Welcome to the magical world of Ponderosa – a family-oriented restaurant where, as one character jokes while recording a vlog, there are no mains, only sides.
This is the place of work for Sandra (Alexis Bledel), where she is frequently visited by her teenage son, Zeke (Jack Dylan Grazer), who spends a lot of time on his phone and likes to smoke an occasional secret cigarette. One day, a rich real estate developer, George (Bill Camp), approaches Zeke and offers him a job at one of his construction sites. He proceeds to do his best to insert himself in the boy’s life as a mentor and, as we discover later, a literal father, despite Zeke having no desire to participate in this relationship.
The first thing one needs to know when deciding to approach Rob Rice’s new film is that, while Ponderosa is of course very real, the rest of what we see on screen, including the characters, are mostly not – it’s all about allegories and metaphors. Ponderosa, Rice’s second directorial work after Way Out Ahead of Us, is a brain teaser, a parable that speaks in riddles and symbols, descending into utter surrealism by the end. Depending on a viewer’s individual sensibilities, it could be a really weird or really exciting hour and a half.
Ponderosa is more or less open about the kind of movie it is from the start, as it paints a seemingly picturesque, but eerie and at times grotesque picture of suburban life that strongly resembles simulated reality, with its unnatural symmetry and unmoving clouds. The word “Lynchian” comes to mind early on, and even more so towards the end, when the film becomes progressively more and more symbolic.
Ponderosa, the buffet, this meta land of plenty full of sides but not main courses, serves as a perfect metaphor for the Americana David Lynch habitually deconstructed in his greatest works. In Rice’s film, the suburban nightmare is seen through the lens of a generational divide, represented by the trio of main characters.
Ponderosa, the film, is at its best when it explores the quasi-father-son relationship as a stand-in for a bigger conversation about the endless gap between people of different ages. The theme is additionally supported by the extraordinary Bill Camp, who, in a film filled with walking concepts, chooses to play George as a blob of pulsing, anxious energy.
Then, another layer is added to the mix, and the whole affair becomes muddled. As we are introduced to a group of older men George is part of, who all strive to force the father-son bond and their unwanted guidance on younger men, the divide here becomes ideological, and the movie gets increasingly satirical.
While conceptually it makes sense, it also leads to a discord of its own in the film’s tone, since from a certain point, the movie starts speaking two different languages. Parables talk in riddles and allusions, presenting codes that can be deciphered and are open to interpretations, while satire is not subtle by definition; it's deliberately loud and clear about its intentions.
Trying to combine both might potentially work, but more often than not, it does not. Then, there is the fact that satire works best when it exposes the core of the very thing it’s spoofing, while Rice’s film stops at merely ridiculing it.
In Ponderosa, the above-mentioned group, their supposedly charismatic guru, and their collective rhetoric are shown as driveling and largely ineffective. While Zeke’s first encounters with that strange world are sufficiently awkward and disturbing, later on, he mostly nods politely, shrugs, and goes back to his phone, turning the whole narrative into a sort of wish-fulfillment on the authors’ part.
Sadly, the reality of the younger generation being receptive to this sort of thinking and ideas is not only more disconcerting but also much more surreal.
The film enjoys its world premiere at the 2026 Tribeca Festival. Visit the film's page at the official festival site for more information.