The San Luis Obispo International Film Festival has given SLO Review the opportunity to preview some of the narrative and documentary films on the festival’s April 24-29, 2025 program schedule. Follow the links to purchase tickets to see these notable films for yourself.
A Spellbinding Puzzle
There are plenty of reasons to attend the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival this year, but if you only catch one feature, make it Aontas. Quiet, smart, and beautifully executed, it’s a perfect fit for a festival that celebrates craft.
There’s something mesmerizing about how Aontas unfolds, moving backward through time, each scene revealing a new glimmer of truth or deeper layer to the mystery. The structure immediately reveals itself, and from the opening shot, I was hooked.
The film doesn’t just tell a story of a botched robbery. It explores how even the most unassuming moments can carry tremendous weight, once we know the context.
The film isn’t simply moving backward, it’s pulling us deeper into a story that’s been hiding in plain sight.”
Aontas is one of those rare films that rewards close attention without ever feeling like it’s testing you. It lingers in silence, trusts its audience, and quietly pulls the rug out again and again, proving it doesn’t require flashy twists to affect devastating revelations. That’s its power: it invites you to breathe in the atmosphere before it tells you why you’re holding your breath.
The film isn’t simply moving backward, it’s pulling us deeper into a story that’s been hiding in plain sight. The loveliness of the film is in discovering what that something is.
The cast is uniformly excellent, with performances that feel as lived-in and authentic as the film’s setting. A look that seems one way, becomes something else entirely in the next sequence. It’s a kind of emotional reverse-engineering.
Every detail, once understood, feels like it was sitting there all along, waiting to be seen correctly.
There’s something incredibly immersive about being allowed to just watch, to sit with the characters in their messy interactions. Early on, it feels like an uneasy portrait of small-town life. Familiar. These are characters who feel like people you might actually know, people you nod to at the farmer’s market, who might stop to chat about their dog or the weather.
Director and co-writer (with Sarah Gordon) Damian McCann never allow Aontas to rely on spectacle. Its greatest mysteries are ones you might walk past without noticing. These are the details that build and break open the mystery. You’ll get the sense that the answers are right in front of us, if we only knew how to read them. That every object, every gesture, might be a clue.
By the time the film ends I found myself reeling not just from the revelations, but from how deeply I’d come to care about how easily our view of someone can shift when we learn the truth. Or think we do.
Watch Aontas, and you’ll leave the theater wanting to talk about it.
Editor’s Note: Screenings of Aontas (Ireland, run time 91 minutes, rated R, in Irish Gaelic with English subtitles) at the SLO International Film Festival are sponsored by Patricia Gomez and Frank Seiple.