THE STORY – Struggling with a deep crisis of faith, a priest embarks on a journey to find the older priest who once abused his friend Paul during their time in seminary. With a wounded coyote in the back of his car, Dan drifts through the American landscape, encountering eccentric travelers, stealing a gun and other assorted trophies, singing Prince songs, and stopping at roadside attractions.
THE CAST – Young Mazino, MiMi Ryder, Tony Hale, Zoë Winters, Keith Kupferer, Carl Clemons-Hopkins, Jee Young Han & Mamoudou Athie
THE TEAM – Hannah Peterson (Director/Writer) & Daniel Hornsby (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 100 Minutes
Father Dan (Young Mazino) sits in a bar—a whiskey-drinking, karaoke-singing priest. But even at his lowest low, the bartender (Zoë Winters), having just met him, begins pouring out the trials and regrets of her entire life to him, seeking absolution. Even if he’s a priest who has lost his way, he still carries something that people are drawn to confess to. Dan hasn’t lost his faith. He’s just lost his belief that the path he has chosen means anything.
Hannah Peterson, returning to Tribeca following her 2023 debut “The Graduates,” begins her sophomore feature “Via Negativa” with an arresting image: a funeral that moves less like grief and more like a collective of intoxicated bodies intermingling in something between mourning and trance, as Dan in voiceover introduces the theological concept of “the negative way”: the idea, borrowed from the mystic Pseudo-Dionysius, that by unknowing and unseeing, we might arrive at true vision. It’s a heady opening that promises a film that matches it equally. What follows is more uneven.
Mazino carries the film entirely on his shoulders. His father, Dan, paints a portrait of a priest that feels different and lived-in. Every gaze he feeds the camera leaves you unsure where this character study might turn next. There is real weight in him: a man who served in Iraq, who lost his childhood friend Paul, who was quietly pushed out of his parish after congregants complained he seemed distracted and struggling in his prayers. When a veteran clocks Dan in a diner, easily identifying him as a veteran with “just a look, the tiredness behind the face,” it’s a devastating exchange that reveals a spiritual crisis to be something much deeper.
The road trip structure that follows Dan’s quiet dismissal has a loose, episodic feel. He hits a coyote at night on the highway and, in an act of instinctive mercy, takes the animal in to care for it. He stops to stare into a roadside pit billed as “Satan’s Hole to Hell,” dropping a rock into a darkness so deep he can’t hear it land. It’s a scene that earns its symbolism without overplaying it. He ends up spending the night with a farmer and his teenage daughter, Anna (MiMi Ryder), a pyromaniac who set a Pizza Hut on fire. Anna asks Dan whether he has a “calling” with the earnestness of someone who wishes God would just tell her what to do with her life. Dan tells her she reminds him of someone. It’s not hard to guess he means himself. (Anna, becoming a road-trip companion for Dan, doesn’t really add much to the story beyond mirroring Dan’s own lostness, and her storyline resolves with little care.)
This is where “Via Negativa” is most alive: in the accumulation of strangers who need him more than his parish ever seemed to. A gay college student confides about his brother, abused by a bishop, who recently took his own life. Many of the encounters Dan has ripple backward in time, to his own complicity in staying silent at the abuse he knew about at the hands of an old teacher, Father Bruno (Keith Kupferer). The end destination of this road trip, this journey for Dan, culminates in a confrontation with Bruno, whose shadow falls over everything.
And yet the film struggles to fully earn the weight of its story. Peterson’s pacing is very, very slow; what might register as meditative occasionally tips into inert. And for a film structured around a man’s interiority, we’re kept removed from Dan’s inner life. We learn his story in fragments, but the film feeds us information so sparingly that when the emotions come most heavily in its closing minutes, it lands as an ache without a strong sense of catharsis. The confrontation with Bruno, which the entire journey has been building toward, can’t deliver what Dan is seeking, and the film is honest enough to know it, but there’s dissatisfaction in the irresolution.
“Via Negativa” is a film about a man trying to forgive himself, angry at the church for abandoning him, angry at his own silence, traveling toward a confrontation that can’t give him closure and arriving somewhere short of absolution. The “negative way” suggests that it’s only through unknowing that we might finally see clearly. The film certainly plays on that, but it’s not very satisfying.
