On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark honors fringe cinema in the streaming age with midnight movies from any moment in film history.
First, the BAIT: a weird genre pick, and why we’re exploring its specific niche right now. Then, the BITE: a spoiler-filled answer to the all-important question, “Is this old cult film actually worth recommending?”
The Bait: The Postman Always Rings Twice
My grandmother died two weeks ago. While sorting through her house in Alabama, I found a framed certificate thanking my late grandfather for his 17 years of service with the United States Postal Service.
Dale James Foreman died in 2008, nearly two decades before his wife, June, but his “Goodbye tension, hello pension” U.S.P.S. retirement mug was still hanging in the kitchen when I arrived.
More than my grandfather’s time in the military, I’ve always admired his work for the Postal Service. The letter accompanying his retirement award praises an organization “built on the service of people like you,” and thanks him for helping create “a happier life for our customers.” It’s a simple sentiment, but one that felt deeply meaningful to me ahead of July 4.
Humanity depends on ordinary people showing up for one another. And that may be the nicest introduction ever given to Kevin Costner‘s wildly self-indulgent, three-hour(!) “The Postman.” But the director and star did indeed hit on something timeless and vital in his 1997 film.
As far as I can tell, neither of my grandparents ever watched “The Postman.” Their VHS tapes and DVDs offered no evidence of any particular affection for Costner, much less his disastrous passion project. But rewatching Costner’s oddly hopeful post-apocalyptic drama on my flight back to Los Angeles, I found myself feeling less alone because of it.
Adapted from David Brin’s novel and released after both the Oscar triumph of “Dances With Wolves” (good!) and the tabloid circus surrounding “Waterworld” (oh, NO!), this singularly strange American epic imagines a wasteland where a wandering drifter accidentally inspires a revolution by pretending to be a mail carrier for a restored United States government… that hasn’t actually been restored at all.
The ridiculous premise, and its brutal reception at the time of release, are enough to qualify “The Postman” as a midnight movie — despite it being a major Warner Bros. title from the height of Costner’s fame. But the magic of “The Postman” as a cult object lies in the way it has since created its own kind of network. Fans recommend the film to one another when hope feels scarce, passing along its core conviction that society survives through connection rather than conquest. People aren’t always moved by stories of heroes who achieve glory. Sometimes they need to hear that someone still needs them.
I first watched “The Postman” last fall after several people recommended it to me on Instagram. Like countless viewers, many of those folks had discovered or rediscovered the film during its strange pandemic-era resurgence in 2020, when Costner’s spectacularly sincere vision of rebuilding the country through public service suddenly felt a little less absurd. Not only did I love it instantly, but finding “The Postman” the way I did changed my programming optimism for the better. (Suffice to say, my After Dark selection for last Fourth of July was Brian Yuzna’s “Society,” and if you don’t know what that means, the definition of “shunting” will fill you in… too much.)
The world didn’t feel stable last summer. Jeff Bezos was getting married in Venice, while I was wondering whether the World Cup could even still happen in the U.S. It seemed impossible to imagine an American future that wasn’t defined by isolation, distrust, and the creeping sense that every institution was either actively failing — or rapidly getting there. Watching “The Postman” back then reminded me that different ideals exist and that powerful weirdos like Kevin Costner once championed them with enough conviction to spend $80 million to bring them to the big screen.
This summer feels different. Not better, exactly. There’s still plenty of fear in the air, and America’s 250th birthday arrives during another profound period of cultural uncertainty. But the World Cup is happening, and it’s genuinely bringing people together. Even the internet’s collective fixation on Taylor Swift’s wedding has felt more communal than cynical. And many of my colleagues at IndieWire lit up when I mentioned “The Postman” during our weekly pitch meeting. They remembered it not as the punchline of Costner’s career but as a movie that shaped their childhoods.
The conversations we’re having about the past feel more communal in 2026. Maybe that’s why the repertory cinema scene is also exploding right now. Letterboxd, revival screenings, retro recommendations, and even columns like this one are all built on the act of passing a meaningful message from one person to another. Talking about old movies isn’t an escape from history, but it can make you feel less lonely, at least.
Affectionately flawed and still essential, “The Postman” understands that better than most. American civilization isn’t rebuilt through war in Costner’s film. It comes back through public service, storytelling, and a willingness to believe that somebody out there still wants to hear from you. The film’s faith in those principles can seem unbearably saccharine at times, but I personally find that kind of sincerity more patriotic with each passing day. —Alison Foreman
The Bite: My Apologies to Kevin Costner
For as long as I’ve known his name, Kevin Costner has been my cinematic cilantro: where some people find grit and depth in his specific late 20th-century movie star presence — a little bit John Wayne in his sturdy, American-bred machismo, mixed with the slickness that defined his ‘80s movie star peers like Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise — to me, most of his performances have been about as compelling as a bar of soap.
