How can film capture the mundane, often inconsequential truths of everyday life? Not the dramatic highs and lows, but the often forgotten moments in between. This question has plagued the minds of many a filmmaker. From Linklater and his clan of American indie auteurs who pioneered the “hangout film” as it became known to the directives established by global filmmakers within slow cinema. This includes Roy Andersson’s tales of banality, or Jarmusch’s attempt at romanticising routine in Broken Flowers (2005) Paterson (2016). Ira Sachs approached Peter Hujar’s Day with a variety of restrictions in place in order to create a uniquely unremarkable time capsule of the lives of two iconic artists.
Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) and Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) are the only two people who are shown; no other actors or extras, or other bodies are seen as the two aimlessly chat. The film’s script is largely adapted from Rosenkrantz’s book of the same name, which is a simple transcript of a conversation between Rosenkrantz and Hujar in which she asks Hujar to write down all that he did in the last 24 hours in detail. The film is a cinematisation of this transcript that doesn’t indulge in any flashbacks or picturing of Hujar’s memories or stories, but instead stays confined within the apartment walls, occasionally gazing out of the window but only onto a blurred city skyline. The day in question being described is completely unseen; instead, we are audience to another day in Hujar’s life, a day in which he recounts the day before with a blasé indifference. Even with all of these limits, Sachs is not afraid of silence and often allows the camera to drift into moments of stillness, almost emulating a Chantal Akerman film with a deep interest in the domestic interior as a reflection of the individual.
Sachs began his career with patient and subdued indies like the dirty New Queer Cinema gem, The Delta (1996) and the Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner from 2005, Forty Shades of Blue. His new movie focus on quietly devastating dynamics became Sachs’s calling card with films like Love is Strange (2014) and Little Men (2016). In contrast, Sachs’s previous effort, Passages, was by far his loudest and most accessible. An instant hit at Sundance, the raunchy, star-studded love triangle drama was a sharp turn for Sachs in many ways. Fittingly, though Sachs tempers Passages out with this latest feature, which is perhaps his driest and most obtuse.
One might imagine a film that dwells on the quotidian to make its appeal to audiences through esoteric poetics or small existential insights; however, this is not the case in Peter Hujar’s Day. The blunt title is sincere, and instead, we have more conversations about Chinese food and off-the-cuff namedropping of NYC figures from the ’70s. The script itself is bare-bones. These characters do not know they will become the pioneers that they will be known as, so there’s no space for introspection or awkward navel-gazing. As a result, Whishaw and Hall are expected to go above and beyond by bringing a certain lived-in, familiar quality to their performances. Hall is restrained and subtle in her charisma, simultaneously being a friend and a flaneur in this interaction. Whishaw, on the other hand, is overwhelmingly committed that his delivery can make the most irrelevant worry sound catastrophic.
Filmed in an ultra-grainy 16mm format, the image texture pairs well with the inherent nostalgia of a premise such as this one. The visuals lose their warmth eventually as the choices become too monotone and repetitive. Cinematographer Alex Ashe doesn’t quite know how to utilise the set design to his advantage. The close-up shots that dissect the bodies on-screen are interesting, but for a one-location film, Ashe and Sachs’ end-product is one that is stagnant.
Sachs relies heavily on the audience to have a built-in fascination with this era of NYC queer mythos. From Fran Leibowitz to Ginsberg to Mapplethorpe, there’s an onus on the viewers to be educated about these figures beforehand. The film becomes overly aware of the targeted audience, a niche art snob crowd, with a certain incessant name-dropping. Even at an unconventionally brief 75 minutes, the edit still feels extended. Once we enter the third act, the edit feels more desperate to stretch out the ennui than to deliver on the original mission of capturing this conversation.
Sachs clearly sees part of his job with Peter Hujar’s Day to reintroduce and rekindle the type of dirty DIY artistic fervor in New York City that ran rampant during the time of this conversation between Rosenkrantz and Hujar. Peter Hujar’s death from Aids and the photos taken by his lover David Wojnarowicz in his last moments make this directorial ethos feel particularly tragic. Sachs isn’t just wistful for the good old days but wants to investigate queer history of avant-garde art and community-making. A bold and ambitious assignment that he merely begins with this formalist trial film that reimagines commonplace trivialities as urgent inspiration for these times.
Peter Hujar’s Day showed at the 59th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. Also showing at the BFI London Film Festival. In cinemas on Friday, January 2nd (2026).
