‘What Can’t Be Mentioned’ Review: Dan Sallitt Returns with a Sequel to His Beloved Incest Drama ‘The Unspeakable Act’

Tallie Mendel reprises their role as Jackie, whose feelings for her older brother reignite when she learns that he expects a child.

“In the spring of 2011, at the age of 18, my brother Matthew got his first real girlfriend,” explains Jackie (Tallie Medel) in voiceover at the beginning of “The Unspeakable Act,” written, edited, and directed by Dan Sallitt in 2012. “I had somehow thought that he and I had an unspoken agreement that we belonged to each other,” she continues, “which was really pretty stupid of me.”

Those words kick off Jackie’s final year of high school as she confronts her longstanding unrequited desire for her brother. Matthew (Sky Hirschkron), who’s aware of and patient with his sister’s feelings for him, and understandably wants to put some distance between them to explore other relationships, including some he might actually consummate. His decision to set boundaries sends Jackie into a spiral. She has trouble keeping food down, she can’t sleep, and she constantly badgers her brother for information about his new girlfriend, that is until he dumps her. Jackie’s yearning for Matthew still burns bright after he departs for college, but his absence forces her to build a life outside of her attraction to him, even if she thinks about him while sleeping with guys in her class.

Sallitt’s greatest coup in “The Unspeakable Act” is his refusal to treat his characters as pawns in service of a “shocking” premise. Jackie and Matthew are mostly typical teenagers with full social lives and creative hobbies. They have opinions on literature, music, and sex. They’re close with their mother but distant from their older siblings. Medel and Hirschkron portray their characters as intelligent, self-aware people guaranteed to chart respectively fruitful paths, even if they occasionally get in their own way. They are profoundly regular, except for that one thing.

But as much as Sallitt doesn’t sensationalize Jackie’s amour fou, a provocation unto itself, he also approaches her unconventional infatuation, and Matthew’s responsive equanimity, with appropriate gravity. Her feelings for her brother are real, which means that she has to actually deal with them if she wants to be a part of society. Her emotional tumult stems from her realization that she can’t continue into adulthood still pining for Matthew, which inevitably means that she won’t remain as emotionally close to him. With “The Unspeakable Act,” Sallitt honed in on a crucial coming-of-age lesson: you can’t always get what you want.

Fourteen years later, Sallitt returns with “What Can’t Be Mentioned,” a sequel to “The Unspeakable Act” that picks up roughly a decade later when Jackie, now in her late-twenties, learns that Matthew is about to have a child with his partner Lily (Kit Zauhar, director of “Actual People” and “This Closeness”). While Jackie exhibits all the outward trappings of stable adulthood, mainly a good job as a professional therapist and a shared apartment with her boyfriend Anthony (Kyle McCormack), Sallitt quickly reveals cracks in the façade. She experiences newfound sexual incompatibility with Anthony that eventually pushes them both into sex therapy, complete with awkward take-home exercises that Jackie struggles to take seriously. She seems to excels at her job, yet she also admits to feelings of countertransference with a forty-something client who privately worries that her two children might be exploring their sexuality with each other.

Sallitt depicts Jackie’s personal and professional struggles as specific hiccups that might manifest for anybody. But he also casts them in the shadow of her youthful attraction to Matthew, which may still be lingering in her subconscious like a party guest that has overstayed their welcome. When she receives news about Matthew’s impending child, she treks upstate for a week ostensibly to reconnect with him and her partner, whom she describes to Anthony as “okay, but totally not good enough for him.” Instead of ingratiating herself to the couple, however, she spends the week getting tanked on red wine and probing Lily with deliberately provocative questions about her bisexuality and how pregnancy has impacted her sex life with her brother.

Lily responds with monk-like composure in response to Jackie’s rude queries. (“My parents are hippies,” she says calmly. “Talking about sex is like talking about the laundry.”) Sallitt crucially abstains from underlining the irony that Jackie can’t process that Matthew and Lily’s shared disposition makes them compatible. Zauhar matches Hirschkron’s even-keeled temperament even when Lily tries to coax more information about Jackie from Matthew. Is she an alcoholic? “She just likes to cut loose some times. She’ll be fine when she’s back home,” Matthew calmly responds. Is she gay? After all, people hide it from those closest to them all the time. “Believe me, she’s not gay,” Matthew insists. A secret that can’t be uttered forms a small fracture between the happy couple that might balloon over the years.

“Mentioned” runs a little over an hour, making it the rare film where you wish the filmmaker expanded his work by even 10 or 15 minutes, maybe to further enrich some of its muted conflicts, or even just to give the viewer a little more time with the characters. Sallitt replicates the formal style of “Unspeakable” in “Mentioned” (static compositions, no camera movement), but changes the editing rhythm to sharper cuts that capture the more rigid routine of professional young adulthood. He also deepens the world of “Mentioned” by peppering in references to characters from “Unspeakable”: Jackie’s childhood therapist Linda (Caroline Luft) makes an appearance over Zoom to offer advice, and Matthew mentions speaking to their mother and eldest sibling Will. (Meanwhile, their second-oldest sibling Jeanne, whom Jackie predicts will one day leave and never look back in “Unspeakable,” is never mentioned.) Sallitt strives for an understated continuity that signals a fully lived-in world bursting with unspoken history.

“Unspeakable” and “Mentioned” are distinct enough entities that one could conceivably watch the latter without having seen the former and still feel fulfilled. However, “Mentioned” is obviously a richer text in the context of “Unspeakable,” if only to fully appreciate how Medel reinterprets Jackie between the two films. They convincingly develop their character’s previously restrained adolescent instability into matter-of-fact adult neuroticism without sacrificing any complexity. They bring a familiar but ultimately more mature charge to Jackie’s scenes with Matthew, who Hirschkron commits to portraying as almost defiantly unflappable. (He may have moved on from reading Mueller to “Stoner,” but he’s still basically the same person as he was in “Unspeakable.”) Medel lends Jackie a spiky, unpredictable quality even when they’re sitting in a chair and glaring at whomever will catch their eye. Most of the acclaimed, visible performances this year can’t muster that level of intrigue.

In a Filmmaker interview upon the release of “Unspeakable,” Sallitt perceptively comments that he doesn’t “see Jackie’s incestuous desire as a transitory thing or part of her passage to adulthood.” Instead he thinks “it’s just the way she is, and she will have to keep a lid on that desire in order to live comfortably, will have to cultivate other aspects of herself.” “Mentioned” effectively progresses from this specific vantage point, with Mendel at times depicting Jackie like she’s managing a chronic condition, and Hirschkron capturing a sibling’s unique sympathies for their sibling’s pain. The final couple scenes of “Mentioned” illustrate Sallitt’s updated perspective over the interim near-half decade, which feels discomforting but ultimately hard won. It turns out that if you try sometimes, you just might find that you get what you need.

Grade: B

“What Can’t Be Mentioned” premiered at the 2026 New York Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.