Peter Hujar’s Day is Proof that Great Cinema Doesn’t Need to Raise Its Voice

Promotional Image for Peter Hujar’s Day (Ira Sachs, 2025)

For the second time in the space of a week, I found myself utterly captivated by a film consisting almost entirely of two people talking.

After watching Blue Film just days earlier, I wasn’t expecting another intimate, dialogue-driven drama to rank among my favourite films of the year. Yet Ira Sachs’ Peter Hujar’s Day does exactly that. At a lean 76 minutes, it achieves something increasingly rare in contemporary cinema: it trusts its audience to simply listen.

The film immediately brought to mind Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre (1981), that enduring masterpiece in which two friends spend nearly two hours talking over dinner, somehow making philosophy, friendship and the passage of time feel as suspenseful as any thriller. Like that film, Peter Hujar’s Day dispenses with spectacle altogether. There are no elaborate set pieces, no visual pyrotechnics, no emotional histrionics. Instead, it relies on the fundamentals: an intelligent script, mesmerising performances, and a patient camera willing to observe rather than dictate.

The premise couldn’t be simpler. Set in 1974, the film reconstructs a real recorded conversation between acclaimed photographer Peter Hujar and his friend, writer Linda Rosenkrantz, as Hujar recounts, in remarkable detail, the events of an entirely ordinary day in his life. Adapted from Rosenkrantz’s published transcript of that conversation, Sachs transforms what could have been little more than an archival curiosity into a quietly profound meditation on art, memory and the creative life.

For those unfamiliar with Hujar, he was one of the great American photographers of the twentieth century, celebrated for his stark, intimate black-and-white portraits of artists, writers, performers and members of New York’s downtown queer community. Although never as commercially celebrated during his lifetime as some of his contemporaries, his photographs have since become recognised as some of the defining visual documents of 1970s and 1980s New York. He died from AIDS-related complications in 1987, but his influence continues to grow.

Ben Whishaw as Peter is, quite simply, wonderful. His performance is astonishing in its naturalism, finding rhythm and quiet humour in what is essentially an uninterrupted monologue. Opposite him, Rebecca Hall is equally superb. Much of her role consists of listening — really listening — and she reminds us how compelling genuine attention can be. The chemistry between the pair feels completely lived-in, the kind shared by old friends who have long since dispensed with performance. The film could almost be a documentary were it not for the fact that the two leads, Peter and Linda, are played by contemporary actors.

There’s a confidence to Sachs’ direction that I deeply admire. He never feels the need to embellish or overstate. The camera remains steady. The editing is unobtrusive. Every creative decision serves the conversation itself. In an age when so much cinema mistakes noise for drama, Peter Hujar’s Day demonstrates that stillness can be just as riveting.

Perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay the film is this: I left wanting to know more. More about Peter Hujar. More about his photographs. More about the remarkable artistic community that surrounded him in 1970s New York. That’s one of the finest gifts any biographical film can offer: not the illusion that you’ve learned everything, but the curiosity to continue exploring after the credits roll.

Like Blue Film, Peter Hujar’s Day is one of the very best films I’ve seen this year. It’s thoughtful, elegant and quietly unforgettable, a reminder that sometimes the most cinematic thing a film can do is simply allow extraordinary people to speak.

Peter Hujar’s Day is available to rent or buy on Apple TV.

Trash by Jon Malysiak is published on July 9th, 2026 — the sequel to Posh and the second instalment in the Templeton Family Chronicles. Pre-order the ebook version on Amazon here. The paperback and hardcover are also now available to pre-order. Jon is Head of Global Publishing at StoryTerrace. More at jonmalysiak.com