Time for a cinematic litmus test. If the phrase “military industrial complex romantic comedy” rings your bells, Hailey Gates‘ feature directorial debut “Atropia” just might be for you. What if we told you it’s also a bit of a satire? And it’s based on real events and places? And it stars Alia Shawkat and Callum Turner, whose forbidden romance really blossoms inside the confines of, well, no spoilers here, but a decidedly unsexy space? If your boxes are being checked right now, time to buy a ticket for “Atropia.”

That’s not to say that such elements will tick *everyone’s *boxes, and that’s just fine by Gates and Shawkat, who realize that their film might not be for everyone. But the people it is for? Oh, they’re going to love it.

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The Sundance premiere (and eventual Grand Jury Prize winner) is the product of a continuing partnership between the two, first sparked by the 2019 short “Shako Mako” which, like “Atropia,” was written and directed by Gates and stars Shawkat as an actress on the set of a replica foreign village used by the American military to train soldiers before they head out into the field. For “Atropia,” that story was expanded out to include a romance with Turner’s character, an American war vet who enjoys the play-acting in the fake country of Atropia a little *too *much.

The pair met “back in the day,” per Shawkat, introduced by mutual friends in New York. Their big initial bonding story isn’t that exciting, they fear (Gates joked that they need to get a better one), but it was the start of a special partnership.

“We shared a cab back to Brooklyn and we were talking and Hailey pitched me this short film that she wanted to make that sounded amazing,” Shawkat said during a recent interview with IndieWire. “She said it was being made by Miu Miu, and I was like, ‘Wow.’ Then I thought, ‘I’ll probably never hear from her again.’ Then it turned into this beautiful experience and the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

Gates laughed. Not hearing from her again? That was *not *going to happen. “Oh no, I had major designs on Alia,” the filmmaker said. “I was a big fan and we had always circled each other, but I thought that would be the best way to solidify our friendship for me to write a part for her.”

Gates eventually cast Shawkat in her short film “Shako Mako,” which was indeed produced as part of Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales series. “They give you a budget and they let you make whatever you want,” Gates said of the Miu Miu scheme. “It’s a mix of people who are very green like me, and then people like Lucrecia Martel and Agnes Varda. We got to show our film alongside Lynne Ramsay, which was just extraordinary. There are worse places to get money from, that’s for sure.”

‘Atropia’Frenesy Film Company

After they showed “Shako Mako” at Venice in 2019, the pair attended a dinner where Ramsay was also in attendance. She had some advice for Gates. “We were sitting with Lynne Ramsay at dinner, pinching ourselves, and she takes a fork up to me and she’s like, ‘If you don’t turn this into a feature, I’m going to stick this fork in your throat,’” Gates said, laughing. “She’s like, ‘If you don’t do it now, some man’s just going to come round and steal it from you.’ Honestly, I thought a man was going to steal it from us, but they were too slow.”

Shawkat smiled. “And that’s what inspires us to do most things,” she added.

Seeing a high-brow fashion label attached to films like “Shako Mako” and “Atropia” might feel a bit off-kilter, but Gates is nothing but grateful for the partnership. “They believed in me as a filmmaker before anyone else did, and that is tremendously valuable,” Gates said. “The film has a very particular tone. It’s a real tightrope walk. I think if we didn’t have an opportunity to show that it was possible to achieve [with the short film], it would’ve been very hard to get this film made.”

Initially, Gates wanted to expand the short into a documentary about these military training spaces, complete with fake buildings, dramatic plotlines, and a very real coterie of actors. “I spent a lot of time going to the bases and interviewing people and working my way up the ranks of the DOD,” Gates said. “They let me see things. They just didn’t want me to film the particulars that I was interested in filming. I think this world really lends itself to satire and we had already made something that I felt was very rich, and so we went forth.”

Many of the details Gates picked up during her research are present in “Atropia”: a reality-bending Thanksgiving sequence, the real animatronics used on the base, even the shady business dealings that led to the displacement of some endangered tortoises that play essential roles. Still, pivoting from documentary to narrative wasn’t some silver bullet.

“Yeah, everybody was desperate to make a military industrial complex romantic comedy,” Gates said with a laugh. “‘Take all of our money.’ No, it was really hard. It was really hard, but we found some brave souls to come on board. We feel really lucky to have something that speaks to this moment and we’re really proud of what we made.”

After pulling together enough financing for a 19-day shoot — the film counts 17 producers, including Gates, Shawkat, Turner, Luca Guadagnino, costume designer Heidi Bivens, “Call Me by Your Name” producers Naima Abed and Emilie Georges, and filmmakers Scott McGehee and David Siegel — there were other complications to navigate. Shawkat was pregnant.

“I had never been pregnant before, but I knew I wanted to make this movie,” Shawkat said. “Hailey put it together really fast actually, so there was a period where we thought we were going to shoot and pretend that I wasn’t pregnant. Then it just was like, OK, I’m pregnant and we’re writing it in and it’s becoming a part of it.”

On the set of ‘Atropia’

The reveal that Shawkat’s character Fayruz is also pregnant is one of the best in the film, a truly serendipitous turn that adds immeasurably to both the story and her performance.

“I come from experimental theater, so I was just like, yes,” Gates said of the choice to make Fayruz pregnant. “Then there were so many great jokes to be made, so many horrifically dirty jokes. And I was really inspired by the way that Alia was moving through it, she was quite cavalier and I wanted to bring that into the character too. I think pregnancy can often be treated with a type of gravitas or a heaviness in film. I just wanted to bring her own attitude to it.”

