‘Atropia’: Sundance Review

Dir/scr: Hailey Gates. US. 2025. 103 mins

Hailey Gates’ ambitious debut feature Atropia is full of comic potential that is never quite realised. The mixture of war games satire, deadpan farce and sweet romance provides amusement along the way without cutting as deep as it sometimes promises. The committed performances of Alia Shawkat and Callum Turner plus the Sundance US Grand Jury prize should guarantee attention for an uneven but often engaging  venture.

A sitcom sensibility with its easy targets and predictable punchlines

Gates sets the scene with a wry observation from Ambrose Bierce in 1875 that “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”  An actor in Uncut Gems (2019) and Challengers (2024), Gates has Luca Guadagnino on board as a producer for her feature-length directorial debut. Her short Shako Mako (2019), also starring Alia Shawkat, sets the template for the opening scenes of Atropia. It is 2006. Carrying a basket of bread, a woman navigates the narrow alleys of a sand-blown village filled with menace. An explosion is followed by wails of anguish as residents scream “Death to America”. Someone stops the scene as a device has failed to detonate and we realise it has all been an illusion, suggesting hints of The Truman Show (1998), Westworld (1973) and others. The reality is a 600-acre site in California containing a mock village used to test realistic battle scene scenarios before American soldiers are deployed to Iraq.

The residents of ‘Atropia’ are all actors, paid to make that illusion as authentic as possible. None of them take it more seriously than Shawkat’s Fayruz Abbas. She treats the task like a constant audition and has gone full Paula Strasberg as a demanding acting coach to the others.

Fictional country Atropia (shades of Duck Soup’s Freedonia) is a version of something that actually exists. At the end of the film we learn that some 200 mock villages are used throughout America to train troops. Here the village is called Medina Wasl and is set in an area dubbed The Box by the military. Predictably, their media channel is called Box News. Gates secures some laughter from the innocence and incompetence of the nervous recruits, the callous indifference of their military superiors and general attitudes to war. Shallow and obvious in places, it flirts with bad taste throughout and displays a  sitcom sensibility with its easy targets and predictable punchlines. Some of the material would also not seem out of place in a comedy sketch show.

Two significant events change the direction of travel as Fayruz learns that a major movie star (played by a good-sport uncredited A-lister) is coming to Atropia as part of his research for a new role. The opportunity to impress a Hollywood bigwig is impossible to resist but just a throwaway notion in the general hodge podge of ideas. The A-lister does return in a post-credits scene. More significantly, Fayruz meets Abu Dice (Turner), an American service veteran now cast as an insurgent leader and prepared to take the games as seriously as her. 

Shawkat’s lively, witty performance and Turner’s charm work hard to encourage our investment in the blossoming romance between Fayruz and Abu Dice and the dilemmas they face. Some of the their most romantic moments are set against beautiful desert backdrops warmly captured by cinematographer Eric K. Yue ( I Saw The TV Glow). The relationship is not without its appeal but it pushes the film towards more conventional territory.  Later, archive footage underlines the realities of America’s excursion into Iraq under President George W. Bush. Gates’ earnest steer towards political commentary and poignancy is well-intentioned  but it doesn’t feel as if the film has earned that privilege.