Where to Land

More than a decade after Ned Rifle, Hal Hartley returns with Where to Land, a compact, deceptively gentle film about mortality, artistic fatigue and the strange burden of deciding what we leave behind. Its opening words, At last!, acknowledge both the filmmaker’s prolonged absence and the difficult birth of a project initially prepared for 2020, financed through crowdfunding and subsequently delayed by the pandemic. Yet the result does not feel like an artefact rescued from another moment. At 75 minutes, it has the alertness of a filmmaker rediscovering the pleasure of movement, conversation and collaboration. Rather than staging his comeback as a grand declaration, Hal Hartley turns towards the ordinary: a man filling out his will, looking at the objects accumulated around him and wondering whether a job in a cemetery might offer more satisfaction than another film. This modest premise becomes a witty and deeply personal examination of an artist attempting to locate his place in a world that has continued without waiting for him.

Bill Sage plays Joseph Fulton, a 58-year-old director whose once-successful romantic comedies including, wonderfully, one involving a hand grenade have ceased to provide either momentum or meaning. He is not destitute, terminally ill or dramatically broken; he is simply tired of living without a practical purpose. His proposed solution is to become an unpaid assistant groundskeeper at a church cemetery near his Upper West Side apartment. The quietly perplexed groundskeeper, played with admirable restraint by Robert John Burke, cannot understand why an educated, elegantly dressed filmmaker would volunteer for such physical work. Joseph Fulton, however, wants to use his hands, spend time outdoors and arrive home genuinely exhausted. There is something both comic and moving in the simplicity of that wish. In an age obsessed with reinvention as performance, his ambition is almost defiantly unglamorous: he would like to become useful, perhaps even “perennial,” borrowing the flattering description of his work once printed in Le Monde.

Trouble begins when this desire for simplicity coincides with the preparation of his last will and testament. His girlfriend, a television star played by Kim Taff, interprets the legal arrangements and cemetery visits as evidence that he is concealing a fatal diagnosis. His niece and assistant, played by Katelyn Sparks, discovers an unopened confidential letter from a hospital, which appears to confirm the worst. From there, anxiety circulates through his small community faster than facts. His affectionate former wife, embodied with effortless intelligence by Edie Falco, his lawyer, played by Gia Crovatin, and assorted friends and acquaintances are gradually pulled into an emergency that does not actually exist. Meanwhile, an aspiring writer played by Jeremy Hendrik becomes convinced that Joseph Fulton may be his biological father, accompanied by a fellow screenwriter played by Jay Lenox. The construction recalls screwball comedy, but Hal Hartley refuses frantic escalation. The misunderstandings accumulate at an oddly civilized pace, allowing every absurdity to expose a sincere fear: not merely that someone may die, but that life may change before those around him have decided what they want from it.

The will itself supplies the film’s most revealing idea. Inspired by Hal Hartley drawing up his own testament while caring for his ageing father, it transforms death into an inventory problem. Who receives the films? What value will they retain? Who wants the responsibility attached to them? How did one person acquire so many things? Joseph Fulton is less concerned with achieving immortality than with the administrative inconvenience of ownership. His lawyer explains that his catalogue may continue generating income, but those works are also obligations that must be assigned to somebody. The filmmaker’s legacy is consequently treated not as a monument but as property requiring maintenance, much like the cemetery he hopes to tend. When a character observes that ownership can become a form of bondage, the line is deliberately blunt, yet the film earns it by repeatedly showing how possessions, careers and relationships promise security while quietly limiting our freedom to change.

This directness is both the signature and the principal limitation of Where to Land. Hal Hartley has never written dialogue that pretends to be accidentally overheard. His characters speak in carefully arranged phrases, stating positions on capitalism, religion, failure, spirituality and environmental collapse before pausing as though the room itself needs time to consider them. Viewers resistant to theatricality may find some conversations closer to illustrated arguments than spontaneous human exchange. The emphatic piano chords composed by Hal Hartley occasionally underline a thought that was already perfectly clear. Yet the artificiality also produces the film’s distinctive music. Sentences circle back, bodies shift within the frame like dancers, and sharp cuts eliminate every piece of connective action that the audience does not need. In one characteristic transition, reaching for the hospital letter is followed immediately by reading it aloud; suspense is compressed into rhythm. The technique may once have invited comparisons with Jean-Luc Godard, but here it feels less like homage than a grammar Hal Hartley has refined until it appears entirely natural to him.

The performances prevent this philosophical comedy from becoming arid. Bill Sage gives Joseph Fulton a serenity that never hardens into passivity; beneath the controlled delivery, one senses a man surprised by the amount of life still demanding his attention. Robert John Burke makes the groundskeeper a quietly enduring presence, while Kim Taff finds genuine exhaustion beneath the comic spectacle of a fantasy-series celebrity declaring that she is finished with superheroes. Edie Falco brings warmth and history to relatively little screen time, suggesting that intimacy can survive the end of a marriage. An encounter with an elderly writer played by Kathleen Chalfant is especially telling: when Joseph Fulton worries about a future in which people may fight over water, she responds with curiosity about change rather than fear of it. The film does not decide which outlook is wiser. It simply places apprehension beside wonder and allows both to remain valid.

Where to Land ultimately becomes less a meditation on dying than an argument for changing direction while one still can. Its windswept New York exteriors make the characters appear exposed and unsettled, while the interiors gradually gather them into a provisional community. The final movement does not solve every relationship or answer every philosophical question; it permits these people to imagine alternatives together. That generosity makes the film more than a nostalgic return by a major American independent filmmaker. Familiar actors, clipped exchanges, abrupt edits and melodic electronic textures reconnect Hal Hartley with his earlier cinema, but the perspective has matured. The ironic distance remains, now softened by an awareness that detachment cannot protect anyone from time. Slight, eccentric and occasionally too explicit, Where to Land nevertheless carries the invigorating conviction that taking stock of a life need not be a prelude to disappearance. Sometimes it is simply the first step towards deciding where, and how, to live next.

Where to Land
Written and directed by Hal Hartley
Produced by Hal Hartley
Starring: Bill Sage, Robert John Burke, Gia Crovatin, Edie Falco, Kathleen Chalfant, Kim Taff, Katelyn Sparks, Jeremy Hendrik, Joe Perrino, Jay Lenox, Aida Johannes and King Mustafa Obafemi
Cinematography: Sarah Cawley
Edited by Hal Hartley 
Music by Hal Hartley
Production companies: Possible Films, Action Features
Distributed by: Possible Films (United States)
Release dates: September 12, 2025 (United States)
Running time: 75 minutes

Seen on 11 September 2026