- Hulu’s “The Testaments” Returns to Gilead For Another Timely Tale About Privilege and Complicity (April 2, 2026)
They say that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Hulu’s first Margaret Atwood adaptation, the award-winning “The Handmaid’s Tale,” became a cultural phenomenon when it premiered in 2017, its exploration of extreme misogyny, authoritarianism, and the battle over women’s reproductive rights an uncomfortably timely companion to the first Donald Trump administration. The show’s iconic red cloaks and white bonnets became mainstays at protests and demonstrations, and many of its most recognizable sayings (“Under His Eye,” “Blessed be the fruit”) crossed over into mainstream political commentary.
Sure, much of the hype around the show had fizzled by the time it concluded in 2025: six seasons of escalating torture porn with a global pandemic in the middle was a lot for even the most invested viewer to stomach. But it’s hard to overstate what a necessary piece of resistance entertainment its earliest seasons were.
Now, the streamer’s second Atwood series, based on the author’s long-awaited “Handmaid’s” follow-up, “The Testaments,” arrives at a political and cultural moment that bears some uncomfortably striking similarities to the one that greeted its predecessor. A year into a second Trump administration, the politics of both resistance and survival have changed drastically, so it’s only natural that the world of Gilead and its evils would have similarly evolved. But while “The Testaments” may approach its subject matter quite differently—its protagonists are teen girls, there’s a conspicuous lack of visible Handmaids, and much less grisly violence—its themes are no less complex and its story no less necessary.
Like “The Handmaid’s Tale” before it, “The Testaments” is not what anyone would call a particularly strict adaptation of Atwood’s novel. But, while it may play a bit fast and loose with multiple elements of the book’s story, the spirit of the piece is exactly right. Disturbingly relevant and brutal by turns, the series is as incisive and insightful as its predecessor. Here, the monstrousness of Gilead is dressed in the soft silks of privilege and the quiet comfort of ignorance, and resistance is grounded as much in solidarity and friendship as it is rage. The result is an unexpectedly powerful coming-of-age tale that offers a fresh, essential return to a universe many viewers likely thought had nothing new to say.
THE TESTAMENTS – “Daisy” – An incident on a school trip spurs Daisy’s memories of Toronto, revealing her past and a world shattered by violence. (Disney/Russ Martin)
THE TESTAMENTS
While Atwood’s novel picks up 15 years after the events of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” only about four years or so have passed in the world of the TV show. Purges have taken place in the wake of the War of Massachusetts, and much of the history of what happened has been shaped, if not outright rewritten, by those who survived. Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd), a key player in much of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” who has, as the show puts it, “been worshipped, vilified, and is now worshipped again,” now runs a school for the daughters of Gilead’s elite. These young women, raised in luxury and advantage, have little real understanding of what life is really like for the female servants in their own households, let alone the women outside their country’s repressive borders.
Aunt Lydia’s school is a sort of authoritarian finishing academy, where young women are sent not to better themselves but to learn how to carry out the various wifely duties expected of them as the future spouses of Gilead’s most highly ranked Commanders. Here, reading isn’t as necessary as embroidery, concepts like sex education are basically nonexistent, and obedience is paramount. The students’ uniforms are color coordinated: Pinks are the youngest girls, Plums are older teens, and Greens are those who’ve become “eligible” and can marry that year. (This transition occurs if and only if a Plum gets her period, which is marked by a public confession and praise ceremony.)
The bulk of the story revolves around Agnes MacKenzie (Chase Infiniti), the pious daughter of a powerful Gilead leader. She’s never wanted for anything and has no experience or awareness of life before or outside of Gilead. On some level, it’s almost disturbing how typical she seems, chasing around after her friends on school field trips, crushing on the handsome young man assigned to serve as her personal security, worrying over the fit of a new skirt.
But things begin to change when she’s asked to mentor Daisy (Lucy Halliday), a recently arrived Pearl Girl—Aunt Lydia’s term for a foreigner who has come to Gilead seeking to convert and commit to its way of life—from Canada, who has a painful history and secrets of her own. As the two grow closer, Daisy’s forthrightness leads Agnes to begin to question the world around her in ways that threaten to change her life and future forever.
THE TESTAMENTS – “Perfect Teeth” – As Agnes begins the rituals that mark her coming of age, she struggles with the confusing stirrings of adolescence. Meanwhile, Daisy is subjected to Gilead’s system of discipline. (Disney/Russ Martin)
AMY SEIMETZ
One of the most remarkable things about “The Testaments” is that, for all its dystopian setting and authoritarian trappings, it’s actually a fairly relatable and compelling teen drama. Yes, it takes place in a nightmarish hellscape where most of the girls at its center don’t know enough about the world around them to recognize everything that they’re missing out on. (Like freedom and bodily autonomy.)
Yet, many of its plot beats are still deeply familiar: The girls get jealous of one another’s successes, have crushes they shouldn’t, and stress about meeting the expectations of others. In fact, they often seem so normal that it’s genuinely shocking when they suddenly parrot the familiar talking points of their government about things like gender traitors and fallen women. But over the course of the season’s ten episodes, they find increasing ways (both subtle and not so much) to finally claim their own power.
Infiniti makes for a capable lead, walking a fine line between Gilead golden girl and traditional teen, engaging in small acts of rebellion, resenting the adults in her life (particularly her unkind stepmother), and questioning the truth of the parentage she’s been kept from. (Like many in Gilead, she is technically the daughter of a Handmaid.) But it is Halliday who steals the show, her Daisy a mass of contradictions and rage, who finds herself much more attached to the girls at Aunt Lydia’s than she ever expected to be.
The show has a strong ensemble feel, and the friendships among the girls at its center feel lived-in and relatable, despite the horrific circumstances in which they unfold. Mattea Conforti is a particular standout as Agnes’s Gilead BFF Becka, and Rowan Blanchard offers some surprisingly satisfying comedic moments as group gossip Shunammite.
“The Testaments” is many things: A political cautionary tale, a warning against both complicity and complacency, a love letter to friendship, and a welcome reminder of the power of teenage girls to change the world. If the lessons of “The Handmaid’s Tale” revolved around a single woman’s ability to fight for change, here that work is transformed into a group effort—and a necessary reminder that even in the bleakest of times, we’re stronger than we are apart.
