Writer-director Vera Miao’s film, which stars Kelly Marie Tran and Benedict Wong, premiered in the Midnight program at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
A family grappling with a recent tragedy moves to a new town, where they don’t know anybody and, even more crucially, have no idea about the town’s calamitous past. But as writer-director Vera Miao’s Rock Springs begins, they’re very much in survival mode, a state that only intensifies as their situation gets more perilous.
“Let’s help each other make the best of this, OK?” pleads Emily (Kelly Marie Tran) as they pull in. This not-so-tight-knit unit includes Emily’s withdrawn young daughter, Gracie (Aria Kim), and elderly mother-in-law (Fiona Fu), who only speaks Chinese and doesn’t think much of her late son’s Vietnamese wife. The language barrier between them, needless to say, doesn’t help draw them any closer.
All three women are grieving the son, father, and husband they’ve just lost, but they’re unable to connect emotionally to give each other any comfort. Though Emily tells Gracie, “We just have to keep going,” and Grandma reminds her, “We must always pay respects to the ancestors,” neither coping mechanism is working.
Emily, a cellist, imagines she sees and hears her husband while she’s practicing; Gracie suffers nightmares set in a sort of purgatory that feels uncomfortably vivid. The oldest among this trio frets that their big move—they had no choice, since Emily was uprooted by her job—fell during “Ghost Month,” when the boundaries between the living and the dead are especially porous.
