A Sundance Film Festival Recap Part 2

Don’t Sleep On the Midnight Section of the Famed Festival

Ah, Midnight movies. That gonzo portion of film festival programming where the curators of the fest can let their freak flags fly. It can also be the toughest portion of a film festival for critics to judge. It’s your fifth or sixth film of the day. You’ve eaten your meals out of vending machines, and a serious case of fatigue-induced “Festival Brain” is setting in. Even through such a brain fog, you can still recognize a solid genre film or a rollicking good time.

The martial arts action-comedy Polite Society rocked the Sundance Midnight section and emerged the clear winner among the late-night crowd, but it was far from the only Midnight movie worth checking out. Here are a few films with creepy vibes to keep on your radar as they roll out later this year:

Talk to Me: This nifty teen horror film from Australia centers on a group of high school kids in possession of the embalmed hand of a deceased medium. When you grasp it and say “Talk to me”, spirits of the dead will appear to you. If you are brave (or foolish) enough, you can take things a step further and let the spirit enter your body. The “possession” lasts until you let go of the embalmed hand.

It’s an updated version of the old “ kids playing with a Ouija board” films, but it’s the modern twist on the genre that makes it work so well. As the kids poke fun at conjuring the dead, they’re shooting TikTok and YouTube videos, collecting “likes” and becoming social media mini-stars. The crowd of onlookers all think that the participant is hamming it up for the camera, but the audience point of view reveals that the talisman works, and we get to see the frightening spirits the kids are unwittingly tangling with.

Of course, there are rules to be abided by. Don’t allow the spirit to possess the participant for more than ninety seconds or the bond may be difficult to break. So, you know what comes next. But that’s fine. Talk to Me delivers its share of jump scares and creepy atmosphere. The directors (Danny and Michael Philippou) are popular producers of YouTube videos with over 1.5 billion views to their careers. So they know the online culture in which they’ve set their film, and it gives Talk to Me a strong sense of realism to balance the supernatural goings on.

The film rockets along at a lean 95 minutes, avoiding the repetition and lulls that often plague a thriller that relies for too long on a clever premise. This film doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. The spirits of the dead however? Talk to Me is the perfect embodiment (or maybe disembodiment) of what horror fans want from a Midnight movie.

Run Rabbit Run: For every bit that the horror in Talk to Me is “external”, Run Rabbit Run is driven by the internal, fueling its nightmare vision with dread and anxiety. The film has drawn comparisons to The Babadook, but in reality it’s a southern Gothic by way of Southern Australia and not a “creature hiding in your closet” film. The only monster in Run Rabbit Run is the looming specter of mental illness.

Sarah Snook (from HBO’s Succession) plays Sarah, a fertility doctor whose own daughter, Mia, is exhibiting odd behavior. One day Mia pronounces that she’s not Mia, she’s Alice, and the color drains from Sarah’s face. Who is Alice? How does Mia know about her? Surely, Alice isn’t somehow possessing Mia? The film unfolds in the present and in flashbacks of Sarah’s childhood where we learn who Alice is and what happened to her when Sarah was a child. As with all good southern Gothics, Run Rabbit Run inexorably leads to Sarah’s abandoned childhood home and the secrets that lie within its crumbling walls.

Run Rabbit Run is the feature directing debut for Daina Reid, a veteran behind the camera in the world of television (Shining Girls, The Handmaid’s Tale). She expertly doles out the narrative to squeeze the utmost tension out of her premise. The story revolves around a common theme for horror films: Is this situation the product of mental illness or something supernatural?

Beneath its surface, Run Rabbit Run also examines the nature of parenthood. It’s no coincidence that Sarah is a fertility doctor. She helps people who want nothing more than to have a child while she grapples with the strange young girl her daughter is becoming. Parents are commonly worried about the health and safety of their children. Run Rabbit Run asks what if you were afraid of your child? The film manages to be both chilling and entertaining. The final scene sticks with you long after the credits roll.

Birth/Rebirth: This film (which is headed to the Shudder streaming service later this year) is the latest variation on the Frankenstein myth. The classic tale has a mad scientist creating a “person” by reanimating parts from corpses. Needless to say, the result is less person and more monster.

The modern spin on this famous trope tends to be: How far would you go to save the person you love? Or more accurately, would you accept a lesser version of that person, mentally or physically, if it meant you didn’t have to say goodbye? Larry Fessenden’s recent film, Depraved (2019), would be a great recent example.

In Birth/Rebirth, Celie is a maternity nurse whose life revolves around her six-year-old daughter, Lila. Rose is a pathologist in the hospital morgue who prefers learning from the dead to socializing with the living. When Lila is stricken with a sudden deadly illness, Rose offers Celie a “treatment” she’s been perfecting. By introducing pre-natal blood and tissue into the corpses in her morgue, she can reanimate the dead. Did I mention that Celie is a maternity nurse?

The two lead performances ground the film which might otherwise tip over into ridiculousness. Judy Reyes (Carla from the sitcom Scrubs) creates a portrait of a mother shattered by grief who gives in to the temptation to see her child “one last time”. Marin Ireland (who also appears in the 2023 Sundance film Eileen) plays Rose as someone who views life as a scientific experiment and an academic learning experience. She lacks emotional intelligence which renders her actions less sinister and more clinical. The odd friendship that forms between the two women is the richest part of the film.

As with most Frankenstein riffs, Birth/Rebirth explores a Monkey’s Paw theme: be careful what you wish for. The two women find themselves going to more and more desperate lengths to carry out their (ghoulish?) mission. By the end of the film, you’ll wonder who the real monsters in this story are. And that’s the point.