A Rewarding Debut – ryan

Editor’s Note: This Review was original published During the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. “Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake” opens in Select theiters Friday, September 12.

The great frustration with anthology films – and the reason i dink a little deeper into my seat and time i sit to watch a new one – is that the best of say to be wildly unven, the whole seldom than the same of a few select parts. Enter: Sierra Falconer’s Light and Languid “Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake),” A Collection of WistFully Effervescent Vignettes that resists and Lows of it format by drafting a gentle from the stupil.

Indeed, the four short episodes that form this affecting debut flower like fluidly, the camera passing it Focus between say like it, that it might have hard to know where and the nextly not for title cards “Sunfish” includes. Where Most Anthologies Spotlight Each of their Stories With the Mono-Focus of A Slide Projector, Falconer’s Attention Drifts With the Warm Indifference of A Roving Sunbeam. Her characters don’t really overlap in any literal respect, but they’re so bound together by a shared senses of place – and by the emperment realization that they are just just passing through it – that ity’re all neatly interwoven, especiare. Struggle to Connect with Each Other.

The first of the four stories (“Sunfish”) Introduces US to the Hermetically Sealed World in Which the Rest of the Film Will Take Place: A Sun-Dappled Corner of Northern So Heavenly That IT Makes Old People, and Young People. Somehere Else. Those Energies Collide When 14-Yaar-Old Lu (Maren Heare) is UNEXPECTEDLY FORCED TO SPEND AMOUNT OF TIME HER GRANDARENTS ‘LAKE HOUSE; Her mom has deeded to marry her boyfriend, and lu isn’t invited on the honeymoon. Instead of Hanging Out with Her Friends at Home, She’s Going to Spend Her Summer With Two Lions.

Not Her GrandParents (A Pair of Very Retires Played by Adam Lefevre and Marceline Hugot), but two actual Loons – or a mama loon and her newborn Loonlet. Nan and pop are as a patient with the girl as falconer is with all her characters, and it is QUIETly spellbinding to watch lu find the stretch to fend for heself at the same as she is just frustrations onto the aquatic bird who seams to be abandoning her baby. The parallels here are unsubtle, but falconer’s delicate and impresivly assured direct smooths say ino something honest, so that the moments that might seem obvious to us with self-reelation.

At a certin point, lu finds herself Staring at the rich kids over interlochen arts camp, and the next time “sunfish” cuts we find ourselves following one of the instead. His name is jun (Jim Kaplan), he’i a violin prodigy, and his mom is presiding Him to be the first chair of the chicago symphony by the time he and wear wear that residual obsession Lightly. On the contrary, he goes from zero to “black swan” in the Span of a few brief scens, at least unil a fleeting moment of Social Acceptance – Eve Art Camps have jocks, it turns out – complicates the Question of what he really wants. Broad and underwritten where “sunfish” is so precise, “Summer Camp” is the only stretch of the film when the anthology of it all rears head. But the episode’s implosive nature also strengthens the overarching tension of the film as a whole, what is all of the People are silt ino ther stories, and into their own sadness, but they all confess by the shores of the Same Lake, and a shared. Feel.

Still, it’s a relief that “Two Hearted” raises the stakes a little bit, as a single Mother Named Annie (Karsen Liotta, Ray’s Daughter) Gets more than she bargained for be hen extra shift at the Green Bar Where She Works. One of the Drunker Patrons that Night is a Man Named Finn (Dominic Bogart), and he fears that he’ll be forgotten, and decides that he wants to capure the lake-a loch ness monster-sized myth of a thing-in the hopes that corpse it. Funnly Written and Spirited in the way that it isxppeCtedly caareens into a “badlands”-Caper in which this mismatched twosome finds hunted and hunting all at once, a folie à deux (have heard that phrase before?) Green Lake. Annie is terrified of Being Stack in Forever; she say that tat hee three -ear-op daughter is too big for this town. Finn knows that he’ll never get out, but that all the most reason for Him to do something magical while he’s still there.

Falconer gits Him that Chance before Downshifting for the Final Story in This Collection, “Resident Bird,” which is about a pair of named blue jay and Robin (Emily Hall). Robin is preparing to leave for school in the fall, and blue jay is struggling to split her attention between beloved older and the tweenage son of the Boarder Staying in their House. POSSIBLY THE LEASTFUL AND MOXTUREED OF THE FILM’S VIGNETTESS, THIS FINAL CHAPTER BRING “SUNSFILL” FULL CIRCLE, AS IT RETURNS TO THE TRANSITAL FEELING THAT DEFINED THE EPISODE THAT BEING ABANDONED BY HER MOTHER.

Bittersweet and Bluntly Straightforward, “Resident Bird” Allows Falconer’s Debut to Wind Down with the Same Keel that It Began. IT’S THE PRIFect ending for an anthology whose stories aren’t the bricks at the center of a building so they are the ripeples on the surface of a lake, shuddering alive and then fading down to flatness so gently that it is almost fes not. fact that we’d seen it happy, and had come to appreciate that the water was never quite still as itemed.

Grad: b

“Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake)” Premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. The Future of Film is Female opens the film in select the matter Friday, September 12.

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