Tribeca 2025 Review: WESTHAMPTON, Not Another Garden State

For the second time in the Tribeca Festival program, a film starts with a Q&A session that doesn’t go overly well. At least, the filmmaker protagonist of The Travel Companion mostly has to just stand there awkwardly, digesting the fact that no one cares that much about his film. In Westhampton, directed by Christian Nilsson, the hero, Tom Bell (Finn Wittrock), has to grapple with the viewers and the moderator who care perhaps too much and come on too strong in asking to explain the autobiographical connection he has to his latest film.

In the black and white movie also called Westhampton, a screen version of the younger Tom causes an accident that forever changes the lives of his friends and his own. As fate would have it, in real life, Tom finds out that he needs to briefly go back to his childhood home he long left behind, to take care of a few things. It’s supposed to be an in-and-out affair, but we’ve seen how those things always go. The town that harbors very different opinions and reactions to Tom inevitably draws him in, as there are still scores to settle and forgiveness to earn — something Tom kind of needs to grant himself first and foremost.

The barebones of the story Westhampton is telling — the one about slaying the demons born out of the actions of days long gone — is not by any means a unique one. Which makes the way the authors choose to tell this story, as well as being self-aware about the fact that they aren't reinventing the wheel, all the more crucial. Christian Nilsson, who also wrote the script, addresses the issue in the very first scene, which takes place in a theater’s men’s bathroom where Wittrock's character overhears a conversation between two guys calling the film he made “another shitty Garden State”.

While the reference becomes a running joke throughout the film, the setting of that opening introduces a certain tone that the film maintains: there is a dry sense of humor to it, the constant presence of a bitter-sweet irony that prevents it from delving into overt dramatics and turning into, if we’re using cinematic references, something akin to Manchester by the Sea. The film that starts in a toilet tends to further ground its potentially most dramatic and meaningful moments in the mundane, setting it next to a boys’ locker room or at a patio with the door closed, preventing us from hearing parts of the dialogue we don’t necessarily need to hear.

Since we constantly follow Tom’s perspective in this journey, Wittrock is at the center of it all, and he gives one of the best performances in his filmography, while still supported by brief but effective appearances of a strong cast that includes Jake Weary, RJ Mitte, Amy Forsyth, and Roxanne Schiebergen. The editing, with its abrupt cuts, and cinematography, with its long, wide shots, also help in creating the sense of being lost — not so much in the actual complexities of the past and present, but inside one’s own head. That’s another great thing about Westhampton: it never attempts to simplify things that are so inherently messy, they don’t really have neat solutions. And as the film’s elegant finale states, that’s okay — sometimes, realizing that certain things will never be resolved is as much a happy ending as we can get.