20 Overlooked Indie Movies from 2021 You Need to See (2024)

• “Anne at 13,000 Ft.”

  

  “Anne at 13,000 Ft.” is Canadian director Kazik Radwanski’s portrait of an unsteady woman struggling to navigate her everyday life. Heavily improvised and constructed from a whiplash pace of episodic moments, the movie can be anxiety-inducing and at times frustrating to watch as it jerks the viewer from one sequence to the next. But leading star Deragh Campbell makes it all worth it. Her staggering performance becomes the film’s center of gravity, her captivating sense of chaos and complexity giving the audience emotional motion sickness as her moods shift between extremes. Like John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands in “A Woman Under the Influence,” Campbell and Radwanski manage to effortlessly sprinkle bizarre moments of humor into the most disturbing emotional conflicts, showing how it’s possible to experience two opposing emotions at once. It’s no small feat to channel the same energy as someone like Rowlands, but the similarities between the great actor and this up-and-comer are astonishing. Read IndieWire’s full review here.

• “The Killing of Two Lovers”

  

  With a movie called “The Killing of Two Lovers,” one might know what to expect from the start, but Robert Machoian’s gripping thriller plays off the prediction of its title at every riveting moment. The movie drifts through a man’s fragile existence as he makes repeated attempts to reconnect with the love of his life and their four children, juggling his simmering rage with the semblance of sanity still percolating in his head. This material could turn melodramatic at any moment, but Clayne Crawford’s jittery performance and Machoian’s naturalistic style joins forces with an ominous sound design that brings the fragility of its protagonist’s mindset to life. The result is a fresh and bracing new look at the dissolution of the American family that redefines edge-of-your-seat filmmaking through the sheer talent on display at every moment. Read IndieWire’s full review here.

• “Can You Bring It”

  

  Tom Hurwitz and Rosalynde LeBlanc’s documentary portrait of Bill T. Jones and “D-Man in the Waters” is a moving look at the choreographer’s powerful and enduring response to the AIDS epidemic. Not the first documentary about the modern dance legend, “Can You Bring It” charts the development of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane dance company and their 17-year romantic and working partnership through the lens of his first solo work following Zane’s death, “D-Man in the Waters.” “Can You Bring It” is most compelling as an archival work. An early section pairs the original dancers’ memories of the piece’s development with visuals of the corresponding movement, sharply telegraphing the viewer into the creative process. Read IndieWire’s full review here.

• “The Disciple”

  

  “The Disciple” unfolds in slow, melancholic rhythms on par with the music at its center. Set against Mumbai’s bustling cityscape, the movie follows an idealistic young performer (real-life musician and acting newcomer Aditya Modak) through three distinct eras as he grows older and continues to internalize his frustration. The movie is more about the journey than the destination, with a conclusion that suggests the student never really becomes the teacher when the subject is his own life. Cinema is rarely this relaxing and revelatory all at once. After it was denied the slot of its country’s Oscar submission, “The Disciple” landed quietly on Netflix earlier this year, and the small screen can’t fully encapsulate the sonic wonders it offers up. But it’s a start, and well worth a look. Read IndieWire’s full review.

• “Days”

  

  A man with severe neck pain and a handsome young sex worker share a chance encounter in Tsai Ming-liang’s achingly poignant return to feature filmmaking, which goes down as one of the most touching films of 2021. Shot piecemeal without a script across three countries and five years before it was reverse-engineered into a simple yet achingly tender story of ships passing in the night, “Days” represents something of a departure for Tsai even before it climaxes with the most piercingly sentimental moment he’s ever filmed (it also includes a climax of a different kind, but that’s par for the course from a filmmaker who’s long seen hand jobs and masturbation as signifiers of loneliness). There’s no mistaking the man behind the camera for someone else: “Days” opens with a long shot of Lee watching the rain from a chair inside the nice but fittingly minimalist home Tsai shares with his star and platonic life partner, as if watching the storm from the end of “Stray Dogs” as it whimpers away. Read IndieWire’s full review here.

