David Wnendt’s “The Sunlit Night” is a trainwreck of a movie.
It had originally screened at Sundance 2019 under the guise of a “world premiere.” I remember being bored by the whole thing. The Norwegian setting was beautiful, but the characters were flatly rendered and Jenny Slate’s attempt to subdue her usual neuro-eccentric style of acting felt very off.
Slate plays a struggling artist traveling to Lofoten, located at Arctic Norway, in search of inspiration - they should have just called it ‘Eat, Pray, Lofoten”. The film is about the communal bonds Slate’s character shares with new friends at a remote village, those include a fellow New Yorker (Alex Sharp) who has come in search of a proper Viking funeral only to find out that the Chief (Zach Galifianakis) is a fraud and actually hails from Cincinnati.
The film is the English language debut of German director Wnendt, which is an adaptation of Rebecca Dinerstein’s novel of the same name. I was very much smitten by Wnendt’s delightfully twisted “Wetlands” back when it won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 2013, so this latest film of his is quite the disappointment for me.
“The Sunlit Night”—distributed by Quiver—will be released on VOD on July 17.
I'm going to say what a lot of people think, and won't say out loud: I don't believe Tom Holland can be a movie star outside of Spider-Man. That's been my genuine hunch for a few years now.