Opening night of Sundance was all about Princess Diana and a twisty Sebastian Stan thriller

When Robert Redford stepped down from the Sundance Film Festival three years ago, it was with the acknowledgment that the annual movie-lovers summit he founded and presided over for four decades would go on just fine without him. “I don’t think the festival needs a whole lot of introduction now,” he conceded during his official retirement from the tradition of introducing it. Redford was right: Sundance has soldiered on successfully without the opening-day, press conference remarks from its shining Hollywood ambassador. What the aging star could never have anticipated, of course, is everything else the fest would rather smoothly weather these past couple years—how the big show in Utah has found a way to go on, albeit without the whole Utah part.

Briefly, it looked as though Sundance might return in 2022 to some semblance of normal—a relative distinction, granted, at an event that functions more like a regular January escape from normalcy, a getaway for anyone hoping to flee the ho-hum routines of daily life for a week or so of mountain-time movie watching, star sighting, and bar hopping. But just three weeks ago, as Omicron cases continued to spike, programmers pulled the plug on plans to welcome thousands of festivalgoers back to the snowy slopes of Park City. It was surely a difficult decision to make, and just as surely the right one. The only thing that’s supposed to spread uncontrollably at Sundance is hype.

I do ache to be back there, trudging winded up winding roads to movie palaces big and small, bunking with my fellow Chicago critics at our annual spot, subsisting on a diet of Diet Coke and late-night oven pizza. This is my 10th Sundance and officially the final one I’ll cover for The A.V. Club. I wanted to do it right. Which is to say, bundled up at altitude.

But, again, the show must go on. And the truth is that last year’s virtual Sundance was an unqualified success: a smooth transition from IRL to URL, on a screening platform with few hiccups, thoughtfully moderated Zoom Q&As operating like the next best thing to seeing Elijah Wood talk in person about the latest fucked up serial-killer movie he’s cheerfully premiering in Park City. The primary purpose of Sundance—to, you know, show a bunch of new movies—has not been compromised by the safe manner in which critics and general ticket-buying audiences alike will experience the festival again. Nor will it prevent me from offering one last year of dispatches on the major titles, this time with help from my Film Club cohost, Katie Rife.

On the list of things at Sundance that haven’t changed, one can add an opening-night grab bag of selections pulled from various programs—including, once more, the inevitable splashy documentary headed for streaming or HBO. This year, the fest reserved that unofficial day-one nonfiction slot for The Princess, a years-spanning portrait of Princess Diana’s life in the limelight assembled entirely from archival materials. Director Ed Perkins (Tell Me Who I Am) entirely forgoes retrospective talking-head interviews, instead setting his huge library of footage of the Princess Of Wales—shot by news cameras, paparazzi, and normal shutterbugs on the street—to contemporaneous commentary. The result is a present-tense overview of how the world, and especially the media, framed Diana’s experiences and even her thoughts over 17 years, spanning from her marriage into the Royal Family in the early 1980s to the international breaking news of her death in the late 1990s.

On some level, The Princess functions as an indictment of the celebrity-coverage machine many hold directly responsible for the car accident that claimed her life; it’s a documentary that implicitly condemns its own footage, building a critique of relentless invasion of privacy from literally thousands of instances when that privacy was invaded. At its best, the film gets the viewer thinking about how difficult it was for Diana to shape her image and her own story when under constant surveillance and discussion. At one point, Perkins cuts to an amateur, voyeuristically captured video of the princess sitting alone and staring into the distance, as the person shooting opines aloud that she must be thinking about her failing marriage. Not a moment later, the director shifts to audio of an official pundit theorizing that “When you put a modern person in an ancient institution, it will destroy them”—certainly a more eloquent, insightful reflection on Diana’s relationship to the Royal Family, but one no less presumptuous about her mental state.

The question becomes whether the movie is exposing the fallacy of these public narratives or reinforcing them. Assembled chronologically, with little productive friction between image and audio, The Princess becomes a history lesson on how the Diana story was told while it was still unfolding, which in practice isn’t much different than the approach a more conventionally assembled documentary would apply to her life. The film just leaves to implication what some talking head would surely say in that film: that we could never really know Diana, that everything we presumed to know about her was a mass media assumption. Thing is, even that idea has become irreversibly woven into the Diana narrative. The Princess illuminates little about the tragedy of her story that hasn’t become conventional wisdom by now; between it and Spencer, I’m starting to suspect that it might be kind of difficult to find a fresh angle on one of the most scrutinized lives in history.

One of the occasional pleasures of Sundance is seeing some veteran character actor nab a rare, maybe overdue leading role. At last year’s fest, that was Jockey, featuring the reliable Clifton Collins Jr. At this year’s, it’s A Love Song, a very minor-key (some might say slight) showcase for the great Dale Dickey, best known for her turn in Winter’s Bone but otherwise a regular presence in indie dramas and TV shows, especially ones about rugged, impoverished corners of America. Here, the consummate supporting player stars as a widow camping at a mountain lake, waiting for a visit by the childhood sweetheart she hasn’t seen in decades.

Dickey is often the most naturalistic presence on screen, and that’s true again with A Love Song. The ratio of authenticity has just been inverted: With her at the center for once, it’s the stuff on the margins that feels vaguely affected by comparison, with first-time filmmaker Max Walker-Silverman introducing a few too many quirky details around the edges, including a precocious little girl in a cowboy hat and a vaguely magical radio that always finds the exact right song for the moment when you spin its dial. Mostly, though, A Love Song has the good sense to just lean on the quiet, weary gravitas of its star, as well as the unforced chemistry she develops with fellow hall-of-fame scene-stealer Wes Studi as the estranged beau who eventually pays her a visit. Drinking beers, eating ice cream, playing guitar, and reminiscing about the old days, the two create a vivid sense of shared history across just a handful of gentle scenes, and partially through the memories we carry of their respective years of work.

I’m not entirely convinced Walker-Silverman grasps the bone-deep sadness of these characters, the product of so many years of loss and loneliness. (How could he, as a man much younger than his subjects?) But he recognizes the inherent poignancy of their presence as movie-industry lifers carrying their age without shame or vanity, and seems as drawn to the landscape of their faces as that of the scenic terrain. (I’m not sure when the film was shot—it could easily be a pandemic production, given the small cast and mostly outdoors locations—but its style is undeniably reminiscent of Nomadland’s.)

Neither of these films packed much in the way of surprise. There was a little more of that in the opening night selection of Sundance’s midnight slate—though even knowing that Fresh was part of that program left me prepared for an eventual turn in this slick, reasonably tense thriller about a young woman (Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones) whose years on the exhausting dating scene appear to come to a blessed end when she meets a charming, funny doctor (Sebastian Stan) at the supermarket. I won’t say much more about what happens from here, except to praise how director Mimi Cave pivots from apparent romantic comedy into something more sinister: with a very belated title/credits drop of the Drive My Car variety.

Were it made 15 years ago, Fresh would probably adhere to the nastier conventions of the so-called torture porn movement. One could certainly imagine a revolting Eli Roth take on this premise. Cave approaches it from a more empathetic, darkly comic, and empowering perspective—a fine angle of attack, though the messy climax privileges scoring audience satisfaction points over suspense or narrative logic. In the end, the film seems borderline skittish about following through on the full queasy horror of its conceit. But there is something fiendishly clever about the way it eventually lends the irritating mundane requirements of dating—small talk; the obligation to present a certain attractive version of yourself—life-or-death stakes. And the performances are strong. Stan, especially, unlocks a casually menacing charm he’s had little opportunity to deploy before now. Virtual or otherwise, Sundance always delivers a few left turns for the actors on screen.