The Sundance Film Festival may have already come and gone, but I’m still ruminating on the queer films I caught at this year’s event.
From queer documentaries and dramas to chilling tales ripped from history and our own internal demons, once again Park City, Utah showed up and showed out on the silver screen.
Rock Springs
Rock Springs
Sundance
Out actress Kelly Marie Tran has quickly become one of those stars whose name in the credits earns a film must-watch status, and her latest, Rock Springs, continues to solidify that. The folk-horror-meets-body-horror film follows Emily (Tran), who moves her family to Rock Springs, Wyoming, following the death of her husband. She is unaware of the town’s dark and bloody history, which writer-director Vera Miao took inspiration from a true story of the The Rock Springs Massacre of 1885. The film is melancholy and bizarre, infuriating and hopeful, and haunting in the best way.
Rock Springs is currently seeking distribution.
Saccharine
Saccharine
Shudder
Writer and director Natalie Erika James made her return to Sundance, having previously wowed—and emotionally devastated—audiences with her film Relic in 2020. Once again, the writer-director delivers a chilling film that knows exactly how to poke and prod at our most sensitive parts. This time, she delves into the dark heart of weight loss, identity, and queer desire through the lens of body and spectral horror in the era of GLP-1s. The commentary is biting and the scares, grotesque. It’s a meaty topic, and thankfully—perhaps even miraculously—it proves not to be more than this filmmaker can chew.
Saccharine has been acquired by Shudder and IFC and will be released in theaters later this year.
Jaripeo
Jaripeo
Sundance
The best documentaries are those that offer audiences a window into a story, a person, or a moment they might otherwise never know or understand. While Jaripeo proves to be more of a glimpse than a deep dive into the hypermasculine, rural rodeo culture of Mexico from which it takes its name, the execution makes it well worth a watch. Co-directors Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig bring us into the secret queer world of these rodeos, where communities gather to revel in the festivities while gay men quietly sneak away for clandestine sexual rendezvous. It’s dreamy, atmospheric, and experimental.
Jaripeo is currently seeking distribution.
The Undertone
The Undertone
A24
While this film may not be queer, I absolutely loved it, so it’s sneaking onto this list. The film follows Evy, a young woman who spends her days caring for her dying mother and her nights recording her podcast. Along with her co-host, she begins listening to a series of mysterious audio files that start blurring the line between reality and fiction, with terrifying results. The standout element of the film is its stellar soundscape, which is chilling in a way I have rarely experienced. This marks Ian Tuason’s directorial debut—and what a way to make a mark.
The Undertone has been acquired by A24 and will debut in theaters on March 13.
Stephane Cardinale - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images; Roberto SCHMIDT / AFP via Getty Images
It's official: Pedro Pascal is set to star in Todd Haynes's upcoming movie, De Noche, which was halted in 2025 amid Joaquin Phoenix's abrupt departure. Pascal will reportedly play a "hard-boiled detective opposite Danny Ramirez as his younger lover" — a role originally meant for Phoenix.
De Noche, which has been described as a "subversive love story," centers the "passionate and unexpected love affair between a cop (Pascal) and a boarding school teacher (Ramirez)." The film is set in Los Angeles, on the brink of war, in the 1930s. As the story goes, Pascal's and Ramirez's characters become targets of corrupt politicians and have to escape to Mexico in order to survive.
Filmmaker Todd Haynes's writes in a statement, "This story, with Pedro Pascal and Danny Ramirez in the two leads, arises out of an era — all too relevant to our own — of domestic corruption, racial exploitation and global terror."
The story "emerges as a testament to the inexplicable powers of desire and love to survive and overcome," Haynes adds, "even the most crippling of human barriers." Much Haynes's latest film — May December starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore — De Noche also centers an age-gap relationship between its two main characters.
For context, Joaquin Phoenix was originally attached to the project (and is even credited as a "story by" writer in it) but abruptly exited the movie just five days before filming was set to begin in Guadalajara, Mexico, in August 2024.
Phoenix's exit caused De Noche to immediately shut down production. At the time, various reports suggested that the Joker actor got "cold feet" to play the explicit sex scenes included in the film. (Even though, it bears repeating, it's a movie based on a story that Phoenix himself originated.)
If there is one truth that unites queer people across the globe and throughout time, it’s that we are here, there, and everywhere. In some places, that existence is out, proud, and in full view; in others, we exist in more discreet and hidden ways. It’s one of these latter examples that Jaripeo, a new documentary from directors Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig, which screened at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, seeks to reveal.
The film takes place in the Mexican state of Michoacán and takes its namesake from the rural rodeos that serve as annual gatherings and celebrations for people in the region.
These events are displays of hypermasculinity, with men riding bucking bulls through the ring—or where failing to do so, will earn them a litany of homophobic slurs. But they are also opportunities for revelers to come together and party. To bask in a bacchanalia. And among those partygoers are gay men who slip off quietly into the surrounding areas for clandestine rendezvous and sexual exploration.
It’s a world few see, but Jaripeo attempts to reveal in both depiction and mood.
Our view into this world comes through introductions to some of the men who inhabit this liminal space, the standout being Noé, a soft-spoken rancher who eschews deeper relationships in favor of solitude and brief sexual encounters in nearby cornfields.
The approach is experimental, often dreamlike, and reflective. It’s immersive and atmospheric, if at times frustratingly opaque. Visually, the film is lush and seductive, though always tinged with a pervasive sense of melancholy.
Ultimately, the result is a film that is quite beautiful and intriguing, teasing a largely unseen world—but rather than delving deep, it remains on the surface, just out of reach, offering a kaleidoscopic peek into lives rarely shown on screen.
If you’ve ever walked into a room, driven through a small town, or simply existed in a space where white cis-het norms were mandatory—and felt the dreaded weight of unwelcome eyes upon you—then the pervasive sense of dread and foreboding that writer-director Vera Miao and cinematographer Heyjin Jun capture in Rock Springs will be eerily and achingly familiar.
The film, which made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival last month, stars out actressKelly Marie Tran—once again delivering a powerhouse performance—and follows an Asian family: Emily (Tran), her daughter (Aria Kim), and her mother-in-law (Fiona Fu). After the death of Emily’s husband, they move to the small town of Rock Springs, Wyoming.
Aria Kim in 'Rock Springs'
Sundance
It’s certainly not a place Emily would have chosen for her family, but one selected out of necessity. A professional cellist, Emily took the only job she could find to support her family. Beneath the stares—quickly masked by a friendly veneer—it becomes clear they aren’t truly welcome.
There’s something intrinsically sinister about this otherwise bucolic town. Something in the soil. That something? Blood. Without spoiling the film, it’s worth noting that Miao did her research in crafting this supernatural slow burn, which is based on the tragic history of the 1885 massacre in Rock Springs.
Jimmy O. Yang and Benedict Wong in 'Rock Springs'
Sundance
This heartbreaking and enraging chapter of U.S. history is brought to life on screen by Benedict Wong and Jimmy O. Yang, who portray brothers and Chinese immigrants working in the mines. Although their screen time is limited, their segment lays bare a chapter of history as horrifying as it is haunting—in every sense of the word.
Here, the legacy of that massacre and the countless atrocities that pepper American history endure. It’s not hard to see how the sins of our nation’s past—and its people—continue to stretch their gnarled, icy claws into the present. Just turn on the news.
That legacy of trauma continues to haunt, whispering from the darkness into the hearts of those impacted, even generations later.
The film is somber and unnerving, as it should be, pairing body horror with Chinese folk horror. The result is an emotionally poignant slow burn, anchored by stellar performances from both Tran and Wong.
