Sundance 2025 Reviews: ‘Omaha,’ ‘Plainclothes,’ ‘Sorry, Baby,’ ‘Twinless’
In my first dispatch for the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, I look at films from mostly first time feature directors dealing with the fallout of the 2008 housing crisis, gay identity in a wide spectrum and a woman on the verge of a nervous breakthrough.
Omaha (Dir. Cole Webley)
At the peak of the housing crisis in 2008, families that were already just scraping by found themselves houseless, homeless and without hope. It’s this period where director Cole Webley makes his feature film directing debut, with a story of desperation, as a recently widowed father of two finds himself with narrowing choices. In a compassionate and devastating performance, John Magaro (September 5) plays Martin, packs up his young children, 9-year-old Ella and 6-year-old Charlie, with happy-go-lucky Rex, their golden retriever, in their Toyota Corolla hatchback (which needs the clutch popped to start) as they head from Utah to the titular Nebraska city. Why Omaha? It’s a question asked by Ella and Charlie but not answered, as Martin does his best to distract them with car sing-a-longs, McDonald’s visits and side trips to the Bonneville Salt Flats to fly kites. The kids don’t know that Martin is biding his time and running out of money, but Ella is smart and aware, she knows something is awry. Played with incredible intelligence by Molly Belle Wright (The Best Christmas Pageant Ever), she externalizes the anguish that Martin is trying to hide, even as he pleads in hushed whispers to his dead wife, “Tell me what to do.” It would be too easy for this kind of story, even with the best intentions and empathy, to divulge into ‘misery porn,’ and it’s to Webley and screenwriter Robert Machoian’s credit that the more dire their situation becomes, including a seemingly unthinkable final act, that every beat is one that we understand and not overmined for cheap sentiment.
Grade: A-
Plainclothes (Dir. Carmen Emmi)
Entrapment of gay men in public bathrooms is the setting for Carmen Emmi’s directorial debut, showing promise as a first-time filmmaker even if the presentation is a bit obvious and well-tread. British actor Tom Blyth, hot off his role as the young Coriolanus Snow in the Hunger Games prequel The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, stars as Lucas, a young cop in Syracuse, New York tasked with luring men into a shopping mall bathroom, allowing them to expose themselves then arresting them once they leave. A practice that has less to do with penalizing sex than it does sexuality, Emmi’s choice to date the film in 1997, a year before pop superstar George Michael was arrested in a Beverly Hills park restroom for ‘performing a lewd sexual act on a plainclothes officer,’ is a shrewd one, to be sure. Keeping us in the largely pre-cell phone era and, more specifically, the hookup app era reminds us of how much has changed, and how much hasn’t, with regards to the persecution of LGBTQ people.
For Lucas, his sexuality is bubbling under, with each day more difficult to stifle. On a routine bust, he locks eyes with an older beefy daddy (a fantastic Russell Tovey, HBO’s Looking) and he breaks the rules; entering a stall, verbalizing his intentions. But it’s very quickly too much for him and he abandons the arrest. But not before Tovey’s Andrew slips him his number and the chase begins. After a failed hook up at a movie theater, the pair find privacy in a greenhouse (and later in a van), releasing Lucas of the hold his internalized fear has on him. But for Andrew, this is, and can only be, a hookup. He’s married with kids (and more) and doesn’t want to risk it all. When the police department begins employing the use of hidden video cameras in the bathrooms, Emmi, with director of photography Ethan Palmer Erik Vogt-Nilsen’s editing, utilize frenetic VHS imagery that initially conveys its need, to mirror the use of the tactic and externalize the paranoid surveillance in Lucas’s head, but it becomes too dependent on it too soon and for too long, veering into heavy handed thriller territory in a way it doesn’t need. It doesn’t take away from how good both Blyth and Tovey are here, who sell every moment of desperation, fear and longing in a way that’s palpable if bleak.
Grade: B
Sorry, Baby (Dir. Eva Victor)
If the only image from your film has a kitten in it, well, you’re gonna get me in. Writer/director/star Eva Victor (Billions) makes one of the most confident debuts at Sundance in a year full of incredible entries. Agnes is getting her PhD in literature and lives a bit of a reclusive life in her hundred-year-old house as she welcomes the return of her friend Lydie (a fiery Naomi Ackie) back to the small, New England town where they went to graduate school. Agnes’s story is told in five chapters, beginning and ending with ‘The Year with the Baby,’ as Lydie announces her pregnancy. Lydie has a girlfriend in New York City, and in classic fashion, the establishment of staying in your hometown while others move away to forge ‘better’ lives takes hold. But it doesn’t feel like that to Agnes; only when the duo meets up with other college friends does the thought rear its ugly head, largely in the form of Natasha (a deliciously venomous Kelly McCormack), a jealous and spiteful friend showing them her new home and digging into why Agnes is still spinning her wheels.
