Twelve years ago, for the closing night of our ninth edition of this annual Halloween column, I wrote about Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook. That film’s concept felt fresh and frightening, even novel in 2014: a monster in the house as a physical manifestation of grief and trauma. Kent’s storytelling dynamism and visual invention ensured that the film’s central ideas—the impossibility of repressing the memories that eat away at us, and the necessity of confronting them head-on, even if they can never be entirely vanquished—came across as robustly metaphorical. The film would prove influential: so many horror movies in its wake have doubled down on the idea that the genre is inherently strongest—even most legible—as an exploration of psychological damage that it’s become a cliché at this point; the derisive
“torture porn” moniker of the aughts has been replaced by “trauma porn” in the late teens and early 2020s.

The range in quality is wide—from Midsommar to the Smile films to the Australian horror renaissance kicked off with Talk to Me to Mike Flanagan’s tearjerking TV terrors—but what generally unites these films is that the characters tend to start off as deeply wounded, haunted by some shame or loss that will become the motivating factor (hidden or not) in their journey towards either redemption or rock-bottom despair. Many horror movies have employed similar kinds of psychological readings, but they were once more anomalous: sure, we’ve had The Seventh Victim (a film about depression, highly unusual for 1940s American cinema) and The Haunting (which stays faithful to its Shirley Jackson source material by delving into the ambiguous emotional impairment of its main characters), but most of our classic horror movies have been about innocents thrust into unimaginable situations: Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Omen, Poltergeist, Get Out. If The Blair Witch Project were made today, would Heather also be confronting the memory of her abusive father, seen in ponderous flashbacks? Horror has always had “teachable” moments, though they’re more along the lines of “don’t go into the woods without a compass” or “steer clear of motel showers.” It’s probably no surprise that the ascendance of grief horror—in which characters aren’t simply scrambling to survive but are implicitly trying to overcome something from their past—has coincided with the mainstreaming of the “self-care” industry. How can we trust our disreputable entertainment if it’s not a steppingstone on the way to wellness?

Moviegoers in general and horror lovers in particular seemed to have overdosed on grief horror by the time Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Woman in the Yard was released last year. Largely dismissed, if not disparaged, the film was something different for its director, an ace genre craftsman whose former descents into horror were classical, hearty, fast-paced, and in the case of Orphan, compellingly unsavory. Collet-Serra’s fans may have been surprised, even disappointed that with Woman in the Yard he preferred to take an emotionally and narratively claustrophobic, character-based approach. The film, with a script that writer Sam Stefanek has called deeply personal, undoubtedly fits more cleanly into this au courant form of grief horror, yet by ignoring it for its alleged 21st-century genre sins, viewers passed on a film with an elegant, pared-down design and a genuinely upsetting interior landscape that, for this viewer at least, was persuasively horrific and, finally, deeply moving.

Much of the film’s power comes from Danielle Deadwyler’s fully invested performance as Ramona, the recently widowed mother of a teenage boy, Taylor (Peyton Jackson), and a prepubescent girl, Annie (Estella Kahiha). The three live in a remote farmhouse, which we come to learn Ramona was already feeling isolated and disillusioned in before the car accident that claimed her husband David’s life. Far from civilization and neighbors and, as the film begins, without electricity due to delinquent payments, the family is barely getting by, stumbling over each other with resentment and confusion, while Ramona, her leg still in a cast, hobbles reluctantly through whatever domestic and maternal responsibilities she can manage.

Deadwyler is a naturally sympathetic, beautifully transparent actor, so watching her descend into apathy is truly alarming; it quickly becomes clear that she’s not merely agonizing over her husband’s death but is severely depressed and hardly functioning. Soon enough, Taylor notices a figure perched on a bench in their front yard facing the house at an ominously polite distance, completely enshrouded in black tatters. The children somehow immediately clock this mystery person as a woman, although it would be impossible to know this due to the distance and the clothing—either an improbability or a psychic trick of the film. In finally gaining the courage to approach this sinister cloaked entity, Ramona asks it to leave their property. Staring back at her, the wraith (played by an excellent, unsettlingly composed Okwui Okpokwasili, her face barely visible behind the muslin veil) calmly states “Today’s the day,” and extends a pair of bloody hands.

Indeed, The Woman in the Yard will take place over the creeping expanse of one day, from sun-dappled, wide-open terror (the first shock cut is to curtains being opened) to the inky darkness of night. Within its circumscribed time frame and single location, Collet-Serra comes up with an array of unforced yet dramatic camera angles and positions that give this tightly enclosed world, shot in effectively destabilizing widescreen, a sense of variation and geometric pleasure. While burdened by the occasional car-crash flashback (done in subjective, slo-mo flourish, par for the course in 21st-century grief horror... The Babadook, Smile 2, even all the way back to The Descent), the limitations imposed by the narrative serve this film well, allowing the viewer to home in on the details and emotional resonances of Stefanek’s script. The fear that the cloaked figure elicits has less to do with “horror imagery” per se than with what it means for the characters. Shrouded and in black, the woman is a classical figure of mourning—in other words, an image of how a widow is “supposed” to behave, to hide herself away like the totaled car that still sits, covered in its own shroud in their yard.

Is the woman a Babadook, a literalization of grief? Or is she more simply, more eerily, a double? (The movie could have been titled Other Mommy.) This sort of mirroring becomes the fulcrum of the film: there’s even a joke about it, with a shot of a movie marquee showing Barbra Streisand’s The Mirror Has Two Faces, and there’s a barely noticeable trick mirror shot early in the film for the eagle-eyed. While such obvious psychological illustration (let’s call it explanatory ambiguity) might have painted other filmmakers into a corner, Collet-Serra’s restraint and Deadwyler’s wrenching dedication create a work of persuasively expressionistic, Southern Gothic-tinged horror.

The Woman in the Yard certainly isn’t above citing other horror landmarks. There are The Shining jokes aplenty, from Taylor’s bored bouncing off the walls with a rubber ball, to Annie’s inability to write her R’s facing forward, instantly echoing the backwards “R” in Danny’s RedRum scrawl (another mirror allusion). There’s more than a whiff of Rear Window suspense in watching Ramona, trying to protect herself and her loved ones while housebound and encased in a broken leg. And as the woman moves imperceptibly closer to the house, we may think of M. R. James’s uncanny “The Mezzotint,” a story of a haunted painting that alters only when you don’t look at it. (It’s a proper reference point, as Ramona is herself a painter—which we’re reminded of in the rather extraordinary final tracking shot.) All of this helps extricate The Woman in the Yard from the recesses of grief horror: I perceived more of an allegiance to the classics here, like Henry James’s doppelgänger masterwork “The Jolly Corner” or any number of Shirley Jackson’s studies of people immobilized by inextricable personal fears. Collet-Serra’s film doesn’t feel like it’s part of the grief horror trend but rather a prime example of why it made sense in the first place. —Michael Koresky

Second Night:
Magic

While Anthony Hopkins’s immortal Hannibal Lecter will forever be his most iconic “baddie” role, a silver medal or at least an honorable mention is due to his less-remembered Charles “Corky” Withers, the eventually murderous ventriloquist given to multiple personality disorder and unchecked rage issues from Richard Attenborough’s upsetting 1978 film Magic. “Bewilderingly miscast” according to Pauline Kael—who in fairness was justifiably baffled that this angry, sweaty, glowering puppetmaster could be a famous entertainer—Hopkins is, in fact, plumbing bottomless depths of an exaggerated form of the self-hatred and insecurity that plague so many performers and layfolk alike. So profoundly moving in his quietude in films like The Elephant Man, The Remains of the Day, and Armageddon Time, here he is all volatility and latent rage, at his most troubling when he’s trying to be relaxed and charming.

Hopkins has good company in Magic. Screenwriting god William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, The Princess Bride) adapted his own novel, and with Attenborough’s elegant touch, the film is much more of a subdued character study (and at times a two- or three-hander) than a showbiz satire. Most of the action takes place far away from any stage, in some isolated Catskills rental cabins. Before it goes upstate, the great cinematographer Victor J. Kemper’s images provide lovely ’70s New York flavor, including shots of a busy Central Park South outside the old Hotel St. Moritz. Trapping you in Corky’s topsy-turvy headspace, Attenborough frequently presents images that can only be in his imagination, like when he seems to see himself as a child playing catch outside his old home. In the first scene, Corky is falsely describing a triumphant magic show performance to his mentor Merlin, while we see something closer to what really happened, but still run through the prism of Corky’s self-flagellation: onlookers cackling derisively and unanimously hating him. It’s this bombing that prompts Corky to rejigger his act, returning to the stage with an apple-cheeked, bowl-cut, insult-hurling dummy named Fats, which quickly (and, again, somewhat bafflingly) brings him major success.