All ten episodes screened for review. Premieres April 8 on Hulu.
- “It Became a Dark Place”: Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear on “Killers of the Flower Moon” (April 2, 2026)
Cinematic depictions of Native tragedy have historically been fraught with questions over authenticity, realism, and empathy; this was doubly true of Martin Scorsese‘s most recent film to date, 2023’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which dramatized David Grann’s eponymous book chronicling the Reign of Terror against members of the Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma. To counteract the usual blinders white artists often exhibit when telling Native stories, Scorsese and the film’s producers took great care to collaborate with the Osage in all aspects of production, ensuring that Osage were heavily represented on both sides of the camera.
But one of the first people who needed convincing was Geoffrey Standing Bear, Principal Chief of the Osage Nation since 2014, who had worked with Grann while researching his book but was wary of a film adaptation. “The first and most important thing was [preserving] the Osage language,” says Chief Standing Bear, but they could not get a commitment from some of the movie’s initial producers. Soon after, the producers brought in Scorsese, and with less than 24 hours’ notice, he was in the front room at the Osage tribal headquarters talking with Chief Standing Bear. “We hit it off immediately.”
Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth’s script recentered the narrative from Grann’s more clinical investigation into the murders, which led to the creation of the FBI, towards the personal tragedies and betrayals of duplicitous whites (in particular, Robert De Niro‘s William Hale and Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Ernest Burkhart) against the Osage they cozied up to, then murdered for their oil rights. The bizarre love story between Ernest and his Osage wife, Mollie, played by Lily Gladstone in an Oscar-nominated performance, became the film’s emotional center, a study in ambiguity between two people who love each other, even as one slowly tries to kill the other and eradicate her family.
“Killers of the Flower Moon” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023 and would go on to receive ten Oscar nominations. Despite its broad critical acclaim and the surfacing of discussions around Native representation on screen, it was a disappointment at the box office, and questions have abounded for years about whether a physical release was possible. Fortunately, thanks to the Criterion Collection, the film received a gorgeous 4K physical release earlier this month, with special features including new documentaries with Scorsese, Osage cultural consultants (including Chief Standing Bear), and others, as well as archival interviews and docs on the arresting final shot in the film and Noah Kemohah’s cover art for the disk.
Chief Standing Bear was kind enough to have a conversation with RogerEbert.com on the week of the physical disk release, at the moment he saw his own copy, to talk about the experience of consulting on the film, how Scorsese assuaged his fears of exploitation, and the frustrating lack of progress the Osage Nation has experienced in the wake of its release.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
It’s been a couple of years since the film came out; what memories do you have of the film’s reception, especially its Oscar attention?
CHIEF STANDING BEAR: I think it’s important that people understand that this is a true story. During the Academy Awards process, we met people who said they would not vote for “Killers of the Flower Moon” because it was just too outrageous. We had to convince them and say, “No, this really was a true story”; it’s a story that would be shocking to a casual observer, but for us, it’s been part of our history for 100 years. That was one issue we took seriously and tried to correct.
But we also learned that once the press and PR teams start going in a direction, that’s the direction they want to go, and that’s the way it’s going to be. So we kept ourselves generally within our culture, with our songs and our language. You saw that one of our drum groups was nominated for the Best Original Song Academy Award, with Scott George; that’s when we really started to come out again.
Speaking of which, that final shot is still so arresting, with the glib, clinical radio play giving way to the Osage dancing to the Oscar-nominated song “Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People).” Which, as I understand, was constructed originally rather than being a distinct Osage ceremony or tradition.
The filming was done on the streets of Pawhuska, where I live in Oklahoma, which were designed, built, or restored to resemble the streets of Fairfax, Oklahoma, during the 1920s, a town 25 miles from here. The excitement showed itself. When people wanted to have a big ceremonial dance at the end, we couldn’t have a real ceremony. But they asked, “What about a powwow?” Some said, “Well, those are fun and light; this is a serious story.” So they decided to do whatever they could and enjoy themselves.”
You’ll see at the end of the movie that the Osage are dancing and celebrating, and my initial response was, “Why are we celebrating this? The movie is not really a happy ending, because it’s a true, tragic story.” But the younger people pointed out to me and others, “Uncle Geoff, it’s not what you’re thinking. What Marty Scorsese is doing is showing that we are still here, and that itself is a cause for celebration.” As usual, the younger people understood what was going on better than my generation, and that moment was created by Marty Scorsese and the Osage people who were participating—the singers, dancers, and families who supported it. I remember that very well.
In your estimation, what impact have you seen in the Osage community or other Native communities in terms of visibility, or any of the social or political goals the Osage have in the years since the film came out?
None! I was at an event this morning, welcoming economic development directors from Oklahoma here in our hotel and casino. I brought that up, not knowing you were going to ask this question. I thanked everyone for the acknowledgments, but then said, “Let’s talk about the missed opportunities.” As I explained this morning, in March 2020, my directors and top staff told me there was no meat or food because COVID had shut down the meat-processing plants in our area, as well as in Colorado and Texas. Our casinos ended up closing. All the momentum we’d built and the creativity of working together were put on pause for months, and the movie packed up and moved away. We didn’t know if they were coming back.
We did not have the talent base you may have in New York or Los Angeles. Our actors, older and younger, go to New York City and elsewhere to join other artists. Once they leave, we have a hard time keeping them all here. So today, in this meeting, I chose that as the subject, zeroing in on the Fairfax and Grey Horse community leaders themselves to use “Flower Moon,” as some other communities have done, to drive tourism. That’s what we’re working on.
I’m sure that feels frustrating, that so much work and care went into your participation and the community’s participation in the picture, to not have it yield the rewards you hoped you’d have in terms of keeping Native talent in Oklahoma and generating revenue in the state.
We do have talent here, and there are folks who did stay. But some now live in the Northwest United States, and that’s the way it is. We have tribes that have developed relationships with producers and directors, but nothing like what Marty Scorsese and the team had with us. That was pretty special.
