Navigating the Taboo: Dan Sallitt Returns with What Can’t Be Mentioned, a Micro-Budget Masterclass in Comedy and Repression
NEW YORK — In the landscape of contemporary American independent cinema, few filmmakers operate with the rigorous, uncompromising geometry of Dan Sallitt. Operating on micro-budgets and maintaining a deliberate, unhurried release schedule, Sallitt has cultivated a reputation as a director’s director. His work—steeped in the intellectual rigor of European masters like Robert Bresson and Éric Rohmer, as well as the improvisational emotional architecture of John Cassavetes—seeks out the quiet, uncomfortable spaces where human psychology fractures under the weight of its own contradictions.
With his latest feature, What Can’t Be Mentioned, which recently premiered at the 64th New York Film Festival, Sallitt has delivered an unexpected and surprisingly funny sequel to his stark 2012 feature, The Unspeakable Act. Picking up fourteen years after the events of the original film, the new project revisits its protagonist, Jackie, as she navigates the terrain of adulthood, professional training, and chronic, unresolved desire.
Main Facts: Revisiting the World of Jackie and Matthew
At its core, What Can’t Be Mentioned examines the persistence of taboo. In The Unspeakable Act, a teenage Jackie (then and now played with astonishing vulnerability by Tallie Medel) grappled with a profound, socially transgressive reality: an unrequited erotic attraction to her older brother, Matthew (Sky Hirschkron).
Fourteen years later, the sequel finds Jackie in her late twenties, still living in Brooklyn, and attempting to channel her acute analytical mind into a career as a social worker in training. Yet, her personal life remains a battlefield of psychological hang-ups. While living with her bookkeeper boyfriend, Anthony (Kyle McCormick)—with whom she attends couples therapy to combat sexual incompatibility—Jackie’s lingering, emotionally distant fixation on Matthew is reignited.
The catalyst arrives when Matthew announces that his partner, Lily (Kit Zauhar), is pregnant. This prompts an invitation for Jackie to spend a tense, claustrophobic few days with the couple upstate, setting off a chain reaction of awkward social encounters, wine-fueled indiscretions, and psychological sparring matches.
Chronology: From Teenage Therapy to Adult Relapses
To fully understand the architecture of What Can’t Be Mentioned, one must look back at the trajectory Sallitt established over a decade ago.
Phase One: The Silent Agonies of The Unspeakable Act (2012)
About halfway through The Unspeakable Act, a young Jackie begins attending therapy sessions to address the titular "unspeakable act"—her incestuous desires for Matthew. Rather than playing the narrative for sensationalism, Sallitt focused on the mundane, agonizing rhythm of the therapeutic process. Jackie had to learn the specific verbiage of mental health professionals, engaging in a squirmy back-and-forth across a clipboard-wielding stranger’s office. True to life, nothing was neatly resolved; the film relied instead on voiceover narration to expose the gulf between Jackie’s interior turmoil and her outward stoicism.
Phase Two: The Fourteen-Year Gap and the Conception of a Trilogy
Originally conceived as the second installment of an ambitious trilogy—one that Sallitt has since admitted will never be completed—What Can’t Be Mentioned bridges a massive gap in time. The sequel trades the heavy voiceovers of the first film for externalized, behavior-driven comedy. Now in her late twenties, Jackie’s intellectual capabilities remain at war with her taboo desires, though she now deploys her analytical skills outward in professional settings before bringing them home to implode her personal relationships.
Phase Three: The Upstate Interlude and Climax
The narrative culminates during Jackie’s visit to Matthew and Lily’s upstate home. As Jackie’s wine-fueled curiosities and pointed remarks target Lily’s upbringing and sexual orientation, the tension builds toward an inevitable, awkward crescendo. The film concludes with a literary gesture from Matthew—who finally offers a tender, humorous diagnosis of his sister’s condition via Robert Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities—before gently nudging Jackie back toward her life in Brooklyn with Anthony.
Supporting Data: Sallitt’s Minimalist Aesthetic and Production Style
Sallitt’s cinematic vocabulary is distinct for what it chooses to omit. What Can’t Be Mentioned eschews standard commercial filmmaking tropes:
- Zero Non-Diegetic Music: There is no musical score to dictate emotional cues to the audience.
- No Montages: Time passes through direct action and rigorous cuts rather than shorthand editing sequences.
- Sparse Set Design: Eschewing traditional cinematic dressing, Jackie’s walls are bare of paintings or comforting decor, lending the spaces an eerie, clinical atmosphere rather than a sterile one.
Instead of traditional cinematic grammar, Sallitt relies heavily on static camera setups and extended long takes. This forces the audience to inhabit real time alongside the characters, allowing the narrative momentum to be generated entirely through the precise, musical timing of Sallitt’s cuts. According to festival critics, these editorial choices yield a sharper comedic rhythm than anything in the director’s previous filmography.
Furthermore, the performances anchor this aesthetic framework. Tallie Medel’s evolution as a performer allows Jackie to transform from an internalized, voiceover-driven teenager into an outwardly volatile adult capable of sustaining agonizingly long, socially anxious monologues. Opposite Medel, Kit Zauhar brings a naturalistic, easygoing warmth as Lily, serving as the perfect foil to Jackie’s sharp, probing neurosis.
Official Responses and Festival Reception
Premiering to a specialized, appreciative audience at the 64th New York Film Festival, What Can’t Be Mentioned generated considerable discussion regarding its thematic preoccupations. During the post-screening Q&A session, Dan Sallitt addressed the cinematic obsession with psychotherapy, famously comparing the relationship between movies and therapy to "ham and eggs."
Sallitt noted that psychotherapy and drama share an identical structural DNA—both are built entirely around characters sitting down and attempting to articulate the unnamable truths of their inner lives. Yet, the director was quick to clarify that the film is equally an interrogation of "therapy-speak."
"The easy part is talking; the hard part is making changes,"
Jackie’s dialogue suggests, capturing the film’s central irony: the very vocabulary designed to heal and connect us can often be weaponized to prevent anything truly genuine from ever being said.
Reviewers have praised the film for refusing to offer easy moral judgments. Sallitt remains entirely content to live within the unanswerable tension of whether Jackie’s digs at her brother’s relationship are calculated sabotage or merely the byproduct of repressed indiscretions unspooled by too much wine.
Implications: The Limits of Language and the Modern Comedy of Manners
What does What Can’t Be Mentioned tell us about contemporary independent cinema and our cultural obsession with mental health?
By setting his story against the backdrop of modern Brooklyn—where therapy-speak, self-optimization, and professionalized psychological framing have saturated everyday conversation—Sallitt constructs a modern comedy of manners. Jackie’s dual life as a social worker-in-training who peppers struggling mothers with clinical questions, contrasted with her inability to fix her own bedroom problems with Anthony, exposes the profound limitations of modern emotional literacy.
The film suggests that humanity’s deepest, darkest impulses cannot always be neatly categorized, diagnosed, or talked away with the right combination of clinical buzzwords. Sometimes, as Matthew’s final gesture implies, the only response to an unquenchable, eccentric mind is a mix of affectionate humor, literary irony, and the quiet acknowledgment that we must eventually return to the difficult work of living our everyday lives.
As the curtain closes on Sallitt’s truncated trilogy, What Can’t Be Mentioned stands as a monument to the filmmaker’s singular vision: a work that proves awkwardness, intellectualism, and deep human frailty can combine to create some of the most compelling cinema of our time.
