6 Must-See Films from the 2022 Sundance Film Festival

Awards Daily’s Megan McLachlan takes a look at some of her favorite films from the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, which took place virtually Thursday, January 20 through Sunday, January 30.

So many movies, so little time. That’s one of the hard parts about attending Sundance Film Festival—or any festival for that matter. But over the course of the week, I had the opportunity to see some of the freshest new films and TV projects coming out, and these were the standouts.

Fire of Love (directed by Sara Dosa)

On opening night of the fest, I had the choice between seeing Jesse Eisenberg’s directorial debut and this doc, and while many people were driven toward the former (I mean, Julianne Moore—c’mon!), I was swayed by Anne Thompson’s passionate tease on the IndieWire podcast and decided to see Fire of Love instead.

Fire of Love is one of those miracle movies where everything falls into place for this story to be told. The doc follows a married couple of French volcanologists, Katia and Maurice Krafft, who documented all of their excursions studying volcanos. This couple camped on these explosive sites, played with the molten lava like it was a snowball, and also wore funky volcano outfits that looked like something out of a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 movie. Bottom line: The Kraffts were obsessed with volcanos. At one point in the doc, Maurice says that when he’s home, he doesn’t really know what to do with himself because he’s always thinking about volcanos. If they weren’t scientifically trained for this, they would be on something like My Strange Addiction.  And while watching it, I thought, this could never be turned into a fictional narrative film because of how crucial the settings were to the story; no Spielberg or Cameron could capture that. Fire of Love could only be told through their eyes and documentation, and director Sara Dosa does an excellent job of weaving everything together, including incorporating their truly breathtaking footage and TV interviews.

Call Jane (by Phyllis Nagy)

Call Jane begins with one of the most exquisite entrances I’ve ever seen an actress receive in a film, with Elizabeth Banks walking down a staircase, the camera following her back on a long take. It’s one of the only times in the film that her back is to the audience, because for the rest of the film, Banks completely owns the screen, in her best, most nuanced performance to date.

Taking place in the late 1960s, Call Jane stars Banks as Joy, a woman who discovers that her pregnancy is causing her to go into heart failure. The only cure? “Not be pregnant,” says the doctor. But when she decides to quietly terminate the pregnancy, a team of all-male doctors (including actors like the always stellar John Rothman) determines that she could still survive and that she should take the risk. What ensues is the lengths at which women will go to have ownership of their body and healthcare, which includes an underground network of women who support women with safe abortions.

Nagy makes excellent, subtle choices, like the fact that the ’60s soundtrack has no recognizable go-to movie repeats, and in documenting Joy’s first experience at Jane’s, the audience stays with Joy throughout the whole procedure, the camera fixed on her face through her roller coaster of emotions. The supporting cast is also great, including Sigourney Weaver, Kate Mara, Chris Messina, Wunmi Mosaku, and Corey Michael Smith.

Speak No Evil (by Christian Tafdrup)

I have not been this disturbed by a film since 2007’s Funny Games. Going into Speak No Evil, you think it’s probably going to be a quiet psychological thriller, mostly looking at the dynamics between strangers, but in the last 20 minutes of the film, it truly goes to a dark place.

It starts with an interesting setup. Two couples meet on vacation, one Danish, the other Dutch. The Danish family invites the Dutch for a weekend trip, despite neither couple really knowing each other that well. And when they get there, the Dutch discover that the Danes like to play really loud music when they drive, leave their children with strangers, and make out violently in bars. Tafdrup expertly builds the tension by exploring the mundaneness of the Dane couple’s disrespect for the Dutch (maybe in our own lives we recognize how compromising we can be in an effort to be nice?). Supported by a score that only increases dread in every note, you know Speak No Evil is building to something. One of the creepiest moments of the film comes early on, when the Danes’ son opens his mouth to let out a scream, revealing he is tongueless. Watching this the first time, you think he might be disturbed, but by the end of it, you realize it’s a warning.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (by Sophie Hyde)

I like to pretend that this film is a sequel for Emma Thompson’s character in Love, Actually and that her husband is dead and she is trying to have the sex life she never had. Leo Grande works like a three-act play (with one epic epilogue), starring Thompson as widow Nancy Stokes and a Rami-Malek-on-serotonin Daryl McCormack as the sex worker she hires to live out all of her sexual fantasies. But first she has to get over a lifetime of insecurity before she can mark him off her to-do list.

Thompson has not had an Academy Award nomination for acting since Sense and Sensibility—from 1996—when co-star McCormack was 4. This is a ridiculous stat! And if any film is a reminder of her talents, it’s this one, where she runs the gamut of fish-out-of-water comedy to devastating drama, all in one posh hotel room. Leo Grande isn’t a film that’s a Something’s Gotta Give crowd-pleasing blockbuster type, but a small, intimate film that puts two people in a room who need each other at this point in time in their life. And that’s just the way Nancy Stokes would want to be seen.

Cha Cha Real Smooth (by Cooper Raiff)

Films with post-college narratives often have a checkbox that they have to tick off, with items like, attended an Ivy League school, has a ton of money to live on their own despite having no job, meeting their person and living happily ever after.

Cha Cha Real Smooth (thankfully) has none of those things. Writer-director Cooper Raiff takes a hackneyed premise and completely spins it into something new the way his character Andrew would in the film. Following graduation from Tulane, said Andrew (a Tommy Dewey-looking Raiff) returns home to New Jersey and works at a mall meat shack while trying to decide what his next move is. When he goes to a bar mitzvah with his little brother and gets everyone dancing on the dance floor, he soon finds himself side hustling as the unofficial party starter for every Sweet Sixteen and mitzvah in the area.

Things get really interesting when he befriends Domino (Dakota Johnson) and her daughter Lola (Vanessa Burghardt) and somehow finds himself entwined in their family dynamics. Johnson’s career trajectory has been building to a role and performance like this one, where she plays a complicated mother faced with tough decisions. She should definitely be in the conversation for next year’s Supporting Actress race, especially if this film finds a large audience (which I suspect it will). Raiff’s script is filled with originality, to the point where a climactic moment in the car at the end gave me pause at how I’d never heard people describe their feelings in such a way.

Fresh (by Mimi Cave)

I’m officially declaring 2022 the year of Sebastian Stan, and frankly it’s about damn time. Besides his presence in the Marvel universe, he’s been quietly turning in consistent supporting work for years, including in I, Tonya and The Martian. Fresh could be a true, star-making turn for him.

I’m sure the logline for this film was. . .”Get Out but for the ladies!” And while this film isn’t necessarily underscored with the same cultural significance, it offers a dim and often realistic look at modern dating, through the straight cisgender lens of Noa’s (Daisy Edgar-Jones) experience. Not that every man is as extreme as Stan’s Steve, but the idea of thinking things are too good to be true. . .and they are, feels not only defeating, but devastatingly true in a world where women go missing every day. Fresh is a fun ride and maybe it doesn’t offer any kind of hope to cling to for single straight women, but when you’re surviving through a pandemic and just trying to make it through, how much hope did we have left anyway? This could be the date movie of the year, and I’m here for it.