Corky’s agent Ben Greene, a name-dropping (Steve Martin, Rich Little), cigar-fellating Burgess Meredith (a recurring delight is to see him shattering the glass caps of his stogie containers) with a horseshoe bald hairline, dangles TV network mega-fame in front of his client. But Corky balks when told he would need to take a physical and aptitude test, knowing it might expose his insanity, so he hoofs it to his upstate Catskills roots. There he plans to look up old crush Peggy (Ann-Margret), whom he finds almost immediately, caretaking some unoccupied cabins and married lovelessly to their other high school alumnus Duke (the always-welcome character actor Ed Lauter). Maybe due to her own pathetic straits, Peggy is charmed by Corky and Fats, even as the former angrily snaps at her, pouring sweat, during a frustrating mental card trick. Peggy also cottons to Fats as he gives voice to his master’s roiling id, cracking remarks like “Wow, boobs and brains!” and saying her “boobs belong in the Louvre.” (It’s really mostly “boob” talk.) Goldman’s oft-crude dialogue also applies to Peggy, who says, “I can be a very crappy lady when I put my mind to it.”

Before long, Corky and Peggy copulate, to the strains of Jerry Goldsmith’s persistent, swelling score, as Fats glowers in the next room. The dummy grows jealous of Corky’s new love interest. Or so it seems, stuck in Corky’s POV as we are; more likely it is Corky’s self-loathing that prevents him from being happy and normal. At one point, Mr. Greene appears at Corky’s cabin with some tempting offers of work, mostly out of concern for his client friend. He gives the clearly unwell Corky one last test: go five minutes without speaking as Fats. The minutes tick away in real time, but the five-minute mark never arrives. It is the film’s best scene.

From here, things grow nasty. While the terrifying ventriloquist dummy segment from the revered horror anthology Dead of Night, with its sophisticated psychological underpinnings, has been the touchstone thus far, Magic’s latter third scoots closer to slasher doll pics like Child’s Play or, more recently, M3GAN. But even in its bloodiest moments, Attenborough stays attuned to the mental torment of his main character, a sick puppy not too far removed from the lethal goons the director himself played in films like Brighton Rock and 10 Rillington Place. Corky and Fats, already sharing the sloppy boyish haircut, increasingly resemble one another over the course of the film—by the time the peaks of Corky’s nose and cheeks turn red toward the end, the transformation is complete. —Justin Stewart

Third Night:
The Old Dark House

Fifty-five minutes into The Old Dark House’s 71-minute runtime, everything changes. A single hand appears on the staircase’s banister, sliding coyly out from behind a wall. Director James Whale cuts to a close-up—the hand’s two middle fingers curl slightly, then splay outward as the hand glides to a stop. We’ve been warned that this is the hand of Saul Femm, the pyromaniacal, sociopathic eldest brother of the household, let loose from his locked room to fulfill his dreams of burning the house down. But that hand stays poised on the railing for the next three minutes, looming in the background as the house’s butler, Morgan (Boris Karloff), comes downstairs and wrestles with the house’s visitors. It’s absurd for that hand to wait so long, but a dramatic entrance is priceless. Best to wait until all eyes are on you.

The Old Dark House is a deeply queer feast of pre-Code bizarreness. Whale, who was openly gay, brought several British theater actors to Hollywood for this 1932 film, including Ernest Thesiger and Charles Laughton, both of whom were bisexual. (Thesiger, who would play Doctor Septimus Pretorius in Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein three years later, was open about his sexuality, and performed some early stage and screen roles in drag.) The setup is the ur-text for Rocky Horror: on an archetypal dark and stormy night, five normies arrive at a creepy old house and seek shelter with its eccentric residents, only for a transformative evening to ensue. First, we meet brother and sister Horace (Theisger) and Rebecca Femm (Eva Moore)—yes, their name is pronounced like “femme”—and Morgan, who is mute and seems to hold all the film’s pathos in his eyes. Horace is delicate and nervous for the secrets of the house to be exposed; when things get out of control with Saul, Horace hides in his room for the remainder of the film. As for his sister, the moment she meets one of the guests, Margaret Waverton (Gloria Stuart—it’s hard not to marvel at the ensemble with each cast credit), Rebecca monologues at her about the sin of fleshly pleasures—all while Margaret changes into an evening gown, making it seem that Rebecca doth protest too much. As the gang learns that there are other family members, and family secrets, kept hidden upstairs, it becomes clear that this is a story about a distinctly British kind of social repression. Who is this family? What aren’t these people able to say? What motivates each character’s emotional world?

This looks like a classical haunted house movie. Whale and cinematographer Arthur Edesondo a lot with brooding close-ups and sudden shifts in lighting, and the film conjures a sense of unease from distorted mirrors, moody drone sounds that emulate the wind, and Karloff’s lumbering physicality. But is it scary? The film has the feeling of a stage play, a comedy of manners; it’s hard not to think of Thesiger’s performance without hearing his pitch-perfect enunciation of “Have a po-ta-to” at the dinner table, putting up a quivering wall of courteous hospitality to mask the house’s psychosexual chaos. During the film’s first climax, something of a red herring for chills and thrills, Margaret and her husband, Philip (Raymond Massey—what did I tell you about this cast!?), discover the house’s 102-year-old patriarch bedridden in one of the locked rooms. He is not frightening at all, but quite chirpy as he matter-of-factly describes some of the dynamics surrounding Saul’s pyromania. He’s also portrayed by a female actress, Elspeth Dudgeon; Whale explained he couldn’t find a male actor who seemed suitably old enough for the role. Considering the film’s overall approach to gender and sexuality, though, it seems fitting that this quasi-drag character would sit at the head of the family table—and seem the most relaxed.

All of this builds to Saul, who is an absolute menace. When he finally reveals himself from behind that wall, we see a slight man with a white beard and wild eyes; he’s played by veteran English theater actor, Brember Wills. We might have expected someone with the same physical hulk as Boris Karloff, who’s so far set the template for what The Old Dark House envisions as threatening. But when Saul descends the stairs, trembling and appealing to another guest, Penderel (Melvyn Douglas—I rest my case!), for sympathy, he appears to be five feet tall at most. His true nature is unleashed with a high-pitched laugh that doesn’t seem to suit his body, a wicked contortion of a grin, and his sudden maneuvers to grab a knife. But what style he brings to the proceedings, wearing a dandyish dressing gown and slippers, cocking a foot to the side as he dances around cracked porcelain on the floor. Toying with his knife, he delivers bizarre sentence formulations with great ceremony: “Are you interested in flame? I know things about flame that nobody else in the world knows.” And finally, when things turn violent, he lunges at Penderel to vampirically bite his neck—a moment that finds a homoerotic rejoinder in the despondent way that Morgan (spoiler alert for two minutes later) mourns Saul’s death, carrying him upstairs like a lost lover who died in the war.

There’s a lot to recommend in The Old Dark House up through this scene, but Saul is the reason this film is electrifying for me. Saul is about freedom; deviation from the norm entangled with danger. But he’s also all about aura. Cinema makes room for theatrical ways of being that are seductively strange—such characters often invite queer readings, but their impact on a text can be much more expansive. I remember watching Blue Velvet (1986) for the first time in high school and being enraptured by Dean Stockwell’s performance as Ben, “one suave fucker,” as Dennis Hopper’s Frank puts it. Yes, there is his sublime lip-sync of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams,” but I was equally hypnotized by the moments leading up to it. It is incredible to watch Stockwell’s eyes fluctuate on a dime between droopy and wide open—no moment more immaculately than when he raises a glass for a toast: “Here’s to your fuck, Frank.” But there is a clear menace lurking beneath, conveyed in the shocking way he gut-punches Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey Beaumont without letting down his cool. There’s also the way that he and Frank seem, at least to Jeffrey’s innocent ears, to be speaking in code about drugs, sex, and even homoerotic dynamics in their own relationship; lyrics like “candy-colored clown” are intoned like mysterious spells cast on an affective plane. At an age when I identified with Jeffrey as a peer, I was hypnotized by the register of this scene, dangerously operatic in a way that suited the suburban American unconscious. Ben could embody, and exorcise, everything under the soil of those picture-perfect lawns. After all, “blue velvet” is a texture: a fabric suiting a decadent costume as much as a theater curtain.

We can trace Ben back to Saul, far more complex and magnetic than a straightforward villain. His psychology is left a mystery, but to simply suss out who he is feels limited. How jealous we mortals might be of his ability to perform this kind of scene. Horror is particularly hospitable to these kinds of performances, and I’m reminded of some of the other puzzle-box men I’ve written about in this column: Terence Stamp in The Collector (1965), Will More in Arrebato (1979), Jeremy Irons times two in Dead Ringers (1988). Are these impulses shrouded in shadow necessarily something to be afraid of? James Whale and Brember Wills knew that any adrenaline rush courses with both fear and delight. —Chloe Lizotte

Fourth Night:
Begotten

The success of many a horror film rests on the skillful manipulation of our sight—what we are invited to look at in a particular moment, and how that image creates tension by suggesting something we can’t see, or setting up the expectation of an image we might not want to see. E. Elias Merhige’s recently restored first feature Begotten (1989) operates in a somewhat different mode to equally upsetting results. The filmmaker points his camera unerringly at exactly what he wants us to be looking at, but his compositions, and the laborious photochemical postproduction processes he undertook to render the final film, make nearly every black-and-white shot obscure somehow. Merhige filmed his actors on location and then later printed and re-photographed every frame individually, often physically distressing the film stock with sandpaper. As such, images are often smudgy and smeary and there’s something odd about the movement of the figures. I found myself leaning in towards the screen, squinting—what is that fleshy object being sliced from a torso? Is that figure vomiting his own innards? Is the piston-like movement I’m watching at length a close-up of a rape in progress? It’s a uniquely discomfiting experience.

