Sunset Smudge (2025) Review: An Eight-Minute Allegory Decorated with Beautiful Colors

Written, directed, edited and photographed by Jesse LoCascio. Starring Callie Dixon as the Florida Girl. Original score by Katalin Kult. Eight minutes. Humble Rat Productions.

It is a truth not universally acknowledged, though it ought to be, that a young woman in possession of a vanishing paradise must be in want of a mirror.

Sunset Smudge opens not with a scene but with a temperament: abstract frames saturated to the very edge of their capacity, colour laid upon colour, a landscape offered first as sensation and only afterward as place. The circumstances gather themselves shortly after. A heat wave. A coast of extraordinary loveliness, filmed on location throughout Southwest Florida. 

And a young woman, played by Callie Dixon and credited only as the Florida Girl, who finds the country around her going quietly to ruin and suspects she may be going with it. The whole occupies eight minutes and not a moment longer, which in our present age of exhausting abundance must be counted a species of good manners.

Between the landscapes, the Florida Girl sits and applies her makeup. She looks steadily at the camera and yet, as every attentive viewer feels before understanding, she does not look at us. The gaze falls a half-inch wide of our own, because the camera is not a camera in these passages. It is a looking-glass. We are not the object of her regard. We are the glass: the flat, bright, indifferent surface that receives a woman’s whole attention and returns her nothing but herself.

I know of no more elegant statement of the film’s argument. Here is a woman surrounded by beauty that will not look back at her, performing the one ritual of composure still available to her, drawing a line, blending a colour, setting a face in order against a disorder she has no power to arrest. 

Austen’s young women understood this labour intimately and were seldom permitted to name it; the countenance must be arranged before one goes down to dinner, whatever has been settled or unsettled upstairs. LoCascio names it, and then doubles it. Vintage Florida postcards from the Tichnor Brothers collection drift through the film like a second cosmetics counter: paradise as it was sold, retouched and posted to somebody’s aunt. A state and a face, both made up, both slipping.

The narration belongs to Dixon as well, and it is beautifully judged, low and unhurried and free of the pleading note that so often creeps into personal work. It declines to instruct us how to feel and is therefore far more effective at making us feel it.

Katalin Kult’s original score keeps the same discipline, moving alongside the images rather than beneath them, never once announcing that a passage is sad in case we had failed to notice. Restraint of this kind is no small achievement in a first flush of feeling. It is the whole difference between a diary and a work of art.

The means are disclosed in the closing titles with a candour I found rather moving: an iPhone 16 Pro Max and Sony MiniDV camcorders, grain and film emulation by Cinegrams, tape brought up to 4K by Video Techniques, hand-drawn titles by Charlotte White that lie across the black like a letter signed at the foot. 

A lesser filmmaker would have concealed the poverty of the apparatus. LoCascio has made it argue for him. The anamorphic width gives the coast the scale of something worth grieving over, while the MiniDV fragments arrive already ruined, grain and bloom and dropout, images that behave like memories rather than records. A film about erosion, shot on formats that erode, then eroded further on purpose. No budget on earth purchases a rhyme that good.

A closing card insists the film is a work of fiction, and the claim is worth taking at its word. The Florida Girl is a character, not a self-portrait, which is precisely why she carries so much. LoCascio came to Southwest Florida from New York expecting radiance and found grief instead, and rather than confess that in the first person he has given it a face, a voice not his own, a heat wave and eight minutes.

If he wishes to know what company he keeps, it is very good company indeed, and older than he may suppose. Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978) narrates the ruin of a golden country in a flat, unbothered murmur. Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1977) reads a young woman’s displacement aloud over the streets she fled to. 

Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) asks how anything survives being remembered. Agnès Varda made a life of this manner, most warmly in The Beaches of Agnès (2008), a self-portrait assembled from what the tide left behind. 

Nearer his own ground, Kelly Reichardt’s River of Grass (1994) drifts through a South Florida of ditches and dead ends, Sean Baker’s The Florida Project (2017) knows exactly what he knows about sherbet purples and motel pinks, and Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun (2022) builds a whole grief out of camcorder fragments. 

Filmmakers working alone, on no money, in a form nobody commissioned, are apt to suspect they have invented something eccentric and unrepeatable. He has not. He has walked unassisted into a distinguished lineage, and done it in eight minutes with a telephone.

There are a great many people who can photograph a sunset. There are very few who can put a feeling on a screen and have it arrive intact in a stranger’s chest, and Jesse LoCascio can do this. The pain in Sunset Smudge is neither described to us nor performed at us. It is transmitted whole, by colour and grain and a hand moving carefully across a face. 

That faculty cannot be taught, only practised, and it is wasted on nobody. So let him make another, and then another, and spend what this one taught him. If limitation has served him this well, a little less of it may serve him better still, and if it does not, he will have proved he never needed it. Whatever he points that telephone at next, there is at least one viewer already waiting, entirely persuaded, and quite prepared to be undone again.

Sunset Smudge is currently on the festival circuit, screening at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image as part of the 2026 Junk Dump Film Festival. A free digital release is expected before the end of the year.

Frequently asked questions

What is Sunset Smudge about? 

A young woman known only as the Florida Girl watches a heat wave settle over a beautiful stretch of Southwest Florida and grieves its slow decay, holding herself together through the daily ritual of applying makeup.

Who made Sunset Smudge? 

Jesse LoCascio wrote, directed, edited and photographed it. The film was produced by Humble Rat Productions in 2025, with Kate LoCascio as associate producer.

Who stars in Sunset Smudge? 

Callie Dixon plays the Florida Girl, the film’s only on-screen presence, and speaks its narration.

How was Sunset Smudge shot? 

Entirely on an iPhone 16 Pro Max with an anamorphic lens and on Sony MiniDV camcorders, filmed on location throughout Southwest Florida, with film emulation and grain by Cinegrams and a MiniDV to 4K transfer by Video Techniques, Inc.

How long is Sunset Smudge? 

Eight minutes.

Where can I watch Sunset Smudge? 

It is still touring festivals, including a screening at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image as part of the 2026 Junk Dump Film Festival. A free digital release is planned before the end of 2026, most likely on YouTube.

What films is Sunset Smudge similar to? 

Tone poems carried by a woman’s voice over saturated landscapes: Days of Heaven, News from Home, Sans Soleil, The Beaches of Agnès, River of Grass, The Florida Project and Aftersun.