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Sundance 2025: all the latest movie reviews and updates from the festival

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Sundance 2025: all the latest movie reviews and updates from the festival

A new year means a new Sundance Film Festival, and a fresh crop of promising original features that could go on to become awards season darlings in a few months. It might be hard to top last year’s festival where Dìdi, A Different Man, and I Saw the TV Glow all made strong showings. But with films like Atropia, Bubble & Squeak, and Didn’t Die on the roster, this year’s Sundance might just do the trick.

Naturally, The Verge is going to be taking in as much of Sundance as we can and posting bite-sized reviews of everything we see. We’ll also be posting longer reviews and sharing trailers, and you can follow along here to keep up with all of the news out of the festival.

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Movie Reviews

The Monkey Has Good Kills, But No Soul

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The Monkey Has Good Kills, But No Soul

In adapting a Stephen King short story, director-writer Osgood Perkins clearly delights in crafting explosive, gory kills meant to spark a laugh more than terrify. Over the course of the film’s hour and 38 minutes, Perkins’s thinly drawn characters are set aflame, their heads are turned to vague viscera by bowling balls or made jelly by wild trampling horses, there is splatter from unforeseen shotgun wounds and unspooled intestines pulled taught by surprise harpoons to the gut. Each event is a freak accident that harkens to Final Destination-level hijinks but aims for more black comedy. It’s the kind of movie primed for midnight screenings. It is less intrigued with the moral portent of its characters’ dilemmas than it is interested in snickering at their fate, giving the film a vaguely nihilistic air. Of course, all machinations are born of a cursed monkey toy that proves impossible to get rid of, whether hacked to pieces or thrown down a well. The harsh, circus twang of the music that plays as it bangs gravely on a drum, teeth bared in a grimace below its depthless eyes, rattles more in the way of annoyance than fear.

Even with its inventive kills and tight runtime, I found myself jotting down notes to myself as I watched: Can this movie end? I just don’t care. The problem is that The Monkey has a hole at its center. It isn’t comedic enough to distract from the fact that the film traffics in rote archetypes, and it doesn’t quite pluck the heartstrings of its audience over the ragged inheritance from fathers to their sons either. The Monkey begins its jaundiced tale on the adolescence of twin brothers, Hal and Bill (Christian Convery), who are a study in contrasts. Hal, the true protagonist, is a wilting flower — easily bruised and endlessly bullied, especially by Bill. Bill mistakes smarm for charm, curses wildly, and treats Hal like a punching bag, seemingly convinced the difference in their birth order is marked by years not minutes. Their mother, Lois (Tatiana Maslany), does her best taking care of them, even as she reels from the unexplained disappearance of her pilot husband Petey (played by Adam Scott, who appears once in the memorable opening scene). Their father couldn’t get rid of the monkey, and so too are the sons beleaguered by it when they find it in a prim, robin’s egg blue hatbox in his room. Life quickly unravels from there as strange deaths in their small town pile up. The boys eventually pack up, move to Maine with their Aunt Ida (Sara Levy) and Uncle Chip (Perkins in dirtbag uncle mode and having fun with it), and throw the monkey down the aforementioned well.

Twenty-five years and a few more deaths later, the monkey seems dormant. Bill and Hal have become men, but haven’t quite grown up. They’re now played by Theo James, whose good looks could make-up for both twins’ deficient personalities. Bill’s smarm has calcified into a kind of mad obsession; Hal is a starkly lonely and cowardly man. Carrying along the thread of inheritance, Hal is a father to teenager Petey (Colin O’Brien), whom he contacts only once a year for fear that associating with him places a target on anyone’s back — the monkey pointing dead center. Hal’s lack of involvement has inspired his ex-wife’s new partner, played by a preening Elijah Wood in the film’s most successful comedic scene, to outright adopt Petey, potentially severing Hal’s pretense of care if it goes through. Familial strife is the film’s backbone, but what a poor and broken backbone it is.

Horror films primed on increasingly gory demises have always trafficked in archetypes. The dumb blonde. The head cheerleader. The gruff jock. These can operate as a crucial shorthand within the world of the film, but for the deaths to really hit with a gut-punch force, you have to feel something for the people — whether it’s hope that a beloved character survives or eagerness to witness a grating character perish. The Monkey has none of that pull. These aren’t characters or even archetypes but the bare sketches of human beings. No one in the film even seems that ruffled from the losses they endure, save perhaps for the brothers. But their storyline mostly brings to mind the fact that Maslany is too good an actor to be playing roles like this.

