While my focus with the festival has mostly been on horror, I wanted to highlight a few thrillers that manage to do some interesting things with the subgenre.

One of the first movies of the festival for me was director Carey Williams’ Emergency. Just last year he showed up at Sundance with his modern-day adaptation of Romeo and Juliet with R#J While that film had a mixed reception, his latest is a huge step in the right direction as it takes comedies about graduation and interjects an examination of black lives in the modern world. Kunle (Donal Elise Watkins) and Sean (RJ Cyler) are two best friends ready to graduate from college but Sean doesn’t want to leave without getting their plague on the Black Student Union’s Hall of Firsts. So he gets two tickets for The Legendary Tour, a kind of college-styled bar crawl through frats and sororities and weed rooms that no black person has accomplished at their school. But when they discover an unconscious white woman (Maddie Nichols) on the floor of their apartment, they, along with Carlos (Sebastian Chacon), their other, nerdy roommate, have to figure out how to save her life while also saving their own.

I’m not sure the world is ready for a comedy centered around three men of color having to navigate a world in which blame and suspicion will immediately be against them in a situation involving an unconscious white girl. It’s telling that the moment the trio show up at a black friend’s house and the housemates discover the unconscious girl, they all flee the house. It’s funny as long as you divorce it from real life, but that’s also, I believe, the intent of the script by KD Davila, which flips the tone as the film enters the third act. While it tackles these college graduation-set film tropes of friends having to leave each other when they graduate, etc., it also centers the trauma of the preceding night on Kunle, who realizes that he might have survived the events, but that night won’t be through with him. What started out as a tonally-weird movie becomes rather pertinent. It’s still a tonal mess (particularly as it upends the note it wants to end on with a scene during the credits) but its winsome cast and its third act emotion struck a chord.

Another thriller with a lot on its mind and a messy third act is the Rebecca Hall-starring Resurrection. Coming from 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong and The Night House, Hall has been turning out some fantastic genre performances. In Resurrection, she plays Margaret, a very successful businesswoman in the biotech science field who has all the hallmarks of the thriller female protagonist. She’s sexually confident, sleeping with a married man before asking how his wife is, edgy enough to give advice to her intern (“Tell him to fuck off. This guy’s a sadist”) as well as introducing her teen daughter Abbie (Grace Kaufman) to whiskey so she’ll know how to drink at college, and a creeping sense of paranoia that a man from her past (played with ruthless efficiency by Tim Roth) is slowly inserting himself in her life again. It’s this last point that starts to fray at her sanity as she finds herself being brought back to the most horrible time in her life. Vivid dreams assault her, the man continues to show up in places he shouldn’t be and before long, Margaret is replacing the locks on her door and practically prisoning her daughter in their home.

Written and directed by Andrew Semans, Resurrection nails the paranoia and dread that come from suffering from PTSD. In a fantastic monologue I’m sure every review will mention, the camera closes in on Margaret’s face as she recounts the events of her past. It’s a viscerally powerful moment made all the more so by the fact that the camera continues to focus directly on her while the rest of the liminal space is drowned out in blackness. Soon she’s just a woman, as if on stage, the only thing in a sea of darkness as she recounts and relives the most horrible moment in her life. It’s powerful stuff, the kind of thing that in lesser hands could have turned to melodrama. But Rebecca Hall’s assured performance centers the story perfectly. Unfortunately, in the climax it verges in confusing territory that makes sense on a metaphorical level but is presented so literally. The film ends on an epiphany, but when mixed with the rather bizarre finale, Resurrection left me pondering the “reveal” more than Margaret’s emotional response and understanding. It’s not enough to ruin the film, but it absolutely kept it from being a complete masterpiece of the subgenre.

Changing directions but keeping the messy female lead, Aubrey Plaza’s subdued but intense turn in Emily the Criminal should suggest there’s more to the actress than her sarcastic wit. Written and directed by John Patton Ford, Emily the Criminal is about the titular Emily (Aubrey Plaza) and her attempt to find a job in a world where background checks put anyone with a record in an almost inescapable cycle. She spends most of her time working as an on-demand contracted driver for a catering company while trying to find a job that will make a dent in her $70,000 student debt. Her coworker gives her a number for someone who looks for Dummy Shoppers and, against her better judgment, she calls the number and is slowly pulled back into a life of crime. As one job turns into another, tensions escalate between her newfound relationship with Youcef (Theo Rossi) and his brother Khalil (Jonathan Avigdori) who run the business, putting Emily in increasingly perilous situations.

Emily the Criminal is a lean and efficient thriller that, even in the smallest moments, is an intriguing look at credit card scams and dummy purchasing with stolen identities. It’s the small details like how that operation works that adds dimension to the very streamlined story. Aubrey Plaza stuns as Emily, bridging the gap between vulnerability and naivety with raw violence and craftiness. As it careens into the third act, Emily the Criminal questions just who Emily is and ends with a fantastic, good for you, moment.