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The 8 weirdest things on-screen at Sundance 2018

The 8 weirdest things on-screen at Sundance 2018

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From an AI asking sexual questions to the demon murder-baby

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Image: Sundance Institute

Independent filmmakers don’t have a lot of security, but they do have a certain amount of freedom. Working outside the studio system, often on shoestring budgets and on personal projects, they have more leeway to barf their ids up onto the screen, sometimes with deeply bizarre results. The majority of the feature-length independent movies and VR projects that hit the Sundance Film Festival every year are looking for some form of traditional distribution, and are designed to appeal to some form of mass audience. And then there are the intensely idiosyncratic projects, the ones with feces-smeared dog-women and undulating ritualistic god-cats. Those are the ones we often remember from year to year, whether we want to, or whether we’ve been through intense therapy to forget them. Once again, we’re taking stock of the most startling moments we experienced at this year’s Sundance.

Image: Sundance Institute

Live musical talk about transdimensional travel and corpse-mulching

At least one audience member, by their own admission, bought a ticket to Cory McAbee’s Sundance premiere of Deep Astronomy and the Romantic Sciences under the assumption that McAbee was planning an actual astronomy lecture. They were moderately startled when he jumped onstage with a musical sales pitch for something called the “Small Star Corporation,” a fictional company that can help ordinary people navigate everything from accidental drifts across dimensions to the process of efficiently recycling their corpse. Deep Astronomy is part of a collaborative, multi-year guerrilla filmmaking project based on talks McAbee has given around the world. (McAbee is also the creator of the bizarre cult science fiction film The American Astronaut, which is very useful context for his latest show.) As a discrete performance art piece, it’s like a cross between a highly cerebral stand-up comedy routine and an art-rock concert, with monologues ranging from pure absurdism to poignant musings on death and time. —Adi Robertson

Image: Sundance Institute

Big swingin’ horse-man cock

In Sorry to Bother You, the writing and directing debut of The Coup’s Boots Riley, protagonist Cassius Green lives in a dystopian future where underemployed people are signing their futures away to a conglomerate called WorryFree, which houses and feeds its employees as well as working them 14 hours a day. Turns out, the company is also producing horse / human hybrids, which Cassius finds out when one of them confronts him in a bathroom stall. The hybrids are more or less full-bodied versions of that hideous horse head mask that’s become such a familiar internet joke. They show up naked, and their startling, ginormous, rubbery genitals become a running joke throughout the film. A lot of Sorry to Bother You is angry and confrontational, about corporate malfeasance, racism, poverty, unions, and moral compromise. The dick jokes, both visual and voiced, function as a bit of a lighthearted safety valve — but they’re confrontational, too. Somebody put a lot of thought, and giggles, into furry fake wangs here. —Tasha Robinson

Image: Sundance Institute

The pig mask punishment

Josephine Decker’s harrowing mini-drama Madeline’s Madeline follows 16-year-old New Yorker Madeline (Helena Howard), whose struggles with mental illness are in no way helped by her unconventional drama coach Evangeline (Molly Parker). Evangeline is heavy into the kind of exercises that have her students flopping around on the floor, grunting and sobbing, pretending to be animals. And she’s endlessly judgmental with her charges: at one point, Decker shoots Howard flopping around on a beach in a turtle costume, then cuts to her lying on a stage, making flipper-gestures with her limbs. “What are you doing?” Evangeline scolds. “You were a turtle, now you’re a girl pretending to be a turtle.” There’s plenty of weirdness going on around Evangeline’s exercises, including a party scene where Madeline pretends to be a cat, licking herself and crawling into the laps of baffled adults, then presiding over a group of mewing children who want in on the game. But the film builds to a dizzying sequence where a whole group of Evangeline’s students don pig and cat masks to get in on the act, turning her studio into a chaotic nightmare of howling and growling leotarded animal-people. It’s like Animal Farm meets interpretive dance in hell. —TR

Image: Sundance Institute

A truck full of witch-spools

Writer-director Rungano Nyoni shot I Am Not a Witch in Zambia and used local actors and dialects to tell her story, but the film isn’t specifically set there. It’s more a pan-African fable about prejudice, superstition, and co-option, particularly around women. In her story, women identified as witches are taken to witch camps, where they’re tethered to ribbons attached to giant wooden spools, to keep them from flying away to commit murder. But like incarcerated Americans, the witches are also used as a source of cheap labor, which means the government has to ship them around on a giant truck built to carry their spools. It’s like a fresh spin on The Handmaid’s Tale, with women presented as honored and respected community resources, but treated like cattle. It’s also a running source of startling and beautiful images, as the women’s ribbon tethers ripple in the breeze, tangling behind them as they walk, or fill the air around a transport truck with waving strands, as if they were all spiders in a web of their own making. —TR

