Sundance 2025: BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, Atropia
After the unscheduled drama of BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions’ abrupt removal from Sundance’s lineup, financier Participant Media’s attorney’s open letter accusing public director Kahlil Joseph of creating a secret cut as justification for said removal and the feature’s reinstatement in the lineup thanks to a new buyer, the film finally screened with the now-very-known context that somewhere in there is an extra minute not in the Participant-cleared cut. I can’t imagine where; this sprawling 113-minute essay film is all tangents and free association, to the point where it seems like you could subtract or add an infinite amount of material and have it come out the same. Taking his cue from the W.E.B. Du Bois-inspired, Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah-completed Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience, Joseph claims the entirety of Black experience as his remit, stitching together a gargantuan amount of archival sources with a near-continuous soundtrack that leans electronic (Flying Lotus, Robert Hood), while Leviathan, The Green Ray and Garrett Bradley’s Time are among the many works put into a blender.
I’d estimate the archival:original footage ratio at about 70/30; totally original elements include on-screen text telling snippets of Joseph’s personal history, alongside something like scenes from an imaginary Du Bois biopic. In addition to the cinematic archival, there’s a plenitude of internet meme-y ephemera and a conversation sourced from YouTube between (one of the film’s many credited writers) Saidya Hartman and the currently inescapable Fred Moten—it’s a lot of movie! These juxtapositions take their cue from a clip of the late curator Okwui Enwezor describing exhibitions as “a kind of thinking machine,” though the idea for how BLKNWS works hews closer to its opening credits shot of a woman in the backside of a cab asking the driver to turn up the radio—this is a “feel it, don’t fight it” mixtape rather than rigorous ideological program. I can see how e.g. the inclusion of Leviathan and The Green Ray can connect to imagery of the transatlantic passage, but it’s also basically a vibe, taking something the filmmaker likes for a benevolent détournement. Between all the name-the-clip moments and the very cool soundtrack (the end credits play over a graphic of a vinyl record turning), I had a decent time watching BLKNWS, which I’ll give the benefit of the intellectual doubt. While the sprawl increasingly lags, this is nonetheless much closer to my idea of “a real movie” than much of what’s on tap here, and I’m glad that it finally made it in.
Laura Casabé’s The Virgin of the Quarry Lake was on my Sundance to-do list because the script’s by Benjamín Naishtat, a bright Argentinian director whose most recent films, Rojo and Puan, find increasingly crowd-pleasing ways to approach the country’s past and present politics while maintaining the oddball perspective of his more oblique earlier features. Rojo took place during Argentina’s Dirty Wars; the author of Virgin’s source short stories, Mariana Enriquez, was a journalist covering those events, and it’s been regularly suggested that her gothic-ish short stories draw upon that background for metaphorical import. Naishtat’s script synthesizes the title story and “Juancho” from Enriquez’s 2017 collection The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, preserving their set-ups and endings while making a number of meaningful additions. Those stories have different protagonists; here, the throughline of both is teenage Natalia (Dolores Oliveiro), who has a terminal crush on older Diego (Agustín Sosa). In Enriquez’s source short story, a Virgin Suicides-esque first-person-plural teenage girl hivemind narrates their collective frustrated crush on the boy, and how they come to despise both him and Silvia (Fernanda Echeverría), the Cool Girl who nabs him. Naishtat streamlines motivations a bit by having Natalia and Diego date before he’s stolen away by the latter; in an amusing inversion of the “girls love guys in bands” trope, here it seems that Diego is in part won over by Silvia because she knows guys in bands.
Enriquez’s stories are set in the present day, but Naishtat adds to his ongoing portrait of Argentina at historical stress inflection points by pushing the period back to 2001, allowing for some AIM chat log exchanges in grungy internet cafes. These early sections are generally a nicely sweaty portrait of analog-era teen boredom, with youths sitting around and chain-smoking as they listen to their favorite CDs. Naishtat also adds a couple of gruesome/goofy moments of gore, including a grody hit-and-run reminiscent of The Devil’s Rejects, before rendering Enriquez’s ending (roughly in a Carrie-lite vein) as written. The resulting film sped fairly through its 97 minutes, which is weirdly low-key and definitely destined to disappoint genre-hounds, but which I found kind of fun.
By far my most confusing film of the festival, Atropia stars Alia Shawkat as Fayruz, an actress at one of the 200 mock combat facilities across the US. It’s 2006, and “W. wants warm bodies,” as one soldier says off-camera. In a period-perfect of evocation of dreadful War on Terror movies from the time, Atropia opens with a brown-and-grey dusty village, off-screen ululating, nervous Americans with guns increasingly screaming at inscrutable locals as music rises, etc. The joke, here and throughout, is that all this would-be combat training is taking place in a fairly mundane workplace, whose contract gig workers all have other things on their mind; e.g., Shawkat wants to use her “performances” to break out as an actual actor. The comedy is supposed to arise from such incongruous contrasts (banality amidst madness etc.), but the fact that I found it not funny is almost irrelevant, even to me: I don’t vibe with so much contemporary comedy that that’s not particularly notable.
But I just don’t get whatever this is supposed to be. The film grew from writer-director Hailey Gates’s dissatisfaction with the War on Terror movies of her (and my) teen/college years, of which every single narrative I saw was uniformly terrible. Gates sporadically invokes real combat with footage from period documentary Gunner Palace, but the emphasis throughout is generally on the jokes. I’m not sure that I’ll ever be able to laugh at George W. Bush’s portrait (I’m still mad!), and I really don’t get what this film does by inserting itself retroactively into the historical discourse. Atropia’s imagined audience seems to be liberal audience members who unreservedly understand the folly of the whole enterprise now, in a way that wasn’t conventional wisdom 20 years ago, then to mine that for terrain for laughs without guilt; I don’t know that America’s current standing in the geopolitical scheme of things yet allows for that much self-congratulation. The only thing that truly made me laugh was Channing Tatum’s cameo as a typically all-in lunkhead actor visiting the facility, squatting down to the ground, picking up the earth and grunting with satisfaction, “Yeah, it’s real dirt.” There are a few anachronistic jokes (one about “retraumatisation”) and an oddly libertarian-comment-board emphasis on the presumed liberal insanity of ecological conservation laws via a recurring bit about how these about-to-enter-fatal-combat troops have to drop everything for the nanny-state preservation of an endangered turtle, but most of the gags are basically sitcom-tier.
The movie is definitely not made by xenophobes or reactionaries. It’s capably blocked and shot, certainly not leaning into the conventional wisdom that comedies should be brightly lit visual non-entities, and its default POV, as externalized in its cast and expressed in its jokes, is inclusive and in favor of cultural specificity; I guess I’m just not ready for Donald Rumsfeld jokes. At the end of the film, title cards tell us the facility is now being used as a Ukrainian staging ground; I wish I’d seen that movie, which could surely teach me something I don’t know about the present, as opposed to proceeding from assumptions that the historical choices of two decades ago are now fully resolved.