Run Amok (2026)

 

If you aren’t watching Run Amok closely, you’ll mistake it for a Hallmark Original movie. Everyone’s sweet and quirky in this town haunted by a ten-year-old tragedy, and gosh darn it, they just want to be helpful. Everyone wants to protect and nurture; everyone’s about empathy and heroism. It’s a model for memorial and—

Screw that. Run Amok is dark as shit, and I love it.

Meg (Alyssa Marvin) lost her mom to a school shooting when she was four. Now a freshman at that very school, Meg convinces the heroic Mr. Shelby (Patrick Wilson) to let her stage a commemorative play about that incident. It’s for “catharsis”, the ninth-grader insists. It’ll help people heal. Shelby and the principal (Margaret Cho) suggest they’ll sing “Amazing Grace”.

Meg has other ideas. Seeking to understand her mother’s final moments and how a student came to gun her down in a hallway, Meg writes a musical reenactment. Backed by an eclectic team that includes her cousin Penny (Sophia Torres), Meg writes so ambitiously that she visits the home of the shooter’s mother—and ruffles many feathers along the way.

When Run Amok follows Meg as she shapes and directs her show, the film is stirring. With no hyperbole whatsoever, Marvin is incredible, giving Meg this awkward, childish innocence and a grown-up-too-fast maturity that lets her weaponize adults’ pity. There’s a scene where she narrates the shooting in complete detail that tore me apart. Marvin plays it cool and collected, crisply maneuvering her riveted older peers through their blocking, never betraying the emotion you read into every pause and gaze. I know nothing about this actress, not even her age, but if she’s really a high schooler, I think she might win three Oscars someday. Meg might be my favorite teenage movie character ever, and Marvin deserves much of the praise.

Mager does, too. It’s clear that she gets Meg, that she’s crafted a character defined by tragedy who refuses to accept that, but also who fears losing touch with it. There’s an easy way to write this story that results in warm hugs and sappy crescendos, but Run Amok wields empathy in this subversive way I’ve never seen before. The scenes between Meg and the shooter’s mother (Elizabeth Marvel) are awkward, unsettling, and grim, yet they subtly stab you with heartbreak when a tupperware of rice appears. Factoring in her incredible direction of a cast both young and veteran—Molly Ringwald and Bill Camp join Wilson and Cho—Mager deserves more opportunities. You can tell there’s huge talent behind this thing.

Everything doesn’t work, of course. The opening ten minutes suffer from horrendous pacing, with huge character shifts that aren’t remotely earned. Camp’s character in particular inhabits an emotional uncanny valley that’s way too slapstick for the intended tone, and the arm-the-teachers stuff becomes way too big in a way that it shouldn’t. I get why she included them to flesh out the story, but they distracted from the real star: the right choice was stepping aside so Marvin and the other kids could grapple with the weight of inherited violence. 

It pains me to acknowledge all that because I want to sing this film’s praises. Mager nails so many things here, and her movie crushed me over and over again. I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating and writing about the threat of violence in schools, and Run Amok stands apart from its similarly centered brethren by focusing (brilliantly) on the way grief lingers and perverts over time. I’ve never seen anything like this before; The Fallout comes close, but that Jenna Ortega vehicle speaks to numbness rather than confrontation. Run Amok is about kids far removed from the violence who still feel it, and about the staff members still defined and haunted by it.

While Run Amok drops the ball at the end and definitely doesn’t stick the landing—although kudos to Mager for having the guts to do what she does during the show—I find myself shrugging my objections off. There’s so much to love here, and Marvin is so transcendent that I simply don’t care. I realize this is probably too dark and weird to ever gain mainstream acclaim, but who cares? 

Run Amok isn’t the best film I caught at Sundance this year, but it’s certainly the one I’ll remember the fondest.

That’s definitely something to celebrate.

 

Watched via the Sundance Film Festival's Online Screening

Rock Springs (2026)

 

Rock Springs challenges me.

On the one hand, there’s the film itself, and on the other, there’s what the film aims to achieve. In a perfect world, these two components sync, each lending power to the other, but this is not a perfect world. While I appreciate what Rock Springs aspires to be about and ultimately admire where it lands, there’s no denying that the path to reach that ending doesn’t work, a mess of clunky exposition and distracting camera work that undermines the storytelling.

Told in three parts, Rock Springs begins with the recently widowed Emily (Kelly Marie Tran), who moves her family to Rock Springs, Wyoming. The move is unpopular: her young daughter, Gracie (Aria Kim), refuses to speak, and her mother-in-law, Nai Nai (Fiona Fu), is obsessed with spirits and old superstitions. But Rock Springs has a dark history, and the film’s second chapter shifts toward it. In 1885, a mob of white settlers attacks and swarms a camp of Chinese miners. After watching that massacre’s effects on Ah Tseng and He Yew (Benedict Wong and Jimmy O. Yang), we return to Emily as the past and future collide.