What made it special for you? I know there was a concerted effort to ensure the Osage participated in every aspect of the production process, and I’m sure the festival process was surreal.
It’s worth noting that none of this is sponsored by the Osage Nation; this is a private endeavor. But we had 100 extras, and Osage people were working behind the camera. We had people working with world-class cinematographers like Rodrigo Prieto and set designer Jack Fisk. Fisk, he would just sit around like a regular guy. I didn’t know who he was. I went up to him, and he goes, “Yeah, I’m a set designer.” “What movies have you worked on?” “Have you seen ‘The Revenant’?” Which I love. He goes, “That’s me.”
These people are just regular, nice, talented people, very special. I met a lot of the people who picked who would be in the movie and what they would do. I was so impressed by how professional they were, how hard they worked, and how wonderful they are as people. There was just an incredible energy. It’s an experience of a lifetime.
I’m sure the festival process was surreal as well.
I asked Chad Renfro, an Osage who is familiar with the artistic world [and Consulting Producer on “Killers of the Flower Moon”], “Where are we going with all this? They’re going to be coming here, but you keep talking about going out into the film community and openings in New York,” and he says we’re going to Cannes from here. That we’d start at the top and work our way back. We did, and it was the most amazing thing to see Osages going down that red carpet, stopping in front of the 300 cameras and posing this way and that.
Someone from Apple yelled at me, “Chief, go!” But my leg injury made it hard, so I just decided I was going to take a beeline down this giant red carpet and look straight ahead. I did it, and didn’t trip or fall. The cameras parted, and I walked right up those steps. And what an experience that was, in that theater, and all the stars and celebrities that were all there. I haven’t really sat down and decompressed that after all these years, but I hold a lot of nice memories here. It was something I’ve never seen.
It must have been interesting for you, especially as a politician who’s familiar with advocating for your community in local and national settings, to suddenly step foot in a global context, much less in a cultural or artistic space like that.
And remember, there was an actor’s and writer’s strike going on at the time. So without them, they asked us to step up to represent the film. I remember at the Academy Awards, seeing our nominated singers and their families pack into 13 limousines and drive off to the Dolby Theater to practice for that evening’s on-stage presentation. To see all of our traditional singers, the women wearing their traditional blankets, in West Hollywood, doing that isn’t something you see every day.
What was your collaboration with Scorsese and the producers like? What was the overall feeling you had in how to incorporate Osage elements, and make sure depictions didn’t just shoot for “authenticity,” but to have an active voice in the shaping of it?
I’ll sum it up in one moment at the Cannes premiere, where they sat me next to my new friend, Robert De Niro. We were watching the movie, and he came on, speaking Osage very loudly and addressing the Osage characters. I remember he was sitting to my right, and I remember putting my hand on his left forearm, like “well done.” And he put his right hand over my hand. It was a nice acknowledgment. I think we all hit it just right; the language and the dress, the film, the actors, the audience, everybody there. That was a significant moment for me. It was pretty awesome.
While the initial release may not have had the effect you hoped for in achieving the Osage’s political goals, how does it feel to have the film finally in a physical format? For a while there, we didn’t think we’d ever get this anywhere but streaming. And you’re featured in a couple of the special features.
My daughter told me that. I can tell you, Marty and I really got to like each other as people, and during these interviews, they just had me talk, whether I knew the cameras were recording or not. I was looking at a young man around your age, and I started asking him, “You talking to me? You talking to me?” because he was trying to talk to Marty and me. And Marty told me that Bob De Niro ad-libbed that line in “Taxi Driver.” Which I thought was amazing, and the kind of fun you have to have when talking about such a serious subject.
Yeah, as I understand it, the murders were a subject the Osage had been reticent to talk about until now.
Absolutely. But I can tell you, everything about Marty Scorsese’s aura of artistic talent and kindness is just beautiful. And we have to mention David Grann, who is the author of the book. He started his research work with Catherine Redcorn, now deceased, and then went into the Grey Horse community with other Osage elders and really put the subject, which we don’t talk about, to the forefront. So now we’re talking about it. Thirty years ago, you and I would be having this conversation out of concern that we’re going to offend families whose elders, their ancestors, were murdered. That’s one thing the movie’s done: through David, then Marty, it became a subject we could talk about, to a limited extent. We still avoid making speeches about it, especially regarding certain families. That’s not proper protocol.
Really, this is all about that one gang over in the Grey Horse/Fairfax area. The whole reservation was rampant with crime, money, alcohol, and death. It became a dark place.
I’m glad there’s an opportunity to air these injustices and have the story told, especially by the Osage. It’s also heartening to see Noah Kemohah’s artwork from the theatrical posters transferred to the Criterion disk.
This is the first I’ve seen of the disk, and the art is great. We’re all artistic; all Native tribes are artistic. Except for me, I can’t draw a circle. But I’m surrounded by people who make great art.
- Female Filmmakers in Focus: Sophy Romvari on “Blue Heron” (April 1, 2026)
An emotionally autobiographical work in line with the filmmaker’s previous short films, which straddle the world of creative nonfiction, Sophy Romvari’s debut feature film “Blue Heron” mines her family’s own painful history to craft a tender film that expands the potential of what a coming-of-age film can be.
Blurring the lines between the past and the present, the film follows eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven), who, along with her Hungarian immigrant parents and her three siblings, has relocated to Vancouver Island in the late 1990s. As the family adjusts to their new surroundings, her oldest brother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) begins to display potentially dangerous behavioral issues.
A Canadian-Hungarian filmmaker based in Toronto, Romvari has spent the last decade making powerful, personal films that explore the tenuous connections we all have with time and with memory itself. Romvari studied film at Capilano University and holds an MFA from York University. Her highly acclaimed short film “Still Processing,” which was her thesis film at York, examines the unresolved grief held by her family over the death of her two older brothers. Her short films have screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, Hot Docs, Sheffield Doc/Fest, and True/False. They have been featured as a collection on Criterion Channel and in a retrospective at the Museum of Moving Image.
Writing out of the film’s world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival, where it won the Swatch First Feature Award, Robert Daniels praised the unique structure of “Blue Heron,” finding that it was made with a “startlingly raw vulnerability” and that it “hits with such precision, it could break you open from the inside.” A few weeks later, the film had its Canadian premiere as part of the Centrepiece program at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the Best Canadian Discovery Award.
