Deep breath, here goes…This is my elevator pitch after three mugs of coffee cut with powdered ephedrine: Under the Burning Sun is George Miller’s Furiosa meets Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge, with echoes of I Spit On Your Grave and Boys Don’t Cry, the (literal) water carried by a lead performance reminiscent of Jodie Foster’s Nell. A lot occurs in a lean and vicious seventy-five minutes, so let’s get fucking going.
Goat gifted me this microbudget gem, probably because it contains so many things I love in an indie project that squeezes diamonds out of dimes. Arresting cinematography, immersive sound design, tantalizing music, storytelling that’s an 80/20 split of show/tell, and queer romance. Matty’s bingo card is full.
If writer-director Yun Xie and cinematographer Tianyi Wang are not fans of John Ford’s work, I’ll eat my ten-gallon hat. The Rule of Thirds is ever present, with the top two dominated by vast, godlike skies. Lawrence of Arabia was achieved with cameras and lenses requiring mountains of cash and years of innovation, but for this indie flick that just made a splash at Slamdance 2025, any number of ingenious setups, rigs and effects have been used to achieve Sun’s lavish parade of vistas. It leaves the impression of a modestly-budgeted Miramax joint from the mid-nineties, with a post-apocalyptic mumblecore (the good kind) gloss.
This is a brutally feminist film. An unapologetic, often challenging watch due to almost character-like bursts of violence, sometimes muted, sometimes wrenching, always believable. Both the makeup and visual effects teams deserve special mention for the wounds, wreckage, scars, sun damage, and debris that silence any qualms about budget constraints with steady visceral conviction.
There is a rape scene early on that I must give the strangest compliment I may ever offer in the capacity of film reviewer: only Irreversible and The Nightingale were harder to keep from flinching away from during onscreen sexual violence. And this scene is horribly successful: our heroine left with an unwanted pregnancy in the middle of a particular nowhere seemingly without Maslow’s easy pickings of nourishment and companionship.
Mowanza is her name, and she purchases a pair of pills from a barely recognizable man (more on this soon) ostensibly meant to induce a miscarriage, leading to the first of many bravura physical performances by Stephanie Pardi, owning the lead role with a mixture of prowling jungle tigress and wounded bird of prey. Were she a real person, I would wonder if she needed a hug, but would not dare attempt to give one, for fear of losing a digit or two. Ahem.
In the press materials for the film, produced by Narval Pictures, a Los Angeles-based collective of Asian-American filmmakers, Yun Xie talks about a personal moment when her mother, toward the end of her life, addressed a hysterectomy scar that was revealed during a private conversation, asking Yun, “Am I still a woman?”
Yun’s response: “Everything was quiet. I didn’t have an answer. Ten years later, I still don’t have one. [This film] asks the same questions and more: ‘What does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to not have a choice?’”
It’s here that I’ll mention the water bottle, which feels like a pitch meeting prop destined to become behind-the-scenes lore, while serving onscreen as an extension of Mowanza’s wiry, straining arms. With the film’s ominous title and parched horizons, water is obviously a critical element, and a thin plastic drinking bottle dangling from a leather strap provides some excellent connections between Mowanza and the motley characters she meets on her jagged, hazardous pilgrimage to the town of Iropus, a place purported to offer utopian technology and, forbidden outside its borders, the promise of abortion surgery.
A cloister of nuns offer her a partial refill if she changes her mind about the trip, various characters take grateful gulps in moments of tentative trust, and the bottle becomes a talisman of sorts. Mowanza wants to rid herself of the nascent life growing in her abdomen, while preserving her own in a pitiless wasteland. There are probably a thousand metaphors, most of them too subtle for my comprehension in this confident, angry story, and I appreciated the unpredictable yet inevitable momentum it gained as the near-constant automotive breakdowns brushed against but never became satire.
As a cisgender man, I was acutely aware that the film did not mind my watching it, but that I was not its intended audience. As such, I am relying on modes of compassion and my lived experience with adult female partners and relatives for this piece. Can I speak to the realities of receiving the correct birth control at a specific stage of an unwanted pregnancy? Certainly not, and pretending that I can would make me the exact type of person this film goes to great pains to confront… with some cinematic sleight of hand.
It wasn’t until a third of the way in that I noticed how each female character is shown in full focus, regardless of lighting, environment, or time of day, while the male characters, conversely, are framed as ungainly, apelike, and nearly headless. If the matte box wasn’t cutting a male character off near the Adam’s apple, a deft touch of vignetting, shadows from nearby objects, or the ingenious use of a welding mask, rendered each grown man faceless.
Brilliantly, the only male character with a clear face and nonthreatening movements is a small boy, the son of a female auto mechanic named Mavis (Stevie Kin), with whom Mowanza has a spontaneous, shockingly tender love scene. Female nudity is part of the tableau, but it feels appropriate, never forced, as naturalistic as the sun-bleached trees and bony shrubs clawing texture into the corners of desert exteriors.
A river appears during the third act and, because it would be hard to both spoil this confident yarn, and simultaneously easy to assume such scenes are dreams/fantasies/projection, I will simply say that the effect it had on me was a quenching like the IV banana bag hitting my bloodstream after a bender gone too far.
Desert and oasis bind the axis around which Under the Burning Sun rotates, yanking and shoving at our heightened emotions as we grapple with Mowanza’s all-too-contemporary dilemma. Even the moments when she’s seemingly caught after a fall invariably lead to doubt and a trauma-forged return to further peril. After all of this, is she still a woman? I am not the one to answer that, but I urge adventurous viewers to ride shotgun in Mowanza’s shitbox and collide with their own conclusions.
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