 

The grisly massacre at the center of the film is no figment of filmmaking imagination, a fact I learned in text during the end credits. I did not watch the Q&A with director Vera Miao, but it’s clear that bringing this atrocity to light motivated this film. The strongest parts of Rock Springs deal with the violence. The 1885 section plays like a horror movie with characters yanked upward and tension built as the monsters close in. To watch Wong hobble off on Yang’s shoulder while whistling flannel-clad men lurk inches away is harrowing. Likewise, the film’s ending works by turning toward memorial and freeing the dead. It reminds me of Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers, actually. It put a lump in my throat. It works.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the rest of Rock Springs. Played as an atmospheric horror movie, the film dances between tired tropes to stoke discomfort. There are amorphous dream worlds, creepy dolls, ghosts leaning into the frame, and rattling bushes—nothing’s new or compelling about any of them. Did I find a few creepy while watching in the early morning darkness? Absolutely. But there’s no cohesion to any of it. They feel tacked on; they entice horror fans to watch and learn about historical terror, but their poor execution weakens the rest of the experience. The script does itself no favors either, adopting a three-chapter structure that backtracks unnecessarily. It wasn’t hard to connect the dots between chapters one and three, but the filmmakers presumed we couldn’t follow.

Moreover, the camera work is a flat-out mess. Despite my limited vocabulary, I watch enough movies to recognize when something’s off, and Rock Springs is distractingly bad. I could feel the camera hustling to heighten the horror elements, but the constant shifting persistently pulled me out of the scenes. I can’t remember a busier movie of shot compositions. Inverted shots, fishbowl lenses, and Dutch angles disrupt the first chapter while struggling to focus on Gracie’s perspective, but then it races between awkward pans, monstercam POV, and Blair Witch shaky handhelds around otherwise well-composed shots that feel like they could fall straight out of Ari Aster. Pick a lane! I wanted to yell at the TV. It tried too hard to evoke superior horror movies, no doubt hoping to lift its genre bonafides to sell its important history lesson.

And all this leads to a monster that I can only call disappointing. I understand it thematically, sure, but the effects work fails. What aims for Cronenbergian instead becomes a potato-frog without sufficient budget to sharpen. While I can forgive that from an independent film with something meaningful to share, I can’t pretend it works effects-wise, and that’s too bad.

There are no doubt cultural elements here that I miss. Rock Springs bluntly narrates several of them, but never with sufficient specificity to convince me that they were real. The film’s mission is sharp, but nothing else here is. I wanted to enjoy it, but the whirlwind of trick shots, the disjointed structure, and the underwhelming script and creature effects prevent the movie from matching that mission.

Perhaps focusing solely on the massacre could have better served Rock Springs. After all, that section plays like a true horror movie because it actually was one, and the hints at back-story suggest several characters worthy of fleshing out. I like Tran and the idea of intersecting the horror genre with this historical reckoning, but that genre mashup doesn’t work here. It left me looking for a literal monster and thinking about better-executed films for long stretches of its runtime.

 
I’m glad to know about the real Rock Springs’ place in history, but Rock Springs as a film disappointed me.

Watched via the Sundance Film Festival's Online Screening 

Union County (2026)

 

On the surface, Union County sounds like a predictable melodrama. It’s a somber tale about opioids in Ohio, and it’s got two big stars surrounded by non-actors. You might not know the geography, but you’ll recognize the indie issues movie recipe. After all, Sing Sing did it just last year.

True though that is, Union County stubbornly resists sentimentalizing its subject matter. Quiet, haunting, and hopeful, Adam Meeks’ drama is sanded-down and unpretentious, channeling the spirit of the program and people it portrays.

Cody (Will Poulter) gets assigned to Adult Recovery Court as part of his sentence for a drug charge. Jobless and living out of his car, Cody has almost nothing, but his foster brother Jack (Noah Centineo), also in the program, extends him a lifeline. But addiction calls to both men, threatening the work they’ve undertaken to change.

Union County opens slowly, and that’s intentional. The shots are long, the camera tight on Poulter’s face as he stares out windows in search of life. The film bludgeons you with the monotony of rural drives and cutting lumber. When something occasions to happen, like a bonfire in the woods, we get flashes of life, but Cody remains muted, withholding everything from us. It’s not that nothing happens so much as it feels like that—for us as well as Cody.

And Poulter sells it beautifully. Union County excels when the camera fixes on a silent Poulter’s sad eyes. Until the final third, we have no idea what’s behind those eyes nor what he’s chasing or running from, but his aloofness is persuasive. Despite the marathon of close-ups, I felt too distant from Cody to empathize with him early on, but when he finally chooses to speak, everything makes sense. You grow close to Cody so that, by the end, you feel with and for him.

Several others’ strong contributions prop up Poulter’s performance. Centineo takes second billing, and he excels at portraying jittery electricity that addiction’s dulled but never vanquished entirely. Although he looks distractingly like Mark Ruffalo, he’s also borderline unrecognizable under his wild beard, basketball shorts, and polar bear physique. Elise Kibler plays Anna, a love interest of sorts, and she nails the part: she’s warm and generous but also guarded and concerned. Despite having only a few scenes, I knew and understood her quickly, and I applaud the script for writing Anna so multi-dimensionally.