Begotten’s first sequence takes place inside a dilapidated house. In the corner of a white room, there’s a man wearing a mask and robe slumped over in a chair, vomiting inky black blood on the walls. Soon, he produces a razor and begins hacking away at his abdomen in a grisly frenzy. After he’s removed some oily organ-like object and is spent, another figure emerges from underneath him (born from him?), a female, who proceeds to handle the dead figure’s penis until he ejaculates. She then collects his sperm to impregnate herself, though it might take a second to recognize the extreme close-up image is of fingers reaching through a mass of wiry pubic hair to find their way into a vagina. These few actions are extended across the first 15 of the film’s 78minutes. It plays like black metal Guy Maddin, replacing the Manitoban’s winking silent film playfulness with an earthy, ritualized solemnity.

The film’s closing credits reveal the man to have been “God Killing Himself” (Brian Salzburg) and the woman as “Mother Earth” (Donna Dempsey). We’ll meet a third figure soon after the prologue, a bald, seemingly albino form twitching feebly in the muck—he is “Son of Earth –Flesh on Bone” (Stephen Charles Barry). For most of the film, he’ll be dragged about by a small group of robed figures by his umbilical cord and beaten and abused in various ways before finally being dismembered and committed to the dirt. Begotten features no dialogue, only a repetitive soundtrack of groans, chirruping crickets, and ambience, so the provenance of this trio remains obscure throughout. Yet Merhige’s images, hard to parse as they are, provide just enough information at the right times to maintain our curiosity, capturing a narrative that suggests elemental cycles of death and rebirth. An offal film.

Begotten found its way into the world the same year as Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man, a similarly grimy and gory hand-cranked 16mm black-and-white debut. They’re quite different films—Merhige’s floats in an opiate haze while Tsukamoto’s pops Adderall by the handful—but they both emerge from painstaking labor undertaken by small groups of craftspeople over long stretches of time outside of traditional moviemaking and the bounds of good taste. Begotten was initially intended as a dance piece for the stage and is populated by members of Merhige’s experimental company Theatreofmaterial, so it’s miraculous how confidently the first-time filmmaker manipulates the cinematic apparatus to create novel, highly unsettling images. Maybe only a novice could have made something like this. Even though Begotten might recall Maya Deren or Aleksei German at moments, the entirety of the experience feels wholly, disgustingly, its own thing. —Jeff Reichert

Fifth Night:
Memento Mori

Memento Mori (1999), a cult classic of Korean horror cinema, starts off with an Alice in Wonderland–like premise. Min-ah (Kim Gyu-ri), a student at an all-girls high school, stumbles upon a diary that belongs to Hyo-shin (Park Ye-jin) and Shi-eun (Lee Young-jin), lesbian girls ostracized by the entire school. An initially innocuous intrigue of accessing someone’s most private thoughts soon takes a dark turn when Hyo-shin kills herself that afternoon. As Min-ah descends further down the rabbit hole of the doomed lovers’ intimate secrets to make sense of what drove Hyo-shin to suicide, supernatural phenomena begin happening to and around her: telepathy, sudden illnesses, and the school’s entry remaining inexplicably locked. But the worst horrors, of course, stem from homophobia, peer pressure, abusive teachers, and growing pains.

Released as a follow-up to Whispering Corridors (1998), then the highest-grossing Korean horror flick, Memento Mori disappointed many for not being very scary. The truth is, it only became a sequel through a retroactive marketing decision by distributor Cinema Service, which wanted to capitalize on the original's record-breaking success. Aside from the all-girls school setting and the narrative revolving around suicide, bullying, and ghosts, the two have little in common. Spiritually, Memento Mori is much closer to The Virgin Suicides than to its predecessor, rendering its horror elements hauntingly sad rather than frightening. But like the Sofia Coppola debut, its dreamy images of adolescent turmoil and heartache get under the skin. The film’s current cult classic status rests primarily on being a strange paranormal queer melodrama, and it doesn’t feel coincidental that its co-directors, Kim Tae-yong (perhaps better known as Tang Wei’s husband these days) and Min Kyu-dong, have not since returned to the genre.

If memory serves me, the first on-screen lesbian kiss I ever encountered was from Memento Mori, which I saw at age 13 on DVD in preparation for watching the more commercially successful Wishing Stairs (2003), the third installment in the Whispering Corridors series. The kiss comes shortly after Shi-eun’s homeroom teacher violently slaps her for the crime of being queer, leaving the poor girl’s lips bleeding. (It wasn’t until 2011 that corporal punishment became outlawed in South Korea.) The classroom’s attention is already fixed on the two girls when Hyo-shin presses her face against Shi-eun’s bloody mouth, a startling act of defiance against homophobia and the pervasive brutality of educational institutions in Korea. Captured by an anxious, handheld camera, the lip-lock feels more desperate and disquieting than romantic and affirming. Surrounded by their jeering classmates, Shi-eun gives in to peer pressure and pushes her away. To my 13-year-old self, those 25 seconds of sapphic rebellion felt like eternity, and I could not understand the disgust on the faces of the onlookers.

Looking back at this experience, I am also struck by how much Memento Mori is about identification. Early on, Min-ah consumes konpeitō, a star-shaped sugar candy, presented as poison inside the diary and attains the telepathic ability to communicate with Shi-eun, who is losing her hearing. She thereby enters the reality described in the journal as an active participant tasked with uncovering the truth behind Hyo-shin’s suicide and restoring her tainted honor. The film does not always make it clear whether some of the flashbacks are actual memories or Min-ah’s imaginings. It’s entirely possible that what unfolds in Memento Mori is akin to Y/N (Your Name) fanfiction, in which the reader is invited to insert themselves into the story.

The ineffable appeal of Memento Mori for me, a closeted trans girl at the time, probably had to do with this self-insertion. Like the two protagonists of Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) who repeatedly enter a haunted house to collect the Proustian candy fragments that allow them to alter the course of the Jamesian melodrama playing in perpetuity, I kept coming back to the film to vicariously experience the desires I did not yet have the language to articulate. Watching Min-ah was my version of eating the mysterious sweet to enter the virtual reality of girlhood and sapphic yearning. The intensity with which I studied Memento Mori was not unlike that of Hyo-shin’s ghost peering into the interior of the school building through its glass roof. It is no coincidence that Hyo-shin takes her own life on the much-dreaded physical examination day, which amplifies the girls' anxieties about their bodies. Perhaps I was secretly hoping that the film would put a pause on my puberty by haunting me.

In the aftermath of the supernatural upheaval at the school, Min-ah telepathically tells Shi-eun, “I’m sorry I lost the diary.” The latter, with a faint smile, responds: “That’s okay, you can always write a new one.” Kim Gyu-ri went on to play a cross-dressing woman in Portrait of a Beauty, a period drama about a female painter who assumes the identity of her dead brother to pursue a life in art. I have since transitioned and made that virtual reality my own material reality. When I began seriously contemplating transition in my mid-twenties, Shi-eun’s words kept ringing in my ears. It took long enough, but the haunting did eventually arrive. —Jawni Han

Sixth Night:
The Appointment

There’s an entire wardrobe’s worth of ’70s genre hand-me-downs in The Appointment: a pack of slavering dogs on loan from The Omen; a potentially telekinetic teenage troublemaker à la Carrie; Edward Woodward hoisted on his own pompous petard as per The Wicker Man. And yet British director Lindsey C. Vickers’s 1982 shot-for-television-film feels woven out of whole cloth. Shot crisply on location in various verdant patches on the coast of England and Wales, it’s got its own luxuriously spooky texture; its fusion of nightmarish dream logic and domestic psychodrama is as cozily enveloping as horror gets.

“I live in the supernatural world,” said Vickers in 2020, “the world of ‘how can that be?’” The Appointment stakes out its territory between the empirical and the impossible early on. The opening voice-over is taken from a police blotter pertaining to the disappearance of a local girl, Sandy Freemont, some three years earlier: “Her friend places her positively as entering the footpath through the area known as Cromley Woods, a then popular shortcut for several of the children living in Millard Heights.” The clipped, documentary tone of the narration is quickly subsumed by suggestive fairy-tale imagery of trees and shrubs parting invitingly before Sandy (Auriol Goldingham) as she wanders home in unblemished white knee highs and gloves. There’s nothing positive about what happens next: eerie voices whispering entreaties and then a blindsiding bit of staging that any of the era’s jump-scare purveyors would surely envy. The prologue is ominous, beautiful, and ruthless; it’s also never referred to directly once for the rest of the film, which reroutes towards a new and apparently unconnected set of characters.