“Blue Heron” has played festivals all over the world, including the Vancouver International Film Festival, the International Film Festival of India, the Bangkok International Film Festival, and the San Sebastián Film Festival, and was named the Best First Feature and awarded the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award from the Toronto Film Critics Association.
For this month’s Female Filmmakers in Focus column, RogerEbert.com spoke to Romvari over Zoom about how images and image-making impact our experience of time and memory, why making short films is the best way to build up your filmmaking prowess, and being part of a lineage of women who use personal filmmaking as a way to reflect on issues of society at large.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
I first saw your film at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall. I didn’t know the plot going in, and it quietly destroyed me because when I was a teenager, I also had emotional issues, and I ended up in foster care. I was like Sasha’s brother. I was like Jeremy. So, watching this film brought up a lot of emotions and made me think about what it was like for my brother to be my sibling while I was going through all of that.
I think this is a movie that taps into some deeply unnameable emotions. You’ve taken this film around to several festivals, so I wondered if you’ve had other people come up to you and talk about how it touched them in similar ways, even though it is so personal to your experience?
Thank you for sharing that story with me. It means a lot to me, especially when people who relate more to Jeremy than to any other character connect with the film. Because I think that was the intangible thing that I couldn’t know. When you’re representing an experience outside yourself, you don’t know how it’s gonna be reflected for other people. So it means a lot that you felt a reflection in that experience.
It has actually been a very heavy film to release, for obvious reasons, but also because of the reactions from the people who have been watching it. I feel like I’m carrying a lot of emotional response, which is such a gift, but it’s also very heavy, because it almost comes with guilt, in a way. I’m seeing people’s very emotional reactions, and people are telling me very difficult things that maybe were locked inside them, and to make something that allows people to have that response is a privilege. But also as a human being, I’m like, whoa.
I feel like the only other film that hits on this deep of a level, and I mean this as the highest of compliments, is Spielberg’s “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.” Every time I watch that movie. I don’t know what it evokes, but I have to, like, hold myself in a corner for a few days. I had the exact same experience both times I watched your film.
“A.I.” makes me sob every time too. I just re-watched it, actually. I wouldn’t say it was a reference, but there’s a spiritual connection. It’s funny because I believe it was the first film I ever saw in a movie theater.
Wow.
Because I grew up on a really tiny island, not Vancouver Island, another smaller island where there wasn’t a movie theater. So it wasn’t until I was older that I started going to movie theaters. I watched that film with my mom. So it definitely had an effect on me, and Spielberg in general. The way he shows life and the world from a child’s perspective. “A.I.” is one of the best movies.
I really tried to focus on depicting my point of view as a sibling, because that was a perspective I hadn’t seen this kind of story be told from, and it also was the perspective I felt I had the most authorship over, and I didn’t want to speak for my brother or my parents. But obviously, I can’t depict my own experience in a vacuum. So, it’s been interesting to see people respond in relation to all of the different characters like this. There are the siblings who respond, having related to that experience; there are the Jeremys; and then there are the parents.
The parents are really difficult. Those conversations have been quite difficult. I’ve met quite a few people who’ve lost children. Or siblings who have lost siblings. There is a communal catharsis that I feel occurs. During Q&As, people are vulnerable and open up about these, like, really difficult things, which is so beautiful. But as a filmmaker, I don’t always have the tools to respond the way I want to. I know they’re responding to the movie, but I want to respond to their response in a way that validates their emotional experience, yet I don’t always feel like I have the right words. So it’s been an interesting and heavy experience for that reason.
Do you feel that through the making of your shorts, you were able to process a lot of the emotions in order to get to a point where you can make this feature film?
I do think I couldn’t have made this film, had I not made all the short films, both artistically and emotionally. I think I was trying all sorts of things and different filmmaking approaches in my short films, which helped me build confidence as a director. That experience gave me a lot of time to become comfortable with the topic, and I can talk about it much more easily now. That was the point from the beginning, not wanting to repress these feelings and experiences. I spent so long making those short films that I really, by the time I got to make the feature, I felt like I could really focus just on the craft.
There are some edits in this film that are so beautiful, where you feel like you’re in one moment, and then it reveals you’re actually different. Like when you think you’re watching the heron fly, but it’s actually Jeremy watching the heron fly on the TV. You do that a couple of times, where the edit unmoors the viewer.
I think I’m always interested in moments in films that upend your expectation of what you’re watching. Whose perspective is it? Where is the point of view coming from? I think that’s why I was excited about the structure: I could have just told the whole story from the past and watched this family come undone. But it was the perspective being switched from child to adulthood, which I experienced, and we all experience, that I found to be interesting. Because I could actually play with the expectations of the coming-of-age genre.
I think coming of age is not something that happens when you’re a child or a teenager; it happens when you’re an adult. Where you start to have self-awareness about your past and how it made you into the person you are. That’s my understanding of coming of age. I don’t think I really came of age until my twenties, when I started looking back on my past and understood why I became the person I am. The movie is, for me, as much about Jeremy and grief as it is about what makes a person who they are. I think I started to understand the obvious reasons why I became a filmmaker when I had that self-awareness.
There’s a scene where Jeremy’s making it snow with flour for his siblings while the Dad is taking photographs. When he is developing the film, he says, “Time is going backwards. It’s a time warp.” I love the way you incorporate film and photography, not only to capture time but also because an image can be an emotional time warp; you are then playing with all the different philosophical aspects of image-making. I’d love to hear how that’s part of you as an artist, and how it’s reflected in the film.
I love that you pointed out that scene, because I think it’s such an important moment. I think image-making is something I’m naturally drawn to because of my Dad and the way I grew up around someone who was always documenting everything around him, including me as a subject. So I think the photographic image became a part of my acknowledgement of reality, of that time existing. I think of documentation as a way of bearing witness to reality. Sometimes I really question my own reality and memories. I think photographs, the photographic image, feels like proof. My Dad has this huge archive of our family that proves that there was a time before everything happened that was so beautiful. Those images are so precious to me now.
