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In recent years — particularly after the pandemic and lockdowns cultivated in us the habit of watching films at home — film industries around the world have been plagued with anxiety about what will convince audiences to go to theatres. This year, we got a few answers. Directors like the Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert), Jordan Peele and Mark Mylod made films that were exquisite viewing experiences and made fantastic use of the way the big screen can immerse you in a surreal world. As if to underscore the importance of being able to see films on the big screen, some of 2022’s most brilliant films are yet to find homes on streaming platforms. Award-winning documentaries like All That Breathes, While We Watched, Fire in the Mountains, Writing With Fire and A Night of Knowing Nothing (all set in India and made by Indian filmmakers) were screened to great acclaim around the world but have been out of reach for regular Indian audiences. Feature films like Everything Everywhere All At Once and The Menu fared better since they had a limited theatrical release, but in India, they swiftly disappeared from cinemas and are yet to appear on any streaming platform. While we wait for these and other films, here are our favourites from international cinema, available at an OTT near you.
A married detective and a murder suspect begin a torrid affair. This one-liner is a quintessential Park Chan-wook one liner – ripe with the promise of aesthetically-charged sex, twisted violence and stylised gore. The possibilities are endless. But this ‘affair’ is torrid in an unusually tender way. Their chemistry is rooted in the seduction of companionship rather than lust. She cures his insomnia, he cooks for her. He keeps an eye on her, she enjoys his gaze. They complete each other’s presence. It’s erotic, but in a Hitchcockian-horror way – driven not by sight, but by sound and sensory anticipation. The love is ominous but barely perceptible, like the fin of a romantic torso that’s lurking beneath the surface. It’s what we don’t see that becomes both scary and heartwarming at once. The director’s disarming use of language, visual expression and technology in this story – combined with hypnotic performances by Tang Wei and Park Hae-il – turn Decision to Leave into a lyrical investigation of star-crossed soulmates, freed by the shapelessness of cinema.
Sebastian Lelio’s masterfully muted adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s novel is a meditation on storytelling, spirituality and the humanity that binds them. Set in the post-famine Ireland of 1862, The Wonder – a title synonymous with both investigation and awe – features a career-best turn by Florence Pugh. As a haunted English nurse torn between the pragmatism of science and idealism of religion, Pugh spotlights the narrative tryst between fact and fiction. Her character, Elizabeth ‘Lib’ Wright, is summoned to a remote Irish village to look into the miracle of a fasting 11-year-old girl, Anna, who has allegedly not eaten for four months. Lib’s experiences with the small community – famine survivors who’ve turned to the divine after being disillusioned by the living – shapes her own personal journey of love, loss and grief. Lelio’s use of a fourth-wall-breaking framing device lends The Wonder a sense of emotional heft and context, making for the most weirdly hopeful ‘horror movie’ in recent memory.
An ingenious Airbnb advert and an unpredictable psychodrama at once, Barbarian is the sort of whimsical horror movie that melts the barrier between visceral entertainment and intellectual engagement. The less we understand, the more we enjoy the savagery of this movie. Director Zach Cregger has a blast with the genre tools at his disposal – satirising themes like feminism, motherhood, sexual abuse and toxic masculinity with the energy of a mad scientist. There’s a double-booked room in a rundown Detroit neighbourhood, a sweet and sinister meet-cute, a monster in a basement, a Hollywood predator, and a house that becomes one of the most unnerving protagonists of the year. It’s nearly impossible to pin down a sense of broader meaning, yet there’s not an ounce of pretension in this potpourri of cinephile spice. It’s not often we detect truth in a skyscraper of red herrings and jumpscares, but Barbarian is what happens when life transcends the rigidity of American genre tropes. At times, even the movie looks alarmed at what happens next – which, in 2022, is a gift that reinvents the gimmickry of streaming-era horror cinema.
Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006) ran so that Apollo 10 ½ : A Space Age Childhood could serenely walk into the sunset. Through the lens of adult remembrance and childhood memory, Richard Linklater lands this quietly nostalgic personal-essay-meets-cultural-snapshot shuttle on a featherbed of rotoscope animation. The Texas-fuelled Apollo 11 mission mixes with the imagination of a fourth grader who inserts himself into the historical moment. The result is a narrative collage that’s both affectionate and melancholic towards the machinations of middle-American living. While watching Linklater’s ode to the limitless age of the Space Race, we found ourselves flitting through his semi-fictional vignettes like they were our own. That says a lot about the filmmaker’s constantly moving explorations of identity and time – a signature ‘voice’ that reaches its softest with this intimate, intergalactic quest of boyhood. Apollo 10 ½ : A Space Age Childhood is easily one of the most overlooked films of the year – a poetic irony, given that it tells a story defined by the grammar of human recollection.
David Cronenberg views the human body not for what it is, but what it can be. And, in some strange prophetic way, what it will be. His obsession with the corporeal has haunted and coloured his oeuvre, staging his treatment of body horror as an existential meditation. In Crimes of the Future, his first film in eight years, Cronenberg returns to familiar territory, yet the Canadian auteur is more lucid than he has ever been. He crafts a decrepit world where plastic has become a source of sustenance, and pain has devolved into a source of pleasure. This perverse ingenuity has extended to new organs developing in the bodies of some people; removing them has degenerated into performance art, a spectacle almost. Cronenberg plays with the inventiveness of this premise to make statements about the pain of creation and the upshot of surveillance in art – going as far as to suggest that in a dystopian world, it is feelings, and not humans, that run the risk of extinction. It’s blood, and not flesh, that runs the risk of heartbreak.
