‘The Gallerist’ Review: Art Imitates Death in Cathy Yan’s Stylized and Funny Sendup on Navel Gazing Art World [B+] | Sundance

The world of modern art is enigmatic and inaccessible to some, a way of life for others. Rotating exhibitions at museums of modern art may draw crowds of culturally curious onlookers, but there is a very small and specific community that gather to bid on a self-destructing Banksy or a banana duct-taped to a wall, two notable works referenced in Cathy Yan’s funny, biting satire The Gallerist, which premiered to a full house and a standing ovation at the Eccles Theater Saturday night at the Sundance Film Festival.

Yan’s second film to debut at Sundance, her first feature, the Shanghai-set Dead Pigs, was a well-regarded introduction that promised an exciting new voice. That debut landed her at Warner Bros where she directed the effervescent DC villain flick Birds of Prey. Six years later, Yan’s third film continues an exceptional run of wild, smart, female-centered stories that are as fun as they are insightful.

It is a hot Miami morning when Polina Polinski (Natalie Portman) fusses about her pristine gallery—the Polinski-Mayer Gallery—ensuring every detail is exactly right. Polina embodies the perfection of someone trying very hard to be perfect. There is nothing effortless about her. The platinum bob, tailored dress, her breezy banter with guests and clients are all part of her desperate need to appear confident and in charge, and to finally receive the recognition and validation she has worked so hard for. Her jumpy, anxious assistant Kiki (Jenna Ortega) attends to the things Polina doesn’t want to acknowledge, like the nearly expired lease they can’t afford or the leaking air conditioner dripping water onto the floor next to one of the art pieces in the show they are minutes from opening. Kiki can’t get a repairman out to fix the broken AC today and is worried about a patron slipping and suing the gallery for all the money they don’t have. The piece beneath the drip is a giant, spectacularly pointy version of an emasculator,  a tool farmers use to castrate livestock. Chekhov’s emasculator, if you will.

Natalie Portman has been a celebrated actress since childhood and her three Oscar nominations, including the win for Black Swan, attest to her ability to bring something unique to each role. Though we are used to seeing her in more dramatic roles like complicated pop star Celeste or newly widowed Jackie Kennedy, that dramatic work is part of what makes her so funny and so right for uptight Polina.

Similarly, Jenna Ortega, whose career took off with the morose title role in Wednesday and as next generation scream queen Tara Carpenter in Scream, embodies Kiki’s hyperventilating panic, intelligence, and her ability to pull herself together when the moment demands it. 

Hiding in the background is the very fidgety artist Stella Burgess (Oscar winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph), a bundle of nerves as she counts down the minutes until the opening of her first gallery show. 

Along with the giant farm tool, Stella’s work is a kaleidoscope of mixed media, yarn art and paintings and sculpture, the sorts of pieces about which some connaisseurs will draw philosophical meaning and comparison to great artists of the past, while others will scratch their heads and say, as one visitor will later, “I just don’t get modern art.” Randolph spends most of the film pacing and panicking quietly to herself which, in the hands of a lesser actress and director, could have looked like she was being sidelined. Instead, Stella’s habit of disappearing every time someone wants to talk to her is made funnier by the fact that it is exactly the opposite of how we usually see the Oscar winner. 

Yan’s film, which she co-wrote with James Pedersen, is not only a commentary on the snobbery and pretension of artists and collectors. It is also a sharp satire about the commercialization of art and the collision of the two thanks to the rise of art influencers, a reality that film, book, and theatre critics know all too well. In The Gallerist, the villainous influencer is Dalton Hardberry (Zach Galifiankis), an obnoxious, entitled TikToker with a cell phone and a ridiculous hat who bullies his way into a “V-VIP” private tour before the public enters. With barely a glance at the pieces on display, he denounces Stella’s work as “not ready,” while smarmily praising Polina for giving space to a Black female artist who, in his opinion, needs the help. It is not surprising that he would accidentally fall upon the end of Stella’s emasculator, nor is the gleeful gratification of witnessing his gory impalement. Though shocking and awful, and the last thing Polina needs today, it is also uncomfortably satisfying to see it happen to a man who represents the quick click, rage-bait culture that has permeated and cheapened the arts in the last two decades.

Now Polina has a problem on her hands: a dead body and a line of people waiting outside. Her mind flashes through medieval and renaissance artworks, a mental slideshow of dead bodies draped across furniture and watched over by demons and angels. She quickly hatches a plan, arranges Dalton’s corpse just so, prints a new description of the piece, and invents a story about toxic masculinity and the violent clash of commerce and culture. Stella is livid that her piece, titled “Daddy’s Love” and intended to honor her farmer father has now been reduced to a dick joke. But she and Kiki become reluctant accomplices to the scheme which becomes both an entertaining absurdist comedy and a heist movie with a crime happening in plain sight and an obvious — to them — solution. The only way out of this is to find a buyer who doesn’t want to put the piece on public display, but lock it away in a freeport like so many priceless works removed from public access. Luckily, there happens to be a freeport in Miami. And even more luckily, Kiki’s aunt Marianne (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is a highly-respected art dealer with a lot of connections.

Marianne is everything Polina wishes she was. Confident, powerful, respected. Zeta-Jones, reuniting with her TV daughter Wednesday Addams, steps onto the screen with poise and polish, her presence felt before it is seen. Though she has less screen time than her onscreen co-conspirators, Zeta-Jones steals every scene she’s in, delivering cutting barbs and sharp insights with an icy coolness and it’s easy to see why Kiki would be both terrified of her aunt and desperate for her approval.

Further expanding on the metacommentary of social media content and the depressing elimination of humanities education, the doors to the museum open and The Body, as it is dubbed by the selfie-taking masses, quickly goes viral. Here Yan embraces the frenetic energy, keeping the camera moving, following Polina and Kiki from one crisis to the next. 

As the temperature in Miami climbs, so does the tension when Polina’s ex-husband Tom (Sterling K. Brown), the Mayer half of the Polinski-Mayer gallery funded by his canned tuna empire, arrives to cancel the spectacle of the “tacky,” “immature” corpse display. Brown eases onto the scene in a perfectly draped suit, suave and commanding, a tinge of wounded pride betraying Tom’s aloofness every time he and Portman share the screen. Their chemistry is as intense and volatile as anything else going wrong in the gallery and it is great fun to watch them let loose together.

The Gallerist has so many big ideas and juggles them all like a skillfully choreographed routine. Occasionally, absurd gags go a little too far into the unbelievable, but as Andy Warhol said in a quote that opens the film, “Art is what you can get away with,” and Cathy Yan can get away with quite a lot.

Grade: B+

This review is from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival where The Gallerist had its world premiere.