unfurl, Endless Cookie will keep you couchlocked, if only to find out what hallucinatory turn it’ll take next.

Another of Sundance 2025’s kookier offerings is the new film from Strawberry Mansion’s Albert Birney: OBEX (B-). Where that former film was a colorful analog imagining of a corporatized future where dreams are recorded and taxed by the government, OBEX is a black-and-white film entrenched firmly in the 1980s.

There, Conor (Birney), a shut-in ASCII artist with a loving pooch and a home devoted to TV screens and computer monitors, muddles through a slight existence on the fringes of society. The outside is scary, unknown—the drone of locusts and the cheery voice of his unseen grocery delivery person remind us that it’s better inside, where you have some control over what you see and hear. Especially if you have walls and walls of VHS tapes, as Conor does, and a karaoke machine that allows you to sing your own synthy Gary Numan lullaby. But when Conor lets in something beyond his control, a cutting-edge video game that promises to literally put him in the game, his unconscious fears manifest digitally.

With a title that alludes to both a communication protocol and the point where our brainstem connects to the spinal cord, OBEX is all about shifting states and the things found in translation. Though it heavily name-checks A Nightmare On Elm Street, OBEX also—like Strawberry Mansion—owes a debt to The Wizard Of Oz. Transplanting that film’s dreamy “and you were there!” psychology to the fantasy world of an old-school RPG, OBEX eventually abandons its effective small-scale worldbuilding in favor of a more ambitious, rambling adventure.

Conor needs to rescue his little dog, which means traversing the game world (alongside a TV-headed companion) and beating the boss. It doesn’t all add up, especially as the narrative makes Conor’s hazy past unmistakably clear, but the film’s still endearingly contained and effectively put together. The horrors when the physical and computational crash into one another are as affecting and disconcerting as Freddy’s bloody hauntings, while its offbeat tech obsession makes Conor’s quiet life poignantly modern. It’s awkward and methodical, but it’s easy to see enough of yourself there that you might get sucked in.

Awkward and methodical and almost entirely unpleasant is Serious People (D), an inspired-by-life film about a music video director who—in order to free up some time so he can better support his pregnant partner—hires a guy who looks kinda like him to be his stand-in. The premise dreamed up by writer-directors Ben Mullinkosson and Pasqual Gutierrez (who also stars as a version of himself) has plenty of potential to deflate the egos of self-important “creatives” and stick it to a racist business that sees non-white people as essentially interchangeable, all while dabbling in the deep end of doppelgänger cinema. But that premise is about all they have—their feature is afflicted with short film disease, where a scant few minutes of substance are dragged kicking and screaming to a full runtime.

The fallout from the film’s central bad idea is obvious—of course hiring some guy off the street to represent you professionally and personally would backfire—so all that’s left is to see how bad it gets, and if it ever manages to be funny. But Serious People’s industry-aimed cringe comedy is either entirely facile or buried in the cast’s mumbly, stumbly delivery. Considering Serious People’s anemic aesthetic, too-loose directorial hand, and single gag that it abuses for 84 minutes, even the most insufferable L.A. residents should stick to YouTube supercuts of Saturday Night Live’s “The Californians” sketches.

Ranging wildly between insufferable and successful, Rains Over Babel (B-) takes you down into a Colombian punk-rock version of the underworld—think Grim Fandango by way of Romeo + Juliet but without a lick of narrative consistency. Writer-director Gala del Sol’s film is operating solely on vibes, relentlessly recounting random bits of Christian and Greek mythology all dressed up in garish Burning Man chic.

As the denizens of its purgatorial nightlife scene work for or against the Grim Reaper (Saray Rebolledo), search for lost souls, or secretly rehearse for their upcoming drag performance, Rains Over Babel flits between storylines with dilated pupils and a feather boa. Along the way, a talking gecko gets a POV scene, the proprietor of Hell’s sex club offers up a delightfully hammy performance, and the afterlife’s best salsa band leaves it all on the dance floor. Would I be less forgiving of its ridiculous plot and ponderous dialogue if it was in English? Probably! But aside from that, its style speaks for itself; Gala del Sol shoots the colorful, queer, costumed-to-kill film with DIY flair. Keep an eye on her to direct the hell out of an episode of the next big mind-bendingly flashy streamer series.