BIFF23 REVIEW: Fancy Dance [2024]

Rating: R | Runtime: 90 minutes
Release Date: June 20th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Apple Original Films
Director(s): Erica Tremblay
Writer(s): Erica Tremblay & Miciana Alise

Everybody’s out looking for me. Who’s looking for my sister?

What begins as a missing persons hunt for Jax’s (Lily Gladstone) sister soon reveals itself to be less about getting back what’s gone and more about accepting what remains. It’s a theme that runs through the entirety of Erica Tremblay’s Fancy Dance—especially on parental lines with Tawi’s disappearance leaving a thirteen-year-old daughter (Isabel Deroy-Olson’s Roki) alone in its wake. Jax believes that being her aunt will be enough. She’s doesn’t quite understand yet that she must also be willing to take up the job of mom.

How could she, though? What examples had she known growing up? Her mother died when she was a teenager and her father (Shea Whigham’s Frank) left the reservation and his daughters behind. Jax and Tawi became survivors as a result. Running drugs. Doing time. Scraping by. And these are the lessons they’ve imparted on Roki too. So, it’s not until child protective services arrives to place her with Frank and new wife Nancy (Audrey Wasilewski) that Jax realizes Roki had become part of her survival.

Tremblay and co-writer Miciana Alise’s script takes us on a road trip of sorts. Roki joins Jax (without permission and thus legally kidnapped) under the belief they’ll be heading towards the annual powwow to be reunited with her mother. Jax takes her to hopefully unearth the truth of Tawi’s disappearance (the police aren’t paying attention) so she can break the news only when her suspicions of murder are finally confirmed. How they get by on the road (stealing and trespassing) entertains while also shedding light on the systemic racism always forcing their hands.

The end result is a well-told if familiar tale set amongst Native characters caught between culture and country with the usual depictions of bigotry and ambivalence on the part of those ensuring that clash forever keeps them down. It may use the horrors of an American murder epidemic on reservations as its backbone, but it’s really about hope for the future and a desire to right past wrongs and be who your loved ones need you to be. Gladstone is fantastic in the lead role, learning that protection demands honesty. Only then can she be the person Roki truly needs.