• “El Planeta”

  

  In artist Amalia Ulman’s charming first feature, the writer-director stars as a young creative who returns from London to post-crisis Spain, helping her broke mother contend with destitution after her husband’s death. Mostly, they hang around the seaside city of Gijón throughout an ambling black-and-white mother-daughter comedy steeped in the small details from their grifter lifestyle, shrugging off the looming threat of eviction and maybe something worse. Think “Tiny Furniture” by way of “Paper Moon”: In a tender and playful riff on the art-imitating-life conceit, Ulman acts opposite her real-life mother, Ale Ulman, an acting novice who nevertheless gives a fun and zany performance as a diva in denial. No matter how much the movie departs from the specifics of their experiences — and the way things work out, it’s pretty clear that it does — the real-life bond between the women helps cement the movie in genuine chemistry even as it zigs and zags through a leisurely plot. Read IndieWire’s full review.

• “Moffie”

  

  Oliver Hermanus’ shimmering and sensual military drama “Moffie” is easily the best movie about gay male repression since “God’s Own Country.” Set in 1981 South Africa at the apex of the South African Border War, the film’s story of gay unrequited desire turns out to be a casing for something far more lethal in its marrow. “Moffie” is Afrikaans slang for “f*ggot,” and the film, which is based on André Carl van der Merwe’s autobiographical novel of the same name, attempts a bold gesture in reclaiming the epithet as an emblem of power. It’s 1981, South Africa, which means it’s not okay to be a “moffie”; effeminacy is a sign of weakness, and being gay is also illegal. It’s also a moment of compulsory military conscription that all (white) boys over the age of 16 must endure, and so that means, as the film begins, Nicholas Van de Swart (Kai Luke Brummer) is readying to ship off to defend colonized land. On its face, the war is between the white minority government and Angola, whose Communism the South African Defense Force wants to stop from spreading; but really, the atrocities as inflicted in this movie are governed by the power-seeking regime of Apartheid, and not any real threat. Read IndieWire’s full review.

• “Stop and Go”

  

  The only surprising thing about Mallory Everton and Stephen Meek’s “Stop and Go,” a breathless road trip comedy that’s silly in the face of death and upends expectations at such a fast and furious rate that you eventually learn to stop having any. Co-written by Everton and her longtime best friend Whitney Call (two BYU grads who honed their craft on the Mormon college’s sketch comedy show “Studio C”), “Stop and Go” doesn’t start on an especially promising note, as its blitz of an opening scene — set at a crowded pre-COVID party where people are talking in each other’s faces and sticking their grubby hands into shared bowls of popcorn — suggests that we’re in for an unusually manic riff on the kind of “take it or leave it” indie fare that’s come out of the pandemic so far.

• “Test Pattern”

  

  First-time feature filmmaker Shatara Michelle Ford squeezes a lot out of 82 minutes. In “Test Pattern,” a perceptive and often quite painful examination of sexual assault, relationship dynamics, racial divides, and the corrosive power of violence, the writer and director mines a dizzying amount of topical issues, tying them all up as a compelling two-hander to boot. Despite the density of the subject, Ford avoids heavy-handed platitudes and dramatic tropes, instead relying on a strong script and a pair of sneakily powerful performances from stars Brittany S. Hall and Will Brill. The movie rightfully earned three Gotham Award nominations this year, including Best Feature and the Bingham Ray Breakthrough Director Award. Read IndieWire’s full review.

• “Little Fish”

  

  Chad Hartigan’s clever sci-fi drama “Little Fish” sums its chief concerns in one grim line: “When your disaster is everyone’s disaster, how do you grieve?” A change of pace for the director of “Morris From America,” Hartigan’s weighty romance takes place in world afflicted by memory loss, with all the devastating results implied by that premise. Beautifully acted and grounded in relatable emotions despite the lofty premise, “Little Fish” plays as both an effective metaphor for Alzheimer’s and for the disintegration of a relationship without closure or reason. Read IndieWire’s full review.

