Welcome back to Lisa Laman’s South by Southwest (SXSW) coverage! This Austin, Texas festival is still underway in the capital of the Lone Star State, but this movie-loving bimbo is covering the event virtually from Dallas, Texas. March 7-9 screenings over the event’s first weekend were the most star-studded affairs of the entire festival, with folks like Ben Affleck, Jenna Ortega, Paul Rudd, Blake Lively, Anna Kendrick, and Nicole Kidman congregating on the birthplace of Dakota Johnson. However, in between those lavish events were a bevy of tinier films debuting and hoping to garner some attention, audience discussions, and distribution offers.
It is currently Monday morning on March 10. I’ve got mid-2000s Keith Urban tunes (specifically “You Look Good in My Shirt”) blaring in my ear, a mild stomachache starting to go into the rearview mirror, and an exciting lunch with a friend on the horizon. I’m ready to delve into three more mini-reviews of movies screening and/or premiering at SXSW, and I hope you are too! Let’s charge forth into the next installment of the 2025 edition of Culturess SXSW coverage!
The Tallest Dwarf (dir. Julie Wyman)
Like so many marginalized communities, default depictions of little people in cinema are typically dehumanizing and othering. Additionally, little people almost exclusively have no control over how they’re portrayed in front of the camera. Julie Wyman’s new documentary The Tallest Dwarf touches on these hardships primarily by allowing members of this community to reclaim various forms of artistic expression. Whether it’s recreating classical paintings, tracing around their bodies, or engaging in acting exercises, The Tallest Dwarf sees little people taking back the artforms that have previously stigmatized them.
All of this intersects with a recurring personal narrative concerning Wyman, whose height makes her noticeably taller than the other souls in her community. Interactions between Wyman and her father, as well as a ticking clock over a DNA test regarding her ancestry, pepper the runtime. Jumping back and forth between these digressions and various pontifications on artistic representations of little people unfortunately render The Tallest Dwarf a jaggedly assembled exercise. Balancing the academic and emotional isn’t impossible to pull off in the land of documentaries. However, The Tallest Dwarf can’t quite stick the landing in its shifts between so many topics.
Still, there are some elements that benefit from intentional dissonance. Chiefly, the atonal score during early scenes set to scrapbook-style animation evoke The Brutalist’s score in clashing together disparate musical aesthetics. Meanwhile, many of the testimonies on-screen, particularly those from little people parents yearning for folks to support their excitement over having kids that look like them, are extremely compelling. That includes Wyman’s stripped-down discussions with her father. Her dad is clearly a man of few words, but he packs immense emotional power into just a handful of phrases.
Other standout segments from The Tallest Dwarf include recounting of the importance of trailblazer actor Billy Barty and a sequence where Wyman’s colleagues read aloud scripted interpretations of what’s going on in the mind of various little people from vintage photographs. Much like with a standout scene in Mati Diop’s Dahomey, The Tallest Dwarf also creates fascinating cinema out of various marginalized perspectives colliding. In this case, Wyman chronicles folks debating whether or not a panel for little people should have financing from a pharmaceutical company that wants to “cure” them. The Tallest Dwarf is messy in assembling its dissonant pieces into a cohesive whole. However, this sequence encapsulates how there’s still sporadically engaging material in here.
Shuffle (dir. Benjamin Flaherty)
Director Benjamin Flaherty is not exploring addiction in Shuffle as a removed spectator. He’s a man who grapples with the fire and pain of addiction on an everyday basis. He’s only here today because he got addiction treatment at a proper facility. Unfortunately, not all vulnerable souls dealing with addiction get the help they need. Shuffle explores a slew of human beings grappling with the modern American horrors of addiction treatment fraud. These are centers that keep people trapped in the cycle of addiction so they can run up hefty bills on a person's insurance. Much like the horrific underpinnings of the prison industrial complex, it's about getting bodies in through the door, not about helping people long-term.
Sometimes, it’s the simplest things that solidify a documentary as a winner. With Shuffle, Flaherty’s narrator voice (which is kind of like if Ben Affleck had gravitas infused into his pipes) lends immediate weight to any topic the film grapples with. There’s an impressive vocal balance between an authoritative aura and an everyman spirit. Better yet, Flaherty knows when to let off his narration to let people like recovering addicts Daniel, Nicole, and Corey (the latter of which now recruits people for other treatment centers) take center stage. Flaherty himself is off-screen for the entirety of Shuffle’s runtime, which truly allows these perspectives room to breathe.
The turmoil and caked-in pain depicted on-screen is heartbreaking, sometimes in the quietest ways imaginable. In one interview segment, Daniel, out in a public park, points to a nearby picnic table where his family staged his first intervention. In another sequence, a torn-up Nicole sits in the pathway of a porch door lamenting how so many people she loves pass away. Corey, meanwhile, is always on the move, with Flaherty recording this man in motels, airports, and bus stops. Capturing these and other anecdotes in exterior locations communicates that Flaherty is chronicling these people in their everyday lives. This isn’t just a sharp contrast to the talking-heads interview segment documentary norm of having folks talk directly to the camera in a controlled soundstage.
