SUNDANCE25 REVIEW: Atropia [2025]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 104 minutes
Release Date: December 12th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Vertical Entertainment
Director(s): Hailey Gates
Writer(s): Hailey Gates

Let’s give these soldiers their worst day here so it doesn’t happen over there.

Medina Wasl is a real place. Well, a real fake place. It would later be re-named Ertebat Shar once America’s military interests turned to Afghanistan and now holds a Russian name as our sights turn towards the Kremlin. The “village” is one of fifteen simulated battlefields (including tunnels and caves) that exists at Fort Irwin’s training facility known as “The Box.” Soldiers are deployed to walkthrough and engage in true-to-life missions and battles with “insurgents” (often played by veterans who’ve lived it) while also dealing with civilians (actors portraying a rotating series of parts). America utilizes many such places for these purposes—as wild a fact to discover as it is an intriguingly shrewd mechanism.

Of course a filmmaker like Hailey Gates would want to take a closer look. It’s the sort of not-quite-believable setting that Hollywood loves and fascinates audiences. The original plan, explained during Gates’ post-Sundance premiere Q&A of Atropia, was to make a documentary, but, despite media tours and the appearance of transparency, that’s hardly something the US Department of Defense would want made. So, she pivoted to a short satire in the vein of M.A.S.H. to put down some of the crazier things she saw while on-location. And, when she and lead Alia Shawkat were between dissolved projects, the decision to expand it into a feature was hatched.

The result is very funny in its look at an absurd reality. With new blood coming in for a session, the film mostly follows a “villager” (Shawkat’s Fayrouz) and an “insurgent” (Callum Turner’s Tanner) attempting to use their performances as a means to an end: an acting job for her and a return deployment to Iraq for him. We therefore meet them in their separate sectors of the sandbox as they meet each other during the current drill. Both are very serious about their craft (her teaching the other underpaid extras how to act and him crafting his own covert operations to find a “mole” sabotaging the exercise’s success) and surprised to find someone else with that same passion. Romance ensues.

While that relationship is ultimately the main narrative thrust of Atropia, it’s really just our way into this world. I don’t want to say it isn’t interesting, but it never elevates beyond being as peripheral to the whole as Nancy (Jane Levy) trying to get a journalistic scoop or Private iPod (Gilberto Ortiz) and Private Plant (Allius Barnes) trying to “survive” or the head honchos (Tim Heidecker and Chloë Sevigny) going through the motions of spending taxpayer dollars. Fayrouz and Tanner are tour guides through the insanity who get just enough to do to become three-dimensional characters amidst a sea of scene-stealing bit-parters adding to the off-kilter atmosphere of this game of high-stakes laser tag.

I don’t say that to disparage the actors or Gates’ script. I only want to ensure you know the plot isn’t the point. Fayrouz and Tanner have their self-interests and neither wavers regardless of what happens between them. Don’t therefore devote your energy to watching whether they end up together because the film is less interested in that possibility than it is using their feelings to introduce more insane yet true scenarios that occur in “The Box.” It’s about them making these first-year soldiers piss their pants in the hopes that it might get them to shape-up and better prepare for live combat. But even that is less a dramatic source of enlightenment than the humorous realization that they’ll never truly be ready.

So, enjoy the comedy. It’s not as biting as you might hope, but it is entertaining. This is especially true when mocking the ways this farce can be exploited (embedding an A-list actor—I’ll let his identity be a surprise—to prepare for a role) or go wrong (get ready for the cranberry sauce carnage of the Thanksgiving Day Massacre). There are Mexicans playing Arabs, fake press staging suicide bombings to escalate the danger for the soldiers who are still “alive,” and a thriving cigarette trade to buy the spotlight when it matters most. Add a couple jabs about bloated budgets going to creature comforts for the brass while actors barely get enough water to drink let alone bathe and Medina Wasl becomes as much a microcosm of American inefficiency as it does a dangerous war zone.