The Movie About The Road That Never Ends
More mini reviews from days 3 & 4 of the Chicago Critics Film Festival. [5/6/2025]
It Ends (road trip horror)
While we sat in line for a press line interview, Jeff Thiede, a friend and Chicago-based artist, brought up that he’ll pass on the upcoming Music Box screenings of Clown in a Cornfield, citing that clowns “just aren’t my thing.” This prompted my mind to wander into itself. I experience a lot of horror movies to varying degrees of true fear. As a critic, I think being aware of my biases is important, yet I couldn’t figure out what freaked me out the most. What horror subgenre or element was my “just not my thing?”
I was about to find out.
Four twenty-somethings turn onto a dark road. They continue driving on that road, searching for a turn. They continue driving on that road, searching. They continue driving on that road. They continue driving. Continue driving. Driving. Driving. Driving…
It Ends gave me a panic attack. As a man who, I’ll be first to admit, depends on his natural confidence to get him through social situations, the fear of finding oneself so alone and small in the universe does spark something in me. At a point in the movie where it feels like all is lost, and a character bargains with anything that’s listening for the ability to progress, I lost my mind. For a moment, I needed the light reflected on the screen to tell me something would work like I needed the air that I was hyperventilating. This is what the cinema is all about. I will be reviewing this movie more thoroughly for another publication, but for now, I can only thank the filmmakers for giving me an experience I’ll always remember as one of the most terrifying in my life.
5/5
40 Acres (dystopian action)
While we’ve exited the midnight screening portion of the film festival, the 9:30-9:45 viewings are certainly picking up the slack. Day 3 brought us 40 Acres, starring Danielle Deadwyler as the matriarch of a family of farmers/soldiers who are defending their land after a plague kills most animal life across the world. Deadwyler’s stone-cold presence allows nothing within the confines of their farmland until her oldest son discovers a desire outside their electric fence.
Stuffed with enough cliche lines and Lifetime-level dramatics to kill a horse (or every horse), 40 Acres will probably land on a streaming service where its appeal will be recognized when it can be viewed on an iPad. Though a few performances are stand out, the premise is no promise to the audience that you’ll get much more than typical action fare
2.5/5
Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted (music documentary)
Knowing nothing about Swamp Dogg going into this film proved an asset to my experience. As I was educated and charmed by the story of Jerry Williams and his rise to legendary status in the music world, I could feel a natural attachment forming to this artist and his posse based solely on the film. Its playful tone and reverence to its hero is as captivating as watching people wander around a house while their pool get painted can get. Williams himself is the charismatic center of the film, throwing out enough comedy to make his serious thoughts on the nature of art and America, today and in the previous century, lean-in worthy.
There are moments when the film drags or gets sidetracked, and its lack of thesis becomes evident when Swamp Dogg tells us about the meaning of life. “Just be cool,” he says slowly, “and be yourself.” A documentary with this much vibrant energy and stylistic integrity deserves a bit more to say than that, but there’s not much more to this documentary except an enegmatic subject.
3/5
Sister Midnight (dramedy)
Nothing at the festival has disappointed me like this film so far. Sister Midnight starts promising; an arranged marriage in Bombay leaves Uma (Radhika Apte) disconnected from her husband. She struggles with a sense of identity under a man who pays her no attention and expects a traditional gender role from her without living up to his side of things. She tries to make house, until an unexpected realization about strange things happening to her body changes her life forever, forcing her to live on the sidelines.
The quirky indie comedy about a woman grappling with her place in a society where her lack of fulfillment as a wife becomes a public matter sounds fascinating. It is unfortunate then when the genre bends and turns completely silly, distracting and detracting from everything that the film once was. It turns into something less original in both story and form, with a montage set to upbeat oldies coming in every few minutes as if the filmmakers themselves might get bored if their characters talk for too long. There’s some seed of an idea here about a woman living on the fringes of society, but it remains unwatered and abandoned for genre frivolity.