“SUMMER WAR” // TRIBECA 2026

BY MATEO MORENO

In Chile, 1989, a young American named Udo Berger (Dan Beirne) and his girlfriend Ingrid (Lux Pascal) are spending their days vacationing in the sun, watching the days go by. However, Udo has more than a vacation in mind. He’s brought along a hobby of his, a strategy board came called “Third Reich” that lets you take a shot at controlling the Nazi invasion in Europe. He’s obsessed with the game (hence, bringing it on a vacation) and Ingrid is tired of it. He spends so much of their time together holed up in a room for hours playing that game. She had hoped this time away would be a different experience. But once again, it’s become his focal point of distraction. They also have befriended some locals there and when one of them goes missing, Ingrid is ready to leave. But not Udo. Not only is he wanting to find a partner to play the game with, but he’s also obsessed with the manager of his hotel, a woman who he remembers when he visited there as a child, but she has no memory of him. He’s also obsessed with the people around him, and the longer he stays in Chile, the more he unravels. Slowly, a sort of madness begins to fill him and he starts to see that the political awareness he feels he has due to his success in the game may be far less than he originally thought.

SUMMER WAR, written and directed by Alicia Scherson, is based upon Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Third Reich but moved it from the Spanish coast to a Chilian town and by doing so gives the story an entirely new background. The country is on the verge of political change and that is felt throughout the film, adding pressure to the climate. Udo’s view of the world is shaded in his own arrogance and privilege, and he finds himself looking like a food quite often, in a country where the Nazi Invasion is absolutely not a game to be played. Udo is a strange and intriguing character. He’s almost completely unlikable and every decision he makes is maddening. Yet he is our view into this world, which makes it an intriguing viewpoint throughout the film. Dan Beirne does a fine job in the role, however he does seem to be miscast here, as everyone in the film is entranced with him. Women flock to him. Yet as Beirne plays it, he’s a creep and completely unpleasant. It feels like we, the audience, are missing something that everyone in the film sees in him. The rest of the cast are all very good, yet the film wavers in its structure. The structure of the film is quite unique; it’s almost like every scene dares you to guess where the film is going and then it goes in a different direction entirely. Much of the narrative of the film is very interesting but because Udo is such an unlikable protagonist, it makes the emotional connection very hard to grab onto. So even though the film is directed well and is quite interesting, it can be a hard thing to grasp that your eye into the emotion of the story is nearly impossible to side with.

GRADE: B

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Alicia Scherson BASED ON THE NOVEL “THE THIRD REICH” by Roberto Bolaño STARRING Dan Beirne, Lux Pascal, Aline Kuppenheim, David Gaete, Agustin Pardella. SELECTED AS PART OF THE 2026 TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL. FOR MORE INFO:https://tribecafilm.com/films/summer-war-2026