There are practical reasons for this strangely self-contained quality: in an article originally written for the now-defunct British horror website Horrified, Ray Newman speculates that Vickers, a veteran assistant director in the U.K. with credits on numerous Hammer titles, shot the introduction after the fact to “spice up” the completed film. (There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes intrigue to unravel here; after being commissioned as part of a privately funded horror omnibus project—one that never came to fruition—The Appointment was submitted to festivals and then feared lost for decades after the mysterious disappearances of its original negative and broadcast transmission tapes.) Taken on purely stylistic terms, the scene feels like an expansion on Vickers’s shivery 1978 short The Lake, about a picnicking couple being shadowed through the forest by an unseen entity, and which itself contains premonitions of its maker’s subsequent—and sadly sole—foray into feature-length filmmaking. In both films, the camera observes the characters with a predatory curiosity: not the lurking, first-person perspective of a slasher but something at once intimate and cosmic, rooted in a tactile, everyday reality yet cognizant of some grand and malevolent design.

The main action of The Appointment is set in the well-appointed home of engineer Ian (Woodward) and his wife Dianna (Jane Merrow), who live with their adolescent daughter, Joanne (Samantha Weysom); a fleeting glimpse of English author Margaret Drabble’s contemporaneous novel The Middle Ground on a bedside table suggests both that the couple is cultured and that the filmmakers are using them to perform a sort of sociological critique—one attuned to details of class, complicity, and generational conflict. “We’re a family—we each count,” says Dianna sternly to her husband, referring—with a not-so-veiled hint of competitive insecurity—to his doting indulgence of Joanne, whose performative Daddy’s Girl act extends to moments of private reflection. Flipping through a book of photos in repose in her room, she seems more possessive than reflective while gazing at Ian; her stockings, meanwhile, call to mind the vanished girl from the opening scene.

To the extent that The Appointment has a plot, it’s as slender and inconsequential as a phantom limb. Ian, whose company bears responsibility for a fatal mining disaster, is required to give testimony out of town at an inquest; his trip is scheduled at the same time as Joanne’s violin recital, leading to a series of sullen outbursts shaded by something more than disappointment. “You’ll have to accept the fact that this is not some great plot directed at you personally,” he snaps in the midst of one sad-eyed guilt trip too many, sounding like a man trying to unwind himself from around his daughter’s middle finger. The conceptual punchline of the film—which isn’t funny, exactly, even as it adopts the shape of a shaggy-Doberman joke— is that pretty much everything that happens from here seems very much to be a great plot directed at Ian, personally, whether by Joanne or a force working through her.

To say more would be to collapse the precisely maintained space between psychology and prophecy—and also ambiguity and gimmickry—where The Appointment enters and takes up residence like a wry, obstreperous poltergeist. Suffice it to say that the myriad narrative head-fakes are geared towards a payoff that’s as surprisingly and provocatively layered as it is inevitable. The most impressive thing about the film—and what links it to other great tales of the uncanny—is its complex, deceptive sense of scale. The modesty of the imagery in The Appointment may have been a mostly practical consideration, but it’s been yoked to artistic imperatives. By shrinking his “supernatural world” to the size of a single household and then plumbing downwards through its conjoined fears and desires, Vickers proves himself an ingenious architect of anxiety, housed in a movie that’s both cluttered and spacious on the inside—a finely handcrafted cabinet of curiosities. —Adam Nayman

Seventh Night:
The Tomb of Ligeia

A bell tolls relentlessly at the funeral of a dark-haired young woman whose coffin—yet unburied—bears a window panel showing her face at rest. Unannounced, a black cat jumps on top of the coffin and the corpse momentarily opens its eyes, its peaceful countenance now constituting a smile. Her widower opens the coffin, checks her pulse and closes her eyes again, blaming “a nervous contraction,” while seeming unconvinced by his own words.

***

Roger Corman was one of the most influential, prolific, and fascinating characters in the history of American cinema. An autodidact who made his way up from set messenger to writer-director-producer, he left us in 2024 with more than 400 film projects to his name, the vast majority in the microbudget exploitation category, with titles familiar only to his most die-hard fans. He also supported fledgling talent—Scorsese, Coppola, Demme, Cameron, Nicholson, Hopper—at the birth of careers that would attract infinitely more recognition than his own. His generosity towards the medium itself was paradoxically matched only by his parsimoniousness and outrageous gift for recycling. He viewed expenditure on film projects as a moral issue, deploring the blockbuster budgets a lot of his own progeny would go on to command: “There must be a better use for that much money […] when great stories can be told for so much less.”

Though Corman never truly felt the lash of negative notices, his strongest critical period as a director was between 1960 and 1964, during which American International Pictures financed his lifelong ambition: to adapt the works of Edgar Allan Poe for the screen. This cycle amounted to eight gothic horror films in five years, and if you think that’s good going, he also directed eleven other films in that period—two of which, Tower of London (1962) and Little Shop of Horrors (1960), are especially enduring—and produced one more, Coppola’s Dementia 13 (1963). All eight of his Poe pictures were decorated by his close collaborator, the art director and alchemist Daniel Haller, and all but one starred Vincent Price, culminating in 1964’s captivating The Tomb of Ligeia.

Based on Poe’s short story “Ligeia” this is an outwardly familiar story of a solitary, miserable man living alone in a castle (see also House of Usher [1960], The Pit & The Pendulum [1961], The Raven [1963], The Premature Burial [1962], and ‘Morella’ from Tales of Terror [1962]), who is played by Vincent Price and mourns the death of his wife (see also The Raven and House of Usher), the beautiful Ligeia, named by Poe after one of the Sirens of Greek mythology. Verden Fell (Price) reluctantly remarries: his new wife Rowena is a fair-haired, fiery young woman who aggressively pursues him despite already being engaged to another, and despite Fell trying to dissuade her in a manner replete with red flags. A black cat apparently inhabited by the spirit of the late Ligeia roams Fell’s castle (see also “The Black Cat” segment from Tales of Terror) and unsurprisingly, doesn’t take too kindly to the new match. The ensuing terrible tribulations for the couple conclude with Fell’s castle up in flames (see also The Haunted Palace [1963] and House of Usher).

A consensus of sorts places Corman’s preceding picture, 1963’s immensely accomplished (and phenomenally weird) The Masque of the Red Death, lit by Nic Roeg at Shepperton Studios on a bigger budget than Corman had ever used before, at the zenith of this golden lustrum in Corman’s career. It would be time-wasting and contrarian to elevate Ligeia in opposition to Masque, yet Ligeia does provide robust arguments for its enduring appeal and consummatory place, not just in Corman’s work but also in Gothic horror cinema. Numerous elements of Ligeia place it outside of Corman’s own comfort zone and traditional modus operandi, such that the peak of his own creative command ended up coinciding with a project whose whole conception frustrated and dissatisfied him so much that he dropped the curtain on the whole series and moved away from Gothic horror into biker and counterculture movies (The Wild Angels [1966], The Trip [1967]). Corman had wanted Richard Chamberlain for the lead role in Ligeia, intended for a man under 30, but AIP made the casting of his beloved mainstay Vincent Price a condition of the project going ahead. Heavy makeup and a dark wig were reluctantly summoned to lessen the impact. Corman also attested that while at the development stage of Ligeia, he just couldn’t think of new things to do with the Poe material as he had become conscious—the irony being unusually lost on him on this occasion—of repeating himself. The happy result of this unhappy process was, despite imperfections to which no truly great cinema is immune, the series’ biggest artistic outlier and most forward-looking, and perhaps his most beautiful.

While Roeg’s camerawork on Masque probably represents the clearest visual representation of Corman’s own cracked vision of Poe’s work, Hammer veteran cinematographer Arthur Grant (apparently aided by Francis Coppola’s second unit work) brings to Ligeia a vivid new dimension, filming in natural exteriors, specifically in the grounds and ruins of Norfolk’s intimidating Castle Acre Priory: a relic of 11th-century Clunisian affluence which fills the screen from the first frame. To those who enjoy Corman’s traditional fog-drenched studio cemetery sets (inspired by Universal horror films and imbuing the Poe series with an almost cozy familiarity), this sudden visual departure is like a punch in the throat; it immediately sets the pulse racing.

Much of Grant’s interior photography features a hallucinatory image-layering and blurring effect that underscores the story’s Freudian elements in a more nebulous and perhaps more discombobulating way than Roeg’s—whose Masque was more theatrical, almost Kubrickian—and, combined with Haller’s ever-improving gothic interior designs, creates a pleasing hybrid experience, as if the familiar look of Corman’s Poe cycle is fighting with a more modern style. This befits Corman, as an active force in the transition from old Hollywood to new Hollywood: his production of 1968’s Peter Bogdanovich–directed Targets is often cited as an exemplar of such, featuring an aging Boris Karloff bemoaning his own performance in Corman’s comparatively regressive, Poe-inspired The Terror. Meanwhile Price’s ultra-hipsterish sunglasses (for yes, Verden Fell has an aversion to natural light—see also House of Usher) mark yet more modernity and must surely have settled somewhere in the recesses of Coppola’s mind right up until he was devising Gary Oldman’s caddish, man-about-town incarnation of the titular Count in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992).

