At SXSW 2026, mumblecore had a resurgence, with genre titan Joe Swanberg’s Dakota Fanning-starring The Sun Never Sets as the ultimate charmer. But the festival also saw the emergence of something I’d like to call “mumblequeer cinema” in Sinner Supper Club, an iPhone-shot, improv-driven ghost story about a queer friend group coming together for a final dinner party before one of them moves, the first since their friend’s passing. The joint feature by Daisy Rosato and Nora Kaye is a resonating, complex, and haunting tale of maturing out of your friendships.

During the heat of NYC summer, a group of longtime friends get together for their gathering, dubbed “Sinner Supper Club.” But upon their arrival, some tension is in the air, their friendships holding on by a few threads. Nora (Nora Kaye) is late. Alice (Elise Kibler) unceremoniously brings her new high-spirited partner, Ash (Ashil Lee), who nobody knows. Jayae (Jayae Riley Jr.) would rather be anywhere else. The host, Genevieve (Genevieve Simon), who is about to move upstate the following day, puts pressure on themself to provide a good experience with their “eviction funeral” theme. Their friend and Genevieve’s roommate Sophie (Sophie Sagan-Gutherz) recently died in a drowning accident, which throws a wedge into an already blocky friendship.

Sinner Supper Club hits all the mumblecore cinema checkboxes: a dialogue-heavy script, slice-of-life hangout plotting told through a vérité lens, and the natural strength of the cast’s acting and improvisational talent. The film injects queerness into a genre whose most popular films are largely hetero-focused, like the works of Joe Swanberg, Greta Gerwig, and the Duplass Brothers. Sinner Supper Clubs hooks you through the writing duo’s ability to restrain themselves from lazy trappings like using love triangles to depict fractured friendship. It’s really about the struggle when a bunch of neurodivergent queers let their resentment with each other build for far too long. Sophie’s death is a part of it for sure, but the film establishes that even when they were alive, these friends already had their issues.  Their passing exacerbated the heated tension. They are all endearing, obnoxious, and somewhat toxic, but no one is made out to be a villain.

The entirely queer ensemble, which consists of widely unknown or emerging actors, produces exceptional chemistry. Aside from Lee’s Ash, Kibler, Simon, Riley, and Kaye powerfully illustrate the history of the group’s friendship, the pain stemming from Sophie’s passing, their internalized resentment of one another, and their shared love. They make you feel the weight of their dynamic, evident in their small exchanges, from the warmth of comforting each other in pain to the discomfort they experience during their one-on-one arguments.

Sinner Supper Club boldly swings for something fluid in its experimental direction, and it largely works in its favor. It builds a ghastly atmosphere through its iPhone-shot presentation, reinforced by a recurring motif of the heat-induced power outages. The DIY aesthetic can feel a bit manipulative at times — especially as Rosato leans heavily on tight close-ups during dialogue-heavy moments where the friends’ grievances begin to surface. Still, because the film fully commits to this intimate, increasingly claustrophobic, almost voyeuristic approach, the discomfort it generates ultimately lands.

At times, the perspective becomes slightly confusing. The story unfolds through Rosato’s lens, and she appears periodically, yet is not always acknowledged by the other characters, occasionally brushing up against a kind of fourth-wall ambiguity. Is she meant to be a ghost? Not quite. The film does acknowledge her presence, making these moments feel more like minor inconsistencies than intentional devices.

Laura Conte’s editing is impressively well-paced, efficiently conveying the layered tensions and emotional complexity of queer friendships on the brink. She captures the span of a full day among friends in a short 70-minute runtime.

At the end of the day, Sinner Supper Club is a unique capital-I independent cinema that impresses with its confident direction, solid cast with impeccable improvisational skills, and creative use of its premise at every turn. It leaves you both a little haunted and thinking about your own friendship groups. Its genre-bending fluidity and DIY style, as well as its focus on raw, complex queer friendships, all under a naturalistic lens, are what I hope will serve as the beginning of a long-term trend of more “mumblequeer cinema” to come.