Tivoli Theatre – After Hours Film Society Presents Hekla

Michael Glover Smith’s Hekla is an intimately deglamorized, down-in-the-trenches look at the acting profession.

by Donald Liebenson | Chicago Reader

A shark must keep moving forward or he dies, a line from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) informs us. The same seems true for actors. In Chicago auteur Michael Glover Smith’s film festival award-winning Hekla, the title character is a Chicago actress (Elizabeth Stam, a cowriter and coproducer with Smith) who in the course of one day attends four auditions, sits for headshots, and performs pop-up Shakespeare in a bar.

Hekla expands the Smith-verse by giving a supporting character from a previous film center stage. She was last seen in Relative (2022), Smith’s Steppenwolf-y (in a good way) ensemble drama of family dysfunction as a former classmate of one of the principals who understandably wants to spend more time with her than at his fraught family college graduation party. Stem commands the screen in nearly every frame of Hekla, a portrait of the artist as a young woman whose creative ambitions strain her two-year relationship with her marriage-minded partner (Mary Tilden) to the breaking point, and, as she offhandedly notes, her relationship with her disapproving family.

Filmed in black-and-white with flashes of color, Hekla is an intimately deglamorized, down-in-the-trenches look at the acting profession. One audition is for an “experimental” director who makes Paul Benedict’s delusional director in The Goodbye Girl (1977) look like Mike Nichols. The cast is fine, with Wendy Robie (who starred as the mother in Relative) providing sparing narration that, unlike the heavy-handed approach of Ella McCay (2025), doesn’t try to force us to love the title character.

But this is Stam’s revelatory vehicle. At one point, a bookstore patron enthusiastically recognizes her from an independent movie she was in. This is a first for her, and she is momentarily nonplussed by this loss of privacy. Stam should prepare herself for the same.