5 Indie Movies This Week: O Horizon, Stop! That! Train!, Waking Life & More

This week on Indie Film Weekly, Glen Reynolds highlights five indie films worth knowing about: three in theaters, one on demand, and one classic.

🎥 Indie Film Reviews:
O Horizon (2026)
Stop! That! Train! (2026)
Jinsei (2026)
Evil Does Not Exist (2023)
Waking Life (2001)

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Transcript

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Welcome back to Indie Film Weekly for the week of June 12th, 2026. I'm your host, Glenn Reynolds. This week in theaters, we've got a magical realist romance where a grieving neuroscientist gets a chance to talk to her dead father again. We've got a full tilt camp disaster comedy on a high-speed train headed for trouble. And we've got a hand-drawn anime Odyssey that follows one hero across a hundred years through a whole stack of identities. Quick ask before we move on if you can see one of these in a theater this weekend, please do. Indie films don't get a long runway, and those opening weekend tickets are what keep the show times from disappearing. On demand, I've got a quiet Japanese thriller that starts like a town meeting and ends like a warning. And for our classic, we're going into a rotoscoped dream walk that turns late night brain spirals into cinema. Want the written version of these picks each week? I also publish the Indie Film Weekly Newsletter. It's the same five films in a quick read. Sign up at newsletter.com. Let's dive in. Our first film in theaters this week is O Horizon, directed by Madeline Rotzler. It follows a young neuroscientist who keeps trying to keep her life moving while grief keeps yanking her backward. Her father has died, and she's holding together the way a lot of high-functioning people do. Busy schedule, forward motion, don't sit still long enough to feel anything. At the same time, she's stepping into a new romance and making a serious career discovery. So her world is already overloaded with change. Then an emerging technology appears that allows her to speak with her father again. Not metaphorically, not through a dream, a real conversation with the voice she thought she'd lost. The comfort is immediate, and so is the destabilization. Because once you can keep talking, you don't have to accept goodbye. The film treats that like both a gift and a trap, and it plays the emotional stakes honestly. Maria Bacolova carries the role with a mix of intelligence and vulnerability, and David Strathairn gives the father a presence that feels specific, not saintly. The fun is that the movie has warmth and humor even while it's wrestling with something heavy. It's not a tech movie. It's a what are we doing to ourselves when we refuse to let go movie? And it's a strong big screen pick. Our second indie film in theaters this week is Stop That Train, directed by Adam Shanckman. This is a disaster comedy that shows up in full glam and refuses to tone it down for anyone. Tess and Dee Dee are best friends working as train stewardesses, stuck on a dreary route where the main event is a broken vending machine. They finally get upgraded to the glitzy Glamazonian Express, which is basically the good China version of public transportation. Then the universe says cute and drops a catastrophic storm. The train is in real danger of derailing and crashing into Los Angeles. So Tess and Dee Dee have to team up with snobby first class attendants and a wildly theatrical president to save the day. The joy here is commitment. Everyone is playing it straight inside an absurd world, which is exactly how camp works. It's a wild ride of Prattfalls attitude and escalating chaos, and it understands the basic truth of group travel. When things go wrong, your worst enemy is not the weather, it's the person who thinks they should be in charge. If you want a theater crowd movie that's basically a party with a plot, this is it. Our last film in the theaters this week is Jinsei. Written, directed, edited, and entirely hand-drawn by Ruyo Suzuki. This animated drama follows one hero across a hundred-year chronicle spanning past, present, and future. In each chapter, he's called a different name, and it becomes different versions of himself, including a J-pop idol, an outcast, a leader, and an oracle. The story begins with a chance encounter with a transfer student that pushes him toward idol training and kicks off a search for self-identity. What makes the film stand out is the scale versus the intimacy. It's huge in timeline, but it keeps returning to a very personal feeling. The pressure of being labeled, the temptation to perform, the fear of becoming someone else's idea of you. There's also an undeniable craft flex in how it was made. One person doing this much work means every frame has intention. It doesn't feel factory built. It feels lived in and obsessive in the best way. If you like animation that aims bigger than comfort and nostalgia, this is a great theatrical pick. It wants your full attention and it earns it. So in theaters this week, that's O Horizon, Stop That Train, and Jinsei. Our spotlight indie film on demand this week is Evil Does Not Exist. Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, it starts in a rural village near Tokyo where Takumi and his young daughter live in a modest, grounded life, gathering wood, water, and wild wasabi for a local restaurant. The rhythm is calm and specific. Then the village learns a lamping site may be built nearby, marketed as an escape for city people who want nature without inconvenience. What follows isn't a screaming match. It's a slow tightening. Practical questions become moral questions. Water, waste, noise, and safety stop being abstract when it's your home on the line. Two representatives arrive to smooth things over, and the film becomes a study in how bureaucracy talks when it needs something from you. Hamaguchi's skill is that he makes the tension physical without doing thriller tricks. You feel the stakes in small pauses and careful sentences, and you start to sense that the damage may be unavoidable even if everyone claims to mean well. It's quiet, sharp, and it stays with you. You can rent it on Apple TV, Amazon, or Fendango at home. Our indie film classic this week is Waking Life, celebrating his 25th anniversary. Directed by Richard Linklater, it's an animated rotoscope dream walk where a young man keeps floating from one conversation to the next, never quite sure if he's awake. Each encounter turns into a mini debate about consciousness, free will, death, love, and why humans can't stop narrating their own existence. The plot is basically wander, listen, spiral, repeat. And I mean that as a compliment. The animation makes the world feel like it's breathing. Faces bend, rooms drift, sidewalks ripple, like reality's one bad thought away from dissolving. What's great about a Richard Linkletter film is it isn't pretentious about being heady. It's curious, it's playful, is the cinematic version of that friend who says, one question, then keeps talking for two hours. Have you ever had a day where you looked around and thought, is this real? This is your movie. You can rent it on Apple TV, Amazon, or YouTube. And that wraps it for the June 12th, 2026 edition of Indie Film Weekly. If you want to support the show, do the simple stuff. Subscribe so you don't miss next week. Share it with one friend who likes being early. Rate it because it helps the apps take the show seriously. Then leave a quick review. Every one sentence helps. Until next week, keep it curious, keep it brave, and keep it ending.