SANTA BARBARA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2026 REVIEW! Sunshine Express, from Iranian writer/director Amirali Navaee, is a magnificently weird and challenging film. In fact, the surreal drama 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 concerns a group of around a dozen people 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, some sort 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 include 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 the contestants’ 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.
“…a group of around a dozen people hired to play roles on a kind of reality show…must convince the other participants that their assigned roles are somehow real.”
Well, that’s where the strangeness 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 to Sunshine Express I can think of is Synecdoche, New York. In that Charlie Kaufman film, the line between a stage production and reality blurs 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. I imagine this 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 here is that everything does at least make metaphorical sense. Contrast this to 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, this satire does have some whimsical bursts of Lynchian absurdity.
"…great art."