• “The Wanting Mare”

  

  It’s been ages since anyone built a complex sci-fi universe filled with far-reaching mythology and imaginative threats, but Nicholas Ashe Bateman’s ambitious debut contains some of the most intriguing science-fiction world-building since “The Matrix.” The movie is an intimate futuristic drama painted into the corner of some giant canvas yet to be seen. Seeing as most sci-fi franchises on movies and TV stem from existing IP, “The Wanting Mare” scores points on ingenuity alone, though it begs for a bigger picture and for more chapters to provide a greater understanding of the world. Frustrating and immersive in equal doses, Bateman’s slow-burn drama seems content to show us around with the occasional conflict as an added bonus. For that reason, some may shrug it off as a half-baked bore. In truth, “The Wanting Mare” begs for deeper readings, and the most fascinating aspect of the movie comes from the way this visibly low-budget enterprise gets away with suggesting so much more than it puts onscreen. Read IndieWire’s review.

• “The Vigil”

  

  Jewish superstition has been riddled with dybbuks and golems for centuries, but horror movies haven’t wised up to it nearly enough. “The Vigil” is proof that bible-thumping priests and haunted convents can’t have all the spooky fun. In director Keith Thomas’s eerie first feature, a young man estranged from the Orthodox Jewish community of Borough Park, Brooklyn, agrees to fulfill the duties of a “shomer,” the ritualistic practice of looking after a dead body over the course of one night. Desperate for rent money, he agrees, unwittingly signing up for a long night with a possessed corpse. The ensuing mayhem relies on the usual preponderance of jump scares, but Thomas combines those moments with aplomb and surprising thematic depth. Set almost exclusively within the confines of the shadowy home, “The Vigil” suggests the potential for a new angle on “The Conjuring” universe via Jewish guilt and Holocaust trauma. And if “Conjuring” owner Warner Bros. doesn’t ingest its lore, Thomas has ample potential for a new franchise of his own. Read IndieWire’s full review.

• “All Light Everywhere”

  

  “All Light Everywhere” winds its way through fragmentary observations about modern surveillance society, unearthing a wide range of amorphous connections about its subject. However, Theo Anthony’s ambitious documentary unearths one brilliant connection — a fascinating lineage between the camera and the gun — and roots it in historical fact. For that reason alone, the filmmaker’s strange and alluring rumination on the ways technology exerts control over human life is a worthy follow-up to his 2016 debut “Rat Film,” which used Baltimore’s rodent infestation as a savvy metaphor for gentrification. Though the results are less cohesive this time, “All Light Everywhere” provides another compelling riff on the ominous forces governing everyday life that’s both alarming and awe-inspiring at once. Read IndieWire’s full review.

• “Mogul Mowgli”

  

  Riz Ahmed has his musical career derailed by the sudden onset of a degenerative disease. The basic premise sounds familiar — the actor plays a similar role in the Oscar-nominated “Sound of Metal” — but “Mogul Mowgli” is a wildly different beast, thanks to both its raw aesthetic approach and its surreal, occasionally hilarious magnification of diaspora anxieties. Ahmed, who co-wrote the film with director Bassam Tariq, plays a London-born Pakistani rapper with a focus on identity. Once his career takes off in New York, an autoimmune disease leaves him unable to walk, let alone attend his breakout European tour. Before long, it sends him tumbling down a rabbit hole of delirium. On its surface, it reads like a paint-by-numbers immigrant/first gen culture clash, but the film gets to the root of this familial disconnect in a unique way, revealing a phantasmagorical journey into Zed’s fractured psyche as a man caught in a simmering culture war with himself. Read IndieWire’s full review.

• “Swan Song”

  

  “Swan Song” is appointment viewing for fans of Udo Kier, who gives a career-best turn as a retired hairdresser making peace with the past. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Kier in drag, outfitted in an electrically engineered faux-candelabra atop his head, lip-syncing to Robyn’s all-time anthem for the lonely “Dancing on My Own.” The German actor has played everyone from Count Dracula in Paul Morrissey’s “Blood of Dracula” to Jack the Ripper and Adolf Hitler (at least three times), and he has served as the muse for Lars von Trier many times over. But Kier gets the role of his lifetime as a fabulously snarky, acerbic, long-retired hairdresser in Todd Stephens’ dark comedy that totters between the campy and the melancholic with wincing laughs and real pain. Read IndieWire’s full review.

