ATROPIA – The 2025 Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. Grand Jury Prize Winner Never Reaches Its Potential

Atropia, the ambitious feature debut from Hailey Gates, has left the 2025 Sundance Film Festival with the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Dramatic Feature. Still, the broader feelings about the project remain divided. With a unique premise and strong performances, Atropia presents an intriguing but ultimately uneven satire of America’s military-industrial complex.

What is Atropia About?

The film is set in a military role-playing facility, a concept that may sound surreal but is, in fact, based on real U.S. military training operations. These large-scale simulated environments are designed to prepare American soldiers for combat scenarios abroad. Initially envisioned as a documentary, Gates ultimately opted for a narrative feature, allowing for a more satirical exploration of the inherent absurdity within these training exercises.

Alia Shawkat leads the film as Fayruz Abbas, an aspiring actress who takes her work in Atropia – a fictionalized version of a real-life mock Middle Eastern village – very seriously. Throughout her time on “set,” she assumes various identities, playing different Iraqi civilians, from a street vendor to a mustard gas scientist. She is one of many actors, paid to bring the illusion of war to life in training exercises meant to prepare soldiers for the realities of combat. The facility is staffed by a mix of actors and military veterans, including Callum Turner’s character, a U.S. service member cast as an insurgent. As the narrative unfolds, Fayruz finds herself romantically drawn to Turner’s character, which is one of many subplots that feels thin and far from being fully fleshed out.

A Satirical War-Drama-Romance

Atropia attempts a precarious balancing act between satire, drama, and romance, often struggling to maintain consistency in tone. Gates draws clear inspiration from military satires like MASH*, using humour to critique the dehumanization of war. At its best, the film employs dark, absurdist comedy to expose the hypocrisy and moral dissonance of these training exercises. A particularly sharp moment sees Fayruz instructing a fellow actor to “channel” her real-life grief over the very real death of her husband to enhance the authenticity of her performance – an indictment of both military role-playing and exploitative acting methods.

Gates also winks at Hollywood’s complicity in war narratives, with an uncredited A-list actor (spoiler – Channing Tatum) visiting Atropia to conduct research for a role. His cameo serves as a nod to the relationship between the film industry and the U.S. military, a connection that often sees real-life war narratives sanitized or repackaged for entertainment purposes. The military–entertainment complex is further underscored in the film’s setting – a 600-acre mock village with its own currency, news station, and staged attacks.

However, while many of these satirical moments land effectively, Atropia stumbles when it shifts towards heavier, more explicitly serious themes. Real archival footage of the Iraq War is used intermittently, intended, I suppose, to show the real effects of trauma for military veterans, but because Gates had not created a deep emotional connection to these vets, it ends up feeling quite forced.

Performances in Atropia 

Shawkat delivers a compelling performance, imbuing Fayruz with a mix of wit, desperation, and self-delusion that makes her both frustrating and endearing. Her sharp comedic instincts, honed in Arrested Development, are on full display, but she also brings a deeper emotional weight when needed. Turner provides a solid counterpoint, but the exploration of his trauma from war remains surface-level. Supporting turns from Chloë Sevigny, Tim Heidecker, and Jane Levy are well-performed, but they are not given an opportunity to showcase fully developed characters on screen.

Despite its intriguing premise and moments of biting humour, Atropia ultimately struggles to cohere. Its most compelling aspect – the examination of the military’s use of role-playing for training – gets diluted by an underdeveloped romance and scattered storytelling. The film’s attempts to juggle multiple tones result in a lack of depth; instead of a sharp, focused critique, we get a collection of fairly amusing but disparate ideas.

At its core, Atropia is a fascinating experiment. Gates has a strong voice and a keen eye for satire, but her reach exceeds her grasp here. While the film offers glimpses of brilliance, it never fully realizes its potential. The sitcom-like humour feels at odds with its loftier ambitions, and the film’s conclusion leaves one wondering whether it wanted to be a sharp political satire, a war-time rom-com, or a dark absurdist comedy.