‘Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake)’ Review: A Gentle and Rewarding Debut Sails Around the Frustrations of Most Anthology Films
The great frustration with anthology films — and the reason I sink a little deeper into my seat every time I sit down to watch a new one — is that even the best of them tend to be wildly uneven, the whole seldom greater than the sum of a few select parts. Enter: Sierra Falconer’s light and languid “Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake),” a collection of wistfully effervescent vignettes that resists the usual highs and lows of its format by drawing a gentle power from the stillness of the water that runs through it.
Indeed, the four short episodes that form this affecting debut flow together so fluidly, the camera passing its focus between them like a baton, that it might have been hard to know where one ends and the next begins if not for the title cards that “Sunfish” includes for context. Where most anthologies spotlight each of their stories with the mono-focus of a slide projector, Falconer’s attention drifts with the warm indifference of a roving sunbeam. Her characters don’t really overlap in any literal respect, but they’re so bound together by a shared sense of place — and by the emergent realization that they’re all just passing through it — that it feels like they’re all neatly interwoven together, especially when they struggle to connect with each other.
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The first of the four stories (“Sunfish”) introduces us to the hermetically sealed world in which the rest of the film will take place: a sun-dappled corner of northern Michigan so heavenly that it makes old people want to die there, and young people feel like they need to live somewhere else. Those energies collide when 14-year-old Lu (Maren Heary) is unexpectedly forced to spend an indefinite amount of time at her grandparents’ lake house; her mom has decided to marry her boyfriend, and Lu isn’t invited on the honeymoon. Instead of hanging out with her friends at home, she’s going to spend her summer with two loons.
Not her grandparents (a pair of very retired birders played by Adam LeFevre and Marceline Hugot), but two actual loons — or a mama loon and her newborn loonlet. Nan and Pop are as patient with the girl as Falconer is with all her characters, and it’s quietly spellbinding to watch Lu find the strength to fend for herself at the same time as she projects her own frustrations onto the aquatic bird who seems to be abandoning her baby. The parallels here are unsubtle, but Falconer’s delicate and impressively assured direction smoothes them into something honest, so that even the moments that might seem obvious to us roil with self-revelation.
At a certain point, Lu finds herself staring at the rich kids over at Interlochen Arts Camp, and the next time “Sunfish” cuts we find ourselves following one of them instead. His name is Jun (Jim Kaplan), he’s a violin prodigy, and his mom is pressuring him to be the first chair of the Chicago Symphony by the time he’s 20. Jun doesn’t wear that residual obsession lightly. On the contrary, he goes from zero to “Black Swan” in the span of a few brief scenes, at least until a fleeting moment of social acceptance — even art camps have jocks, it turns out — complicates the question of what he really wants. Broad and underwritten where “Sunfish” is so precise, “Summer Camp” is the only stretch of the film when the anthology of it all rears its head. But the episode’s implosive nature also strengthens the overarching tension of the film as a whole, which is that all of these people are siloed into their own stories, and into their own sadness, but they’re all connected by the shores of the same lake, and a shared undertow they think no one else can feel.
Still, it’s a relief that “Two Hearted” raises the stakes a little bit, as a single mother named Annie (Karsen Liotta, Ray’s daughter) gets more than she bargained for when she takes an extra shift at the Green Lake bar where she works. One of her drunker patrons that night is a man named Finn (Dominic Bogart), and he fears that he’ll be forgotten, and decides that he wants to capture the giant fish in the lake — a Loch Ness Monster-sized myth of a thing — in the hopes that its corpse might be his legacy. Funnily written and spirited in the way that it unexpectedly careens into a “Badlands”-esque caper in which this mismatched twosome find themselves being hunted and hunting all at once, a folie à deux (have you ever heard that phrase before?) born in reaction to the “black hole” of Green Lake. Annie is terrified of being stuck in it forever; she says that even her three-year-old daughter is too big for this town. Finn knows that he’ll never get out, but that’s all the more reason for him to do something magical while he’s still there.
Falconer gives him that chance before downshifting for the final story in this collection, “Resident Bird,” which is about a pair of sisters named Blue Jay (Tenley Kellogg) and Robin (Emily Hall). Robin is preparing to leave for school in the fall, and Blue Jay is struggling to split her attention between her beloved older sibling and the tweenage son of the boarder staying in their house. Possibly the least eventful and most textured of the film’s vignettes, this final chapter helps bring “Sunfish” full circle, as it returns to the transitional feeling that defined the episode that began with Lu being abandoned by her mother.
Bittersweet and bluntly straightforward, “Resident Bird” allows Falconer’s debut to wind down with the same even keel that it began. It’s the perfect ending for an anthology whose stories aren’t the bricks at the center of a building so much as they are the ripples on the surface of a lake, shuddering alive and then fading back down to flatness so gently that it almost feels like nothing had changed — or it would, if not for the fact that we’d seen it happen, and had come to appreciate that the water was never quite as still as it seemed.
Grade: B
“Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake)” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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