Making a successful satire is a fine art at the best of times. But making a successful satire on the world of fine art? Well that's, er, an even fine
Making a successful satire is a fine art at the best of times. But making a successful satire on the world of fine art? Well that’s, er, an even finer art. Get the balance just right and you wind up with something urgent, timely, and thoughtful like Ruben Östlund’s 2018 effort The Square; futz the formula with even just one absurd gag too many, and you could land in the realms of Dan Gilroy’s Velvet Buzzsaw. Enter The Gallerist, director Cathy Yan’s first movie since Birds Of Prey, in which Natalie Portman plays — you guessed it! — an ambitious gallery owner who unwittingly finds herself making Zach Galifianakis’ corpse the centrepiece of her first show. Check out the nutty trailer below;
Okay, so firstly WHAT A CAST! Seriously, Jenna Ortega, Sterling K. Brown, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Daniel Brühl, Charli XCX… talk about stacked. Secondly, great employ of Andy Warhol’s “Art is anything you can get away with” quote. And thirdly, this set-up, preposterous as it is, kinda could just about fall on the right side of so absurd it might be genius, with the screws ever-turning on a never-more-game Natalie Portman, who looks set to rival Olivia Wilde in I Want Your Sex and Tom Rhys Harries in Clayface in the race for ‘Most Prosecutable Fictional Artist Of 2026’ stakes. Yikes!
Here’s the official synopsis for The Gallerist: “Set against the glittering excess of Art Basel Miami, The Gallerist follows an ambitious gallery owner (Portman) clinging to the edge of elite society and desperate to prove herself on the heels of a nasty separation, facing mounting financial hardship. What begins as an impromptu act of survival—when she conspires to pass off an accidental corpse as the centerpiece of her debut show—spirals into a sly game of deception, spectacle, and ticking-clock chaos as influencers and police converge. Will she end up famous, a felon, or both?”
With The Gallerist having already set tongues wagging on the festival circuit this year, and Yan’s long-awaited directorial return promising to see the filmmaker going for broke once again just as she did with Harley Quinn, we can be sure of at least one imminent installation: our butts, in cinema seats, on January 4, 2027.