In an arresting casting choice reminiscent of the Archers’ The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) and consistent with the film’s theme of reincarnation, both women (Rowena and Ligeia) are played by the English stage actress Elizabeth Shepherd. The necrophiliac parallels with Hitchcock’s Vertigo aside, the most striking attribute of this decision is that, combined with Corman’s more restrained use of Price in a role he didn’t conceive for him, it effectively makes Shepherd the lead, butting up against a more febrile, less overtly imposing (but consequently even more compelling) Vincent Price.

This is—and more importantly, feels like—a significant departure from the preceding Poe films, a contrast best underlined by the testosterone-fueled dinner table sequence in The Raven. That features a more typically dominant Price, together with the ghoulish troll-headed Peter Lorre and his handsome young son Jack Nicholson (surely the most unlikely relations imaginable), facing off against a titanically sinister Boris Karloff…all while poor Olive Sturgess, seated at the end of the table, sheepishly and mutely watches all this willy-waving play out. Shepherd doesn’t steal Ligeia—because Price is still so good—but she balances it by matching his intensity throughout. While Rowena is unexpectedly magnetic in her second Mrs. de Winter plight and subsequent descent into madness and possession, it is the confrontation between Fell and Ligeia that ultimately provides the film’s most crucial narrative pillar: Fell’s life has no purpose unless he can rid himself of Ligeia’s influence over him. Shepherd’s dual depictions arrest the viewer not just by their intra-distinction but by the power of seeing a strong character brought low, and by the complexity of Rowena’s own predicament, especially in comparison with the other female characters in Corman’s Poe cycle (she is stronger even than the unloved Rowena character in the source material).

For this we must thank Shepherd herself, but also the film’s screenwriter, Robert Towne (Chinatown, The Last Detail), whose known gift for character and dialogue injects a level of wit and friction hitherto eschewed by Corman’s Poe films, whose humor otherwise derived largely from the wildness of their characterizations (by Price and Lorre in particular). Towne’s script, poetic and bombastic to a fault, also proposes perhaps one of the finest aphorisms in horror fiction not written by Edgar Allan Poe himself: "Man need not kneel before the angels, nor lie in death forever, save through the weakness of his feeble will." These blasphemous words are attributed to Ligeia and are defiantly read at her grave by Fell, whose anxiety about his late wife’s atheism had by that stage morphed into a justified fear that she might be right: what if the strongest of wills can defy death? —Julien Allen

Nosferatu screens at Museum of the Moving Image with live piano accompaniment on Friday, October 30, 2026.

A shadow, shaped almost like a man, with long lanky arms and sickles for fingers, creeps up the stairs; it thirsts lasciviously for fresh hot blood, and there's a beautiful woman up there who has some. This living darkness, lyrical and ominous, is one of cinema’s eternal images and illustrates the way Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror sets the supernatural in a recognizable world. By juxtaposing its believable sets and location shooting with the vivid, abstract presentation of the infernal Count Orlok, the film conjures up damnable images that intrude upon its naturalism, allowing the real and the unreal to inhabit the same frame.

In 1838, in the fictional German vicinage Wisborg, estate agent Thomas Hutter is assigned by his boss, Herr Knock (who, with his disorderly eyebrows, decrepit teeth, and ghoulish smile, looks not unlike a monster himself), to travel to Transylvania to meet a new client, who plans on buying a house neighboring Hutter’s. As encouragement, Knock tells the man, “Of course, it will cost you some effort … a little sweat and … perhaps … a little blood.” Hutter agrees.

Hutter embarks on his endeavor, never suspecting the terrors awaiting him; up a serpentine dirt road he goes, into the Carpathian Mountains, to the count’s vast, infirm castle, seemingly unpopulated and pervaded by a sepulchral air. The scenes of his travel and arrival evince Murnau's unique marriage of naturalism and abomination, showing us a world made pretty by God offended by this desolate acropolis and the man-like thing who lives here. A creature who defies nature. Here, Hutter's “dreams are heavy,” and the reliable, familiar reality to which he is accustomed succumbs to the sublime impossible.

While Nosferatu’s style has, in the last century, been imitated again and again, it remains unsurpassed, a singular collaboration between artists who all broke new ground. Designer and occultist Albin Grau handled sets, costumes, and storyboards, and created the ratty countenance of Orlok, taking influence from Hugo Steiner-Prag’s black-and-white illustrations for Gustav Meyrink’s 1915 novel The Golem. Fritz Arno Wagner, a pioneer of German expressionism who worked with Murnau on The Haunted Castle the previous year, served as primary cinematographer, assisted by Günther Krampf. Together, they captured the grandeur of the natural world and defiled it with frightening, anomalous images. Screenwriter Henrik Galeen transcribed Stoker’s anglophile novel into a distinctly German voice. And Murnau brewed it all together.

And, of course, there’s Max Schreck, one of cinema’s most enigmatic personages, who has long passed into legend. He was, before the film, an accomplished thespian in Germany, having studied at the Berliner Staatstheater, and subsequently touring the country, though he is today known, almost exclusively, for Orlok. Hairless, with the visage of a vermin, and skin a cadaverous pallor, he moves with an inhuman rigidity, stares with eyes crazed yet diabolically focused, sleeps in a coffin in the dreggy dark crypt of the castle he inhabits alone, and he has a plan born of insidious ambitions. The combination of Murnau’s dreamlike naturalism and Schreck’s indelible presence creates a hypnagogic ambience. Even though the story of Dracula is universally known, there is still an inescapable, unsettling sense that something bad is coming, leaving us suffering in the grip of a cryptic seduction.

Nosferatu is for many the definitive vampire film, but Lotte Eisner’s essential book Murnau points out how many critics, filmmakers, and scholars disliked the film in 1922, and continued to do so for a flummoxing amount of time. As late as 1946, Theodore Huff, who helped program for the Museum of Modern Art, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives, dismissed the film with harsh conviction, calling it “Teutonic,” specifically deriding the acting and aesthetic, comparing it unfavorably with Hollywood films that he preferred. And yet, Nosferatu has had a profound effect on American films, a commencing influence on gothic horror, on noir, on the Universal monsters. David Thomson said of the brilliance of Jacques Tourneur: “Time and again in these films, it is the imaginative use of light, decor, space, and movement that makes the impact of the movie,” and the “supreme vindications of the menacing nature of shadow, composition, and pace.” You could say that this makes him a descendant of Murnau, as he helped pioneer all of this, here and in his other films.

Nosferatu is tagged as the first true horror film, which it isn't; consider, as one example, J. Searle Dawley's Frankenstein from 1910. But what it does that had not been done with such poetic intensity is capture a singular cinematic incongruity. “There is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites,” Jung wrote. “Hence it is necessary to discover the opposite to the attitude of the conscious mind.” Here, we have the undying clash between good and evil; surreal and naturalistic imagery co-existing parasitically; and the psychological, philosophical, and visual contrasts of light and dark.

Murnau also pairs different settings and actions occurring far apart together through montage, resulting in images linked spiritually. Building on and experimenting with the work of Abel Gance and D. W. Griffith, and predating Sergei Eisenstein, Nosferatu attests to the power and symbolism of crosscutting in a dreamy, eerie, sensual way that evokes the venereal nature of Orlok's malfeasance. Murnau gives us Orlok ambling awfully into Thomas's room as Ellen moves in a somnambulistic daze towards the balcony many miles away. Orlok bends over to drink from Thomas and Ellen reaches out desperately for a man who isn't there—or for a monster who, in a sense, is. “A sudden fever,” the doctor says. The scene shows how Orlok and Ellen are themselves an incongruous pair, and how his fiendish love defies nature—defies God. And in the end, it's this obsession, and his victory in finally getting her, that is his doom.

For Nosferatu, Murnau and DP Karl Freund experimented with what would come to be known as “unchained camera” employed in The Last Laugh, filmed two years later. Murnau uses static, careful, but not too finicky images of Orlok's sulfurous face, with his buckteeth fangs and crazed, wide-open eyes; lighted rooms infected with pitiless shadows as deep as abysses and large doorways evoking both escape and imprisonment; trees surrounding the castle; and a grand old ship marshalling rats and the pestilence brought by the blood-sucking settler.

“Murnau concerned himself with lighting effects because he did all he could to make a film a total work of art,” Heinrich C. Richter, the designer for Murnau’s earlier films Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde / The Head of Janus (1920) and Journey into the Night (1921), said. “He was especially interested in effects that were still novel, like beams coming through a door or headlights piercing darkness.” Murnau’s main recurring visual technique is filling vacancies with unseen, unuttered dread. There is depth and density in his images, in Orlok’s lurking in doorways and the creeping darkness seemingly possessing its own autonomy; the poor portly doorman in The Last Laugh lets people in through a doorway; the space traversed by the trolley in Sunrise; the acrobats flying glorious through empty air, risking harm and death, in the lost film 4 Devils, as shown in Janet Bergstrom's Murnau’s 4 Devils: Traces of a Lost Film; the vast flaxen fields of crop around which everyone’s lives revolve in City Girl; the boundless, ageless, unsympathetic sea surrounding two lovers struggling to survive on a colonized island in Tabu. (Orlok too crosses the sea.)

