Dan Sallitt’s What Can’t Be Mentioned returns to a character whose emotional life resists the reassuring idea that adulthood puts everything in order. Jackie, played again by Tallie Medel, has a profession to prepare for and a relationship to navigate. She also has a family history that cannot simply be filed away. Sallitt’s conversation with Joshua Minsoo Kim in Film Show 074: Dan Sallitt makes that unfinished business an especially interesting way into his new film.
Premise spoilers follow. This is a critical preview based on the published interview and documented story material, rather than a verdict on an advance screening. The distinction matters: a filmmaker can explain his intentions, but the performances, rhythm, and final effect still have to speak for themselves.
Where Jackie’s story resumes
Film at Lincoln Center identifies the 2026 feature as a continuation of The Unspeakable Act, Sallitt’s 2012 film. Jackie is now in her late twenties, living in Brooklyn and training as a social worker. Her relationship with Anthony, played by Kyle McCormack, has encountered sexual difficulties. Meanwhile, her older brother, played by Sky Hirschkron, is expecting a child with Lily, played by Kit Zauhar.
The complicated history beneath those developments is Jackie’s unrequited incestuous attraction to her brother. That premise deserves plain language, without turning it into a sensational advertisement. The dramatic question is how an adult lives alongside feelings and memories that other people have their own reasons for approaching cautiously.
My reading of this setup is that Jackie’s professional direction supplies its sharpest irony. Preparing to help people understand their difficulties does not necessarily make someone able to interpret her own. Knowledge can provide useful language while leaving the underlying discomfort intact. A character who understands emotional processes may still struggle when understanding requires surrendering a preferred story about herself.
Jackie: wanting a conversation, fearing its consequences
The extended synopsis published by The Film Stage describes Jackie visiting her brother Matthew and Lily, becoming more expansive in their company, and eventually insisting that avoiding her earlier feelings limits the siblings’ closeness. Yet she also cuts short the conversation she initiates. These are reported story developments, rather than observations of how the finished scene plays.
That reversal is the most revealing element of the premise. Jackie appears to want recognition, but recognition means letting another person answer. Once Matthew participates, the discussion cannot remain entirely hers. He may remember things differently, attach different importance to them, or offer a response that fails to satisfy a need she has not fully articulated.
From Jackie’s perspective, silence could feel like exclusion: an important part of her experience has become something the family can live comfortably around. From another perspective, her demand for openness could require everyone else to reorganize a peaceful evening around her distress. Both readings deserve room. Understanding why she presses the issue does not settle whether pressing it is fair.
This is where the character becomes more interesting than the taboo attached to her. A person can sincerely seek intimacy while trying to control its terms. Jackie’s contradiction offers a useful question for the eventual viewing: does she listen as intently as she asks to be heard?
Anthony, Matthew, and Lily need lives beyond Jackie
Anthony’s position is especially easy to overlook. The published synopsis describes an understanding response to their sexual difficulties. Patience, however, should not make him dramatically invisible. A partner can respond generously and still have needs, uncertainty, or disappointment. The critical test is whether the film gives those possibilities weight without requiring him to become hostile before he matters.
Matthew faces a different problem. He occupies an extraordinary place in Jackie’s emotional history while also building a household with Lily. From his perspective, maintaining a boundary need not amount to refusing affection. His future child gives that distinction additional significance: his life has commitments that exist independently of his sister’s interpretation of their bond.
Lily, meanwhile, should be watched as a participant with her own understanding of the room. Reducing her to an obstacle would reproduce the narrowest possible view of Jackie’s situation. Her relationship with Matthew and her connection with Jackie need not carry identical meanings for all three people.
The pregnancy also creates a productive connection with our examination of how parenthood changes the assumptions surrounding a relationship in Babies. Here, the useful question is what happens when one person’s family milestone unsettles another person’s sense of belonging.
Why an ordinary distraction can matter
In the Tone Glow interview, Kim brings up a moment involving a brother typing while someone tries to speak to him. Sallitt explains his recurring interest in mundane activities. That detail suggests a practical way to approach the film: pay attention to where attention itself goes.
A keyboard can give a listener something to do while another person waits. The same gesture could register as distraction, evasion, habit, or an attempt to keep an uncomfortable exchange ordinary. Its meaning depends on timing and performance. A synopsis cannot establish which interpretation wins.
This is also where restrained filmmaking faces a demanding test. Leaving emotions unstated can invite close attention, but it can also leave a scene underdeveloped. The question is whether pauses and everyday actions allow us to distinguish the characters more precisely. Quietness alone is no achievement; specificity is.
An unfinished relationship does not require a tidy ending
Sallitt tells Kim that the film originated as the middle installment of a trilogy, while explaining that the proposed third part never became compelling enough to make. That background is useful because it discourages an automatic expectation that returning to Jackie must mean completing or curing her.
Still, incompletion has to work as drama. An unresolved ending can deepen a character when the audience understands more about the choices ahead. It feels thinner when uncertainty merely replaces development. For this story, the distinction may turn on whether Jackie acquires greater awareness of other people, even if her own desires remain difficult.
That is a more useful standard than treating a festival selection as a verdict. As our discussion of finding films that stay with you beyond a festival premiere argues, the lasting question concerns the work’s dramatic achievement rather than the excitement surrounding its arrival.
The title’s connection—and the deeper question
One connection is confirmed by Sallitt himself: What Can’t Be Mentioned takes its title from a line in The Unspeakable Act. The phrase links the films through language. An experience can remain active long after people have stopped naming it.
The deeper issue, in my reading, is whether acknowledgment and resolution are being confused. Jackie may want her past admitted into conversation without knowing what a satisfactory conversation would accomplish. Matthew may believe a loving relationship can continue without repeatedly revisiting it. Neither position automatically answers the other.
That tension gives Sallitt’s return to these characters its strongest promise. Honesty becomes meaningful when it includes responsibility for what another person hears, feels, and chooses to disclose. Jackie’s most consequential challenge may be accepting that being understood will never give her complete control over what understanding looks like.
Original content by this site's editorial team. Published: September 19, 2026 at 19:29:40 PDT (Los Angeles time)
