“In the spring of 2011, at age 18, my brother Matthew got his first real girlfriend,” explains Jackie (Tally Medell) in voiceover at the beginning of “The Unspeakable Act,” written, edited and directed by Dan Salit in 2012. “I somehow thought there was an unspoken agreement between him and I that we belonged to each other,” she adds, “which was really very stupid of me.”
These words begin Jackie’s final year of high school as she confronts her long-unfulfilled desire for her brother. Matthew (Sky Hirschkron), who is aware of his sister’s feelings for him and is patient with her, and naturally wants to put some distance between them in order to explore other relationships, including some that he can actually fulfill. Her decision to set boundaries gets Jackie into trouble. She has trouble keeping food down, can’t sleep, and constantly asks her brother for information about his new girlfriend, until he gives her up. Jackie’s desire for Matthew continues to shine after they leave for college, but his absence forces her to live a life outside of her attraction to him, even as she thinks about him while sleeping with the boys in her class.
Salit’s greatest coup in “The Unspeakable Act” is his refusal to treat his characters as pawns in the service of a “shocking” premise. Jackie and Matthew are mostly typical teenagers with full social lives and creative hobbies. He has opinions on literature, music and sex. They are close to their mother but distant from their elder siblings. Medell and Hirschkron portray their characters as intelligent, self-aware people who are respectively guaranteed to set fruitful paths, even if they sometimes get in their way. Except for that one thing, they’re extremely regular.
But nothing makes Jackie as sensational as Salit. Amur Fu, A provocateur in his own right, he also views her unconventional infatuation and Matthew’s reactive equanimity with appropriate seriousness. Her feelings for her brother are real, which means she really has to deal with them if she wants to be a part of society. Her emotional turmoil stems from her realization that she cannot continue to be there for Matthew into adulthood, which essentially means she will no longer be emotionally close to him. With “The Unspeakable Act”, Salit emphasizes an important coming-of-age lesson: You can’t always get what you want.
Fourteen years later, Salit returns with “What Cannot Be Mention”, a sequel to “The Unspeakable Act”, which picks up nearly a decade later, when Jackie, now in her twenties, learns that Matthew is about to have a child with his partner Lily (“Actual People” and “This Closeness” director Kit Zouhar). While Jackie displays all the outward appearances of stable adulthood, primarily a good job as an occupational therapist and a shared apartment with her boyfriend Anthony (Kyle McCormack), Salit quickly reveals cracks in the facade. She experiences new sexual incompatibility with Anthony that eventually pushes them both into sex therapy, which involves awkward at-home exercises that Jackie struggles to take seriously. She appears to be excelling at her work, yet she also admits to feelings of countertransference with a forty-year-old client who is privately concerned that her two children might discover their sexuality with each other.
Salit depicts Jackie’s personal and professional struggles as typical hiccups that could appear for anyone. But he also casts them in the shadow of her youthful attraction to Matthew, who perhaps still lingers in her subconscious like a party guest who has overstayed his welcome. When she receives news of Matthew’s upcoming baby, she reportedly travels upstate for a week to reconnect with him and her partner, whom she tells Anthony is “okay, but not entirely good enough for him.” However, instead of devoting herself to the couple, she spends the entire week getting drunk on red wine and asking Lily deliberately provocative questions about her bisexuality and how the pregnancy has affected her sex life with her brother.
Lily responds with sage-like calmness to Jackie’s rude questions. (“My parents are hippies,” she says calmly. “Talking about sex is like talking about laundry.”) Salit crucially avoids underscoring the irony that Jackie can’t notice that Matthew and Lily’s shared nature makes them compatible. Zauhar matches Hirschkron’s calm nature, even when Lily tries to get more information about Jackie from Matthew. Is he an alcoholic? Matthew replied calmly, “She just likes to rest for a while. She’ll be fine when she gets back home.” Is he gay? After all, people hide it from those closest to them all the time. “Trust me, he’s not gay,” Matthew insists. A secret that cannot be revealed creates a small rift between the happy couple that will grow over the years.
“The Mentioned” runs a little over an hour, making it the rare film where you wish the filmmaker had extended his work by 10 or 15 minutes, perhaps to further enrich some of its silent conflicts, or even to give the audience a little more time with the characters. Salit replicates the formal style of “The Unspeakable” in “The Mentioned” (static compositions, no camera movement), but changes the editing rhythm to sharp cuts that capture the more rigid routines of professional young adulthood. He also deepens the world of “The Mentioned” by including references to the characters from “The Unspeakable”: Jackie’s childhood therapist Linda (Caroline Luft) comes on Zoom to offer advice, and Matthew mentions talking to their mother and oldest brother Will. (Meanwhile, his second-oldest brother Gene, whom Jackie predicts will one day leave and never look back in “Unspeakable”, is never mentioned.) Salit strives for a concise continuity that perfectly hints at a world of the living bursting with untold history.
The “unspeakable” and the “mentionable” are such distinct entities that one can see the latter without seeing the former and still feel complete. However, “Mentioned” is clearly a rich read in the context of “Unspeakable,” if only to fully appreciate how Madell reinterpreted Jackie between the two films. He develops his character’s previously controlled teenage instability into true adult neurosis without sacrificing any complexity. They bring a familiar but ultimately more mature charge to Jackie’s scenes with Matthew, whom Hirschkron is committed to portraying as almost defiantly ineffective. (He may have gone from reading Mueller to “stoner,” but he’s still basically the same person he was in “Unspeakable.”) Medell gives Jackie a prickly, unpredictable quality, even when he’s sitting in a chair and staring at whoever catches his eye. Most of the acclaimed, visual performances this year couldn’t muster that level of intrigue.
In A Filmmaker Interview Upon the release of “Unspeakable”, Salit candidly commented that he “does not see Jackie’s incestuous desire as a fleeting thing or part of her path to adulthood.” Instead he thinks “that’s just the way she is, and she has to mask that desire, develop other aspects of herself, in order to live comfortably.” “Mentioned” effectively moves from this specific vantage point, with Mandel at times portraying Jackie as if she is managing a chronic condition, and Hirschkron capturing a sibling’s unique empathy for their sibling’s pain. The final couple scenes of “Mansioned” reflect Salit’s updated perspective on nearly half a decade in the interim, which feels uncomfortable but ultimately hard-won. It turns out that if you try sometimes, you’ll find that you’ll get what you need.
grade B
“What Cannot Be Mentioned” premiered at the 2026 New York Film Festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.