The obvious thing to say about Dan Sallitt’s new film, What Can’t Be Mentioned, is that it can’t be fully appreciated without first seeing its more-than-a-decade-old predecessor, The Unspeakable Act — and it’s hard to disagree. Sallitt’s films have always been concerned with the vacuums created by the swift, sudden, and unprompted passage of time. His most well-known, Fourteen, followed the painful swell and compression of a close friendship over the course of 14 years, using delicate but devastatingly timed ellipses to unmoor the viewer from temporal logic. Life is not logical, Sallitt seems to say, and neither should a film about it be.
Perhaps the same attitude should be applied to the gaps between these companion films. While those familiar with The Unspeakable Act may have really felt the duration of the intervening 15 years, the effect of watching Sallitt’s latest would suggest no time had passed at all, and that the actors had aged at the snap of a finger. Questions of continuity be damned, just go with it!
What Can’t Be Mentioned finds Jackie (Tallie Medel) as a therapist-in-training whose intimacy issues and ambiguous, unresolved issues with her brother are triangulated by Sallitt within a thoughtfully observed psychoanalytic comedy. Comprising intimate details of human emotion rather than instructive narrative context, it is precisely through familiarity with the former film that the latter becomes so rich with tension and friction. Like Freud, to whose psychoanalytic framework Jackie adheres, we know her sexual insecurity and repression, which rub and tug against each other throughout the film, are busy deep below the surface, each a lingering trace of the previous film.
The title of The Unspeakable Act obscured and illuminated its own meaning, at once directly referring to Jackie’s reluctant attitude toward virginity and the boys who wouldn’t acknowledge you the day after taking it, while hinting at the specter-like presence of sibling incest. Today, nearly 15 years later, she’s no longer a teenager grappling explicitly with a sexual attraction to her older brother, Matthew (Sky Hirschkron), but a married adult grappling with something more ambiguous. Fittingly, the new film opens in a bedroom shrouded in darkness and set to the sounds of rustling bedsheets and frustrated exclamations that betray Jackie’s newfound aversion to sex with her husband, Anthony (Kyle McCormack). The rejection is, as Jackie later insists during couples therapy, all in her head. She loves Anthony and finds him attractive, if occasionally hard to live with.
The first half of What Can’t Be Mentioned is dominated by a series of one-on-one sessions in various configurations. Along with couples therapy, Jackie consults her own client, relays stories of and questions about them to a professional mentor, and continues therapy with Linda (Caroline Luft), whom she began seeing as a teenager in the first film. At first, it’s not the content of the sessions that is most interesting or relevant. One client comments on the strangeness of having a therapist seemingly as young as Jackie, another says his wife is too nice and thinks they could “get somewhere” if she were meaner, and a young teenage girl is scared about opening up. These admissions aren’t exactly prompts to viewers acquainted with the previous film to expect something; Sallitt instead uses them to illustrate an entirely new, fleshed-out version of Jackie.
Previously, she was a mess of neurotic, teenage contradictions, obsessed with but not exactly tortured by her deviant attraction; wise beyond her years and stridently herself, but so sensitive to disruptions in the world around her (Matthew’s departure for college chief among them) that she crumbled whenever she was forced to contend with them. As an adult, she has an air of self-assuredness that comes across less as a front than it once did, and more as a tribute to self-work and the natural passage of time. It manifests in an upright posture, and in the way she sits forward in a chair during a session rather than slumping back into it. Her seeming unflappability in the face of intrusive intimacy issues with her husband is perhaps a byproduct of doling out advice rather than receiving it, but it also belies the cracks in her foundation of productive introspection. The change in comportment from the first film is stark, probably too good to be true.
The teenage Jackie comes back to life over a tense weekend at Matthew and her pregnant sister-in-law Lily’s (Kit Zauhar), house. She sits on the couch with her feet tucked under her legs and lets her neuroses, insecurities, and hair-trigger moods surface from a bottomless well of wine. This film is a gas tank, pressurized after every scene by more and more emotional content. Jackie prods Lily with increasing intensity about intimate personal details, like whether or not pregnant sex with her brother is still good, or if she ever saw her hippie parents have sex. To anyone who hasn’t seen The Unspeakable Act, the sudden immature shift in Jackie’s demeanor will seem improbable. But for those who have, it’s confirmation that the old Jackie hasn’t changed all that much.
Sallitt’s locked-off camera and precise compositions allow for unexpected dynamism and productive unease to play out in each scene. The Unspeakable Act was dedicated to the then-recently deceased Eric Rohmer, and you can see why. His patient frames are playgrounds for actors to talk about their hang-ups and move in ways that mirror them. What Can’t Be Mentioned follows the same approach. Where Medel squirms and writhes in place and Zauhar shifts in shock and defiance at the impropriety, Hirschkron is still, as if steeping in the tension between them. Where Jackie is alive, Matthew is weighed down by years of his own troubles, which this film doesn’t have space to accommodate.
It’s not worth spoiling how or in what manner What Can’t Be Mentioned’s nervy emotional crescendo hits its peak — a revelation of feelings at once predictable yet shocking in its delivery — but Sallitt lays clues earlier in the film that suggest the direction it might take. The pleasure of What Can’t Be Mentioned is in attaching oneself to its early cerebral pathways (Freud and counter-transference among them), only to lurch uncomfortably to their visceral counterparts. Flowing wine, libido, and jealousy form a heady concoction that, once drunk, turns nebulous unease — recounted by Jackie in the film’s first five minutes as the worry one of her clients feels over leaving the pre-teen son and daughter alone together — into a blaring siren to those who have seen The Unspeakable Act, and an ominous drone to those who haven’t. That Jackie’s own issues have so far lingered dormant, intellectually scrutinized but emotionally untapped, means the unspeakable act now is to mention what is on everyone’s mind.
Published as part of NYFF 2026 — Dispatch 7.
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