It helped that Shawkat felt, by her own admission, “great” during her pregnancy and the production. “I had a lot of energy,” the actress said. “I felt really grounded and relaxed because I had this feeling of, ‘Well, what’s the worst that could happen?’ Obviously, something bad could have happened, but I just had this feeling like whatever. It helped me get it off my brain that my life was about to change in this other huge way. It gave me this extra oomph. It really rounded out the character for Fayruz for me, because it gave this extra layer of she’s in such denial that life is happening, that she’s willing to stay on this fantasy course no matter what. ‘Literally, my body’s changing and I won’t believe it.’ It was just the perfect metaphor for me.”

Still, there was another concern: who could be Shawkat’s best scene partner *and *make her feel safe? “It was paramount for me to find somebody that she felt very taken care of with, because the stakes were really high,” Gates said. “She was unbelievable, except she was burping a little too much, but we didn’t know what it would feel like. We needed somebody who was really sensitive and there for her.”

Shawkat and Turner had previously worked together on Jeremy Saulnier’s “Green Room,” and maintained a strong connection. Curious, Gates met the actor for dinner at Los Angeles’ own Dan Tana’s. “He came in and he was sweating and just inhaled a steak in two seconds. He was so nice to the waiter,” Gates recalled. “And I was like, ‘Alright, we’re good. You got it.’”

Shawkat has nothing but good things to say about her co-star, who takes on a complicated role with both humor and some gravitas. His Abu Dice? Well, let’s just say, we all have a very different sense of him by the end of the film.

“He’s just a charm ball,” Shawkat said. “He’s gorgeous and talented and funny. I think he really goes off instincts. A lot of these male actors are planning how to get an Oscar and they’ll just do whatever it fucking takes. He’s so not like that. He’s like, ‘I want to have a good time. I want to be with good people, make stuff.’ I never felt like he was thinking he should be somewhere else or he thinks he should be doing something bigger. He was really fun to play with.”

He even provided some other necessary bolstering when times got tough. “There was a moment where there was a little bit of a tricky production issue and I was a little stressed and he came over to me and he was like, ‘Hailey, Agnes Varda made her first film at 33 too,’” Gates recalled. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God!’ I was so touched by it. Then I went home and I looked it up and it was a lie. I said to him, ‘Were you lying to me?’ And he was like, ‘I just knew you needed to hear something nice.’ Totally had my number.”

Alia Shawkat, Hailey Gates, Callum Turner, and Chloe Sevigny at the ‘Atropia’ New York Premiere After Party held at the IFC Center on December 08, 2025 in New York, New YorkVariety via Getty Images

The film premiered at Sundance this past January. Reviews were decidedly mixed, which Gates and Shawkat are aware of, even if they skipped reading most of them (Gates said she did not read any, Shawkat said she read “the good ones”). They don’t have a problem with that.

“I think if everybody liked the movie, we would’ve made the wrong movie,” Gates said. “There was certainly a resistance to embracing a film that was holding a mirror up to the American Empire. … When I’m watching a movie, I don’t like to be taught a lesson, and I think this film presents this idea and you have to decide how you feel about it. I think for some people, they like a little more handholding, perhaps. I don’t know.”

Shawkat agrees wholeheartedly. “The movie is not a softball movie,” Shawkat said. “Even though it’s a comedy, it’s smart and you have to engage with it. No offense to film critics, but sometimes I think they’re expecting something without just seeing what the movie is, if that makes sense. They’re like, ‘Well, this is supposed to be like this.’ And it’s like, well, no, it’s not. It’s its own thing. It’s very tonally unique and it feels it’s of a different era. I think the movie will age really well. … I think a younger generation will really respond to it.”

Critical consensus aside, the film walked away from the festival with some very big wins, including the fest’s top honor: the narrative Grand Jury Prize, picked by a group that included “Past Lives” filmmaker Celine Song, “King Richard” director Reinaldo Marcus Green, and “Succession” alum Arian Moayed.

Gates had already left Utah when she got a “cryptic email” from festival director Eugene Hernandez, asking if she could return for the awards ceremony. “As it was happening, I thought I must have read this email from Eugene wrong,” Gates said. “I’m sitting in the audience and I’m going to be totally humiliated. They don’t tell you anything [beforehand]. They say, ‘We’d like you to be there.’”

When the film’s win was announced, Gates couldn’t believe it. “I blacked out and I was rambling,” Gates said. “I rue the day when I see that footage again. But it was amazing. Celine Song gave us the award and it was a really special moment. I hugged the sign language interpreter. That’s what I remember.”

Almost a year later, the film is arriving in theaters during a particularly fraught time in the American experience. That feels right to the pair, and they hope it might help ensnare the right kind of audience. And, if not now? Later. Soon.

“I hope people see it,” Shawkat said. “We don’t have the biggest rollout compared to other movies, but I hope it gets traction, obviously, and people see it. … The timing of what’s happening in the world, it’s coming out with this timing for a reason. You know what I mean? I think that’s a blessing in its darkness at the same time. I also hope it’s something that I think will age really well and people will see it and it’ll have this life. If it doesn’t have this huge show now, people will be like, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe this didn’t have its moment then, but it will now.’”

*Vertical will release “Atropia” in limited theaters on Friday, December 12, with an expansion targeted for January 2026. *