While much is in flux in today’s world, thankfully we can still depend on the Sundance Film Festival to deliver the very best in independent cinema. With the 2022 event recently wrapped, we’re here to share our thoughts on the best narrative films of this year’s lineup.

Sundance did not return in 2022 as initially intended. After going fully virtual in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the organizers hoped they could pull off a hybrid festival this year. This would have involved a full-blown in-person event in Park City, a virtual component, and select screenings at satellite venues across the country. However, with the new Omicron variant and COVID-19 cases on the rise, Sundance pulled the plug on the Park City part of the plan two weeks before it was set to get underway. It was deflating, but at least the 2022 festival could have a life virtually and through the satellite venues.

After their 2021 practice run, Sundance has the virtual screening thing down pat. Fest-goers could watch film premieres and attend live virtual Q&As with the cast and crew, or they could catch up with films during their second screening windows. There were even post-screening parties and discussions to attend for pass-holders on the festival’s virtual community space, the Spaceship.

We settled in at home and tried to consume as many films as possible. Below you’ll find some of our favorites. From a British remake of Kurosawa’s Ikiru to a shape-shifting folk horror film to a pseudo-sci-fi dark comedy involving clones, read on for the best narrative films we saw at Sundance 2022.

Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Low Spark Films

Emily the Criminal

John Patton Ford, last seen in the Sundance 2010 lineup with his AFI short thesis film Patrol, delivers the goods with his debut feature, Emily the Criminal. A character-driven crime thriller with a timely and relatable premise, the film stars Aubrey Plaza in the titular role as a former art school student with a spotty record and $70,000 in student debt. Living in Los Angeles, thousands of miles from her family, Emily is desperately trying to make ends meet. When a co-worker at her dead-end catering job tells her she can earn some quick cash as a dummy shopper, she’s intrigued. Emily proceeds to get caught up in a credit card fraud ring run by Lebanese cousins Youcef (Theo Rossi) and Khalil. Could crime actually pay for the film’s reckless anti-heroine?

Plaza pulsates as Emily and her chemistry with Rossi is palpable. They win the award for the sexiest couple at this year’s festival. Their performances are complemented by Ford’s tense direction and smart script. Suffice it to say, you won’t feel robbed after watching Emily the Criminal. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait 12 years for Ford’s next project.

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Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Dual

Riley Stearns opens his pitch-black pseudo-sci-fi comedy Dual on a darkly lit football field. Two men, with an array of weapons at their disposal, battle to the death as a TV crew captures all the action. When the match is called, it’s revealed that the winner and the loser look exactly alike. It is in this uncanny alternate reality that we meet Sarah (Karen Gillan). Living a joyless, gray existence, Sarah video chats intermittently with her long-distance boyfriend Peter, ignores calls from her mother, and masturbates to videos of people having sex outside haunted houses.

Just when it seems like Sarah’s life couldn’t get any more depressing, she’s told she has a terminal illness. On the advice of her doctor, she clones herself to make things easier on her loved ones after she dies. Sometime later, Sarah learns her health has taken a miraculous turn. She’s been given a second chance. But by now, her double, who seems to be a better, cheerier version of her, has ingratiated herself into Sarah’s world and won’t go willingly. If Sarah wants her old life back she has to take out her double via a good old-fashioned duel. However, will the one left standing actually be the victor?

Dual, Stearns’ third feature, finds the filmmaker further honing his unique and effective deadpan style. A thoroughly gratifying watch, the film lingers in the psyche thanks to assured direction and a razor-sharp script with dialogue the actors’ voice in monotone. It’s only a matter of time before Stearns gets the recognition he deserves as one of today’s vital indie auteurs. As for the cast, Gillan is convincing in her dual role of Sarah and Sarah’s Double and her wry delivery hits. Aaron Paul is also terrific as Trent, Sarah’s zealous combat training coach.

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Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Branko Starcevic

You Won’t Be Alone

If Terrence Malick and Ari Aster had a bastard child and let it roam the 19th Century Macedonian countryside, it would look something like Australian filmmaker Goran Stolevski’s ambitious folk-horror feature You Won’t Be Alone.

A charred-bodied, shape-shifting witch named Old Maid Maria (Anamaria Marinca), also known to the townspeople as the Wolf-Eateress, appears at the bedside of newborn Nevena hoping to feed on her blood. The child’s mother pleads with the witch to spare her daughter for now and come back after she turns 16. Maria concedes, sealing the deal by cutting the baby’s tongue with one of her talon-like nails, rendering her unable to speak. In a panic, the mother stashes the infant in a sacred cave, leaving her to grow up feral. When the girl comes of age, Maria fetches her, but instead of feeding on her blood, she turns her into a witch by clawing the girl’s chest and spitting in the open wound.

Nevena, strong-willed and naïve, is a handful for her new witch mama, and the pair part ways. Approaching her new environment with wonder, Nevena soon discovers she can take the shape of the animals she kills. Thus begins her journey of experiencing life’s joys and hardships through the skin of others.

Stolevski tells his supernatural coming-of-age tale through stream of conscious voiceover narration, natural lighting, and liberated camera movements reminiscent of Malick. Nevena’s poetic internal dialogue in broken Macedonian guides the story. Actress Sara Klimoska, who plays the 16-year-old in her pure form, sets the tone for the character. The other actors, Noomi Rapace, Carloto Cotta, Anastasija Karanovich, and Alice Englert, embrace Nevena’s spirit and evolve her as she learns and feels more comfortable in the skin she’s living in.

You Won’t Be Alone doesn’t feel like a debut feature. It’s daring and lyrical, and Stolevski lulls viewers into suspending disbelief and venturing somewhere unfamiliar. His direction is confident, and he eloquently explores a range of themes, from identity and gender, to grief, alienation, and loneliness.

