SANTA BARBARA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2026 REVIEW! Sunshine Express by Iranian director Amirali Navaee is a magnificently weird and challenging film that may stand alone in cinema history for the unique tack it takes, alternately hewing to and dramatically violating narrative rules to land a symbolic punch. It fits in the vanishingly small category of bold movies that don’t make logical sense as much as metaphorical sense, and leave you wondering what you just saw, like some of the more boundary-pushing films of Ingmar Bergman, Charlie Kaufman, or David Lynch.
Ostensibly, the plot is that a group of around a dozen people is hired to play roles on a kind of reality show. They are on the set of a train said to be bound for the fictional realm of Hermia, a kind of paradise, and must convince the other participants that their assigned roles are somehow real. If they fail, they are kicked off, but if they succeed, they will be rewarded with a better life. Their roles consist of things like singer, train manager, prisoner, cop, sick patient, judge, and so on. There is a kind of “big brother” watching over them, sounding an alarm, and reprimanding them if they break character or the rules, potentially resulting in their removal. The bizarre thing is that everybody knows everyone else is playing a role, and they are allowed breaks, where they return to their normal personality and talk about each other’s performances.
“There is a kind of “big brother” watching over them, sounding an alarm, and reprimanding them if they break character, or the rules, potentially resulting in their removal.”
Well, that’s where the bizarreness starts, but it builds from there. There are hints that something wild is going on in the outside world, which they are cut off from, since cell phones are prohibited. The line between metaphor and reality constantly shifts, as the real becomes fake and the fake becomes real.
The closest film I can think of is Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, where the line between a stage production and reality starts to blur, until the whole thing effectively devolves into metaphor. That film divided critics sharply, with some listing it as the greatest film of the decade, or one of the top films of all time, while others rated it as pretentious garbage. Sunshine Express will similarly divide audiences, because when you set up a narrative with rules, and those start to dissolve into symbolism, it can feel like a violation. But the key to Sunshine Express is that it does at least make metaphorical sense, unlike some of the most self-indulgent work of David Lynch, like Inland Empire, which was just weirdness for weirdness sake with little cohesion. Even still, Sunshine Express does have some whimsical bursts of Lynchian absurdity.
Metaphorically, the bizarre, Kafkaesque world of Sunshine Express explores the nature of totalitarianism, where people are forced to play a role, performing for others on the outside, even if their inner life may be dramatically different. Given a mixture of incentives and coercion, some people can’t take it and “get off the train,” while for others their performative self becomes internalized. Meanwhile, nobody knows who’s watching, who’s really in charge, and confusion abounds. Reality becomes absurdist, partly because everyone left is playing a role, and truth has vanished. In that sense, Sunshine Express is stunning because the metaphor is so deep; it extends into the form of the film itself. Can we even believe what the filmmaker is showing us? The final shot is a curveball for the ages, and leaves us as audience members questioning what we might have thought of the film, knocking us off-kilter with glorious mischief and foreboding.
“Given a mixture of incentives and coercion, some people can’t take it and “get off the train,” while for others their performative self becomes internalized.”
None of this is to say that the parts that you can logically make sense of in Sunshine Express are straightforward. Certain symbolism is obvious — you can ask a person to manage or control a group of people, and they may take on that identity. Others are more sneaky, but understandable, like cops and criminals shifting roles. But some are nearly inscrutable, although I concede there may be cultural references I don’t understand.
The greatest art isn’t something neatly wrapped up in a bow, but something that will stir up feelings, emotions, and leave your head churning, trying to find meaning that you can perceive in fragments, but whose totality remains elusive. A week after seeing it, I am still mulling over Sunshine Express, but I do know one thing — it is great art.
Sunshine Express screened at the 2026 Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
"…A week after seeing it, I am still mulling over Sunshine Express, but I do know one thing — it is great art."
