Editor’s Word: This evaluation was initially revealed throughout the 2025 Sundance Movie Pageant. “Sunfish (& Different Tales on Inexperienced Lake” opens in choose theaters Friday, September 12.
The nice frustration with anthology movies — and the rationale I sink a little bit deeper into my seat each time I sit down to look at a brand new one — is that even the perfect of them are typically wildly uneven, the entire seldom better than the sum of some choose components. Enter: Sierra Falconer’s mild and languid “Sunfish (& Different Tales on Inexperienced Lake),” a set of wistfully effervescent vignettes that resists the same old highs and lows of its format by drawing a mild energy from the stillness of the water that runs by means of it.
Certainly, the 4 brief episodes that type this affecting debut circulate collectively so fluidly, the digicam passing its focus between them like a baton, that it might need been onerous to know the place one ends and the subsequent begins if not for the title playing cards that “Sunfish” consists of for context. The place most anthologies highlight every of their tales with the mono-focus of a slide projector, Falconer’s consideration drifts with the nice and cozy indifference of a roving sunbeam. Her characters don’t actually overlap in any literal respect, however they’re so sure collectively by a shared sense of place — and by the emergent realization that they’re all simply passing by means of it — that it seems like they’re all neatly interwoven collectively, particularly once they wrestle to attach with one another.
The primary of the 4 tales (“Sunfish”) introduces us to the hermetically sealed world through which the remainder of the movie will happen: a sun-dappled nook of northern Michigan so heavenly that it makes previous individuals wish to die there, and younger individuals really feel like they should dwell some other place. These energies collide when 14-year-old Lu (Maren Heary) is unexpectedly compelled to spend an indefinite period of time at her grandparents’ lake home; her mother has determined to marry her boyfriend, and Lu isn’t invited on the honeymoon. As an alternative of hanging out together with her buddies at residence, she’s going to spend her summer season with two loons.
Not her grandparents (a pair of very retired birders performed by Adam LeFevre and Marceline Hugot), however two precise loons — or a mama loon and her new child loonlet. Nan and Pop are as affected person with the lady as Falconer is with all her characters, and it’s quietly spellbinding to look at Lu discover the power to fend for herself similtaneously she initiatives her personal frustrations onto the aquatic fowl who appears to be abandoning her child. The parallels listed below are unsubtle, however Falconer’s delicate and impressively assured path smoothes them into one thing trustworthy, in order that even the moments that may appear apparent to us roil with self-revelation.
At a sure level, Lu finds herself staring on the wealthy youngsters over at Interlochen Arts Camp, and the subsequent time “Sunfish” cuts we discover ourselves following considered one of them as a substitute. His title is Jun (Jim Kaplan), he’s a violin prodigy, and his mother is pressuring him to be the primary chair of the Chicago Symphony by the point he’s 20. Jun doesn’t put on that residual obsession flippantly. Quite the opposite, he goes from zero to “Black Swan” within the span of some transient scenes, at the least till a fleeting second of social acceptance — even artwork camps have jocks, it seems — complicates the query of what he actually desires. Broad and underwritten the place “Sunfish” is so exact, “Summer time Camp” is the one stretch of the movie when the anthology of all of it rears its head. However the episode’s implosive nature additionally strengthens the overarching rigidity of the movie as a complete, which is that every one of those individuals are siloed into their very own tales, and into their very own disappointment, however they’re all linked by the shores of the identical lake, and a shared undertow they assume nobody else can really feel.
Nonetheless, it’s a aid that “Two Hearted” raises the stakes a little bit bit, as a single mom named Annie (Karsen Liotta, Ray’s daughter) will get greater than she bargained for when she takes an additional shift on the Inexperienced Lake bar the place she works. One among her drunker patrons that night time is a person named Finn (Dominic Bogart), and he fears that he’ll be forgotten, and decides that he desires to seize the enormous fish within the lake — a Loch Ness Monster-sized fable of a factor — within the hopes that its corpse could be his legacy. Funnily written and spirited in the best way that it unexpectedly careens right into a “Badlands”-esque caper through which this mismatched twosome discover themselves being hunted and searching suddenly, a folie à deux (have you ever ever heard that phrase earlier than?) born in response to the “black gap” of Inexperienced Lake. Annie is frightened of being caught in it ceaselessly; she says that even her three-year-old daughter is simply too huge for this city. Finn is aware of that he’ll by no means get out, however that’s all of the extra motive for him to do one thing magical whereas he’s nonetheless there.
Falconer provides him that probability earlier than downshifting for the ultimate story on this assortment, “Resident Fowl,” which is a few pair of sisters named Blue Jay (Tenley Kellogg) and Robin (Emily Corridor). Robin is getting ready to depart for varsity within the fall, and Blue Jay is struggling to separate her consideration between her beloved older sibling and the tweenage son of the boarder staying of their home. Probably the least eventful and most textured of the movie’s vignettes, this remaining chapter helps deliver “Sunfish” full circle, because it returns to the transitional feeling that outlined the episode that started with Lu being deserted by her mom.
Bittersweet and bluntly simple, “Resident Fowl” permits Falconer’s debut to wind down with the identical even keel that it started. It’s the right ending for an anthology whose tales aren’t the bricks on the heart of a constructing a lot as they’re the ripples on the floor of a lake, shuddering alive after which fading again all the way down to flatness so gently that it virtually seems like nothing had modified — or it could, if not for the truth that we’d seen it occur, and had come to understand that the water was by no means fairly as nonetheless because it appeared.
Grade: B
“Sunfish (& Different Tales on Inexperienced Lake)” premiered on the 2025 Sundance Movie Pageant. The Way forward for Movie Is Feminine opens the movie in choose theaters Friday, September 12.
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