Writing about Sunrise, Dorothy B. Jones said that moviegoers with “more finely developed capacities for discrimination find additional pleasure in the profound understanding of human nature—implicit in all of Murnau’s best work—and also admire and appreciate the subtle artistry with which he fashioned this picture.” This begins in earnest with Nosferatu, which elucidates the approach Murnau would take for the rest of his too-short life, tragically ended by a car crash. There’s a psychological acuity in the ways he delves so deeply and daringly into the minds of troubled men, and his faith in images is used to survey the fragility and tenacity of the soul, its ruination and its salvation.

Klara and the Sun
Dir. Taika Waititi, U.S., Sony

“We’re modeled from trash,” declares a character at the solemn climax of Never Let Me Go, Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel about clones raised to adulthood, then harvested for their vital organs. Set in an alternative England during the 1990s and narrated by a clone reflecting on her childhood at a specialized boarding school, the book is backdropped by the rigged systems created by neoliberalism in Thatcherite Britain. In 2021, Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun revisited the human/nonhuman divide, asking who gets entitled to a ‘good life’ and how such a thing is defined. Its titular narrator is a solar-powered humanoid robot—an AF, or artificial friend–who becomes the childhood companion for a wealthy girl with a life-threatening illness. Both stories end bleakly, with their nonhuman protagonist surrounded by garbage while awaiting death, kept company only by her memories.

Taika Waititi’s screen adaptation of Klara and the Sun is trash of a different kind. A film based on a thoughtful novel about AI shouldn’t feel generated by it. Reducing the book to a ceaseless sequence of flatlining quips and sentimental swells, Waititi’s rendition is his worst offering to date. The filmmaker whose early work like Boy (2010) and What We Do in the Shadows (2014) held sweetness and acerbity with confidence has been on a steady decline for more than a decade. Confusing in its aesthetic worldbuilding and tonally erratic, Klara and the Sun feels helmed by an absentee boss. The choice to transform Ishiguro’s contemplative novel into a quirky dramedy seems bizarre, but taking source material in unexpected, even contrary, directions could make for a worthwhile anti-adaptation. That’s not the case here. The film is childish in its reluctance to approach anything that was difficult in the novel. Though its narrative proudly centers big feelings—grief, love, fear of death—their hollow articulation through tropes, jokes, and platitudes only amounts to the simulacra of these emotions.

Waititi’s version builds its structure by stacking key events from the book. Klara (Jenna Ortega) is an AF housed among others of her kind. The Manager (Natasha Lyonne) begrudgingly cares for her charges, who we learn are older models of the higher-tech B3 iterations sold across the street. Unlike her peers, Klara is peppy, curious about everything, and—from the get—obsessively attuned to the beauty of humanity. She’s Agnes Varda meets Willow Rosenberg on acid, a gamine ingénue who uses words like “super duper.” Fueled by the sun, she worships its life-giving properties as a framework for making meaning from her strange socialization. When Klara gets a turn to peacock in the storefront window, she woos apathetic teenager Josie (Mia Tharia) with silly mime movements. Josie’s mother, Chrissie (Amy Adams, out of place in Hunger Games-esque business casual and frequently huffing a kazoo-shaped vape), is a tough customer, but her daughter wins out. Though leaving her own flock saves Klara from an early fate of being “melted down for parts,” she soon steps into more complex familial dynamics.

In Ishiguro’s novel, human characters are verbally resentful and borderline abusive to their AFs, a detail that recalls the way the clones of Never Let Me Go are looked upon by their caretakers with fear and occasional disgust. It’s a powerful motif illustrating how people can react when subjugation that benefits them is made visible. In Waititi’s film, these scenes are played for laughs. During the film’s opening montage at the store, the Manager irons a shirt directly onto the chest of an AF. From the moment Klara steps into her new “home,” Chrissie and her housekeeper Melania (veteran Waititi scene-stealer Rachel House) drop disses like it's their job. When indoor tensions escalate, Chrissie drives Klara to a waterfall and tries to drown her. Gross-out comedy supersedes lingering in uncomfortable but revealing tension: it’s all water under the bridge, or rather, projectile vomit from Klara’s innards before they quickly smooth things over.

Part of the problem might be adapting this book in the first place. Klara lands clunkily in the current moment where questions about the “humanity” of AI are out of touch with more urgent political concerns regarding environmental destruction, intellectual/artistic theft, data ownership, legislation, and the corporate mythologization of billionaires. A film that follows the question “can AI feel?” with “and can’t we all be friends?” is pursuing the wrong lines of inquiry, and different ones than those posed by the novel.

Waititi’s Klara yokes to a subgenre of movies more interested in broad-stroke philosophical musings about artificial life than engaging the horror show that has become our actual moment. Mainstream cinema is still struggling to find new stories to tell outside the narrative parameters set by Blade Runner (1982) and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001). Aside from the predominance of media about people having sexual and romantic relationships with humanoids, there’s a growing number of films about grief and family, wherein a technologically simulated spouse or child is introduced to replace the dead and mitigate loss. Black Mirror’s “Be Right Back” (2013), Replicas (2018), Swan Song (2021), After Yang (2021), and most recently Sheep in the Box (2026) are all notable riffs.

These films of varying quality repeatedly say the same thing: you can’t cut corners when it comes to grieving. At the same time, they also present the possibility of loving—or at least accepting life with—the robot. Much like the somewhat exhausted discourse around “elevated horror,” these films instrumentalize grief as a marker of conceptual seriousness that mitigates their sci-fi leanings. They are family dramas about interpersonal issues first, and as such rarely apply the same level of interrogative depth to our entanglements with technology.

Klara and the Sun is another addition to this category. Josie—whose family is still mourning the death of her younger sister—is sick because her mother opted to put her through a fictional genetic procedure that provides children with artistic and intellectual advantages. As Josie nears probable death, Klara’s purpose as her potential replacement becomes clear. “Grief makes you crazy,” Chrissie tells Josie, apologizing for a series of desperate delusions that make up Klara and the Sun’s denouement. So can algorithms, as can be observed either through doomscrolling viral AI slop melodramas about anthropomorphized fruit or the more concerning phenomenon of AI-induced psychosis. A tepid franchise that still toes the line about “living with” AI, M3GAN at least understands this.

Most dramas about the robot changeling child ignore harsher but more banal realities—like parents sitting in front of chatbots asking how to raise their kids. Ishiguro’s poignant but dismal final passages of Klara and the Sun activate readers towards critical reappraisal of the world around them. Waititi insists on a happy ending that encourages the viewer to simply hope for the best, a conservative and ultimately dangerous fantasy.

Fatherland
Dr. Paweł Pawlikowski, Poland/Germany/Italy/France, MUBI

“Where is home?” Sixteen years after he fled Nazi Germany to settle in the U.S., and four since Hitler killed himself in a bunker, Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) is fielding questions from a phalanx of reporters in downtown Frankfurt. The writer, who received the Nobel in 1929, has returned to his native turf to pick up another award, the Goethe Prize. But the atmosphere inside the cavernous hotel hall where the presser is taking place has turned pugilistic. You’d be forgiven for mistaking the conference for a trial. Opposite the literary titan and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller), presently acting as his interpreter, reporters from either side of the Iron Curtain take turns to challenge Mann’s allegiances. There’s the German journalist who asks what he might have to say to the countrymen who viewed his departure in 1933 as a betrayal; a Soviet colleague who wants him to attest to the East’s superiority; an American who wonders if rumors that he may pick up a second Goethe Prize in the DDR are true (they are). But it’s Betty Knox (Anna Madeley), Erika’s partner and fellow war correspondent, who gets to ask the most personal question—curiously, the only one Mann doesn’t know how to answer. “My home now is California, but my heimat, where I belong—that’s a much more difficult question.”

The first time I watched Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, in Cannes, I remember hastily jotting down Mann’s words, convinced that they might serve as a Rosetta Stone to decipher the entire journey. As it turns out, they do. Like Ida (2013) and Cold War (2018), the first two instalments in Pawlikowski’s black-and-white postwar trilogy, which this brings to a close, Fatherland follows people fumbling after a sense of belonging in a postwar continent riven by all sorts of divisions, old and new—heimat remains a mirage in all three works. But on my second viewing, another question lingered: How tall is that ceiling?

Now on his third collaboration with cinematographer Łukasz Żal, Pawlikowski’s honed an instantly recognizable aesthetic. Ida, Cold War, and Fatherland all tend to traffic in static shots in which people often appear from the shoulders up but only occupy a small portion of the frame—poking out of the boxy Academy ratio as if from windows. The rest is vertical headroom, plenty of it, a stylistic choice which in Fatherland reaches a kind of apotheosis. Virtually every indoor scene is designed to keep the ceiling out of sight, leaving characters floating in immensely and oppressively spacious rooms. The marbleized conference hall in Frankfurt, where columns jut dizzyingly skyward to dwarf the Manns and their audience; the sinisterly semi-deserted bar in East Germany, the camera perched just far enough from Thomas and Erika so as to turn the place into a cathedral; and the derelict church father and daughter visit in the closing sequence, reminiscent of Cold War’s own coda.