This praise says nothing of the rest of the cast, though, and they deserve acclaim as well. Most of the people Cody meets are actual members of the Adult Recovery Court’s program, and that realism adds depth to the synthetic story centering it. In particular, Annette Deao is incredible in her role as a counselor, at once being direct, compassionate, and patient. I’ve seen movies where the non-actors’ lack of presence undercut the film’s polish, but Union County isn’t one of them. Whether they’re offering frank testimony in court or reflecting during a basement share-out, they implicitly endorse the urgency behind Cody’s story.

In its weakest moments, Union County slips away from its tight character study; especially in the first act, circumstances rule the roost rather than the people. The film has a ton it wants to say, and it’s great stuff, but I wish they’d found an extra character beat or two for Cody in the first half. I can point to so many later own—his awkward pencil grip, the way he doesn’t lean toward Anna, an alternate approach to downing dessert—but ultimately, I can buy that his first half numbness blots out who he is. It’s a heavy movie when Centineo’s off-screen, and that’s okay, but a flourish here and there wouldn’t hurt.

Still, what Union County does is remarkable. Instead of staging a drama, the film drops us into this world, driving us around the same rounds and sitting in on the same AA meetings. Without ever forfeiting its cinematic polish—seriously, this thing’s shot beautifully—it lets you observe this incredible program at work and meet those doing it for real. So many people struggling with addiction lack infrastructure and support, and the film makes a moving case for the Adult Recovery Court model. No, they don’t have all the answers, but they teach structure, accountability, and compassion to people who need someone to pick up the phone, someone to wait on the porch, someone to say, “I know you fucked up, and that’s not good, but here’s your next step”.

Union County works because it never shies away from the struggles but always—always—believes in the program and people so doggedly that you do too. Union County is what an issues movie should be, and these tears mark how I should feel when a good one ends.

 

Meeks, Poulter, and company have made a good one. 

 

Watched via the Sundance Film Festival's Online Screening 

The Musical (2026)

 

Many years ago, I got excited about a film titled Hamlet 2. In that film, Steve Coogan stars as a jaded high school theater teacher who decides to stage a wild musical sequel to Shakespeare’s play. As the film goes on, the play grows wilder and wilder until it becomes an effects bonanza about a time-traveling Jesus Christ. I never got there with Hamlet 2; its music amuses me, but the story ultimately falls short. The wacky premise bests the film itself.

The Musical suffers a similar fate. Although a story of petty revenge with middle school theater kids as pawns puts a smile on my face, it barely scrapes together enough meaningful moments and likable characters to reach a successful in-story play.

Doug (Will Brill) nurtures playwright dreams, but he’s stuck teaching middle school theatre under the faker-than-video game-plastic Principal Brady (Rob Lowe). The one consolation was Abigail (Gillian Jacobs), his art teacher girlfriend, but at the start of a new year, she’s dating Brady, and Doug’s pissed. With few avenues for revenge, Doug tasks his earnest tween cast with tanking Brady’s accolades by dumping their rendition of West Side Story for an uncomfortable original he wrote.

Because I enjoyed the ending so much, I find myself retroactively softening toward the rest, but there were definite problems. The Musical runs only 87 minutes, so several scenes feel dashed off, and the school setting oscillates between well-rendered and eye-roll-inducing. The movie loses sight of Lowe for too many stretches, and Jacobs doesn’t get much to do. That’s too bad because they both nail the assignment: Jacobs is perfectly sweet and earnest in her limited scenes, and Lowe, though no longer the strapping Chris Traegor of Parks and Rec, plays punchable face to perfection. Both excelled.

Unfortunately, Brill did not, although I’d point more to the screenplay than to him. In order to maneuver the chess pieces quickly, Brill careens between versions of Doug to fit each scene’s demands. One minute, he’s a sloppy brooder, the next a beloved leader, but the connective tissue must’ve landed on the cutting room floor. Early on, his awkward orneriness turned me against him—I’m allergic to the Principal Bradys of the world, but Doug is too delusional and overbearing to root for. There’s a scene he shares with Jacobs on a set of riders that basically ruined him for me; he’s an unlikable, charmless character that the writers forgot was unlikable in the final act. While I empathize with Doug’s situation, I never got there with him. That hurt the film.

I suspect I’m being over-harsh on such a silly film. Once the film stops making kids mouthpieces, their performances add to the fun; they seemed to be having fun, that’s for sure. There are no original songs in The Musical, which disappointed me, but that final show’s aesthetic and mocking gravitas sell me on the film’s vision. Perhaps if I had a theatre background, I’d find more fruit to pluck, but I did choir in high school.

Like Hamlet 2, The Musical follows a fun idea for sure. But while I suspect most of the film will be fairly forgettable, I’ll always have that final staging to smile about.

 Watched via the Sundance Film Festival's Online Screening