Director Romain Gavras has described his action thriller as a “myth of the near future”. The film is set in Athena, a fictional Paris suburb that becomes a war zone when a video showing the murder of a 13-year-old boy by a group of unidentified men in police uniforms, goes viral. For Abdel, Karim and Moktar, the case is personal. The 13-year-old was their brother and the aftermath of the tragedy leaves each of the three surviving siblings hurtling towards a terrible confrontation. With a fearless screenplay — by Gavras, Ladj Ly and Elias Belkeddar — that moves at a terrific pace and points fingers at the right wing for fostering a culture of violence, Athena is a furious but stylish meditation upon racism and inequality. Everyone talked about Gavras’s 11-minute tracking shot in which a police station is attacked, but it’s just one of many scenes that make the film such a tense and unforgettable movie-watching experience. The cast and crew also rehearsed the film for almost two months, which is perhaps why the inferno in Athena gathers strength with such masterful precision.
Andrew (Cooper Raiff) is your typical Gen Z gent — he’s sensitive, articulate, witty, aimless, a little bit angsty and largely unemployed. After graduating, he finds himself back home with his family and being offered the job of a party starter at local bar mitzvahs. At one of these gatherings, he meets Domino (Dakota Johnson) and her daughter, Lola (Vanessa Burghardt). For Andrew, it’s love at first sight. While the film is not a love story in the romantic sense, Cha Cha Real Smooth is all about different kinds of love, particularly the love of a mother and the love between brothers. Raiff, who has also directed and written the film, is in practically every scene and carries the film with an easy charm that makes you forget he’s acting. He’s also a gifted writer, who makes the story never tips into sentimental mush, but always feels heartfelt. At some point, Leslie Mann, who plays Raiff’s mother, will be acknowledged as a national treasure and if anyone expresses any doubt, show them the scene at the start of Cha Cha Cha Real Smooth, when she ignores all driving and road rules, unsnaps her seatbelt, crawls to the backseat to comfort a heartbroken little boy.
Moody, dark and shadowed with mystery, Thomas Wright’s procedural is about an undercover cop who is trying to get a murder suspect to cough up incriminating evidence. It’s just more bleak, poetic and philosophical than any crime drama you’ve seen this year. Henry (Sean Harris) is suspected of having abducted and killed a boy in 2002 (The Stranger is mostly set in 2010). He’s a free man, wandering around dusty parts of western Australia, but the police are on his trail. He meets Mark (Joel Edgerton), who appears to be part of a criminal syndicate, but is actually a police officer. What the two share can’t really be called a friendship, but it is deep and it is unnerving. Wright, who has directed and written the film, makes sure you feel the violence of the crime committed but without a single graphic shot. The Stranger shuttles between different time periods and it’s not until you’re well into the concluding chapters that Wright reveals how the timelines have looped to intersect with one another, weaving the past into the present through anxiety and fear. Harris is brilliant as the sinister Henry, with his raspy voice and an eerie, unsettling vibe. Be prepared to see his phantom presence in the shadows of your room long after you’re done with the film.
Life in Inisherin is simple. There’s a pub where people gather and sing; a store owner who is hungry for news; a village idiot who is also a truth teller; a crone who watches over it all; and locals like Colm (Brendan Gleeson) and Padraic (Colin Farell) who have settled into idyllic, daily routines. Then one day, Colm says he’s bored of Padraic and suddenly, everything is broken. Padraic pushes Colm’s buttons and Colm reacts viciously. Fogs obscure the roads that were once sun-lit. The bright green gives way to twilight blue. The pub where people once gathered happily is now filled with anxious faces and dirty with blood spatter. The only sliver of hope lies in Padraic’s sister, who proves to be more courageous than anyone else on the island. Simultaneously funny and sad, tender and violent, this is a story of changing times and restless people. Powered by masterful performances by Farrell, Gleeson and the rest of the cast, The Banshees of Inisherin is one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking films of this year and writer-director Martin McDonagh’s best film so far.
What do you do if the horse ranch you own is being stalked by a hungry alien? If you’re characters in a Jordan Peele film, as brother and sister OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Em (Keke Palmer) are, then you embark on an adventure that obliquely examines everything from the erasure of Black history, the imagery of Biblical plagues, the lure of the spectacular as well as the history of photography and the moving image. At one level, Nope belongs to the creature horror genre and features an alien that becomes more beautiful and terrifying with every passing minute. However, it’s more than that. Peele’s plots are almost always a cipher and in Nope, what he’s showing is our relationship to the media we consume. Em and OJ decide that they’re going to turn the situation that’s threatening their lives into a spectacle from which they can profit. With the help of two allies — one of them is a snooty cinematographer who bears an eerie resemblance to Nope’s cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema — the siblings decide they’re going to film the alien in action. It’s perhaps telling that those chasing the alien in Nope are two Black siblings and a Latino man (Brandon Perea), people who belong to communities that Hollywood has traditionally overlooked.