Indie Film

The most honest thing in Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s Hot Spot is its real estate. Variety’s reviewer, no admirer of the film’s plotting, still surrendered to what the production design is doing: Anna Anosowicz builds humanity’s last compound out of existing midcentury brutalist architecture and far older ruins, Greek stones included, dressed with what the review calls superficially futuristic window-dressing. The future, in other words, is not built here; it is scavenged. Not a brave new world but a thriftily recycled one, hanging onto past glories by a thread, and that single design decision tells you more about a civilization run by a rationing AI than any title card could. It is also, en passant, the oldest trick of resourceful production: when you cannot afford to build the future, photograph the past strangely enough and the audience will do the rest. Smoczyńska is working with the biggest budget of her career, and she spends it like a director who remembers not having one. ...

There is a particular pleasure in watching a director who has run two-hundred-million-dollar machinery choose to work small, because everything he does on the small picture tells you what he actually believes about the craft. Martin Campbell, the man who launched two Bonds with GoldenEye and Casino Royale, shot Just Play Dead in the Canary Islands as an independent production, and he names the terms himself without being asked twice: tight budget, tight schedule, delivered on schedule and on budget. Samuel L. Jackson plays a wealthy criminal faking his death to escape the feds; Eva Green plays the wife who prefers the death to be real and the insurance to be hers; everyone else circles the money. In Campbell’s summary of the character logic, nobody has any kind of redemption, they are all trying to knock each other off, and, of course, chaos happened. C’est le bordel, by design, and the design is the interesting part. ...

I will restrict myself to one question, because it is the question this film lives or dies on: how do you photograph a man the whole world has already memorized, at the age before he was anyone? Anthony Bourdain has been mythologized without pause in the years since his death, and the field of posthumous product is exactly as lurid as you fear. Matt Johnson’s Tony, for A24, written by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe, answers the question with a scope decision so severe it amounts to a manifesto: one summer, 1975, Provincetown. A nineteen-year-old washes dishes badly, lies about everything, and gets, in the words of Kitchen Confidential that open the film, the good ass-kicking he badly needs. The show, the fame, the voice, none of it appears. The film ends before the man begins. ...

Nicolas Winding Refn was clinically dead for twenty-five minutes in 2023, on a table, mid-surgery, with two weeks’ warning that this might be how it ended. He has said plainly that the idea for Her Private Hell came when he was dead and came back. I begin there not for the drama but because the origin explains the method, and the method is the story. A director who believed his film career was over returned to features after a decade away and spent his second chance on the least commercial materials available: silence, stillness, a fog-bound artificial city, and a horror plot conducted like opera. Whatever you conclude about the result, nothing in it is an accident of laziness. It is all wagered. ...

There are two kinds of first-contact film. The first kind lands the hardware: saucers over cities, armies in the streets, a planet’s worth of extras looking up. Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is this year’s grand version of it, and Wells’s Martians were doing it on the page in the nineteenth century. The second kind never shows you the visitor at all. It gives you a signal, an instrument, and a person who has to decide what the data means; Contact is its cathedral, and Clara and Ad Astra keep smaller chapels. The Outer Threat, the directing debut of the Toronto writer William Woods, belongs entirely to the second kind, and the interesting thing about it is not that a low-budget Canadian production chose the cheaper church. It is how far the film commits to the choice once made. ...

Twelve million US dollars for domestic rights. That was the cheque A24 wrote at Sundance for Olivia Wilde’s dinner-party comedy The Invite, one of the biggest sales of the festival, and the number is worth holding in your head for the length of this piece, because everything intelligent about this release flows from what the buyer and the seller decided to do with it next. They did the old thing. They did the thing the trades had been writing obituaries for since the pandemic: a platform release, New York and Los Angeles first, a slow build, and a bet that word of mouth still exists as a market force. Three weekends into wide release the film sat at twenty million domestic and fifteen point seven international from 36 markets, on its way past forty million worldwide with Italy, France and Spain still to open. The consultant David A. Gross, who watches these curves for a living, told Variety he would not be surprised by a finish above sixty million. For a talking-heads comedy in a summer owned by The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day, that is not counterprogramming. That is a heist. ...

Every financier will tell you an attachment is only as good as the paper it is signed on, and every producer has watched a name walk the moment a better offer cleared. So savor the inversion at the center of The Isolate Thief’s production story: the name actor chasing the producers. Sean Bean says the money for this small-budget Civil War Western took quite a few years to raise, two or three by his own count, because the story was unusual and the budget was not the kind that forgives unusual. His role in that period was not to wait politely. He kept calling: “Look, you think we might be getting it together?” When it finally came together, with Hideout Pictures persevering alongside the producers, the package still had its star, and the reason he gives is the only durable one in this business. Kevin Lefler’s script, in his words, was fantastic, and it was what blew him away in the first place. ...

Bref, we all know the rule: independent filmmakers should not touch science fiction. The moment you introduce a spaceship into your script, the budget multiplies by ten, the production design swallows your schedule, and the visual effects supervise you into an early grave. Yet, here is Pavlo Ostrikov’s U Are The Universe, a film about a space trucker who becomes the last man alive after Earth is destroyed in 2070. He shot it in Ukraine, relying almost entirely on a single actor and a robot companion, and brought it across the finish line for $800,000. ...

Bref, let us not waste time. We have all seen the numbers. A $22.6 million opening weekend for an independent horror film is not a fluke; it is an earthquake. But while the industry trades hyperventilate over the box office returns of Longlegs, I am far more interested in what Osgood Perkins and his cinematographer, Andres Arochi, actually did on the floor. When you strip away the hype, what remains is an execution so deliberate, so suffocatingly controlled, that it warrants a true post-mortem. This is not a film that succeeded purely because of a flashy ad campaign. It succeeded because the mechanics of its production and the aesthetics of its framing were built to weaponize audience anxiety. ...

Most independent filmmakers, starved for resources, focus every dollar and every ounce of energy entirely on the visual image. Sound is an afterthought, relegated to capturing dialogue and dropping in a cheap score. David Lynch understood early on that true psychological terror is auditory. For his 1977 debut Eraserhead, Lynch partnered with sound designer Alan Splet to pioneer a radically new approach to cinematic audio. Musique Concrète and the Found Sound Rejecting traditional orchestral scoring and standard Foley work, Lynch and Splet utilized the techniques of musique concrète. Rather than composing music, they spent 63 days—working nine hours a day—recording “found” everyday noises. They recorded howling wind, electrical hums, and the metallic vibration of guy wires. ...