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The Monkey continues Perkins’ brand of glossy, inert horror with the kind of cinematography and blocking that calls the wrong kind of attention to itself. Longlegs is more offensive in that regard because it took itself so damn seriously despite exploring nothing of merit with any panache. It was a stellar marketing campaign in search of a better film. But with this movie, Perkins tries to infuse a comedic edge to his work that indeed offers some manner of levity — whether it’s an inexperienced priest bumbling through a somber sermon or the grim breakdown of a realtor fluttering through a description of all the recent death in town. If anything, I wanted that humor to be punchier, more brutal. Instead, there are just more gruesome deaths, growing exceedingly ridiculous as the story continues. But a horror film can’t survive on kills alone, and the narrative of The Monkey — for all the movie’s craft and pedigree — is the worst thing a horror saga can be: boring.

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‘Mother’s Baby’ Review: Marie Leuenberger Is a Powerhouse in a Gripping Maternity Drama That Entertains Even as It Goes Off the Rails

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‘Mother’s Baby’ Review: Marie Leuenberger Is a Powerhouse in a Gripping Maternity Drama That Entertains Even as It Goes Off the Rails

What’s with all the maternity angst lately? First came Nightbitch, then If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and now — in keeping with the rule that three makes it a trend — please welcome Mother’s Baby. Led by a fiercely compelling performance from Marie Leuenberger, Johanna Moder’s psychological thriller ticks along with exceptional confidence while it maintains ambiguity as to whether post-partum depression is feeding Julia’s paranoia or there really is something unsettling about her infant son, making her suspect a switcheroo at the private fertility clinic where she gave birth. It’s when the script starts providing answers that things get shaky.

Part of the issue is that the movie often seems to be itching to make a decisive turn into horror but keeps holding back. Moder and co-writer Arne Kohlweyer commit to that shift so late in the action that it all becomes a bit, well, silly. The bizarro outcome might also have packed greater shock value if it hadn’t been so plainly telegraphed at various points. That said, Mother’s Baby is juicy, disturbing and slashed with dark humor. It had me gripped for the duration, even at its loopiest.

Mother’s Baby

The Bottom Line

Less creepy than Rosemary’s, but just a fraction.

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Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)
Cast: Marie Leuenberger, Hans Löw, Claes Bang, Julia Franz Richter
Director: Johanna Moder
Screenwriters: Johanna Moder, Arne Kohlweyer

1 hour 47 minutes

Alongside Leuenberger’s tightly wound turn as accomplished classical orchestra conductor Julia — think Lydia Tár with a baby bump — the movie makes wonderful use of Claes Bang as Dr. Vilfort, head of the swanky but secretive Lumen Vitae clinic.

When the medic greets Julia and her husband Georg (Hans Löw), he’s all smooth reassurances, explaining that the facility uses all the latest research and has the highest success rate. He’s also convinced that just one treatment will make Julia pregnant, even though the couple has clearly tried many other options before shelling out the big bucks for Lumen Vitae.

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With subtle intonations and the tiniest flickers of his facial expressions, Bang lets us know that Dr. Vilfort isn’t quite the nurturing miracle-worker he appears to be with his soft-spoken manner and crisp white lab coat. Creepy pets in movies are generally a red flag, and the doc has an office aquarium with an axolotl, a cannibalistic Mexican salamander with the ability to regenerate lost limbs. In terms of cuteness, it’s the hairless cat of the amphibian world, and if you’re thinking stem cells, you could be getting warm.

Just as predicted, Julia gets pregnant on the first try and all goes smoothly through the gestation period. Not so much when she goes into labor. In one of the most intense childbirth scenes in recent memory — squeamish mothers should approach with caution — Julia becomes increasingly panicked as the nurses keep multiplying, hurriedly implementing changes to the procedure. Robert Oberrainer’s camera slowly circles the delivery table throughout, adding to the sense that something is going very wrong.

When the baby boy does finally appear, he doesn’t make a sound and is whisked out of the room with the utmost urgency by Dr. Vilfort and midwife Gerlinde (Julia Franz Richter), before Julia even gets to see or hold him. The badly shaken new parents are told nothing for what seems like hours, until Vilfort appears to tell them the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck, and due to an oxygen deficiency, the infant was taken to the general hospital’s neonatal ward. He assures them everything will be OK.

