TALLIE MEDEL IN WHAT CAN'T BE MENTIONED
DAN SALLITT: WHAT CAN'T BE MENTIONED (2026)
Not Éric Rohmer
Jake Kring-Schreifels in The Film Stage is one of several informed critics reviewing the new film by Dan Sallitt debuted at the New York Film Festival that's the second in a trilogy the auteur says he'll never complete. I'm uninformed, reporting here without seeing the first, which we can consider as taking place in real time 14 years ago when Jackie Kimball (Tallie Medel) had to try to come to terms at the age of seventeen with her incestuous desire for her brother, Matthew Kimball (Sky Hirschkron).
Sallitt has now made a sequel with the same actors playing the same people at a real-time distance (or a bit less) from the earlier film. Brother Matthew and sister Jackie have grown up and live apart from each other, Jackie in Brooklyn, Matthew upstate. Somehow, through therapy, stoicism, and whatever, Jackie has learned to live with her forbidden but lingering desire for Matthew. To arrive here has taken Jackie a lot of therapy. Indeed, she's on her way to becoming a therapist/social worker herself.h She's also wrestling with an aversion to physical intimacy that is causing hangups with her current (acceptable) partner, Anthony (Kyle McCormack). He and she are attending couples therapy.
Upon learning that brother Matthew and wife Lily (Kit Zauhar) are expecting a baby, Jackie has taken the occasion to go up and visit them, get drunk on red wine with them a couple of times, and say a thing or two that can't be mentioned.
Kring-Schreifels writes in his review that Sallitt's filmmaking "can be an acquired taste," but involves an approach to "dialogue and dry humor" that is "remarkably assured." Being new to Sallitt's writing I found the dialogue of What Can't Be Mentioned more odd than funny - sometimes odd enough to induce double-takes.
It may be true as Kring-Schreifels writes that Sallitt's roots are in "Robert Bresson, Éric Rohmer, and John Cassavetes," but that's too disparate a list to convey what you're in for. The dialogue would not occur in a film by Éric Rohmer, whose characters don't intentionally provoke each other or nurture not-very-well-concealed incestuous desires.
A lot of what this is really about is the language and thinking of therapy. Obviously that, or those, can't be taken too seriously, the prestigious HBO series In Treatment notwithstanding. The incestuous desires of Jackie are a pretext, I'm guessing, for a lot of fun for Sallitt; but he also likes to shock. When you invent stories and characters you just have to go where they take you, and What Can't Be Mentioned is an amusing ride. My only problem is Jackie's wine-drinking: specifically, she pours too often and drinks too fast.
There is subtlety and control otherwise, however - qualities introduced into the material by Sallitt's making Matthew a super-bland and unflappable person, who loves his sister and isn't going to expel her from his world or judge her. Lily turns out to be very hard to upset as well. Does she have to have her hand on her pregnant tummy all the time? This is another little bit of business that is slightly off, like the wine-guzzling. These off-details aren't enough to keep Sallitt's Bresson-Rohmer-Cassavetes style from being confidently sui generis.
What Can't Be Mentioned, 61 mins., premiered in the New York Film Festival's Currents section at Lincoln Center Oct. 3, 2026, preceded by the short film Sounds From Home. Showtime:
Mon, Oct 12
1:30 PM