• “Cryptozoo”

  

  “Cryptozoo,” the dazzling animated feature from cartoonist Dash Shaw, takes place in the past and feels like it hails from another dimension. The film is a daring, visionary work — a cluttered symphony of erratic line drawings, psychedelic colors, and recycled genre tropes galore — that can feel all over the place, but it’s a total joy to immerse in Shaw’s expansive look at conflicting worldviews and environmentalist feats, bound together in a delightful consolidation of storytelling conventions that suggests “Yellow Submarine” by way of “Jurassic Park,” with a dose of “Tomb Raider” for good measure. It’s an overwhelming combination loaded with giddy, infectious creativity at every turn. Four years after his John Hughes–inspired teen disaster movie “My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea,” Shaw has cemented his place as one of the most exciting new voices in animation. Read IndieWire’s full review here.

• “The Night House”

  

  Rebecca Hall’s feature directoral debut “Passing” dazzled critics this year, but she had another must-see release as an actress thanks to Searchlight Pictures’ horror movie “The Night House.” Directed by David Bruckner, the film is a shudderingly intense and sad*stically loud horror movie and a grief-stricken portrait of a woman unraveling. For as hard as it hits, “The Night House” doesn’t bruise enough to follow you home. But the movie’s soundscape will vibrate around the hollow of your bones for a long time to come; the next time you don’t stop for Death, you might not be able to shake the feeling that Death has kindly stopped for you. Read IndieWire’s full review.

• “Worth”

  

  One part character study, one part journey through bureaucratic bullsh*t and political machinations, Sara Colangelo’s “Worth” brings to life the story of attorney Ken Feinberg’s (Michael Keaton) seemingly unwinnable mission to compensate 9/11 victims. Portrayed by Keaton in an unflashy, wholly impressive turn, Feinberg is a reason-driven legal wonk who, despite not believing that anything can ever be truly fair, still thinks the law and rational thinking can get people at least part of the way there. He’s the kind of guy who unwinds by listening to opera, who comes home and doesn’t take off his jacket or so much as loosen his tie before settling down to relax. And what he lacks in emotional intelligence — his first meeting with the victims’ families is a jaw-dropping lesson in what not to say to people in mourning — he makes up for with an unshakeable moral compass. It’s one of Keaton’s best performances yet. Read IndieWire’s full review.

• “Language Lessons”

  

  The coronavirus pandemic has inspired a wide variety of scrappy slices of entertainment, from “Songbird” and “Malcom & Marie” to “Locked Down” and “How It Ends,” and that’s just in the narrative arena. Fortunately, Natalie Morales’ winning “Language Lessons” offers one of the best uses of the format yet, a “Zoom film” that utilizes its constraints to craft an intimate, expressive two-hander, no fatigue in sight. Morales also stars in the film alongside her co-writer, Mark Duplass, who first conceived of the film’s relatively simple idea before pitching it to Morales as a workable lockdown project; the pair’s obvious creative harmony helps the film stay afloat even during some (scattered) rough moments. Read IndieWire’s full review.

• “Violet”

  

  First-time feature filmmaker Justine Bateman throws down more than a few traps for her eponymous character in the drama “Violet”: She has to embody a character whose biggest problems literally play out in her head, while contending with Bateman’s liberal use of poetic on-screen text that doesn’t always seem necessary, and she’s expected to convince us to feel empathy for a pretty, successful Hollywood executive. These aren’t easy asks, but they’re also part of the artifice that Bateman handily chips away at as “Violet” unspools. They also provide star Olivia Munn with the chance to turn in the best work of her career, one only enlivened by the great potential for missteps that Bateman’s thorny script provides. And Justin Theroux, who provides surreal voiceover for the protagonist’s self-doubts, adds an additional terrifying dimension to her conundrum. Read IndieWire’s full review here.

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