Rounding up some of the most interesting films we saw at Seattle International Film Festival 2025

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May might be the unofficial start of the summer blockbuster movie season, but for real Washingtonian film junkies the bigger cinematic event on the calendar is the Seattle International Film Festival. We ventured to the Emerald City to cram in dozens of movies in just over a week, and here are some of the standout films to keep an eye on when they eventually head to local theaters or streaming services.

CAT TOWN, USA
Think of this documentary as a kind of inverse Tiger King. Cat Town,USA centers on two boomer Floridians who run an animal sanctuary that specifically caters to elderly cats that have either been abandoned by their owners or left to fend for themselves on the streets. Terry and Bruce Jenkins are certifiable goofballs whose warmth and compassion floods off the screen. If you're a cat person, this will hit you like a Mack Truck (even if you aren't, their benevolence will be hard to deny). Director Jonathan Napolitano maintains a light touch throughout, redolent of the more whimsical entries in Errol Morris' filmography. Cat Town, USA reigns as the best cat-centric doc SIFF has screened since 2016's Kedi. (JASON BAXTER)

CHAIN REACTIONS

Cinematic documentarian Alexandre O. Philippe (The People vs. George Lucas, Memory: The Origins of Alien) turns his attention to Tobe Hooper’s 1974 slasher masterpiece The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in this probing and deeply-geeky documentary. Following the format he employed for his (arguably more successful) Lynch/Oz, Philippe’s film is divided into five discrete monologues about Chainsaw and its enduring legacy. Comedian Patton Oswalt starts things off with his trademark infectiously nerdy enthusiasm, and is followed by Japanese shock-horror auteur Takashi Miike, Stephen King, director Karyn Kusama (Jennifer’s Body, The Invitation) and film critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. What becomes crystalline across all of these segments is the quintessentially American nature of Chainsaw, with all of its grisliness and unflinching depravity. Seek this out if you’re the type of cinephile that geeks out watching smart people wax rhapsodic about genre flicks. (JB)

COLOR BOOK
Life is not easy, but there's beauty to be found in the journeys that don't go as planned. In writer/director David Fortune's Color Book, a grieving now-single father just wants to take his 9-year-old son with Down syndrome to his first Atlanta Braves game. Anchored by gorgeous black and white cinematography and dynamite performances by William Catlett as the patriarch Lucky and Jeremiah Daniels as his boy Mason, Color Book mines the most out of its simplicity for an emotionally wrenching yet warm and optimistic story about love, vulnerability, and family with subtle but sharp commentary on class and culture in the ATL. (SETH SOMMERFELD)

COME SEE ME IN THE GOOD LIGHT
It's rare to hear an audience laughing and audibly weeping through the entire runtime of a movie, but the documentary Come See Me in the Good Light earns those reactions. Director Ryan White's film follows poet Andrea Gibson after they've been diagnosed with incurable ovarian cancer, and it eavesdrops as Gibson and their wife, Meg Falley, have lots of conversations — tough, tender, funny — about the future, however much of it Gibson has left. But the Golden Space Needle Award winner for SIFF's best documentary isn't just a live, laugh, love tearjerker. It's also unflinching in its depiction of terminal illness — the endless medical appointments, the side effects of chemotherapy, the yo-yoing test results, the chronic pain — and it uses selections of Gibson's poetry to put it into perspective. Come See Me in the Good Light is set to premiere on Apple TV+ in the fall. (NATHAN WEINBENDER)

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HAPPYEND
Despite being set in the "near future"— as its portentous opening titles indicate — Happyend stands as one of the timeliest entries of this year's SIFF. As seen through the lives of a half-dozen Japanese high school seniors, the film explores a myriad of all-too-topical themes: authoritarianism, xenophobia, the surveillance state, and government conspiracies. Heavy stuff, to be sure, but fortunately the film is leavened with a constant vein of humor and a well-earned sentimentality. Happyend could have worked simply as your prototypical coming-of-age story or as a manifesto for peaceful resistance in the face of unjust and crooked crackdowns on freedom. Miraculously, it superserves being both. Nailing the cinematography, performances, editing, and score, this first narrative feature from writer/director Neo Sora (son of the famed composer Ryuichi Sakamoto) is remarkable. (JB)

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INVENTION
The SIFF New American Cinema Grand Jury prize winning feature is exactly the type of atypical and experimental filmmaking that you go to film fests to seek out. Director Courtney Stephens and star Callie Hernandez co-wrote this movie about a woman who travels to a small town after her estranged father dies in order to deal with his estate. The only thing he really left her is a patent for a New Age-y healing device, and while she initially dismisses it as snake oil nonsense, she begins to become more curious when talking to all the folks around town that knew her dad. The film gets stranger by intercutting footage of Hernandez's actual deceased father who peddled alternative medicine on TV, plus interstitial transition shots of a candle flame foregrounding audio of the actors discussing how to approach the narrative's improvised scenes. As strange as that may sound it becomes an affecting commentary about conspiracy mindsets, family legacy and belief. (SS)