Image: Sundance Institute

Frankenstein-themed, AI-guided dance performance

Frankenstein AI: A Monster Made by Many intelligently updates Mary Shelley’s tale based on modern fears about artificial intelligence. The main installation was one of my favorite parts of Sundance’s New Frontier lineup; it culminates in a large, glowing screen — the titular monster — asking AI-generated questions to audience members, then using their responses to evolve. (One of my session’s: “Why do humans like having sex, even though they can see in color?”) But a one-time performance also added a live dancer (Jacinda Ratcliffe) who worked in tandem with the machine. Her movements were choreographed beforehand, and whenever the AI analyzed a set of answers, it would formulate a “mood” that affected her dance, delivering the information via earpiece. I still have no idea how intelligent or monstrous the AI actually is, and how much it’s just a device for heightening our awareness of physical human interactions — which is arguably one of the most interesting things about the project. —AR

Image: Sundance Institute

Poppy

YouTube star Poppy is a post-modern pop princess whose place on the reality / fiction spectrum is eminently unclear. The protagonist of the half-hour web series pilot I’m Poppy, meanwhile, is a semi-alien figure who is propelled to fame by a dangerous secret society, a deal with the literal devil, and the love of a New Age cult. Her best friend is a carton of rose water, her worst enemy is a mannequin, and her pastel wardrobe is impeccable. It’s hard to tell whether this is supposed to be a clearly fictionalized version of the more ambiguous meta-story that Poppy’s videos hint at, or some kind of key with which to unlock even stranger mysteries. —AR

Image: Sundance Institute

Demon babies, ball-gags, and scissor-stabbing

The description for Nicolas Pesce’s sophomore feature Piercing seemed to offer a pretty clear idea about what the movie was going to be: the story of a happily married guy (Christopher Abbott) who happens to kill people on the weekends to stay sane. I’ve seen Dexter, so Piercing sounded seemed pretty straightforward. But around 10 minutes in, when a baby started talking about murder in a demonic voice, I realized that was not the ride I’d ended up on. Instead, Piercing is a funny and disturbing Grand Guignol mashup about relationships, control, and how giving that control up — in the most bloody, horrific way possible — can be one of the most intimate and liberating things a person can do. Mia Wasikowska joins Abbott as Jackie, a prostitute he plans to murder, until he discovers she has a fascination with scissors and self-mutilation. From there, the tables turn, then turn yet again. By the time it was all wrapped up, I felt like I’d just watched Phantom Thread’s horror show cousin. That sounds like it should be a good thing… but was it? I still don’t know. Maybe I should ask the demon baby. —Bryan Bishop

Image: Sundance Institute

Nic Cage’s heavy-metal demon-mutilation trip

One person’s favorite thing is another’s most unsettling thing, and no Sundance 2018 film captured that better this year than Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy. It made Adi’s best-of-fest list, but I found the trippy revenge story of a lumberjack (Nicolas Cage) who seeks vengeance against the men responsible for the death of his love Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) just batshit crazy. The movie is full of trippy imagery that sometimes makes it feel like a walking, talking lava lamp, but that’s part of the charm. Also part of the charm is the bizarre folk-singer-turned-cult leader (Linus Roache) who ends up responsible for Mandy’s death. Along the way, there are demonic bikers, a crazed chemist, and Nicolas Cage full-on forging his own battle axe. (I was hoping for some Army of Darkness snap-zooms to accompany said forging, but you can’t have it all.) But there’s a fine line between charming throwback and low-budget exploitation pastiche, and for me, the film definitely leaned toward the latter. That said, the movie could have essentially been called Nic Cage Unleashed. It’s filled with so many crazed looks, wild grunts, and turned-to-11 emotional breakdowns that his performance became its own kind of weird art form. I imagine some future scenario, where aliens land on Earth and uncover a copy of Mandy, and wonder whether the fighting prowess and manic energy of this strange man made him some sort of mad god. To those aliens I would say: yes it does. —BB