Films

Johnny, a U.S. military drone pilot, and his sister Mary have only ever had each other, scraping by in a dead-end rural town shadowed by childhood abandonment. Consumed by the violence he’s watched and inflicted from behind a screen, Johnny drifts toward self-destruction, leaving Mary to hold together their fragile world. Drawing on the real testimonies of American drone pilots living with PTSD, Nichols, a former collaborator of David Lynch, stages his protagonist's guilt as something closer to infestation than metaphor, in eruptions of harsh noise and glitch-riddled imagery. Sparse but devastating when it hits, this is a ferocious, formally audacious debut that lingers.