Sure, I like “Bull Durham” as much as any intelligent person with taste, and you’d be a cold-hearted bastard not to tear up a little watching “Field of Dreams.” But pretty much all of his other major starring turns have left me cold. “Dances With Wolves?” Bland and uninspired. “The Bodyguard?” I’m still looking for the amazing chemistry Costner and Whitney Houston allegedly had. “JFK?” Overrated! “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves?” One of the most agonizing film-viewing experiences of my life. Costner, to me, has always been an actor of limited emotional range, and a movie star whose charisma and appeal doesn’t really hit my personal cinematic wavelength.
And yet, despite not really responding to Costner the star, in recent years I’ve grown increasingly fascinated by Costner the auteur. Watching “Horizon: An American Saga — Part 1,” the first installment of his probably-never-actually-getting-finished passion project, during its release in 2024, I was struck by its ambition and scope, which was alternately maddening and awe-inspiring.
From the thorny starting point of an Apache raid on a Western homestead, Costner weaves a complex, multi-perspective tale that wrestles with the romance and realities of American colonialism and mythmaking. The actor, whose political beliefs don’t cleanly map onto the modern divisions of the two-party system, has both a reverence for America as a set of ideals and an awareness of the faults within its history that creates interesting textual friction. If his films aren’t always the most cleanly made (his most polished and rewarded, “Dances With Wolves,” is the one I’ve been personally least engaged by), they’re undeniably fascinating insights into his particular worldview.
The tension of Costner’s America lies at the heart of “The Postman,” a work of extreme ambition that’s goofy, ungainly, and somehow a little moving despite its myriad flaws. Costner himself has commented that he should have begun the film with the words “Once Upon a Time,” because it’s a fable as much as it is a traditional narrative, a parable about a nameless nomad who inspires revolution and hope through initially selfish actions.
The film is way too long; it takes a full hour for our hero to actually become a postman. Its direction is stodgy and unimpressive, and its screenplay stilted and mawkish. And “The Postman” hasn’t necessarily changed my opinion on Costner as an actor. The titular nomad needed, perhaps, an actor with a little more mischief and roguishness to sell his transformation from conman to folk hero (Harrison Ford, 55 at the time, may have been a good alternative). Costner is simply too one-dimensional a performer to make that transformation work, and his character feels like an inert symbol rather than a flawed human being from the start.
And yet “The Postman,” in all its neo-Western, post-apocalyptic glory, is a film too strange not to compel me. In its vision of a desolate America ruled by tyranny and militia, the United States becomes, in the eyes of those who live in its pre-industrial ruins, an idealized symbol of better times. When the dream of a reconnected America is sparked by the Postman, threading together lies to get a quick and easy meal, rebellion against the militia controlling the landscape spreads like wildfire. That this dream was founded on a lie becomes beside the point; if the ideal America doesn’t truly exist, does it matter when it still inspires people to fight for justice?
It’s easy to scoff at the idea that the U.S. Postal Service is what provides that spark, but it’s probably the most genius choice Costner makes. What moves the settlers and scavengers who join the new postal service isn’t jingoism or the allure of violence, but the promise of connection a piece of mail represents — the idea that they can still be in communion and conversation with people who live hundreds of miles away. There’s something sweetly earnest about the glory with which Costner shoots such an easily overlooked civil service job; a scene where the Postman gallops on his horse to fetch a letter from the hands of a young boy has a grandeur that would make any John Ford Western proud.
It’s old hat nowadays to call “The Postman” the type of film that isn’t made anymore; it’s more accurate to say it’s the type of film that now can only be made with extreme difficulty. Big-budget passion projects still exist, but in the form of works like “Megalopolis” or Costner’s own “Horizon,” films stalled for years that require directors to fight tooth and nail to bring them to the screen.
That there was ever a time when Warner Bros. would fund something this weird is frankly insane, and one can’t help but admire the fact that it exists at all. Getting a studio to fork over millions of dollars for a blockbuster about the power of the U.S. Postal Service: that’s the American Dream, baby — or at least Kevin Costner’s version of it. —Wilson Chapman
Read more installments of After Dark, IndieWire’s midnight movie club:
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