Reviews

February 2, 2025

Sundance Film Festival Reviews 2025: “Atropia” & “Bubble & Squeak”

 

ATROPIA (no distrib):  A setting in search of a movie.  The US military operates training camps in remote locations around the country that are designed to give soldiers the most accurate possible preparation for time in a location where they may have to serve, including actors portraying innocent citizens or dangerous insurgents, dummy munitions and bombs, and even smells that can run the gamut from tasty local food to burning flesh.  Hailey Gates’s Atropia (which won the Audience award for US Competition films) takes place at one of those camps, simulating Iraq (it’s 2006) in the desert between LA and Las Vegas.  The film is much at its best when it simply observes the silliness of the place:  because of the proximity to Hollywood, the actors are constantly auditioning and waiting to hear from their agents about real jobs when they’re not grousing about their props and the size of their roles, while the officers who run the place import sushi from Vegas to make sure they’re spending their full budget.  There’s a great little cameo from an actual movie star who shows up to rehearse for his own war movie and gets sucked into the experience.  Unfortunately, a plot has to kick in, and Atropia falls fairly limp as it recounts the troubled romance of actress Fayruz (Alia Shawkat) and the US soldier on leave from the front who’s playing insurgent Abu Dice (Callum Turner).  Both of them have secrets that aren’t terribly interesting, and the more Gates commits to their relationship as the key story of the film, the more she seems to lose grasp of what was making Atropia work.  The fringes of the script are far more insightful and involving than the center.

BUBBLE & SQUEAK (no distrib):  Absurdism… for what purpose, exactly?  Evan Twohy does an impressive job of world-building, creating an Eastern European country where the inhabitants were so scarred by their wartime years when there was nothing to eat but cabbage that it’s been banned, and not only are their laws against it, but holidays and festivals celebrating their collective cabbage-loathing.  While the older generation despises the stuff, though, there are young people for whom it’s forbidden fruit, leading to a dangerous cabbage-smuggling black market.  When American newlyweds Declan (Himesh Patel) and Delores (Sarah Goldberg) arrive for their honeymoon, it’s obvious to just about everyone except Declan that his wife’s trousers are filled with what turn out to be 29 cabbages.  (She says she suffers from tumors.)  They’re arrested by Customs and are soon on the run in local forests, chased by a posse led by Shazbor (Matt Berry, speaking with a unique accent).  Among their adventures are encounters with a cabbage-smuggler in a bear suit (Dave Franco) and a stay in a church made entirely of hay.  Some of this is amusing, but the movie’s edifice is built almost entirely of free-standing variations on a single gag.  Delores doesn’t seem to have any reason to have loaded herself up with cabbages other than a sense of adventure (she has no particular plan to sell them), and Declan is just clueless throughout.  Very late in the game, Bubble & Squeak positions itself as a metaphor about marriage and ill-matched couples, but by that point it feels like an afterthought.  While Twohy has a touch for vaudevillian gags, his film isn’t nimble or varied enough to satisfy at feature length.



About the Author

Mitch Salem
MITCH SALEM has worked on the business side of the entertainment industry for 20 years, as a senior business affairs executive and attorney for such companies as NBC, ABC, USA, Syfy, Bravo, and BermanBraun Productions, and before that, at the NY law firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges. During all that, he has more or less constantly been going to the movies and watching TV, and writing about both since the 1980s. His film reviews also currently appear on screened.com and the-burg.com. In addition, he is co-writer of an episode of the television series "Felicity."