Weird romance, generational trauma, and sociopathic billionaires make up our first roundup from Sundance 2024, with mixed results.

Unconventional romance Love Me (Sam Zuchero, Andy Zuchero/ USA/ 2024/ 93 mins) takes place over billions of years and focuses on the courtship of a buoy and a satellite. In the post-human world with all of our extinct species achievements at their fingertips, the two bond of over cat memes and videos of giggling babies. After hitting on a smug YouTube channel featuring the smug relationship of Deja and Liam (Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun) the two resurrect the couple as avatars for their own courtship.

Very definitely aimed at a Gen-Z audience weaned at the digital teat, Love Me has been dubbed as ‘sexy WALL-E‘ (Horn-E?), somewhat snarkily, by some of us more jaded souls. Initially, it’s a cute and whimsical piece, with real personality given to the robots as they try and interact on their limited approximation of a human level. However, once it gets complicated by the avatars, and later the flesh and blood pairing of Stewart and Yeun (presumably as the machines’ mastery of their chosen romantic medium improves), it becomes overly bogged down in twee earnestness and the sheer amount of different ideas, each glanced at rather than truly explored. Stewart and Yeun are both exceptional and the notion of a love that can endure the heat death of the universe is inspiring, but its presentation is ultimately overly jumbled and grating. 2/5

The title character of Pedro Freire‘s Malu (Brazil/ 2024/ 100 mins) will also test a viewer’s patience, as she does with everyone around her. Played with scorching ferocity by Yara de Novaes, Malu is a 50-year-old, out of work actress, living in a crumbling house in a run-down suburb of Rio de Janeiro. She’s a mercurial presence with a fractious relationship with her Conservative mother Lili (Juliana Carneiro da Cunha), who also lives in the house when she isn’t banished to a shack in the garden. A potential bridge between the two is Malu’s daughter Joana (Carol Duarte), an up-and-coming theatre actress who has come for an extended visit from Sao Paulo. Of course, her return after a period of estrangement adds as much fuel to various fires as it does sooth old burns.

Something of an act of exorcism for writer/director Freire, Malu is hewn from his own experiences with his mother, the late actress Malu Rocha. Freire has mined his past with great acuity and a vivid eye for the ways families can tear themselves apart. As per Tolstoy’s maxim that every unhappy family is unhappy in their own way, Malu occasionally feels like we’re intruding in something both universal, but deeply private, with beating hearts exposed and old wounds carved open. Each of the three leads is incredible, bursting with love and resentment, and each get at least one moment to come into their own. For a compact narrative, Malu feels perpetually on the edge of combustion. It leaps forward in time, at times confusingly, with much of the actual story told in gaping ellipsis and with little exposition to orientate the audience. It’s also a little exhausting to spend so much time with such volatile characters, but this is deeply personal filmmaking filled with insight, and a yearning for reconciliation which you sense never quite happened in real life. 3/5

There are no redeeming features of practically anyone in the ultra-blunt satire Veni Vidi Vici (Daniel Hoesl, Julia Nieman/ Austria/ 2024/ 86 mins). There have been a glut of ‘eat the rich’ movies recently, but this bleak and somewhat redundant film reminds us the rich are far more likely to be the ones doing the dining. The Maynard clan are a family of ultra-rich sociopaths, the head of whom, Amon (Laurence Rupp) snipes innocent members of the public for sport. He flaunts his actions, safe in the knowledge that it will be overlooked by the police, the country’s governing institutions, and the supine media. His daughter Paula (Olivia Goschler), in an icy Patrick Bateman-style voiceover demonstrates that the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree.

It’s difficult to glean filmmakers Hoesl and Nieman’s intentions here, other than to piss the viewer off. There’s nothing here we don’t already know, or hasn’t been explored with greater dynamism, and with greater consequence elsewhere. There is never any sense that a comeuppance is on the cards for the Maynards. Everyone who even thinks about challenging them are either easily removed or manipulated into complicity. Because of this, the film lacks any real bite, even with an ending that’s calculatedly played for maximum outrage. Nihilistic rather than merely cynical, the depths of depravity only feel like such if there’s been a corresponding glimpse of hope and light. In Veni Vidi Vici, they’re presented merely as par for the course. 2/5

Screened as part of Sundance Festival 2024