SEEDS
On paper, Seeds sounds like a typical agitprop documentary, a film about multigenerational Black farmers in Georgia and the challenges that come with the job. But it's director Brittany Shyne's approach that makes Seeds so immediate and absorbing. She adopts the fly-on-the-wall methods of Frederick Wiseman and the lyrical, free-associative style of Terrence Malick, shooting in a lustrous black-and-white that gives the landscape a haunting, timeless beauty. Each scene is a small, vivid snapshot — aging farm equipment held together by ropes and handkerchiefs; a trailer home with holes in the floor covered by plywood; a grandmother washing her hair in the bathroom sink; two old-timers having a conversation from their idling trucks — and they add up to an epic portrait of lives as they are really lived. (NW)

EVERGREENS
Spokane writer/director Jared Briley's first feature has a rich Evergreen State feel. The story centers on 20-year-old Eve (Darby Lee-Stack), a Spokanite who never really leaves town in part because of family reasons. She stumbles across a young bohemian cross-country roadtripper named James (Edouard Philipponnat) and decides to join him on the final leg to Seattle. Evergreens hits a lot of the tentpole road trip and coming-of-age film benchmarks, but the richness of pine-laden cinematography and music by beloved Seattle singer-songwriter Damien Jurado help elevate its home state cred. (SS)

F—TOYS
Imagine if John Waters was a millennial woman and was told to try to make a Wes Anderson-like colorfully quirky film. That idea kept springing to mind while watching F—toys, the directorial debut of writer/star Annapurna Sriram, where she plays a sex worker who needs to come up with $1,000 to remove a curse placed upon her. While the movie’s titled tone and brash humor absolutely did not work for me personally, I’d be pretty shocked if this film doesn’t find a devoted cult audience. (SS)

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SIFF award-winning Sorry, Baby will be coming to Spokane screens soon.

SORRY, BABY
The protagonist of Sorry, Baby is a lit professor who specializes in the art of the short story, and the movie itself (which won Seattle Film Critics Society Feature Film Award) has the closely observed sense of detail you'd find in a particularly good piece of short fiction. Agnes (played by the film's writer/director Eva Victor) has begun teaching at the New England liberal arts college where she recently graduated. This new job is fraught, however, because Agnes is filling the position and occupying the office of the man who sexually assaulted her. It's a film about trauma, yes, but it's also about what it means to grow up and get serious, and Victor handles it all with delicacy and a disarming streak of off-kilter humor. Sorry, Baby is scheduled for a theatrical release on June 27 via A24. (NW)

SOULEYMANE’S STORY
Immigration has long been a relevant subject for noble social dramas, but the gritty French film Souleymane’s Story unfolds with a particular immediacy in our current climate. Souleymane, played memorably by first-time actor Abou Sangaré (who won the Golden Space Needle Award for Best Performance), has fled West Africa and sought asylum in Paris, where he uses a friend’s account to deliver food around the city. Meanwhile, he’s preparing to justify his asylum status, rehearsing dates and details about his background that we come to realize are either embellished or outright fabricated. Director Boris Lojkine finds propulsive intensity in the mundane, and Souleymane finds unexpected humanity and empathy amidst the intricacies and inconsistencies of a mostly inhumane system. (NW)

TWINLESS
It's always difficult to sing the praises of a movie where the less a viewer knows about it before they watch the better, but writer/director James Sweeney's deliciously dark and twisted comedy Twinless fits that bill. To keep it basic: Dennis (Sweeney) and Roman (The Maze Runner's Dylan O'Brien) meet at a support group for twins whose twin sibling has died. Their odd couple friendship leads to a ton of uproariously funny and deeply uncomfortable moments, and Sweeney expertly manages the story's tone as it takes some absolutely wild turns. It's the best film I saw at SIFF and rightfully earned Sweeney the Golden Space Needle for Best Director. If Twinless actually gets the proper wide release it deserves, it will become one of the comedic films that defines 2025. Twinless is scheduled for a theatrical release on Sept. 5 via Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions. (SS)

UNCLICKABLE
Did you know that the second most lucrative criminal enterprise in the world behind the drug trade might be online ad fraud? Unclickable dives deep into the way bad actors exploit online metrics, bots, and ad sales companies in order to generate an estimated $33 billion-$60 billion per year in passive income streams. Not only does director Babis Makridis interview an array of experts to detail how exploitable the problem is, its total lack of government oversight and the way that Google and Facebook profit off the fraud, but he also assembles a very small team to create fraudulent websites to show firsthand how the enterprise works. It’s one of those documentaries that makes you hate government ignorance and tech’s faux ignorance even more. (SS)