It also accentuates Shuffle’s verisimilitude. While treatment center fraud is all about erasing the humanity of addicts to cultivate more money, Shuffle’s intimate filmmaking scope reinforces every crevice of everyday reality for its central subjects. The result is an emotionally absorbing title where even expository segments are told with poetic phrasing (“sobriety is an affront to profit”) or striking animation evoking the doodles you might see on a blackboard. Closing scenes underscoring the importance of treatment centers run by fellow addicts and emphasizing communal connections are a further fantastic touch in Shuffle.
This is not a documentary labeling all treatment centers evil. What Flaherty is critiquing is centers exploiting addicts for capitalistic gain, rather than helping people cope with this sickness. That complexity renders Shuffle a haunting portrait of a man realizing the tools that saved his life can easily be warped for malicious means. Flaherty’s filmmaking in Shuffle is restrained but richly human right down to lovely little flourishes like incorporating simulations of film stock imperfections into certain images of Daniel and Nicole. Flaherty’s profoundly personal connection to Shuffle’s central topic benefits the production endlessly.
She’s the He (dir Siobhan McCarthy)
In my Graduate School musical cinema classes, we discussed how academic interpretations of musical movies often saw queer contexts in the male friendships anchoring films like Singin' in the Rain. After all, these dudes had more chemistry than the cis-het male/female relationships in the actual stories. How could audiences not imagine the queer relationships barely contained off-screen? That's why the "No Dames!" scene in Hail, Caesar! was inspired. It made the subtext hysterical text.
Siobhan McCarthy's feature She's the He operates in a similar fashion. Trans interpretations have been tossed around endlessly regarding cross-dressing High School/College movies like She's the Man or Sorority Boys. McCarthy’s just got the chutzpah to say “okay, but what if this basic plotline led to a sweet trans coming-of-age story?”
Lifelong best pals like Ethan (Misha Osherovich) and Alex (Nico Carney) are staring down the barrel of profoundly unhappy senior years of high school. Alex is profoundly crestfallen over not getting laid or scoring with crush Sasha (Malia Pyles). Ethan, meanwhile, is withdrawn for reasons they can't pinpoint. Alex gets a stupid idea to get close to Sasha: he and Ethan should pose as trans girlies to get access to the girl's locker room. In this rancid scheme lifted straight out of a 1980s teen comedy, Ethan begins to feel unexpected joy in her heart, especially after Sasha takes the time to put her in a dress that just feels so right. Ethan’s starting to realize she’s actually a trans girly just as Alex is committing further and further to deception to get close to Sasha.
I am once again asking for major comedy movie filmmakers to look towards indie films on how to shoot yukfest’s right. While so many major studio and especially streaming comedy directors limply execute gags, Siobhan McCarthy’s directorial debut immediately demonstrates impressive panache. An early scene of Alex and Ethan trying to talk in gym class while dodgeballs bombard the shot’s background especially resonates as some great multi-layered visual comedy. There’s also a welcome emphasis on bright colors in the production and costume design even when the characters are inhabiting naturally dimly lit environments like the wings of a stage. She’s the He doesn’t view comedy cinema as “lesser-than”; but rather just another mode for creating interesting imagery.
McCarthy’s filmmaking sensibilities also include peppering the screen with little pieces of scraggly hand-drawn animation. It’s a move evoking similar elements in The Mitchells vs. The Machines, but the adult-skewing sensibilities of She’s the He means this movie gives its doodles a distinctive identity through more ribald impulses like representations of a car known as “D*ck Gobbler”. Plus, McCarthy knows when to dial back these elements and just let more realistic visual aesthetics dominate the screen for intimate sequences like Ethan and Forest (Tatian Ringsby) having a heart-to-heart chat about trans identity.
So many raunchy comedies lose their way when more sentimental elements enter the frame. In She’s the He, witnessing moving bursts of trans camaraderie proves just as entertaining as watching Ethan and Alex trying on elaborate femme outfits at a thrift store (Alex’s declaration of “I look like I’d break up a marriage” at one scantily clad dress is hysterical). That sense of balance extends to the very well-calculated performance of Nico Carney. An intentionally insufferable buffoon, McCarthy and Carney both work nicely in accentuating this youthful naivete that takes off some of the edge of this guy. He’s not oppressively aggressive, but more like a hyperactive younger sibling. That’s a persona Carney inhabits well, especially with his great sense of comic timing.
As She’s the He’s heart and soul, Misha Osherovich absolutely crushes their first film role. In a yukfest full of jokes about “men don’t wash their ass” and pontifications on what Ryan Reynolds calls Blake Lively during sex, there’s such rich emotional immediacy to Osherovich’s depiction of Ethan’s growth throughout this film’s runtime. They deliver tremendously impactful work that's a must-see. Certain elements of how She’s the He’s evolve can be undeniably clunky. I was especially slightly disappointed in its shift from a more ribald John Waters-inspired high school comedy in its first act to something evoking Stephen Chbosky and Tim Tharp in its finale.
However, Siobhan McCarthy's creative vision is largely a wonderful thing to behold, especially since they know the importance of good imagery and actors in comedic features. Bonus points too for deploying a tune featuring Charlie XCX. Between She's the He and Bottoms, I'm so here for all the cool anarchic LGBTQIA+ 2020s movies using Charlie XCX tunes, let's keep this trend going. In other words, She’s the He is this generation’s “No Dames!” in making the subtext of a film genre engrossing text.
Be sure to come back to Culturess in the next week for the final two installments of Lisa Laman's SXSW reviews!