Atropia (2025)

 

The first movie I saw in theaters without any adults was The Truman Show. Matt and I spent an ungodly sum on food and then gave the rest to donation collectors from the Roy Rogers Foundation. That was an iconic movie for me, so invoking its artificiality to talk about Atropia, another movie focused on simulation, would tickle me to no end.

Unfortunately, as I got deeper into Atropia, comparisons with The Truman Show no longer felt apt. In Atropia, everybody knows the world is fake—there’s no Jim Carrey unwittingly sincere in the face of artificiality. Medina Wazl is a training facility populated by actors and veterans. There’s no hiding from the unreal: announcements implore responsibility for blood bags while an artist paints fake limbs for the amputee actors to “lose” during "skirmishes". Most of the “insurgents” speak Spanish, not Arabic. Private iPod provides pop songs a cappella.

Set in 2006, there’s a war in Iraq underway, which motivates the war games, but those who take the exercises most seriously draw eye rolls. That intensity comes from different places: Fayruz (Alia Shawkat) sees these episodes as a springboard to Hollywood; she urges authenticity from her team to maximize her chance of being discovered. On the other hand, there’s Tanner (Callum Turner), who recently returned from a tour in Iraq but is itching for another round. He’s intent on coaching up those soon-to-be deployed boys who aren’t ready for the real war in the Middle East. With conflicting goals, Fayruz and Tanner grate on one another at first before a spark ignites between them. Pretending to be terrorists, they wreak havoc on would-be soldiers less committed to the bit, lording over their fake Fallujah between intimate whispers and saucy jokes.

But who are these two people really? Is their chemistry genuine, or is it another fake explosion from the simulation? Both want out of Medina Wazl and both center their lives on an Iraq ravaged by United States military efforts for…well, nobody’s able to articulate why exactly. That weighs on them, too, but that weight isn’t felt through the costumes and fake blood inspired by actual cultural garb and the very real violence and death happening a world away.

If this sounds like a heavy premise, I’ve misled you: this is a funny movie. More dark comedy than outright laugher, Atropia satirizes the American military’s involvement in Iraq with plenty of humor, much of which lands. Some elements don’t—a subplot involving a constipated reporter feels like a silly plot contrivance, and an early celebrity cameo dials things up a little too much—but most segments bring bite. In particular, every scene with Tim Heidecker and Chloë Sevigny as dispassionate commanders overseeing the "operation" underlines the insincerity of the cause, and Chekov’s tortoise amused me every single time. Atropia is a cinematic throwback to my college years when Hollywood churned out anti-war films, but it has a defter touch than the satires did during the actual conflict. 

Moreover, Atropia ‘s scope exceeds the Iraq War. This is a film about self-deception, about performance and simulation and slipping into roles so deeply that we surrender some part of ourselves to them. Shawkat’s Fayruz embodies that dissociation from an acting perspective, but Turner’s Tanner feels the weight of his deployment; playing Abu Dice in a phony conflict feels more real than anything else. Forget The Truman Show: Atropia’s cinematic parallel is Synecdoche, New York, but with the intellectual self-seriousness limited to subtext scribbled on a port-o-potty wall.

The challenge of Atropia for writer-director Hailey Gates was juggling everything. To ask one film to be an anti-war critique, a commentary on simulation, and a convincing romance, all while maintaining the lightness of a comedy while edifice and construction intrude on every scene, is a tall order for a directorial debut feature. But she succeeds: Atropia is a joy to watch, rich with surprises until the very end and a brilliant vehicle for Shawkat to wield her full range of talents. Is it a tad over-ambitious? Probably. But it requires incredible touch to posit Charlie Kaufman-esque existential questions without forfeiting accessibility or warmth—and Gates does it. I can’t wait to watch what she does next.

Of course, Atropia has no release date yet; I’m not even sure it has a distributor lined up. But I still have a few hours with it available through the Sundance app. I might start it up again.

That’s the highest praise I can give the film.