Snapshots from Sundance 2022: On ‘When You Finish Saving the World’, ‘A Love Song’ and ‘Fresh’
The Hindu
Actor Jesse Eisenberg makes an unsentimental directorial debut in ‘When You Finish Saving the World’, while we get a low-key ‘Nomadland’ in ‘A Love Song’, and a supremely enjoyable horror-thriller in filmmaker Mimi Cave’s debut ‘Fresh’
Unsentimentality is the best part about Jesse Eisenberg’s When You Finish Saving the World, which smartly casts Julianne Moore in a very Julianne Moore character. Adapting his audio project of the same name, the film is about the fraught relationship that Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard, who is brilliant at channelling the restlessness of a teenager) and his mother Evelyn (Julianne Moore) share.
In the opening scene, we see Ziggy live streaming his rock songs to his 20,000 followers, a number he seems to have become obsessed with. Ziggy’s passion toward music means a lot less to his more formal, stubborn mother. Actually, both share the same stubbornness. I laughed my heart out when Ziggy asks Evelyn to drop him at school, asking her to give five seconds. She looks at her watch and leaves exactly after without Ziggy, of course. Evelyn runs a shelter for survivors of domestic abuse. Both Ziggy and Evelyn, though share the same space, live in their own worlds.