Sundance: Alia Shawkat & Callum Turner Make the Sweet-Edged War Satire 'Atropia' Worth the Visit

Much like missiles, satire requires precision. But this year’s Sundance Grand Jury prize winner, the “War On Terror” satire Atropia, turns out to be a lot shaggier than that—much like the explosives we witness fizzling on the backs of plastic donkeys, not everything here sticks its landing. But that’s okay? Parodying the Iraq War of the Aughts has been done to death by now with most of its sharp edges sanded down, and so this somewhat gentle and silly slice of absurdity weaves its own peculiar meander through the thorns of war-what-is-it-good-for. Which is to say I dug it, even while I don’t foresee it casting a long or terribly dark shadow across that deeply serious conversation.

Atropia is the name of a fake Iraqi village that’s been constructed in the California desert by the U.S. Military just a few short hours drive from Hollywood. (So close to Utopia, and yet.) Apparently this is a real thing the military does—build immersive settings that replicate where they’re shipping soldiers off to so they can get a sense of what they’re in for. It’s a billion-dollar version of Laser Tag basically, and they hire hundreds of actors to Truman Show it up for the grunts, playing terrorists one day, bread-makers the next. They’re full-time cosplayers for whatever battle we might currently be waging—living history animatronics of flesh and blood and cell phone data.

The foremost thespian working inside of Atropia is Fayruz (Alia Shawkat), a striving Serious Actor who takes her daily-assigned assortment of roles extremely seriously, even as she’s morally dubious about the entire project given the fact that her real-world family is from Iraq. When we see some real Hollywood people come to town in the film’s opening act (including a big name cameo that nobody seems to want to spoil even though he’s featured prominently on the film’s IMDb page) we get a very funny display of just that—taking on the role of a mad chemist that day, Fayruz goes way way above her call of duty to get captured by and to put on a show for the glitterati among the real troopers’ midst.

Until the U.S. Government got in her way writer-director Hailey Gates had actually intended to make a full-length documentary about these real-world fictional 4D experiences that the military’s built for their killing games—and she did make a 2019 short film called Shako Mako, named after one of these places. And it’s here in the backstage world-building as we’re introduced to this strange surreal space that you can really feel Gates’ enthusiasm for and fascination with the subject bubbling up through the sand. We spend a lot of time watching the happy-go-lucky prosthetics guy make exploded limbs. And then jiving on the disconnect between the “dangerous” environment they’re in as it rubs against the goofy shenanigans that the actors get up to in between mass casualty events.

Enter Abu Dice (Callum Turner), a U.S. vet sent back to the States in between deployments who really, really wants to go back to the real thing, but is stuck for the moment inside of this reenactment. Brought in for his lived knowledge of what the troops will face over there, Fayruz looks at Abu and immediately senses him as a threat to her theatric domination—it’s a real “Sam & Diane” hate-to-love vibe for a quick moment that the friction between them feeds, until the gigantic wallop of these two actors’ sexiness inevitably wins the day.

Shawkat and Turner share such a weird, fun chemistry together that even as Atropia wanders off the map and into a desert of its own making it’s hard to get too worked up about the film’s semi-aimlessness—their relationship is fraught and goofy and totally charming, and much like the movie itself seems to I also stopped caring about the satire of it all whilst watching these two actors have so much fun together. Running around and blowing up the game just because they can, fucking in porta-potties, Atropia begins to feel more like a tossed-off wartime-adjacent Hope & Crosby lark—a Road To Zanzibar with a lot of deranged sexual chemistry.

If that’s not entirely the movie I signed up for going into this it’s still a movie I’ll watch the hell out of—especially whenever the movie cuts back to Tim Heidecker and Chlo Sevigny playing the suits in charge of these here war-games, straight-facing up a storm of the silliest nonsense. (And naming Sevigny reminds me to mention that Atropia was produced by Luca Guadagnino, and that its writer-director Gates is also an actress, and she actually played the Tinder date that Josh O’Connor abandons in Challengers. You’re welcome.)

We’re in a dark place in the world right now—I say that in case you hadn’t noticed, and if you hadn’t please take me to where ever it is you exist—and perhaps it was Atropia’s duty was to tear down the Military Industrial Complex of these disturbed United States a few extra notches than it ends up doing. It’s a pretty soft punch. But there’s also benefit to be had in sneaking in that message in lightly too, giving us a fallible weirdo child-of-immigrants who’s figuring out her place here among the styrofoam rubble of her homeland; that battle doesn’t have to define this character fully. We all should have the opportunity to mount a Callum Turner of our own—that’s the true American Way we should all be fighting for.