For the more adventurous viewer, the Sundance Film Festival’s NEXT section is where it’s at, and where some of the most creative filmmaking discoveries come from. Last year gave us Ana Lily Amirpour‘s "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night" (with the director since setting up her next movie at Megan Ellison‘s Annapurna Pictures), Desiree Akhavan‘s "Appropriate Behavior" and Gillian Robespierre’s “Obvious Child” which became a big indie comedy hit last year, among others. We don’t yet know what will stand out this year, but one strong contender, mentioned in our Most Anticipated Sundance 2015 Film Fest picks, is Matt Sobel’s “Take Me To The River.”
A movie about secrets and the layers of misunderstanding and misperceptions between family, “Take Me To The River” is also a little bit like a mysterious waking dream. Starring up-and-comer Logan Miller, Robin Weigert (Sundance drama “Concussion”), Josh Hamilton, Richard Schiff, Ursula Parker (Louie C.K.’s daughter on FX‘s “Louie”) and Azura Skye (“American Horror Story”), the movie centers on a family from California and their artsy teenage son (Miller) and the family reunion that quickly goes awry in the narrow-minded world of farmlands Nebraska.
While the movie isn’t political at all, Weigert says Sobel’s drama intuitively taps into a larger social unrest. “This is just my take on it, but the movie’s unease is actually woven into the country right now,” she explained. “There’s a subterranean anxiety that is in everyone because of how much our conversation has broken down and I feel like the movie nails that: that something is off and at any moment things could explode because people’s communication has so greatly broken down.”
The movie has its secrets and enigmatic points too. While she did not want to reveal too much, she said the picture at times gave her “chills” and says it “has suspense and the coiled potential for violence.” We’ll find out more next week when the film has its Sundance premiere. We’ve got two exclusive photos from the film and you can see them below. “Take Me To The River” premieres at the Library theater at Sundance on Monday, January 26.
Browse through all our coverage of the 2015 Sundance Film Festival by clicking here.