To call that empty space would be both technically correct and somewhat misleading: there is nothing empty about these backgrounds. Thomas and Erika do not hang in a vacuum but move across a string of liminal places—hotels, restaurants, theatres—and it’s a hallmark of the director’s artistry that these do not just stand as inert backdrops, speaking instead to his characters’ mental states. Pawlikowski mines postwar architecture for a pathetic fallacy. His wanderers seem to exist in a molecular relationship with their vacated milieus, which are an extension of their inner lives—a broken world housing broken drifters. This is why all the vertical headroom in Fatherland is no formal gimmick, and why the two questions—the exact location of Mann’s heimat, and the vertiginous size of the locales he roams while searching for it—are intimately connected.

The first person to grace the screen in Fatherland only appears in the opening scene, but his absence haunts the film. On May 21, 1949, early into Mann’s cross-country tour, his son Klaus died from an overdose of sleeping pills while in Cannes. A fellow writer, Klaus was best known for the formidable Mephisto, a scathing, fictional portrait of an actor clawing his way to stardom in Nazi Germany whom authorities deemed too similar to real-life thespian Gustaf Gründgens and banned over a libel dispute. While doctors couldn’t quite agree on whether his death was an accident or a suicide, Pawlikowski’s script irons out all ambiguities. Naked and disheveled, crouched at the foot of his bed in a sombrous hotel room, Klaus (August Diehl) looks and sounds like he’s long lost his will to live. “I can’t remember the last time I felt something,” he murmurs, funereally, to his sister listening in from the family’s California home. But he misses her dearly, and though Diehl and Hüller never share a frame, the distance only makes their bond more vivid and tangible. Erika invites her brother to join their tour; when he doesn’t show up in Frankfurt and news of his passing reaches her, it’s as if all the loneliness the film had surreptitiously accrued until then could finally detonate. Fatherland grows gloomier, the gulf between father and daughter wider. She’s devastated by the loss; he’s so insulted by it that he’d rather travel East to pick up another accolade than attend his own son’s funeral. Neither can muster the right words to process that trauma. “Let us love what is alive and mourn what is dead, but leave it behind us,” says a quote by Goethe that’s particularly dear to Mann; you could read Fatherland as a story about two people trying to live by that maxim, to no avail.

Klaus might be dead, but traces of him still litter the road trip. He’s in Bach’s cantatas—the only music, says Erika, that “almost made him believe in God”—and he’s in the crowds listening in rapt silence to Mann’s speeches about Goethe, love, Germany, the future. Early on, Erika has a vision of her brother looking at her during one such lecture from a gallery on the other side of the theater; when she returns to the venue after everyone’s left, the stalls are vacant, but a high-angle shot makes the entire auditorium look like a whale’s skeleton stranded on a beach, the rows a gigantic ribcage glistening under the sun. Here, as in other moments in which Erika stands as a tiny silhouette in Pawlikowski’s frames, the film’s form suits the story and the emotional void at its center—to borrow from Herzog, these are all “landscapes of the soul.” It’s a beautiful, unfading image, and Fatherland teems with similarly striking compositions. But the source of its arresting power resides in their gradual erosion. Fatherland is more glacial and austere than Cold War. Gone is the jazzy exuberance that billowed from that self-destructive romance; there are no intoxicating dance scenes, and no sinuous camera movements. Only once does Żal forsake the tripod to trail after Erika as she ditches one of her father’s public appearances to seek solace in the shadowy chasm of a nearby garden; only once does she raise her voice at him: “a cold-blooded narcissist” hiding “in a great castle of words.”

Fatherland concerns a father and a daughter trying—and failing—to repress an unspeakable loss, and its aesthetic testifies to that same failure: it thrives on the dissonance between its immaculate, meticulously studied surfaces and all the pain that percolates into them. At 82 minutes, it might register as the work of a miniaturist stripping down his style to conjure something cold and compact, a tale shrouded in caliginous light, almost cool to the touch. But there’s a palpable electricity coursing through it, most of it radiating from the actress at the film’s center. Hüller’s Erika might project an impenetrable façade, but hard as she tries to maintain it, grief still works on her, threatening her composure in myriad tiny ways: a pursed lip, a slight arching of the eyebrows, a thumb nervously rubbing her palm. Hüller communicates tangles of emotion even in repose—that she can convey so much by doing so little is a measure of her genius, and her understated performance is a perfect fit for a work that makes restraint its operating principle.

There are no loud, declamatory scenes here, and Fatherland is all the more lacerating for all that withholding. When catharsis finally comes under the notes of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” the release feels contagious—it’s one of Pawlikowski’s most indelible sequences. As father and daughter sit among the ruins of an abandoned church and Klaus’s favorite music echoes from a battered organ, Fatherland wraps on a life-affirming note: a belief that what is no more is still around us, filling the air we breathe and all the empty space we traverse.

Possible Love
Dir. Lee Chang-dong, South Korea, Netflix

In the early 2010s, Lee Chang-dong set out to make a narrative film in response to the violent police crackdown on striking workers who fell victim to cruel corporate restructuring. (Although the director has not named the incident in interviews, the most likely inspiration would be the SsangYong Motors Strike of 2009.) He ultimately walked away from the project, concluding that it was not his place to tell this story, but the idea continued to haunt him. Then in 2022, Lee released his first short, Heartbeat, about a boy named Cheol who suspects his depressed mother (Jeon Do-yeon) is about to commit suicide and cuts school to save her. The source of her despondency, the short gradually reveals, has to do with her laid-off husband (Sul Kyung-gu), engaged in a sit-in protest on a tower crane. Lee initially believed the short was the best he could do with the material, but he changed his mind upon hearing his former student and now co-screenwriter Oh Jung-mi’s suggestion to juxtapose the couple’s story with that of a documentary filmmaker recording their plights. Together, they revisited the draft that Lee penned more than a decade ago and incorporated the documentarian’s strand to make the director’s ethical concerns part of the story.

The resulting effort, Possible Love (2026), is his most narratively ambitious film in scope since Peppermint Candy (1999) and a testament to Lee’s prolonged ethical deliberation both as an artist and the son of a utopian socialist father. Structurally, it is similar to A Single Spark (1995), which Lee wrote the screenplay for prior to his directorial debut in 1997, in juxtaposing labor struggle with creative pursuits. A Single Spark’s writer, working on a biography of Jeon Tae-il, the martyr of the Korean workers’ movement who self-immolated in protest of despicable working conditions at garment factories in 1970, is now replaced by documentarian Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) pointing her camera at Ho-seok (Sul), a dispirited laid-off welder scarred by the experience of a failed strike, and his more upbeat factory worker wife Mi-ok (Jeon). The three initially meet at a funeral for Ho-seok’s former colleague lost to suicide, where he objects to being captured by Ye-ji’s camera. With the consent of the union at Ho-seok’s old workplace, we learn, she is working on a documentary about corporate restructuring and labor. Observing Ho-seok’s erratic behavior and how his mere presence makes other attendees uncomfortable, she intuits that there is a compelling story to be told here.

Ye-ji begins by approaching the more amenable Mi-ok, who quickly opens up to the filmmaker about her and Ho-seok’s lives. Until the film’s climax, it is primarily through Mi-ok’s words and the brief news footage of police brutality unleashed on protesting workers that we piece together their respective class backgrounds, how they first met as teenagers in a rural town, and what transpired during and after the strike. For the first interview at a cafe, Mi-ok recounts her childhood memory of observing her mother washing cars for a living and being mesmerized by the light reflected off the water coming out of a hose. Ye-ji interrupts and asks her to repeat the same story on camera; the second time around, we “see” Mi-ok’s recollection. Similarly, when she shares an episode from her late teen years about a decisive moment in her relationship with Ho-seok in the third act, we only begin to see this memory once Ye-ji’s camera starts rolling. What may initially seem like flashbacks are actually the filmmaker’s imaginative reconstructions disguised as the subject's memories. This simple yet brilliant sequencing order foregrounds a pressing question that Ye-ji, married into wealth, has to reckon with: does she really understand these people or is she feigning it to ventriloquize her own desire through their stories?

Over the course of Possible Love, we see intriguing connections develop among Mi-ok, Ho-seok, Ye-ji, and her generationally affluent husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung). The latter, the most impenetrable of the quartet, conducts his business in English and is characterized as a generous patron of the arts by one of the production assistants. Mi-ok seems in equal measure alienated from and fascinated by the other couple’s casual display of wealth. She admires Ye-ji’s luxurious outfits but also advises the documentarian to dress more humbly while on set; when Sang-woo, while driving his Porsche, explains that independent filmmaking derives its name from its freedom from the influence of capital, all she can do is nod along in silence. Undercurrents of sexual tension begin to emerge between Mi-ok and the heir, all while Ho-seok slowly lowers his guard and agrees to go to therapy.

