Tribeca ’26: ‘SUMMER WAR’ Is an Intriguing Descent Into Obsession

There are movies that unfold according to a plan, each scene carefully advancing a story toward a predetermined destination. Then there are movies like Summer War, where every scene feels as though it might wander off in an entirely unexpected direction. Writer-director Alicia Scherson’s adaptation of Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Third Reich is messy, strange, and occasionally frustrating, but it’s also consistently intriguing, the sort of film that keeps pulling you forward even when you’re not entirely sure where you’re being lead.

Set against the Chilean coast in 1989 during the waning days of the Pinochet regime, the film follows Udo Berger (Dan Beirne), an American wargaming champion vacationing at the Hotel Del Mar with his girlfriend. Pale, awkward, and definitely out of place, Udo seems far more interested in tabletop warfare than the actual world around him. Obsessed with strategy and military history, he spends much of his vacation studying The Third Reich, an elaborate World War II board game he insists is infinitely more complicated than chess. Things get weirder from there.

Udo harbors an uncomfortable fixation on the hotel’s housekeeper, Miss Elena, a crush dating back to childhood visits with his family. He and his girlfriend then befriend an Argentinian couple whose seemingly carefree vacation gradually reveals darker undercurrents of domestic violence and eventually breaks out into a disappearance at sea. Then comes Quemado, a local kayak vendor with a burned face and a mysterious past, whom Udo recruits to participate in his increasingly all-consuming war game. As the match continues, the line between game, fantasy, and reality begins to blur.

What begins as a vacation drama slowly mutates into something closer to a paranoid psychological thriller, with Scherson blurring the line between historical conflict, personal obsession, and strategic abstraction. The film never fully explains where one ends and the other begins.

Not everything works. The performances are uneven, particularly whenever characters switch into English. Conversations often take on an awkward, stilted quality that can feel more distracting than intentional. Dan Beirne’s Udo is an intentionally odd creation, a dorky, pasty interloper whose social discomfort becomes increasingly difficult to separate from genuine psychological unraveling. Several directorial flourishes, including Udo’s detached narration, occasionally veer into territory that feels more tacky than inspired. Oddly enough though, these rough edges rarely sink the film.

Working with cinematographer Alejo Maglio, Scherson transforms the Chilean coastline into a place of strange contradictions: beautiful and vaguely threatening, inviting and alienating. The film drifts between vacation drama, political allegory, psychological breakdown, and conspiracy thriller with a confidence that suggests Scherson is less interested in providing answers than in maintaining a state of productive disorientation. Every scene feels slightly unstable, creating a persistent uncertainty about where the story is headed next. Even when individual moments don’t fully land, the cumulative effect remains oddly compelling.

What exactly Summer War is trying to say about war is harder to pin down. Stock footage from twentieth-century conflicts appears throughout. The strategy game increasingly mirrors the psychological battles unfolding between the characters. Udo approaches warfare as an intellectual puzzle, reducing conflict to movement, calculation, and tactics. Yet the film continually surrounds him with reminders of the human consequences such abstractions ignore.

At one point, Udo asks Quemado if he can recite any of the poetry he enjoys reading. Quemado replies that he can’t remember the words, only the way they made him feel. It’s a line that doubles as a useful guide for approaching the film itself. I can’t claim to fully understand every symbolic connection Summer War is attempting to make nor its many ties to the region’s sociopolitical histories. I’m not entirely convinced the movie understands all of them either. But nevertheless it communicates a feeling. And does so fairly effectively.

That feeling is one of mounting unease, displacement, and slow psychological decay. Udo drifts through the film like an alien visitor, increasingly consumed by fantasies of control while his grasp on reality quietly deteriorates. The pieces never fit together quite as neatly as the film wants them to, but they’re alluring pieces nonetheless. Summer War may be too uneven to fully succeed, but its willingness to embrace ambiguity, contradiction, and just being pretty bizarre makes it more memorable than many cleaner, more conventional offerings. Like a half-remembered poem, it lingers less because of what it says than because of how it makes you feel.

CONCLUSION: Alicia Scherson’s Summer War is an uneven but mostly interesting descent into obsession, paranoia, and abstraction. Bolstered by a uniquely disorienting atmosphere and a refusal to follow predictable narrative paths, this Bolaño adaptation rarely comes together cleanly but remains consistently intriguing nonetheless.

B- 

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