After a big, banner year for Sundance with acclaimed films such as Past Lives, Passages, Fair Play and 20 Days in Mariupol all premiering, all eyes are fixed on what will emerge from this year’s edition, kicking off this week in Utah.
With the festival’s Covid-era digital element retreating further into the background and a new head honcho hoping to bring back a more independent spirit, the 2024 lineup teases some provocative on-the-ground question marks with fewer known properties and more what ifs, an excitingly rather unknowable set of films to open the new year with.
Here are some of the biggest potentials:
The Outrun
Four-time Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan might have suffered a bit of a misstep with the one-two punch of See How They Run and Foe but she’s entering 2024 with two surer things, the first of which unfurls out of competition in the premieres section. Before we see her in Steve McQueen’s wartime drama Blitz later in the year, Ronan will headline The Outrun, an adaptation of journalist turned author Amy Liptrot’s memoir, detailing her move back home to the Orkney Islands after struggling with alcoholism in London. It promises to be an intimate showcase for Ronan and a tough, unvarnished look at addiction with a jagged, flashback narrative reminiscent of Jean-Marc Vallée’s Wild that brought its star Reese Witherspoon an Oscar nomination back in 2015.
Union
The never-ending growth of Amazon’s empire has led to expansion beyond comprehension and predictably problems beyond control as workers have started to push back against a litany of unfair practices. The documentary Union pulls together the stories and journeys of those fighting against them, centering Chris Smalls, the famed organiser of the company’s first-ever union. It’s an age-old battle and directors Brett Story and Stephen Maing have gained intimate access to a modern version of the struggle, hit by Covid, as a charm offensive is employed to combat the misinformation being peddled by Amazon. Likely to be one of the festival’s most rousing films.
Love Me
Kristen Stewart might be a longtime Sundance bedfellow but her luck there – from The Runaways to Welcome to the Rileys to Camp X-Ray to Lizzie – hasn’t always been equal to her talent. She has two major plays at this year’s festival, both sounding fascinatingly different, the first of which has her starring alongside an actor who has fared slightly better there – Steven Yeun, whose trip to his first Oscar nomination started with Minari’s 2020 festival premiere. The pair star in Love Me, a post-apocalyptic romance between “a smart buoy and an orbiting satellite” spanning a billion years, a head-scratcher of a set-up that will have to be seen to be understood.
Love Lies Bleeding
Stewart’s other big movie might be a little easier to figure out on paper but that doesn’t exactly make it conventional: a gory lesbian crime thriller from the director of Saint Maud. In Love Lies Bleeding, Stewart plays a gym manager who falls for an ambitious bodybuilder, played by The Mandalorian’s Katy O’Brian, and the two become embroiled in a tragic crime plot. Given the buttons pushed in director Rose Glass’s breakout horror and with the film premiering as part of the festival’s midnight section with test screenings reportedly inspiring “visceral reactions”, expect this one to be a major talking point when it premieres this weekend.
Presence
During the pandemic, Steven Soderbergh made one of the only truly essential pandemic films – the ingenious tech-thriller Kimi – and while the less said about his follow-up the better – the strange and unnecessary Magic Mike’s Last Dance – his new film looks to be something of an exciting partner to the former. Reuniting with Kimi’s screenwriter, established Hollywood scribe David Koepp, for another one-location genre experiment, Presence will be a one-of-a-kind haunted house movie from the perspective of the ghost. “Everything is revealed through the glimpses of this family that this presence sees,” Soderbergh told Variety last week. “And the whole ghost genre element is a Trojan horse to show a group of people in danger of falling apart.”
Girls State
Arguably the biggest documentary of this year’s Sundance acts as a follow-up to the biggest documentary of 2020’s festival, conversation-demanding prize-winner Boys State, picked up for a sizable $12m by Apple and A24. The sequel Girls State answers one of the film’s most pressing questions – what about the girls – and delivers another vital snapshot of American youth in the 21st century as high-schoolers descend upon Missouri’s annual representative government program, allowing participants the opportunity to live out their political ambitions. Taking place as the US prepared to rollback rights to abortion, it’s set to be timely, if potentially bleak, viewing.
I Saw the TV Glow
Back at 2021’s virtual Sundance, first-time film-maker Jane Schoenbrun broke out with creepy internet-based horror We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, a film perhaps better suited for an online premiere than the majority of that year’s lineup. Their follow-up, I Saw the TV Glow, is another film interested with how we consume media, this time focusing on two friends who become obsessed with a mysterious late-night TV show that starts to affect their grasp on what’s real and what’s not. It stars Justice Smith (doing double duty at the festival with this and the much-anticipated satire The American Society of Magical Negroes) and should mark one of the more original genre offerings of the year.
Power
Director Yance Ford is returning to Sundance after breaking out big with Strong Island back in 2017, going onto receive a best documentary nomination at the Oscars. That film was a tough personal project about the murder of his brother, a young Black man at the hands of a white mechanic who got away with it, and while his follow-up is on a far grander scale, it’s likely to cover similar issues. Power is said to be “a sweeping chronicle” of policing in the US and how markers such as race and class have affected how it touches upon the lives of Americans then and now.
Freaky Tales
Making one of the more impressive Sundance debuts of the 2000s with the powerful Ryan Gosling-led teacher-student drama Half Nelson, the directing duo of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have had a patchy career ever since, never quite scaling those heights, most recently stumbling with the baffling and thankless decision to direct Captain Marvel back in 2019. But their latest at least offers signs of life, freed from franchise shackles, the curiously titled Freaky Tales, an anthology film set in 80s California. There will be four interconnected stories, bringing in supernatural elements, hip-hop, horror, kung fu and a climax that apparently “leaves no appendage unsevered”. Expect the unexpected with a cast including Pedro Pascal, Ben Mendelsohn, the late Angus Cloud and, making her acting debut, Normani.
My Old Ass
Before Aubrey Plaza showed a wider HBO audience that she could handle both light and dark in the second season of The White Lotus, she found a smaller captive audience at Sundance, delivering knockout turns in Ingrid Goes West, Black Bear and Emily the Criminal. Her latest, high-concept comedy My Old Ass, sees her star as the older version of a teen who is preparing to leave for college and thanks to a mushroom trip, the two get to meet. Produced by Margot Robbie, who last brought Promising Young Woman to Sundance in 2020, expect it to be one of the more in-demand market titles of the festival.