When I made “Still Processing,” I was studying the photographic image, its impact, and how it depicts mortality. This has been written very eloquently by people far more academic than I, but it’s something I studied because I think it’s about the impact of seeing those images for the first time, for me, versus seeing the video images, and the video content was very different.
I think that’s why all of my films have been about characters who are obsessed with looking at the past and looking at old photographs, looking at old videos, and trying to come to terms with the past. I think “Blue Heron” is the first film where I finally feel it’s more about accepting than processing. Sasah comes to a place where she ultimately can’t do anything about the past anymore, and she’s just coming to a place of acceptance. The photographs thematically are part of that story.
When you come to accept the past, you still carry bits of it with you, right? For Sasha, there’s the blue heron keychain that Jeremy gave her, and she also has her mom’s evil eye in her car. So she’s carrying her whole family and that whole thing with her, even as she moves forward as a person.
You’re the first person to point out the evil eye. No one else has noticed that. We tried to infuse subtle inheritances. Things that she had from her past. She’s wearing a t-shirt that Jeremy wore earlier in the film when she’s making breakfast. These little things that were hand-me-downs or from her parents.
I really was trying to show, in her childhood, the things her parents were teaching her, and then, in the second half, you see them being applied. So she’s cooking with her mom as a kid, and then later, you see her making her own breakfast. Little parallels like that. Or in the first half of the film, you see the mom recording the conversation with the psychiatrist without his knowledge. Then Sasha does the same in the second half, using her iPhone while speaking with her parents. The dad literally handing her the camera is just a very literal metaphor of this being handed down to her.
So I was trying to show the ways that you are shaped by your circumstances, but also by your parents and who they are. I think a lot about nature versus nurture, especially in relation to my brother, who grew up in the same environment but had such different outcomes in our lives. I feel like I carry a lot of survivor’s guilt in that I wonder why my life turned out this way, and his turned out that way. He did have a different father, but we grew up in the same circumstances. It’s something I feel like I can’t help but grapple with.
That is why I wanted to show the siblings’ point of view. But it was important that I admitted this is not a depiction of this person. This is just a fragmented attempt to show what I experienced. Jeremy’s only line in the movie, pretty much, is just, “I think there are a lot of things you don’t remember.” I acknowledge that this is a surface-level, impressionistic view of a person. This character is so dissimilar from my brother. There’s no way I could even begin to depict my brother. So it’s just emotionally autobiographical, and unless it’s actually footage of him, it’s never going to be accurate.
I think that line is really perceptive, just from my experience. My brother is a little bit older, but I remember everything that I went through because I went through it. But he doesn’t remember very much. I feel like his mind helped him get through it by just putting it in a box. So whenever I’m still working through stuff, he’s like, “Why are you still thinking about this?” And I’m like, “I don’t know. Why aren’t you?” It’s interesting how, with siblings, going through a lot of difficult emotions at a young age helps the body and mind develop coping mechanisms.
I thought about that a lot. I would write scenes that I had a vague memory of, but then I would speak to my parents, and they would say what I had written was so misremembered. They were like, “That’s not how that happened at all. It was much more extreme.” There were just variations, and I couldn’t believe how much I didn’t remember. Once I realized that, I decided it didn’t matter. It’s about what makes sense narratively and cinematically, and how I am going to depict it to move the story forward. It didn’t matter anymore if it was true or exactly how it happened, because if you honor that too much, then you’re creatively limiting yourself. So I just threw that out the window.
There are some needle drops in this film that are literally two of my favorite songs of all time. When King Crimson’s “I Talk To The Wind” came on, I gasped in the theater. But also “Some Things Last a Long Time” by Daniel Johnson at the end was just so beautiful. Every song by him makes me cry.
I could do a whole lecture on music supervision, because it’s so hard to find songs that you can even relatively afford. And music was so important to me. The entire atmosphere of the film stemmed from the diegetic music playing in the house. When I looked back at the videos my dad had taken, there was always music playing in the background that sounded like a musical score. So I tried to implement that in the film in the same way, where the music is coming from a source, and it’s not a musical score in the movie, but it creates the atmosphere of a musical score in the household. That was a big part of the dad’s character in the film. He’s always at a distance, but he’s creating an artistic atmosphere for the kids to live within.
So all the music was based more or less on my dad’s taste, which obviously became my own. I was talking a lot to my brother about things we remember Dad playing, and just how our tastes have all melded together. Like, I went to see the movie “The Devil and Daniel Johnson” with my parents in a theater. They loved Daniel Johnson as well. So I think all the music was little hidden love letters to my parents and acknowledgements of the impact that their tastes have had on me. Both of them are very artistic people who also love movies, and it had a big impact on me. But it was hard because it was very expensive, so we had to raise extra funds just for the music.
You bring a touch of quasi-documentary filmmaking to the scene with the social workers. I think one of the main things most people don’t have to grapple with, if they don’t have issues as a teenager, is the social services system. But having gone through it, I can say it’s a horrible system. I think it’s horrible everywhere. I don’t know why, I don’t know if there’s an answer. I like that you didn’t necessarily look for an answer. You just looked for various ways it can fail, or for the fact that there are so many variables in these kinds of situations that the system can’t cover them all.
It’s so complicated, and from a systemic perspective, we just do not have an answer. I think having grown up with a heavy presence of social services coming in and out of my house with different suggestions and solutions that never really brought any kind of relief to anybody, but also witnessing really caring, loving people who were trying to do their best within their limited roles, I really wanted to show that juxtaposition. The people within those systems are often well-intentioned, but within government systems and their limitations, all these things converge and create a very broken system where it’s so easy for people to fall through the cracks. I did so much research on social services and on psychology. I spoke to various experts while writing the script, and every single person said the same thing: there was no good answer for these things.
I even spoke to a specialist whose entire psychological research was around siblings who grew up with siblings who had extreme behavioral issues. That was his exact focus. He has a child who is very similar to my brother, who is like Jeremy. This is his entire focus, and yet, as a parent, it still happened in his family. I really wanted to show a very specific example of it, which is my own, but I know that it’s not that unique, you know? I think everyone feels isolated in their experiences. Parents, especially, feel very isolated in their experiences. They feel like they fucked up. They ask, “What did we do wrong?” And the system forces you to feel that way. Then, as someone like yourself, going through the system, you feel like you’re the scapegoat for the problems. It really is a problem that I think there is nowhere to really place the blame, except for potentially the government.