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Sundance Institute | photo by Number 9 Films/Ross Ferguson

Living

Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru gets a poignant and respectful British makeover in Living. Directed by Oliver Hermanus from a script by Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, the Bill Nighy-starrer counts among the feel-good hits of Sundance 2022, and this is despite – spoiler alert – the main character dying two-thirds of the way through.

It’s London, 1953, and Mr. Williams (Nighy) is a widowed, bureaucratic pen-pusher of some stature in a city slowly recovering from the trauma of WWII. Accustomed to keeping his mouth closed and his head down, one of his employees privately refers to him as Mr. Zombie because of his stoic and lifeless demeanor.

As one day bleeds into the next, Williams is jarred out of his fog by news that he has stomach cancer. Now, with only months to live, he wonders how his life ended up this way. Williams embarks on a period of self-reflection. Perhaps it’s not too late for him to turn things around and do something to give his life meaning.

Living carries a timely and benevolent message. It arrives as the world is emerging from a period of darkness induced by the Covid-19 pandemic. We can get stuck mourning what we’ve lost and keep our heads down or we can choose to wake up as Nighy’s character did. Living leaves you with a warm fuzzy feeling.

As for Hermanus’ filmmaking, it’s meticulous, thoughtful, and well-suited for Ishiguro’s sublime script. The direction, production design, costumes, and cinematography integrate seamlessly, transporting the audience back to this bygone era. Nighy delivers a beautifully restrained performance as Mr. Williams. And, for the Ikiru naysayers, Living pays reverence to the original while charting its own course.

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Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Wyatt Garfield

Resurrection

Andrew Semans’ horror-thriller Resurrection should come with a content warning: This film contains a plotline that could trigger those who have been in a toxic relationship or a cult. Eerily realistic in its depiction of long-lasting psychological trauma, Resurrection is unnerving, unrelenting, and downright haunting.

Margaret (Rebecca Hall) is no-nonsense and prides herself on having everything under control. She spends her days at a biotech job where she’s a respected colleague. At night, she comes home to her sleek, modern high-rise apartment and soon-to-be-college-bound daughter Abbie. An overly devoted single parent, her only other notable relationship is an affair she’s having with a married co-worker.

At the film’s opening, Margaret is offering her intern a shoulder to cry on. The young woman is having boyfriend issues but wants to give him the benefit of the doubt. Margaret is having none of it and tough loves the woman to stand up to him. At the time, the conversation seems innocuous. However, as the film unfolds, this kindly pep talk is a significant foreshadowing.

Soon after her chat with the intern, Margaret attends a work conference where she spies a man from her past across the room, Dr. David Moore (Tim Roth). The sight of him sends her spiraling. The story descends from plausible to unbelievable. It is up to the audience to discern if what they’re watching is reality or delusion.

Hall delivers a spellbinding performance as Margaret, a woman whose past has been resurrected. Her desperation and terror make the screen sweat. Roth is equally brilliant as her smarmy sadistic ex.

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Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Klondike

Blending fact and fiction, Maryna Er Gorbach’s Klondike provides a glimpse of what it’s like living in a modern-day war zone. The film, which marks the Ukrainian filmmaker’s first solo directorial outing, takes place in 2014 in Hrabove, a village in Donetsk on the Ukrainian/Russian border. Irka (Oxana Cherkashyna), seven months pregnant, lives with her husband Tolik under constant threat of violence. Russian-backed separatists are entrenched in the region and want Tolik to join them. Her brother, who is very anti-Russia, has returned to help her escape. Meanwhile, a plane, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, has crashed into the village. Debris and body parts have been strewn everywhere. With the walls around her literally crumbling and everything in complete disarray, Irka chooses to stay in her home and focus on the tasks at hand – milking the cow, cleaning the house, and fixing the stroller.

Klondike, while tragic and bleak, extols women for their resilience and effectively explores the differences between the genders when it comes to dealing with adversity and war. The story benefits from Gorbach’s direction, which keeps her characters at a distance and avoids sentimentality. A nod should also be given to Svyatoslav Bulakovskiy’s cinematography. The land, which is at the heart of the Ukrainian/Russian conflict, is treated as another character. The film incorporates several dramatic pans and gorgeous wide shots.

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Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by IFC Films

Happening

Of the three films at Sundance 2022 that explore abortion and women’s reproductive rights in the 1960s, Audrey Diwan’s Happening is unquestionably the most affecting. The other two films, HBO documentary The Janes and Elizabeth Banks-starrer Call Jane, are formulaic and focus on The Janes, a Chicago collective that performed illegal abortions in the 1960s.

Happening, also based on actual events, is a screen adaptation of Annie Ernaux’ semi-autobiographical novel of the same name. The film centers on Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei), a 23-year-old student pegged as “the smart one,” she sees university as a ticket out of her small town. Despite being boy crazy and pleasure curious, she and her friends claim to be virgins. When Anne finds out she’s pregnant, she views it as a death sentence. The last thing she wants to have right now is a baby. However, with abortion being illegal, she isn’t sure where to turn. Happening follows Anne in her race against time to cure herself of what she refers to as the terrible disease that turns women into housewives.

Diwan’s film is naturalistic and intimate. The shots are close-up or medium. At times, the lens practically sits on Anne’s shoulder. The viewer is right up on in there during her medical exams and procedures. You can’t help but feel empathy because you’re along for the ride and it’s arduous and lonely. And while the film is set in the 1960s, Diwan isn’t fussy with its period details, so it feels timeless, making it even more harrowing. Right now, there could be a young woman in Texas going through something similar.

Emotionally fraught and utterly involving, it’s no wonder Happening walked off with the Golden Lion at 2021 Venice Film Festival.

Photo credit: © 2022 Sundance Institute | Photo by Stephen Speckman