Sundance review: 'Mayday' is an imaginative revenge fantasy, of a young woman going to war in an alternative reality

‘Mayday’

★★★

Appearing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Can be streamed through the festival digital portal on Tuesday, February 2. Running time: 100 minutes.

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Bringing real guns to the battle of the sexes, writer-director Karen Cinorre’s “Mayday” is an engrossing psychological drama propelled by dream logic in an alternative reality.

In this reality, or something close to it, Anna (played with grit by Grace Van Patten) is a waitress at a wedding venue, living in her car and buffeted by the abuse of her boss (Frano Maskovic), who sexually assaults her in the walk-in freezer. Anna, at the end of her rope, decides to end it all by crawling into a gas oven.

She ends up crawling out the other end and falling into the ocean. She’s found on the rocky coast by Marsha (Mia Goth), who commands a group of young women in a never-ending war. Marsha and her squad — tough-talking Gert (played by the French singer Soko) and the sensitive Bea (played by model Havana Rose Liu) — operate out of a derelict U-boat, luring ships full of men into storms, like the sirens of mythology.

Marsha sees in Anna the potential to become a dead-eye sharpshooter. Anna trains hard, learning to swim and shoot and kill. But, as she descends into this ceaseless war, Anna begins to discover that Marsha’s motives aren’t necessarily pure.

Cinorre takes this surreal story into a lot of directions, crossing from war picture to revenge fantasy, with a musical dream sequence thrown in because, well, why not? Not everything here works, but even the less-successful moments have some bite.

Watching “Mayday,” I kept thinking that this is what Zack Snyder’s “Sucker Punch” might have been if directed by an imaginative woman and not a slavering guy with a “Sailor Moon” fixation. I also kept hoping that Cinorre has more where this came from.