Kate Plays Christine

Like a freshman in college, Kate Plays Christine is still trying to figure out what it wants to be. The second of two films about Christine Chubbuck (a TV journalist/presenter who committed suicide live on-air in 1974) that premiered in 2021 at the Sundance Film Festival, Kate Plays Christine can't decide if it wants to be a drama or a documentary, a biopic or bts, moralistic or artistic... We spend much of the film's runtime following the talented Kate Lyn Sheil as she broodingly tries to get a handle how to portray Ms Chubbuck, yet we've already seen Rebecca Hall nail her performance of the journalist in the film Christine. In the end, we learn very little about Ms Chubbuck from Kate Plays Christine and find it easy to ignore the 11th hour proselytizing about how we should feel guilty for watching the film they made. The interview with the two men who knew Christine (one of whom was there on the day of her suicide) and the actual footage of an interview Christine Chubbuck gave are the centrepiece of this movie, but sadly there's not much else to it.