But in between ‘The Year with the Baby’ chapters something bad happens to Agnes, ‘The Year with the Bad Thing.’ The group’s thesis director, Professor Decker (Victor’s Billions co-star Louis Cancelmi, excellent here) trips over himself with praise for her work and when a meeting in his office is interrupted by his ex-wife asking to take care of their shared sick child, Decker takes off. A text message from him the next day sends Agnes to Decker’s house where the camera locks into place across the street of the three-story house as the day goes on and into the night, only the lights of the first floor on. Agnes entered the house with eagerness and left broken. She walks back to her car, drives home and immediately tells Lydie the details of her assault in a stunning, single take scene of virtuoso acting by Victor.
One of Victor’s greatest strengths in her filmmaking trifecta here is her astonishing ability to shift tones not just within scenes but within sentences, taking us from heartbreak to humor in a way that’s never glib or defensively dismissive. Her wit is sharp, a bit Phoebe Waller-Bridge-esque (as is her stature and posture), her dramatic staging is minimal but extremely effective. Her understanding of the Cat Distribution System is perfect. A scene where she hooks up with neighbor Lucas Hedges and teases him about his dick, hilarious. A single scene with John Carroll Lynch, beautiful. It’s easy to see why the Pastel team of Adele Romanski, Mark Ceryak and Barry Jenkins backed this venture. Victor is a singular voice, much like their discovery of Charlotte Wells with her 2022 debut Aftersun, not offering a blanket revelation or resolution but embracing a shared experience of the most vulnerable aspects of lives fictional and real, with fresh eyes and a fresh perspective. Victor isn’t trying to be a voice of her generation, but she is asking you to listen. I’m all ears.
Grade: A-
Twinless (Dir. James Sweeney)
Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger, more beautiful, more perfect. No, this isn’t a review of The Substance but there’s an interesting core element of seeing, and creating, a different version of yourself that you present to others vs the one you keep closer to your vest and hide inside, in Twinless, the new film from writer/director/actor James Sweeney (Straight Up).
In Twinless, two men, Dennis (Sweeney) and Roman (Dylan O’Brien) meet up at support group in Portland, Oregon for people that have lost their twin, talking in their group circle about their sibling, often as a tether and confused how to simply exist in the world without them. “I was a ‘we,’ now I’m an ‘I'” and referring to those without twins as ‘singletons.’ Dennis is gay, reedy and needy and gloms quickly onto Roman’s straight oaf, a little too quickly. But they bond in their unified experience with the very lonely Roman reaching out to Dennis to simply go shopping for groceries together. For Roman it’s an act of survival, to just get to the next day after losing his brother Rocky (also O’Brien in a stunning dual performance). For Dennis it’s survival too, but for a connection different than sibling love, it’s romantic but also treading a dangerous line that reminded me of Mike White’s utterly brilliant dark comedy of gay obsession, Chuck & Buck, with a dash of Fight Club.
It’s a tonal highware act without a net as one slight error on Sweeney’s part could bring it all down. One minute you’re shocked at a reveal and the next he stings you with a devastating zinger. After a group of young people call Dennis and Roman faggots, a fight ensues, unleashing violence on Roman’s part while Dennis punctuates it with “I thought Gen Z was supposed to be nice!” That itself is its own balance, the knowing of when and how to soften a harsh reality with comedy but there are fewer examples other than the one of growing up gay and having laser sharp wit as your only defense. It, like any weapon, can become one of cruelty too, corroding over the years, and Sweeney knows this. He allows Dennis these follies and foibles, making him a complicated protagonist and antagonist, two dueling forces battling for power and posing a direct challenge to the audience of alliances and how far you’re willing to go with him, one that’s worth taking on.
Every few years feels like we enter a new queer renaissance for film, but longing continues to be a theme not only worth mining but one that finds pure gold in. 2023’s All of Us Strangers, 2024’s Queer and now Twinless do more than explore the rules and complexities of gay desire, they excavate them. There’s also something incredibly exciting about the current crop of millennial filmmakers like Sweeney and Jane Schoebrun, the early to mid-30s set looking at their growing up years in the 2000s and finding how it fits into their storytelling, whether it’s the SIMS game or a television show that defined their youth, creating art through the lens of experiences with media not exclusively to film is opening the door to generational voices.
One of Sweeney’s great qualities as a filmmaker is that he doesn’t ever let his film get mired down in simple clichés of cinematic twindom, no over the top use of mirror images or misleading doppelgängers. Although a shot of Dennis watching a Mary Kate and Ashley movie provides a very funny and nostalgic wink.
Returning to the astonishing turn by O’Brien, who won the Sundance Jury Award for Acting for his performance, since breaking through with the constantly queer-coded MTV series Teen Wolf to his appearance at last year’s Sundance in Ponyboi, O’Brien is creating detailed and wide-ranging characters and in Twinless he does it twice. His Roman is brutish but not unkind, a wounded soul but remaining open and hopeful. In Rocky, with the little time we get with him, O’Brien delicately navigates specific intonations and mannerisms that are so uniquely gay that you lose yourself in him immediately (there are notes of Robin Williams in The Birdcage but dialed down). It’s going to stick with me as one of the best performances of the year in one of the best films of the year.
Grade: A
He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.
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