But when Vilfort returns the following day with their child, Julia remains distressed, eyeing the baby suspiciously as her agitation escalates into a full-blown anxiety attack. She has trouble breast-feeding at first, which prompts Gerlinde to advise switching to formula, going against the usual breast-is-best counsel of midwives. The fact that Julia keeps referring to the baby as “it” seems a good indication that maternal bonding won’t happen overnight.

When Julia and Georg get their son home, Moder begins to have some insidious fun with the scenario. Julia is not ready to commit to a name, so they give their son the “working title” Adrian, which horror connoisseurs will recall is the name given to the Mia Farrow character’s offspring in a certain Polanski film.

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This Adrian might not be Antichrist material, but he doesn’t seem normal either, sleeping through maximum-volume noise, staring blankly ahead with eyes that seem to register nothing, and almost never crying, even when Julia gets caught up in her preparation for a Schubert concert and forgets to feed him for a whole day.

Leuenberger — who looks at times uncannily like Kathryn Hahn — is superb in these fraught scenes, leaning into unhinged behavior without ever making us question Julia’s rationality. There’s something shockingly funny about a mother giving a sudden full-fist squeeze to a squeaky toy right next to a baby’s ear just to get a reaction.

When she starts sawing vigorously away on a violin or pumping the stereo volume to thunderous levels on Sturm und Drang classical pieces, Georg begins to doubt her stability. “You wanted a child,” he shouts at her. “Yes, but not this one,” she replies. The script also touches on the identity loss that can accompany motherhood by having Julia fly into a rage after changes are made to the orchestra season program without consulting her.

Julia’s apprehension, which Leuenberger steadily builds to a cymbal-clash crescendo, isn’t helped by unsolicited visits from Gerlinde, who seems much more attached to Adrian than his mother. When the midwife cautions Julia that it’s unsafe to leave the baby unattended on a changing table, you can bet there’s going to an alarming fall. Gerlinde brings a gift from the doctor of a fishtank with an axolotl, which irks Julia but clearly seems adorable enough to Georg to make him pick up a companion for it. Bad idea.

As friction between Julia and Georg reaches a peak, he leaves with the baby to stay with his mother so that his wife can rest and get back to normal. But Julia’s fight to uncover the truth just becomes more and more desperate once she starts hearing vague reports of other mothers’ negative experiences at Lumen Vitae. Not to mention being told at the neonatal ward that there’s no record of her child’s birth.

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In one of the most chilling scenes, Julia is taken to see Dr. Vilfort after being stopped from entering the clinic’s medical labs. He keeps a calm smile on his face and a measured tone of voice as he talks her through the potential custody issues and the ruin of her career that would likely result from an insanity diagnosis.

To Moder and Kohlweyer’s credit, there are valid points being made here about the frequent dismissal of women’s fears as mental health problems. But the progression from psychodrama to grotesque motherhood nightmare is too abrupt to be entirely convincing, even if it delivers a generous serve of lurid pleasures. Whether Julia’s freakish discoveries are real or in her mind, the movie could have benefited from being let off the leash earlier.

Still, even if it sits somewhat awkwardly between serious drama and horror, there’s plenty to enjoy here, from the terrific performances to the fiery use of music to Oberrainer’s razor-sharp widescreen images, which turn murkier and more overtly sinister in the purple-tinged final act.

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Review | What Does that Nature Say to You: Hong Sang-soo finds humour in domesticity

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Review | What Does that Nature Say to You: Hong Sang-soo finds humour in domesticity

4/5 stars

Veteran Korean director Hong Sang-soo specialises in delicate character studies, but rarely has he found such a warm ray of humour as he does in his latest film, What Does That Nature Say to You.

Premiering in competition at the Berlin International Film festival – a feat Hong seems to manage almost every year without fail – this new work is an incisive domestic comedy-drama that feels like it has the potential to break out of the festival circuit.

The story begins as a couple arrive by car from Seoul. Dong-hwa (Ha Seong-guk), a poet in his thirties, has driven his girlfriend, Jun-hee (Kang So-yi), to her parents’ home in Yeoju.

Introduced to her father, Or-yeong (Hong regular Kwon Hae-hyo), he is convinced to spend the day at the family homestead. Soon enough, he is drinking makgeolli with Jun-hee’s father, and promising that he wants to love her.

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Dong-hwa, who earns money shooting wedding videos, is also principled, and refuses financial help from his parents.

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