There’s a second in Atropia, Hailey Gates’ daring and deeply unsettling characteristic debut, the place an actress — performed with biting precision by Alia Shawkat — wanders into what seems to be an energetic warfare zone. The cinematography leans into the acquainted language of contemporary warfare movies: the shaky handheld digital camera, the muted desert palette, the eerie quiet earlier than an inevitable explosion. However then, one thing shifts. A pretend donkey sits within the foreground. The gunfire sounds staged. Somebody shouts in English, however their accent is compelled, over-pronounced, the best way an actor may ship a line they don’t fairly perceive.
Abruptly, the phantasm collapses. We’re not in a warfare zone — we’re in Atropia, a simulated location designed for navy coaching, the place actors play out conflicts that will probably be rehearsed repeatedly, getting ready American troopers for a model of warfare that has been pre-scripted, sanitized, and curated for his or her understanding. That is actually the theatre of warfare — tongue-in-cheek, self-referential, and cuttingly absurd.
Empathy Is Non-compulsory in ‘Atropia’
Atropia
3.5
/5
- Launch Date
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January 25, 2025
- Runtime
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104 Minutes
- Director
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Hailey Gates
- Writers
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Hailey Gates
- Glorious ironic performances make you query actuality and the character of efficiency.
- A typically very humorous and typically very unhappy satire of artwork and warfare.
- In some methods, the movie will get too caught up in itself and turns into foolish.
Shawkat’s character, a struggling actress, takes a job in Atropia not as a result of she has any deep perception within the American navy, however as a result of it’s a paying gig — a job in an business that continues to pigeonhole her into stereotypes. She, like many others in Atropia, is enjoying an element in a simulation designed to arrange troopers for warfare. However how a lot can this really put together them when even these employed to play the Iraqi civilians aren’t sympathetic to the tradition they’re meant to embody? In a single notably biting alternate, an Iraqi further repeats a drained stereotype of the folks he is employed to painting, decreasing them to caricatures fairly than partaking with their humanity. If even the performers are formed by the identical biases, how can the coaching create actual understanding? The train is performative; the empathy is non-obligatory.
Atropia follows the absurdity of this coaching floor, the place actual navy operations mix seamlessly with Hollywood-style re-enactments. Troopers observe counterinsurgency whereas a visiting actor prepares for a staged battle sequence meant for media protection. Chloë Sevigny and Tim Heidecker seem because the heads of a shadowy company that income from the countless loop of warfare video games, reinforcing the concept on this America, warfare isn’t just fought, however rehearsed, marketed, and bought. Sevigny’s character, in a company coaching video, delivers the movie’s most damning line: “Create compliance by creating issues that solely you may repair.”
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The movie balances its critique with deeply human moments, together with Callum Turner’s efficiency as a soldier haunted by his actual experiences in Iraq. In one of many movie’s most deeply unsettling sequences, his reminiscences invade the current, slicing between footage of previous invasions and the faces of harmless Iraqi folks caught within the chaos. The distinction between actual warfare and simulated warfare underpins the movie’s central pressure, a motif that recurs all through Turner’s arc: when does preparation turn out to be propaganda?
A Simulacrum of Battle: Conflict Video games as Technique Appearing
Atropia, each the identify of the fictional metropolis and the title of the movie, exists as a large set piece. It is a fake Center Japanese city the place American troopers observe counterinsurgency, role-playing skirmishes with employed actors who play civilians, insurgents, and informants. These actors, largely immigrants or second-generation People, are paid to embody the stereotypes the navy has deemed important for coaching functions. The absurdity of the premise — of watching women and men carry out a warfare that has already been fought, misplaced, and rebranded — mirrors the absurdity of a nation continually rewriting its personal narratives to go well with its world ambitions.
One of many movie’s most quietly sensible metaphors is the safety of a desert tortoise, an endangered species that should not be touched beneath any circumstances. This seemingly minor element displays the deeper contradictions inside America itself. One nook of the nation is devoted to getting ready troopers for warfare, the place it fiercely protects wildlife at any price, even on the expense of coaching these troopers successfully. The tortoise turns into a stand-in for the cognitive dissonance on the coronary heart of the nation, an emblem of how America’s priorities are break up between militarization and environmentalism, safety and destruction, violence and forms.
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Gates’ background as an actress, mannequin, and former Vice journalist makes her uniquely suited to inform this sort of story. Atropia exists on the intersection of efficiency, media critique, exploitation, and investigative journalism, analyzing the blurred traces between appearing, reporting, and propaganda. As somebody who has labored in a number of spheres of performativity, Gates understands that these cultures (Hollywood, journalism, the navy) are constructed on scripted narratives. Conflict, as she presents it, is not any completely different. It’s rehearsed, staged, and endlessly repeated for audiences who’ve been skilled to eat it as leisure.
The Romance of Conflict and the Phantasm of Escape
After which there may be the love story — a daring, sudden twist in a warfare satire like this. Alia Shawkat’s character, a sizzling, pregnant actress enjoying an Iraqi villager, finds herself entangled with Callum Turner’s soldier, a person whose solely sense of normalcy is warfare. Having been despatched out at a younger age, he has by no means really realized find out how to be a civilian, and even in Atropia — the place the warfare is fully performative — he clings to the construction it supplies.
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His reference to Shawkat’s character is each actual and synthetic, difficult by the truth that she, too, is enjoying a job. Whilst he falls for her and her for him, the irony stays: the Iraqi villager he loves is simply one other American, caught in the identical simulation, performing the identical fantasy. Atropia takes sudden dangers, mixing absurdity with moments of real heat, displaying that even in a world constructed round synthetic warfare, actual feelings and actual connections nonetheless handle to floor, or do they?
On the movie’s emotional core is the connection between Shawkat’s character and an Iraqi cultural coordinator/Mayor of Atropia (Tony Shawkat), one of many few folks in Atropia who appears to acknowledge your entire operation for what it’s. “We’re serving to groom our youngsters into bombing our homeland,” he states bluntly, slicing by way of the layers of detachment. He’s the one character who expresses real look after Shawkat’s position in all of this — as a result of he understands that warfare, even in rehearsal, is rarely only a sport.
In one of many movie’s most visually putting moments, Shawkat and Turner’s characters escape to Las Vegas—as a result of, in fact, if you wish to see one thing lovely, you go to a metropolis designed to duplicate magnificence from world wide. The movie is crammed with these ironic moments, pointing to America’s obsession with simulacra. If we don’t have actual tradition, we fabricate it. If we don’t have actual justice, we manufacture it. If we don’t have actual warfare, we reenact it till it feels actual sufficient.
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A Satire for a Nation That No Longer Is aware of What’s Actual
Atropia balances satire with sincerity, discovering humor within the absurdity of warfare with out undermining its very actual penalties. It’s a movie concerning the efficiency of energy, the commodification of battle, and the best way America continues to promote warfare — not simply to the world, however to itself. The post-credits scene, which I received’t spoil, brilliantly ties the movie collectively, reinforcing the concept Atropia isn’t just a setting however an idea, one that may be exported, rebranded, and resold in any language, for any enemy, in any warfare. Because the credit roll, it’s unattainable to not ask: If warfare is a product, then who, precisely, is the patron?
Hailey Gates has created one thing uncommon — a satire that doesn’t simply mock however interrogates, a warfare movie that understands that in 2025, warfare is now not about battlefields, however about narratives. And in Atropia, everyone seems to be an actor. Some simply receives a commission greater than others. Atropia screened on the 2025 Sundance Movie Competition, the place it just lately received the Grand Jury Prize within the U.S. Dramatic Competitors.