General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Eephus

Eephus is a 2024 American independent comedy-drama directed by Carson Lund, his feature directorial debut, about two New England recreational baseball teams playing the last game on their field before it is demolished to build a school. It premiered in the Directors' Fortnight section of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and received a United States theatrical release from Music Box Films on March 7, 2025.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / debut	Carson Lund's first feature as director; he also co-wrote, produced, and edited¹
Screenplay	Carson Lund, Michael Basta, and Nate Fisher³
Premiere	Directors' Fortnight, 2024 Cannes Film Festival¹
US release	March 7, 2025 (theatrical, Music Box Films); 98 minutes²
Setting	A Sunday in October, 1990s Massachusetts, at Soldiers Field in Douglas⁴^•⁵
Critical reception	Metascore 84 ("universal acclaim"), 22 reviews, 100% positive; 100% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer⁶^•²
Recognition	Two nominations at the 2026 Film Independent Spirit Awards: the John Cassavetes Prize (features under $1 million) and Best Editing⁷

Spoilers

Premise

The film follows a single game between two amateur teams, Adler's Paint and the Riverdogs, on the final day their beloved field, Soldiers Field, will be used; the site is to be razed for construction of a new school.⁸ Set on a Sunday in October sometime in the 1990s, the movie begins as the players arrive and ends soon after the game does, with all of the drama originating in the game itself rather than in off-field storylines.⁴ The players, all men ranging from college age to graybeard, stretch the farewell game into extra innings as the light fades, and with the score tied they must choose between playing on in near-total darkness, using headlights to see the ball, or leaving the final contest unresolved.⁴^•⁹

The title refers to the eephus pitch, a real baseball rarity: an arcing lob thrown at roughly half the speed of a normal pitch or less, intended to catch batters off guard and disrupt their timing.¹⁰ In the film, a player named Merritt Nettles, played by co-writer Nate Fisher, specializes in the pitch and describes its effect as making you lose track of time.¹⁰^•¹¹

Production

Lund, a New Hampshire native and longtime recreational wooden-bat league player in Los Angeles, developed the premise from observations accumulated over a decade of weekend games, including a shadow boxer in the outfield that made its way into the film.¹² He wrote the screenplay with his childhood friend Michael Basta and with Nate Fisher, whom he met at Harvard Film Archive screenings; the three plotted the film like a box score, mapping the game's action and then deciding where to show dugout conversation.¹³^•⁵

Location. Before shooting began in October 2022, Lund scouted roughly a hundred ballfields, about half in person, looking for one "degraded by time with old wood, chipped paint and a sense of history." He chose Soldiers Field in Douglas, Massachusetts, a wooden ballpark whose past includes a Yankees-Red Sox exhibition featuring Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams.⁵^•¹³ The film was written as a New Hampshire story but shot in Massachusetts, where the field was found.¹⁴

Cast. The ensemble is largely non-professional and New England-based, led by Keith William Richards as Ed Mortanian, with Cliff Blake as the devoted scorekeeper Franny, Ray Hryb, Stephen Radochia, and David Pridemore among the players.¹⁵ Two Boston sports figures appear: former Red Sox pitcher Bill "Spaceman" Lee, one of Major League Baseball's best-known practitioners of the eephus pitch in the 1970s, recruited to appear for a single inning, and longtime Red Sox radio announcer Joe Castiglione, who plays the pizza vendor Mr. Mallinari.¹⁶^•⁴ The documentarian Frederick Wiseman, then 95, voices the radio announcer.¹⁰

The film was made through Omnes Films, a Los Angeles-based independent collective co-founded by Lund, whose other features include Tyler Taormina's Ham on Rye (2019) and Christmas Eve in Miller's Point (2024), the latter photographed by Lund; both premiered at Cannes alongside Eephus in Directors' Fortnight.¹^•⁴

Style and reception

Critics consistently described the film as a slow, deadpan ensemble piece in the tradition of Robert Altman and Richard Linklater, with Lund citing Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), a slow-cinema elegy set in a soon-to-close Taipei theater, as an inspiration.¹⁷^•¹⁰ The Associated Press's Jake Coyle called it "the best baseball movie since Moneyball," noting that the camera drifts from player to player like a roving spectator while the afternoon light gives way to nightfall.⁹ The New Yorker's Richard Brody highlighted Lund's deep-focus staging of ordinary plays as a stylistic innovation within the baseball genre.⁴

On Metacritic the film scored 84 based on 22 critic reviews, all positive, designating "universal acclaim"; its Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer stood at 100% from 89 reviews, while the audience Popcornmeter was 61%.⁶^•² Reviewers were not uniformly enthusiastic: RogerEbert.com's Peyton Robinson gave it 63, writing that the characters were not engaging enough to sustain the deliberately slow runtime.⁶

The film received two nominations at the 2026 Film Independent Spirit Awards, for the John Cassavetes Prize, given to features made for under $1 million, and for Best Editing, credited to Lund himself.⁷ It also won the Best Screenplay award at the Silk Road International Film Festival in Xi'an, China.¹¹

Home media and streaming

In the United States the film streams on Amazon Prime Video and MUBI, and can be bought or rented on Amazon Video, the Apple TV Store, and Fandango at Home; DVD and Blu-ray editions are sold through Amazon and Barnes & Noble.⁸

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2026 › Thriller, crime, and sports dramas

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?