It was important to me that the social workers in the film were real social workers and experts, because I wanted them to speak for themselves, which is why we cast them. It wasn’t because I wanted a documentary aspect to the film. I need them to speak from their professional experience. I did a test shoot with social workers, and I played Sasha. We did the whole conversation, which ended with them saying, “Even now, twenty years later, we don’t have a much better response to this.” It was important that it was actually baked into the reality, not just me writing a script.
Your film is wonderfully empathetic with how the parents feel. Even though they’re trying to get help and social services are trying to help them, they still feel like they’re bad parents. She says social services thinks she’s a bad mom. When I was a teenager, I didn’t think that my parents felt like they were bad parents, but I realized when I got older, I was in foster care. Of course, they felt like they were bad parents. You have to get older to realize how your parents even felt about you growing up, let alone how you felt about your parents. I think this is a film that had to have been made when you were older, so that you could have that perspective. I’m glad you waited until you had that perspective, so that it could be a fuller portrait.
If I had made this when I was twenty-five, it would have been much more angry and confused and in the middle of everything. I think I needed the time and the space to actually make the film, not just emotionally, but artistically as well. Back then, it wouldn’t be as coherent. I think a lot of people are rushing to make their first feature before they’re thirty, or whatever, but I highly recommend making shorts until you feel you actually have something to say.
How do you hope people will feel when the film is over?
I hope they feel okay. I’ve been asked, “What do you want people to take from it?” But I don’t want people to feel a certain way. If they happen to feel moved by it, I hope they feel open to it and accepting of those feelings, however they choose to process them. It’s a very personal film that I think I’ve opened up to the world, and I made it with the hope that people could connect to it, and it’s so clear to me that this film is emotionally resonating with a lot of people, but it would be strange if it did that for everybody.
Were there any films by other women filmmakers that either inspired you or that you think not enough people have seen?
A film I only discovered while prepping this film, after a friend recommended it, was Martha Coolidge’s 1976 “Not A Pretty Picture.” I bring it up specifically because you said it’s underseen. It was only restored in 2022 and had such a small release. Watching it now, it’s crazy to me how much of an impact it clearly had, even somehow subconsciously, on so many filmmakers. It’s doing the hybrid techniques so elegantly, and it’s from fifty years ago. There are some films made before it that are hybrid, of course. But I think the way she’s balancing the fiction, the emotional catharsis, and the personal filmmaking is incredible.
I’m in a long line of women, specifically, who make work based on processing their pasts, especially within systemic harm and societal issues, using themselves as a vessel to discover those things. When I saw that film, it just made me feel like I was in conversation with a film that I had not even seen. It made me feel like there is something very specific and special about the way that women use film. There’s a whole history behind that, and it’s an honor to be in a historical conversation with these other films that, for some reason, women are drawn to making.
Coolidge’s film also helped me feel more confident in my own film’s structure. Because I think the way that she’s using cross-cutting makes a lot of sense for that movie, but it made me realize that what I was trying to do was actually different. I really wanted to show time being ripped away from someone. I think when you cross-cut, you actually cradle time, and you don’t have that same effect of time disappearing. That’s why I wanted to avoid cross-cutting between the two timelines. I wanted it to be a jarring bifurcation in the middle where you’re suddenly in adulthood. Sometimes it’s affirming to watch something you love, doing something in a way that affirms a decision to do the same thing differently.
- The Unloved, Part 148: High-Rise (April 1, 2026)
(Editor’s note: If you have the time/money, please help Scout finance his independent film “Stubborn Beast” in the wake of an investor dropping out last minute. Details at his GoFundMe.)
My friend Jim Gabriel died in 2023, and a curious thing happened. His many friends and fans were forced to center their grief as a wave of text online, as almost none of us lived near him. It’s a peculiar thing that happens now in the age of social media. There’s a sort of absence now in the grieving process because we meet so many people who come to mean so much to us, and we may never ever sit across from each other. I met him in person only once, at a party in Brooklyn in 2015, I think. His face beamed, joyous under the beard and the ubiquitous cap. He struggled with illness, he had money troubles, and he was like any of us. There were ups and downs, but Jim was always Jim, and he was thus always a pleasure.
His righteous anger at hypocrisy and the horrible lows of the American experiment were a small beacon in a fog. He was always so much fun to talk to and not just about the thing that brought us into each other’s orbit in the first place, some 15 years ago: movies. Jim went to bat for the obscure and the beloved alike: “The Right Stuff,” “Thief,” “Trainspotting,” “All That Jazz,” “Sherman’s March,” “Drugstore Cowboy.” But we bonded, as I must with my peers, about the stuff nobody liked. And it was, I have no trouble admitting, just Jim’s love of the movie “High-Rise” that got me to reconsider it.
For years after seeing it, I had this nagging feeling that the movie, which struck me as running on fumes by the end, when I went to a New York press screening, was maybe more than the sum of its parts, but I couldn’t see it. Jim could. He spoke about the innovations of screenwriter Amy Jump, the peculiarity of Ben Wheatley’s direction, the combined force of their quirky sensibility and love of hard human comedy, with author J.G. Ballard’s sleek prose and despairing vision of an anemic England entering the future with no idea what it meant or where physically that meant they were headed. I couldn’t see what Jim saw, but that Jim saw it was enough, and so for years my memory of it changed, improved, and then finally I watched it again. And again. And again.
And not only did I start to see its charming overreach as essential to its success, but I also felt like I was watching a movie with my pal, something I never got to do. Art can always be a bridge from the other side, if we allow ourselves ways of seeing. It’s a privilege to have this film to share with him, in his memory. And it’s made me love Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump even more.
