Sundance 2024: Stress Positions is part of queer cinema's new vanguard

Editor's note: this review of Theda Hammel’s Stress Positions, which recently premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, contains spoilers.

The first great comedy about the COVID era is finally here.

In Theda Hammel’s Stress Positions, comedian John Early shines bright as the hilariously named Terry Goon, a man who is manically trying to take care of his injured Moroccan male model nephew during the height of quarantine in the summer of 2020 while living in a retired “party house.”

Stress Positions has a lot going on in its tight 90-minute run. There are a lot of characters, and each is louder than the last, but the chaos and frustration that causes perfectly mimic how we were all feeling during that summer.

As more and more people from Terry’s life try to come and meet his beautifully handsome nephew, Terry loses more and more control, and by the end of the movie, two people are headed to the hospital, one runs away, and one dies.

Hammel, playing Terry’s acerbic friend Carla, is a hilarious highlight, spilling everyone’s secrets, saying whatever’s on her mind, and encouraging Bahlul to transition. “Not everyone is trans!” Terry hilariously shouts at her at one point in the film.

Dueling voiceovers and cyclical events happening to multiple characters in nearly identical ways give the film a dream-like state where characters and narratives blend together – something that actually does happen for queer people. How many times have we as trans people met other queer people who could be us from the past or us in the future?

The film also successfully skewers Millenial’s ideas of identity and politics, and how tied up the two are. Carla and Terry keep talking about “the Middle East” and “the Arab world,” but in reality, have very little idea what those two things are. Carla is excited to join in the protests of that summer but doesn’t seem to be aware of what she is actually fighting for or against. When Bahlul asks Carla if she “always felt like a girl,” she replies, “No. I wanted to kill myself, and this helped.”

Bahlul, on the other hand, is very casual about his politics, gender, and sexuality. As Terry keeps saying he’s not gay, “he’s religious,” Bahlul is happy to experiment with his gender, finding joy in feeling beautiful when he puts on a blonde wig belonging to the eccentric upstairs neighbor Coco. “She’s not a tr*nny, she’s just crazy,” an exasperated Terry says at one point about her.

Stress Positions might not be for everyone (especially if you’re cis and straight and don’t have a lot of queer friends), and it might be a little too caustic for some straight-laced viewers, but that makes it a stronger film with more to say.

I cannot heap enough praise onto writer/director/composer/star Theda Hammel. Stress Positions is her first feature and, along with other Sundance standouts I Saw the TV Glow (written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun) and Love Lies Bleeding (written and directed by Rose Glass), it sets the pace for a new wave of queer cinema.

There are hints of Barry Levinson and Judd Apatow in Hammel’s film, but through a new, exciting, queer, lens. She’s sure to have hit after hit on her hand after this debut, and I can already see young queer and trans filmmakers being inspired by her style and talent.