Fancy Dance is now playing in select theaters, and will stream on Apple TV+ beginning June 28. 2023 turned out to be something of a breakout year for Lily Gladstone. Those who showed up for Kelly Reichardt’s 2016 film Certain Women were already aware of Gladstone’s excellence; the rest of the world fortunately caught up when Martin Scorcese’s Killers of the Flower Moon catapulted them into the upper echelon, nabbing a Best Actress nomination at the Oscars along the way.
That clout surely spurred Killers studio Apple into acquiring Fancy Dance. In the feature debut from director Erika Tremblay, Gladstone plays Jax, a Seneca-Cuyahoga looking after her niece, Roki (Isabel DeRoy-Olson) and struggling to find anyone who’ll investigate the disappearance of the girl’s mother, Tawi. In this mode, Fancy Dance operates almost like a bleaker version of the backwoods noir Winter’s Bone , one where most everyone involved knows what the answer is going to be, and they’re fighting more for closure.
Similarly, Tremblay and co-writer Miciana Alise introduce a ticking clock complication, and that’s where their movie starts to feel less sturdy. It comes in the form of Frank and Nancy (Shea Whigam and Audrey Wasilewski), Jax’s dad and stepmom who get custody of Roki since Jax has a criminal record and Tawi shows no signs of coming back soon. For a while, it’s actually pretty compelling.
Jax is stuck against an uncaring bureaucracy on one end and a system with a history of dec.