- “Help Me To Find Kokumo”: A Guide To Beyond Chicago (March 30, 2026)
Since its inception in Los Angeles in 2013, Beyond Fest has gone on to establish itself as the largest film festival in the United States focusing primarily on horror, science fiction, fantasy and related genres, presenting a consistently strong program of new releases (including a number of premieres), retrospective screenings, shorts programs, special guests and the proverbial much, much more. For those of us not based on the West Coast, their programs have been a consistent source of envy for many movie fans.
To that end, Beyond Fest has at long last decided to spread its goodness into a different time zone. From April 2-5, they, in conjunction with MUBI, will be presenting Beyond Chicago, a program of 30 titles ranging from the first local looks at a number of highly touted films to a number of cult classics, a number of them presented in the miracle of 35MM, all of which will be showing at the city’s most hallowed movie palace, the Music Box Theatre.
The festival kicks off on April 2 with the local premiere of “Obsession,” the new film from Curry Barker, who made a splash in 2024 when his $800 YouTube feature “Milk & Serial” garnered a lot of attention from the horror press, who wondered what he might be able to accomplish with a larger budget. For his follow-up, he gives us the story of an amiable goof (Michael Johnston) who is desperately in love with his childhood friend/co-worker (Inde Navarette), but while she cares for him, it is clearly only as a friend.
One day, he goes into a novelty shop and finds a “One Wish Willow,” a tchotchke that allegedly grants the user one wish. As it turns out, a.) the thing actually works and b.) wishing for someone to feel undying love for you without any sort of consent is perhaps not the wisest of ideas. Judging from the response that the film has already received following its screenings at Toronto (where it was the center of a bidding war that saw it sold to Focus Features, who will be releasing it on May 15) and SXSW, it would seem as if he has indeed lived up to the promise of his earlier work.
For the Closing Night slot on April 5, the fest will be holding the World Premiere screening of another eagerly anticipated title, “Faces of Death,” Daniel Goldhaber’s reimagining of the 1978 “Mondo Cane” riff that was little more than a collection of scenes of people dying in any number of gruesome ways that, if you believed the hype from everyone from moral watchdogs to the kid on the playground who snuck a look at an older sibling’s copy, were real. (Spoiler Alert: Most of them were obvious fakes.)
Rather than redo the faux-documentary schtick, Goldhaber and co-writer Isa Mazzei (both of whom will be on hand for a post-screening Q&A) have reconceived it as an overtly fictional narrative, in which a video platform moderator investigates whether or not a series of apparent snuff videos are merely fakes or something much worse, starring the likes of Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery, Jermaine Fowler and—because you can hardly say to have a major film festival in 2026 without her appearing on your screen at some point, the increasingly-ubiquitous pop goddess Charli XCX.
Among the other major titles on the program, Ben Wheatley’s “Normal” (4/3) finds Bob Odenkirk (who will be appearing along with co-writer/producer Derek Kolstad) once again stepping into the role of unlikely action hero, this time as the sheriff of a seemingly bucolic Midwestern town who finds himself running afoul of all the locals (including the likes of Henry Winkler and Lena Headey) in the wake of a bank robbery that goes sideways.
The carnage continues with Kenji Tanigaki’s “The Furious” (4/4), a martial arts thriller about a seemingly ordinary father (Xie Miao) whose daughter is kidnapped by child traffickers and who teams up with a journalist (Joe Taslim) to rescue her and other abducted children in the most bone-crunching ways imaginable.
In “One Spoon of Chocolate” (4/4), the latest work from musical icon-turned-writer/director RZA (scheduled to take part in a post-screening Q&A), a former military veteran (Shameik Moore) is released from prison and relocates to his small Ohio hometown to make a new life, only to run afoul of a group of local racist goons in a series of confrontations that quickly and violently escalate in the tradition of the classic blaxsploitation films of old.
Even more blood spills in “Over Your Dead Body” (4/5), a remake of the Norwegian dark comedy “I Onde Dager” from Jorma Taccone (currently scheduled to attend) about a couple (Jason Segel and Samara Weaving) who go off to spend some time at a secluded cabin to fix their fraying marriage, not realizing that a.) each is actually planning to do away with the other and b.) an unforeseen twist will force them both to put their plans on hold, at least temporarily.
On the documentary front, “Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth And Nothing Butt” (4/2) recounts the story of the legendary 1980s underground band co-founded by Gibby Hanes and Paul Leary, both of whom will be on hand for the screening along with director Tom Stern, and charts the ways in which they would go on to influence alternative culture for years to come.
Of the bigger new titles, perhaps the most intriguing is “Rose of Nevada” (4/2), the latest work from Mark Jenkin, whose last film, “Enys Men” (2022) was a quietly but deeply unsettling low-fi thriller about a wildlife volunteer whose stay on a supposedly uninhabited island to observe a rare flower begins to take on the form of a waking nightmare. In this one, which, like its predecessor, was shot in 16MM to give it a grainy, tactile look, an empty fishing boat (whose name supplies the film’s title) turns up on the shore of a fishing village in Cornwall 30 years after it set out and never returned.
Although the fates of those on board remain a mystery, the boat’s owner (Edward Rowe) nevertheless elects to put it back to work, a move that seems like a spectacularly bad idea even before the discovery of the words “Get off the boat now” carved into the wood below deck. However, two young men—financially struggling family man Nick (George McKay) and drifter Liam (Callum Turner)—sign on for some quick and much-needed cash and ship out with an appropriately grizzled captain (Francis Magee) for a few days of fishing.
What happens next, I will not even hint at to allow you to discover for yourself. Suffice it to say, something happens—something strange and disturbing that the two men find themselves responding to in increasingly different ways. Although one could easily imagine the basic elements gathered here being put to the service of a traditional horror narrative, that is not what Jenkins has given viewers. Instead, as he did so memorably with “Enys Men,” he is less concerned with creating standard-issue “BOO!” moments designed to get viewers jumping than with creating a moody cinematic dreamscape where the line between reality and nightmare is so blurred that the audience is just as baffled as the characters are regarding which is which.
Those who are in the mood for cheap shocks and gallons of gore may grow frustrated with the film’s enigmatic tone and low body count (unless you include the fish). However, those looking for something that is both undeniably strange and quietly disturbing—particularly if you were an admirer of “Enys Men”—should make an effort to check this one out.
