“Light From Light”
It’s been a while since we heard from Paul Harrill, the filmmaker behind 2014’s well-received “Something, Anything” that screened at BAMcinemaFest, Austin Film Festival, and Nashville Film Festival and earned terrific notices by very discerning critics at the LA Times, The Village Voice, the Dissolve and more. He’s returned finally with “Light From Light” which stars the fiercely underrated Marin Ireland (“Homeland,” “Hell or High Water“), Jim Gaffigan, Josh Wiggins, Atheena Frizzell, and David Cale. In the NEXT section at Sundance, reserved for challenging, adventurous, or provocative works, the drama centers on a single mom and part-time paranormal investigator who is asked to look into a possible “haunting” at a widower’s farmhouse in East Tennessee. Ireland, a stage actress who has appeared on everything and everywhere, turned a lot of heads years back when she first turned up on “Homeland” (during the years when it was briefly great). She never broke out as she should have, but she’s electric and has the goods and maybe it’s her time to shine now.
“Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile”
Zac Efron stars as infamous serial killer Ted Bundy isn’t much of a hard sell for a Sundance crowd looking for a breakout hit. To boot, the film is directed by Joe Berlinger, an Emmy-winning and Academy Award-nominated filmmaker and producer known for his famous “Paradise Lost” trio of documentaries. Usually working with documentarian Bruce Sinofsky (they created the landmark documentary “Brother’s Keeper” and Metallica‘s “Some Kind Of Monster” doc), Berlinger’s partner, unfortunately, passed away in 2015, but he had already started charting his own path more than 10 years ago after Sinofsky’s health began to deteriorate. ‘Extremely Wicked’ chronicles the life of serial killer Ted Bundy’s longtime girlfriend Liz Kloepfer played by Lily Collins. The drama also co-stars Jim Parsons, John Malkovich, Jeffrey Donovan, Haley Joel Osment, and Angela Sarafyan, but Efron as the notorious Bundy is obviously the kind of anti/against-type-casting that everyone’s going to be paying a ticket for.
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“Animals”
Australian filmmaker Sophie Hyde‘s debut fiction film, “52 Tuesdays,” won the World Cinema Dramatic Directing Award at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and following that, her series ” F*!#ing Adelaide,” was a big hit on ABC in Australia. Her latest, “Animals” stars Alia Shawkat from “Arrested Development” and Holliday Grainger, the U.K. actress known for the Showtime series “The Borgias,” and roles in dramas like “Tulip Fever,” “The Finest Hours,” and “Cinderella.” Based on the acclaimed 2014 novel of the same name, “Animals” explores the long hangover between adolescence and adulthood through a bittersweet tale of two friends growing up and growing apart.
“Relive”
Blumhouse Productions bring the science fiction horror “Relive” to Sundance and given their pedigree with horror hits, all eyes will be on it. “Relive” stars David Oyelowo, Storm Reid, Byron Mann, Mykelti Williamson, and Shinelle Azoroh and it’s a high concept family drama too about a man (Oyelowo) who he gets a phone call from his dead niece after his family dies in what appears to be a murder. He’s not sure if she’s a ghost or if he’s going mad, but as it turns out, he’s not. Part supernatural thriller, part time-warped police procedural, “Relive” is created by Sundance alumni, writer/director Jacob Estes known for “Mean Creek” and “The Details.” It sounds intriguing and liable to spark a bidding war if it’s a hit with audiences.
“The Sunlit Night”
Writer/director David Wnendt made quite the splash in 2014 with the sexually provocative “Wetlands” which screened at Sundance in the World Dramatic Competition section. He did the same in 2015 with “Look Who’s Back,” the satirical comedy about Adolf Hitler suddenly resurfacing in modern-day Germany like nothing’s happened. His latest, “The Sunlit Night,” stars Jenny Slate, Zach Galifianakis, Alex Sharp, and Gillian Anderson and follows and American painter (Slate) and a Russian American émigré (Sharp) as an unlikely pair who find each other in the Arctic circle of Norway and an isolated island where the sun never sets. If anything, ‘Sunlit Night’ sounds like Wnendt’s least rabble-rousing work and something more akin to a transatlantic “Lost In Translation” like romance which hey, could be a great thing.
