Read more Sundance: 5 Sleepers That Could Surprise at the Festival But that’s just a false clue in an unsatisfying mystery. Sobel’s grasp of tone and story become less assured as the intrigue unfolds and Ryder gets drawn into Keith’s home, where his three daughters and their young mother ( Azura Skye) start to look disconcertingly like sister wives. A possible olive branch is extended the next day, but the unsettling climate instead exhumes a murky family secret.
Open hostility follows, making it clear that Ryder and family are no longer welcome, and Keith’s longstanding issues with sister Cindy resurface.
Having already made no effort to disguise his distaste for his nephew, Molly’s father Keith ( Josh Hamilton) reacts with rage. When Ryder and Molly slink off to the barn to look for bird’s nests in the rafters, something happens the girl emerges screaming and traumatized. The assembled jocks and cowboys roll their eyes, but Ryder’s young female cousins have drunk the Katy Perry Kool-Aid they are bewitched by the cool alien in their midst, none more so than nine-year-old Molly ( Ursula Parker). He rocks up to the al fresco lunch in snug red shorts, a deep-plunge V-neck T-shirt and yellow-framed ’80s retro shades. While Ryder reluctantly keeps quiet, his outfit speaks volumes. Read more Sundance Hot List: 10 Films That Could Be the New ‘Boyhood’ His laidback dad Don ( Richard Schiff) advises against broadcasting that news, reminding Ryder that the get-together is not about him. In the car en route to a family celebration at the sprawling farm where his grandmother ( Elizabeth Franz) still lives, 17-year-old Ryder ( Logan Miller) asks his mother Cindy ( Robin Weigert) if her Nebraska clan is aware that he’s gay. But when the obsessively trippy bassline for “Under Pressure,” by Queen and David Bowie, comes in to cue the end credits here, it’s difficult not to wonder how much difference a suggestive score or a more sophisticated soundscape might have made to this creepy but less-than-trenchant drama. Too many inexperienced filmmakers rely on music to create tension, rather than building it into their characters and plotting.