On the retrospective front, the festival is offering up a canny mix of fan favorites and odd obscurities. Before appearing at the screening of “Normal,” Bob Odenkirk will be hosting a showing of a 35MM print of “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” (4/3), Joseph Sargent’s enormously entertaining thriller about a New York subway train being held for ransom featuring Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam, Jerry Stiller and one of the greatest final moments in screen history.
Similarly, before his screening of “One Spoon of Chocolate,” RZA will be presenting “The Kid with the Golden Arm” (4/4), Chen Chang’s 1979 period martial arts epic about members of a security firm transporting a fortune in gold taels through a stretch of land filled with a wide assortment of dangerous criminals intent on stealing it all.
The festival will also host the world premiere of the new 4K restoration of the 2008 screen adaptation of “Speed Racer” (4/3), with co-writer/director Lilly Wachowski participating in a pre-screening Q&A.
Iconic Japanese cult actress Meiko Kaji will be making her first Chicago appearance for screenings of three of her classic films—the world premiere of the 2K restoration of “Silver Butterfly 2: She-Cat Gambler” (4/3), a revenge thriller in which she co-stars with Sonny Chiba, and a double-feature of “Lady Snowblood” and “Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41” (4/4), two visually stylish and super-bloody action epics that would serve as key influences for Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” saga.
For the late-night crowd, there will be a midnight screening of Paul Morrissey’s still-jaw-dropping horror-comedy hybrid “Flesh for Frankenstein” (4/4), in the miracle of 3D, to serve as a tribute to the late, great Udo Kier, who delivered one of the most unhinged performances of his career—which, if you are familiar with his career, says a lot—as the mad doctor looking to create a new master race with the help of the severed head of Joe Dallesandro.
If that wasn’t enough, thanks to sponsor MUBI, the festival will also be presenting a number of free screenings, though tickets are still required for admission. “Camp” (4/3) tells the story of a seemingly cursed young woman who goes off to work as a counselor at a camp for troubled youth but cannot shake her sense of doom. “The Yeti” (4/3) follows a team assembled to search for a tycoon and an adventurer who have gone missing in a harsh stretch of northern Alaska, only to find themselves in the territory of the titular creature.
“Flush” (4/3) is an outrageous French entry in which a guy runs afoul of the wrong people and finds himself left for dead with his head stuck in a squat toilet and struggling with everything from possible drowning to an attack by a drug-addled rat. “Phase” (4/4) is a British sci-fi film about a pregnant woman who, after being exiled from a space station, goes off in search of the father of her child.
“Bulk” (4/4) is another film from Ben Wheatley, this one a sci-fi mind-bender in which experiments in string theory go wildly out of control with increasingly surreal results. In “Imposters” (4/4), after a couple’s infant son is kidnapped, the mother discovers a way to bring the child back, but over time, the father becomes increasingly convinced that what she has brought back is not their son.
“The Kirlian Frequency” (4/5) is an Argentinian chiller about a radio show whose spooky and ostensibly fictional on-air tales are becoming a grisly reality. The first film produced by the company belonging to Indonesian action star Iko Uwais (best known here for the “Raid” films), “Ikatan Darah” (4/5) about a martial artist whose career was cut short by injury who is forced back into action when her brother runs afoul of a criminal syndicate.
“Cruel Hands” (4/5) is an Australian thriller about a woman who, along with her young son, escapes from her abusive husband to a remote farmhouse, where she eventually has to defend them against her husband, the police, and raging brushfires.
A trio of older titles is also part of the free series. “Blood Brothers (& Other Delights)” (4/4) is a collection of super-gross, zero-budget films made in the 1980s and traded through the mail by Mike Diana, an underground cartoonist whose self-published work, Boiled Angel, would lead to his conviction in the 1990s for artistic obscenity. “Small Kill” (1991) is an almost indescribably weird thriller about a degenerate psychopath—played by none other than Gary “Radar” Burghoff (who also co-directed the film—who goes around kidnapping children and killing them if their parents don’t cough up the ransom.
“Sheila and the Brainstem” (4/5) is a strange 1989 sci-fi satire about a guy who travels to a subterranean world where he finds the Brainstem, which he believes holds the power of immortality, only to have it stolen in a convenience store by a trio of punks who mistake it for beef jerky. In addition, there are two blocks of short films, “Strange Frequencies” (4/4) and “And Then What” (4/5).
As tantalizing as most of these titles may seem, I have saved the most notable part of the lineup—one that may go down as one of the must-see screening events of the year—for last. On April 5, the festival will be presenting the local premiere of “Boorman and the Devil,” the eagerly anticipated film from director David Kittredge (who will be in attendance) chronicling the wild history behind one of the strangest would-be blockbusters of the 1970s, “Exorcist II: The Heretic,” John Boorman’s infamous follow-up to the groundbreaking 1973 horror classic “The Exorcist.”
Presumably realizing that anyone watching “Boorman and the Devil” will then immediately want to seek out “Exorcist II” to see it for themselves, the festival is following up the documentary with a rare screening of an original 35MM print of the film, marking its first appearance on a Chicago screen in a long time. Although it received much derision back in the day and is usually regarded as one of the worst sequels ever made, its reputation has begun to improve over the years, with no less an authority than Martin Scorsese making a case for its worth.
Personally, I think the film is a straight-up masterpiece, one of the most audaciously bizarre American films of the Seventies—particularly for one produced on such an immense scale—and one that continues to look better with each passing year. (Disclaimer: Both I and fellow critic and Music Box’s own Steve Prokopy are featured in the doc.)
Scoff if you must, but I can assure you that it is a film that, once seen, you will never forget, and yes, I mean that in a good way. Besides, now that films like “Heaven’s Gate” and “Sorcerer” have gone on to finally receive the acclaim they deserved, we need another once-scorned auteurist epic reclamation project. I cannot think of a more deserving work.
Beyond Fest Chicago runs April 2-5 at the Music Box Theatre (3733 N. Southport). Tickets for the main screenings are on sale now. Tickets for the free screenings will be available to Music Box members on April 1 and to the general public on April 2. Tickets can be purchased online at musicboxtheatre.com. For additional information on the festival, go to beyondfest.com.
