NYFF Review: With What Can’t Be Mentioned, Dan Sallitt Crafts a Comedic Sequel to His Incest Drama

About halfway through The Unspeakable Act, Dan Sallitt’s spare, somber, unflinching 2012 feature, teenager Jackie (Tallie Medel) begins attending therapy to address the underlying issue at the heart of the movie’s title: an attraction to her older brother Matthew (Sky Hirschkron). It’s not that she’s embarrassed; she just has to grapple with those desires while embracing the rhythm of this professional duet and articulate exactly how she’s feeling. What unfolds is a squirmy back-and-forth that sends up the environment’s specific verbiage and the inherent strangeness of revealing your darkest self to a stranger jotting down notes onto a clipboard. Like most unenthusiastic, self-imposed sessions, nothing really gets resolved.

Therapy plays a much bigger role in What Can’t Be Mentioned, Sallitt’s unexpected, much-funnier sequel that picks up on Jackie’s unrequited romance 14 years later. Originally conceived as the second part of a trilogy that Sallitt now admits he’ll never complete, his micro-budget follow-up carries many of the same qualities of his filmography, building on prolonged, pregnant silences and filling each scene’s empty space with a protagonist whose intellectual capabilities remain in constant battle with her taboo desires and sexual frustrations—nothing that her natural curiosity and a few glasses of wine can’t begin to solve. What Can’t Be Mentioned begets another uncomfortable comedy of manners and human interaction. 

Now in her late 20s and still living in Brooklyn, Jackie has become a social worker in training, gently interrogating struggling mothers and narcissistic bachelors while learning how far to push them during sessions with her boss. At home, she and her bookkeeper boyfriend Anthony (Kyle McCormick) are contending with problems in bed, forcing them to consult a therapist (and take-home exercises) about their sexual incompatibility. And in the midst of that conflict, Jackie still harbors feelings for (yet is emotionally separated from) Matthew, who has recently announced that his partner Lily (Kit Zauhar) is pregnant, prompting Jackie to spend a few days upstate with them.

That’s enough narrative thrust for Sallitt, whose filmmaking can be an acquired taste but whose approach to dialogue and dry humor is remarkably assured. The writer-director, whose work has roots in the films of Robert Bresson, Éric Rohmer, and John Cassavetes, doesn’t furbish his movie with music, montages, or even paintings on Jackie’s walls. It’s not sterile so much as eerie. He builds scenes with a static camera and long takes, refusing a basic editing structure while relying on his performers to cultivate narrative momentum that might otherwise occur through more formal cinematic techniques. The story moves around the precise timing of Sallitt’s cuts, which build better pace and comedy than his previous efforts. 

Medel has, luckily, become a more compelling and willing participant, game to take prolonged monologues into uncomfortable, disturbing, socially anxious places. Unlike The Unspeakable Act, which leaned into voiceover to share Jackie’s interior thoughts, What Can’t Be Mentioned offers Medel more room to externalize Jackie’s chronic condition, psychological fascinations, and drunken curiosities—primarily directed towards Lily, who attempts to rationalize and downplay her eventual sister-in-law’s pointed, piercing remarks about her sexual orientation and upbringing. (“My parents are hippies,” she tells Jackie. “Talking about sex is like talking about laundry.”) It’s in these awkward interactions where Sallitt mines most of the movie’s comedy and Zauhar’s naturalistic, easy vibe only enhances Medel’s vulnerable, itchy performance. “Maybe I should go to bed,” Jackie says each night, having already soured the entire evening.

Is Jackie attempting to once again undo her brother’s relationship with small digs at open wounds, or is the wine just unearthing all of her repressed indiscretions into insensitive questions? Sallitt is content to live within that unanswerable tension, but he has fun with the idea that Jackie can’t ever escape her own job or innermost desires. As he noted in the Q&A after a New York Film Festival screening, the history of cinema and psychotherapy go together like “ham and eggs” (the breakfast analogy makes sense considering the batch of fluffy pancakes that Lily makes one morning), specifically as it pertains to their inherent dramatic structure. Yet Sallitt seems equally interested in interrogating the oversaturation of therapy-speak—the way certain vocabulary can help diagnose and connect, but just as powerfully prevent anything real from ever being said at all. 

Throughout Jackie’s intoxicated trials and errors, Matthew sits in the background, absorbing his sister’s sexual irritations and acting as a buffer when necessary. The unspoken intrigue as her neuroticism crescendos might be the movie’s highlight. It’s not until the end that he picks up Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and attempts his own literary diagnosis. It’s a tender, albeit humorous way to address Jackie’s unquenchable erotic mind, a tacit acknowledgment of her previous incestuous “phase” and polite nudge for her to go back home to Anthony, who is waiting to repair the broken aspects of their life together. Jackie must remind herself of an eternal truth: “The easy part is talking; the hard part is making changes.”

What Can’t Be Mentioned premiered at the 64th New York Film Festival.