Anticipation was high for the beginning of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, but it's been the Midnight strand, which last year launched The Babadook and The Guest, that's so far offered the most fun. Whether this year’s entries will match those film at the box office remains to be seen, but so far they have been wayward and strong, spearheaded by Eli Roth’s wickedly entertaining female revenge comedy Knock Knock, in which Keanu Reeves plays a middle-class dad whose life is turned upside down by the arrival of two mysterious young women on his doorstep one night. The film’s sexual politics are still being debated, but for those up for the ride this is a much-needed slice of modern-day exploitation, a sexy, scary (but mostly scary) mash-up of** Play Misty For Me** and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!.
Given that two of last year’s opening-weekend entries – **Boyhood **and **Whiplash **– are currently jostling with six other movies for the Best Picture Oscar, we might have expected a little more from the other strands. But although the festival is starting to rack up sales – **Dope **and **Me & Earl & The Dying Girl **being the most buzzworthy at time of writing – nothing has captured the critical consensus in the same way.
Noticeably absent in the Premieres section is the usual crop of middleweight indies, which last year included A Most Wanted Man and T****he Raid 2. This year offered a much less varied roster, giving Noah Baumbach’s comparatively low-key comedy Mistress America a chance to shine. Co-written with Baumbach’s muse, Greta Gerwig, it’s another rarefied slice of privileged Americana, but it’s a story with wit and heart, featuring another irresistible turn by its leading lady.
Next to Baumbach’s romp, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s Mississippi Grind, in which a down-at-heel gambler (Ben Mendelsohn) goes on a betting spree with a happy-go-lucky drifter (Ryan Reynolds), seemed a little earnest and unfulfilling, a slightly formulaic road movie with echoes of their breakout odd-couple film Half Nelson. Similarly, **The End Of The Tour **(pictured), in which Jesse Eisenberg plays a Rolling Stone reporter on assignment to interview cult writer David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel), seemed very much an intimate two-hander, making little effort to evangelise the late author for audiences unfamiliar with his work.
Partnering Knock Knock in the genre mash-up stakes is Corin Hardy’s The Hallow, a heartfelt homage to old-school horror (Dick Smith and other artisan FX legends are namechecked in the credits) that plays like a fantastical mix of Pan’s Labyrinth and Evil Dead as a young couple find the wood spirits in their new Irish homeland aren’t too pleased about their presence. Then there’s the lean and unashamedly entertaining Cop Car, in which two pre-teen boys find an empty sheriff’s car and steal it. With shades of early Coens, it plays a little like last year’s Blue Ruin with a dash of Night Of The Hunter, as Kevin Bacon’s bad cop gets on the boys’ trail to prevent them looking in the trunk and revealing what he’s been up to.
Another film that takes liberties with genre is Robert Eggers’** The Witch**. Starring newcomer Anya Taylor-Joy, it tells the story of a family of Puritans who break away from the founding fathers after the establishment of a religious colony in New England. Rich with creepy atmosphere, and featuring some truly unnerving set-pieces, it is one of the better films to screen so far this year. We won’t be seeing it in next year’s Oscar shortlist perhaps, but Sundance works – and has always worked – better as a platform for the new and the unusual.