Premiered at Sundance 2023 | Now streaming on Apple TV+ | Directed by Erica Tremblay
Lily Gladstone has spent years proving herself one of the most quietly devastating performers in American cinema. With Fancy Dance, director Erica Tremblay's feature debut, Gladstone finally gets a leading role worthy of her gravitational pull—and she seizes it completely.
A Search on Stolen Land
Gladstone plays Jax, a Cayuga woman living on the Seneca-Cayuga reservation in Oklahoma. When we meet her, Jax is already deep in crisis: her sister Tawi has disappeared, and the machinery of justice has failed to engage. Tribal, state, and federal law enforcement pass responsibility between them like a hot coal, each jurisdiction finding reasons not to act. Jax, unwilling to surrender her sister to statistical oblivion, conducts her own search while caring for Tawi's daughter, Roki (a remarkable Isabel Deroy-Olson).
The film's narrative engine is deceptively simple—where is Tawi?—but Tremblay, who co-wrote the script with Miciana Alise, refuses easy categorization. Fancy Dance shifts between intimate family drama and low-tension thriller, between documentary realism and something more lyrical. Jax and Roki's relationship becomes the film's true subject: two generations of Indigenous women negotiating survival in a system designed to ignore them.
Gladstone's Body as Text
Where earlier supporting roles in Certain Women and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs hinted at Gladstone's capacity for withheld emotion, Fancy Dance gives her space to build a complete psychological architecture. Jax communicates through accumulation of detail rather than declaration. Watch how Gladstone handles Jax's protective instincts toward Roki—the hand placed on a shoulder, a glance held half a beat too long, the sudden stillness when danger approaches. Conversely, her body language tightens in scenes with authority figures, Jax's spine straightening into a defensive wall she's constructed through years of bureaucratic combat.
The performance never requests sympathy. Jax makes difficult, sometimes illegal choices—boosting cars to fund her search, lying to child protective services—and Gladstone plays each decision as pragmatic necessity rather than moral drama. She understands that for Indigenous women in America, survival itself can constitute transgression.
Tremblay's Visual Politics
Working with cinematographer Carolina Costa, Tremblay shoots Oklahoma in humid greens and bruised purples, deliberately refusing the romanticized "Big Sky" treatment so often imposed on Indigenous stories. The landscape here is lived-in, sometimes claustrophobic—overgrown lots, fluorescent-lit tribal offices, the cramped interiors of stolen vehicles. Costa's camera stays close to Gladstone's face, but never exploitatively; we're invited to study Jax's calculations, not to consume her pain.
The supporting cast operates with similar restraint. Ryan Begay brings weathered warmth to the role of Jax's father figure, while Shea Whigham appears as a sympathetic but limited ally, his helpfulness bounded by the same jurisdictional blinders that failed Tawi. Only Isabel Deroy-Olison occasionally breaks the film's tonal control, her Roki possessing a child's desperate optimism that cuts against the adult world's resigned pragmatism.
Genre as Survival Strategy
Tremblay's most sophisticated choice involves the film's stolen-car subplot, which introduces genuine thriller mechanics without sacrificing social context. These sequences generate propulsive energy—will Jax get caught?—while simultaneously illustrating economic desperation. The genre elements don't distract from the political; they embody it. When Jax teaches Roki to hotwire a vehicle, the scene plays as bonding ritual, vocational training, and implicit critique of an economy that leaves such skills necessary.
This integration distinguishes Fancy Dance from more didactic social-issue filmmaking. Tremblay trusts her audience to connect systemic failure to individual action without expository signposting. The film's title itself operates on multiple registers: the traditional Haudenosaunee social dance, the performative femininity Jax must adopt in certain spaces, the elaborate choreography required to navigate overlapping legal authorities.
Context and Continuity
Fancy Dance premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, where Apple acquired distribution rights, and arrives at a cultural moment when discussions of tribal sovereignty and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women have gained overdue national attention. It belongs to a growing wave of Indigenous-led filmmaking that includes Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr.'s Wild Indian (2021), Morrisa Maltz's The Unknown Country (2022), and Jeff Barnaby's Blood Quantum (2019)—works that reject outsider perspectives in favor of interior complexity.
Tremblay's background in documentary (she previously directed the