In the film’s second half, Ye-ji invites the working-class couple and their taciturn son, Cheol (Jung Seop), to spend their summer vacation with her and Sang-woo at their seaside villa. Although she presents the invitation as a no-strings-attached offer, Ho-seok sees through her and agrees to sit down for an interview on camera. On the way to the summer house, Sang-woo tells Ye-ji that he admires how she is “method acting” her way into the lives of the have-nots; she recoils and insists that she is genuinely trying to love her subjects. But that social barrier between the two families is made all the more concrete when they arrive at the vacation home. The house’s opulence aside, what really underscores the chasm between them is an old whistle that once belonged to Sang-woo’s grandfather who, it is insinuated, worked as an imperial police officer during the Japanese occupation of the peninsula. The heir explains that he used to blow it to summon his “friend,” an old gardener’s son who is now looking after the estate. This echoes with the fact that Ho-seok named his son Cheol, which means steel in Korean, because he works with metal. It is a sobering reminder that both poverty and prosperity are inherited in our capitalist world, and the villa itself is an architectural embodiment of structural inequality.

The steady accumulation of such potent narrative details and metaphors enriches the thematic layers of Possible Love, and is typical of Lee’s filmography, which is often characterized as novelistic and literary. What do we mean when we call a film “novelistic?” Outside of literary adaptations that remain faithful to their source material, the term is often paired with other nouns, such as scope, depth, and density, to describe a disparate group of works, from A Brighter Summer Day and Happy Hour to Rosetta and Manchester by the Sea. Whether it’s applied to an intimate character study or a film with a sprawling narrative, our use of the word seems broadly in line with György Lukács’s observation that the novel is an attempt to overcome our modern world where the divine is no longer imminent to us and to strive toward the totality of individual life and history.

In the case of Lee, the adjectives “novelistic” and “literary” have been both blessing and curse. Of the elegant narrative construction and deep exploration of fundamental questions concerning human nature found in his films, Lee’s champions tend to chalk them up to his storied past as a novelist. His skeptics, on the other hand, derisively deploy those words to devalue the director as a formalist while still acknowledging his storytelling talent. Although some may protest characterizing his films this way at all, it is undeniable that Lee’s filmography demonstrates his persistent interest in literature. Secret Sunshine (2007) is adapted from a masterwork by Yi Cheong-jun, one of South Korea’s most celebrated novelists. Lee describes Burning (2018), a loose adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s “Barn Burning,” as “the tale of a young Faulkner lost in Murakami’s world.” Even his most genre-inflected work, Green Fish (1997), contains a sequence lifted directly from Han Chang-hoon’s short story “Today’s Fortune.” Furthermore, A Single Spark and Poetry (2010) concern the act of literary creation, and many of the subjects, themes, and motifs Lee often deals with in his fiction carry over to his moving image works: the lives of ordinary people swept up in tumultuous historical moments, the treatment of ideology and history as hereditary matters, and the frequent use of fire as a symbol of cleansing and liberation.

Lee was part of the literary generation that firmly believed in the transformative power of letters and tried to live by Jean-Paul Sartre’s assertion that “literature is, in essence, the subjectivity of a society in permanent revolution.” Despite the unrelenting state violence and surveillance in the name of anti-communism and “social cleansing” under Chun Doo-hwan’s military junta, campus activism persevered and laid the foundation for the June Democratic Struggle of 1987, which marked the beginning of democratization in South Korea. Lee and other writers associated with division literature (a Korean tradition that reckons with the division of the peninsula and the stifling effects of Cold War politics on its people) and committed literature amplified the brave voices of those engaged in non-institutionalized politics. But once the military regime responsible for the Gwangju massacre of 1980, which drove the director to become a writer in the first place, was toppled and the student movement came to a screeching halt in 1991 with serial self-immolations in protest of the conservative government that succeeded Chun’s reign, Korean literature changed course. Choe Yeongmi’s 1994 poem, “At Thirty, the Party is Over,” about living in the ruins of unactualized political dreams, is a compelling snapshot of defeatism hovering over the literary scene at the time.

The decline of the Sartrean conception of literature in Korea was especially shocking to Japanese philosopher and literary critic Kojin Karatani. Citing Korea’s more robust student activism and labor organizing, Karatani held out hope that literature of this kind would continue to thrive in the country, unlike its Japanese counterpart, which, he argues, started to wane with the meteoric ascendancy of Haruki Murakami in the late ’80s and ended with the death of Kenji Nakagami in 1992. For him, Murakami commenced an age of novels as “commodities,” eclipsing literary luminaries like Nakagami and Kenzaburo Ōe, who instrumentalized literature as a force for political projects that existed outside the sphere of electoral politics. But Karatani was still right in that labor movements in Korea persisted throughout the ’90s and into the early aughts, and Lee left behind lettered life and picked up the camera right as the New Korean Cinema bloomed and independent film collectives such as Labor News Production and Jangsangotmae emerged as alternative platforms for workers’ struggles. Filmmaking, for him, was the continuation of literature by other means.

If we can indeed call Possible Love “novelistic,” it is foremost because Lee strives to tap into the Satrean spirit of literature by returning to the issues of labor. Unlike A Single Spark, however, Lee’s latest is less interested in telling a convincingly fictionalized account of the SsangYong Motors Strike and its aftermath than in constructing a network of competing symbolic representations uncovering certain historical and social conditions that haunt it. The summer house built by Sang-woo’s grandfather exposes the inseparable tie between the accumulation of wealth and Korea’s colonial history; the laid-off workers still fear being branded as “commies” by the society that has yet to recover from the logic of the Cold War; Mi-ok’s experience as a seamstress at a garment factory is a marginal improvement on the conditions that Jeon Tae-il protested in 1970. Through its sweeping scope, Possible Love trades the granular analysis of the particulars for a lucid picture of history as a repetitive structure that governs life under capitalism.

But in the film’s final 30 minutes, Sang-woo’s summer home and its adjacent private beach enter as a place where personal histories and desires briefly take precedence over economic and historical conditionings. Ho-seok, finally agreeing to be on camera, shares his trauma and the immense sense of betrayal he feels toward his ex-colleagues who left him in the brutal hands of the riot police; Ye-ji, in turn, gets the footage she has long wanted but is now tormented with the burden of ethical responsibility that comes with bearing witness to the suffering of others. On the beach, the sexual tension that has gradually risen between Mi-ok and Sang-woo culminates in a moment of skinny-dipping in the waters of his own private beach. She temporarily experiences the kind of freedom afforded only to those who own a piece of nature as personal property, while the erotic tension is ultimately thwarted and sublimated in a mock bullfight that ensues between the two. In this fleeting moment of Bakhtinian carnival, the hierarchy turns unstable, and some semblance of social equilibrium takes hold. But alas, reality returns with vengeance, and neither the documentary project nor the interpersonal relationships survive the violent crash of uninhibited desires.

Possible Love concludes with the less privileged couple back home, marveling at the full moon. Earlier in the film, Mi-ok and Ye-ji exchanged memorable episodes from their lives revolving around the celestial body, seemingly experienced around the same time in different parts of the world. While on a romantic date in Wolmido in their youth, Ho-seok told Mi-ok that what his heart contains was just like the moon that they were looking at. Ye-ji, studying in Chicago at the time, worked overtime one night and had to walk back to her dorm with the guidance of the moonlight. They were surely gazing at the same object, but it’s debatable if they really saw the moon the other was beholding. According to one Japanese literary myth, Natsume Sōseki chastised one of his students for translating the English phrase “I love you” into the mother tongue as “aishiteru,” for no Japanese person of that era would say such a thing. Instead, he proposed that “tsuki ga kirei desu ne” (“the moon is beautiful, isn’t it?”) would be a more worthy translation. The moon’s symbolic association with literary translation is significant when considering that in the film, Mi-ok and Ho-seok speak in naturalistic vernaculars whereas their wealthy counterparts’ spoken words almost always sound stilted. Can the language of love be translated from one class to the other? Lee is unsure, but he does not shun that possibility—on Mi-ok’s phone screen, we see a picture of the moon in a message box waiting to be sent.

New York Film Festival 2026:
The Only Living Pickpocket in New York
Dir. Noah Segan, U.S., Sony Pictures Classics

Pickpocketing in New York today has got to be a crapshoot. On the one (speedy) hand, there is more wealth than ever; more one-percenters idling in Patagonia puffers, more Fendi-fettered undergrads glued to their phones. On the other, affluence less often takes the form of fresh greenbacks or a gilded object worth swiping. Back pockets seldom bulge with cash, fat wallets are swapped for Apple Pay.

In an age when billionaires fuel political decisions and class inequality has hit its highest in thirty years, the prospect of snatching a few bucks from a real live human feels almost quaint, a relic of a simpler time. Openly nostalgic, Noah Segan’s sophomore feature, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, is deeply indebted to such mythos—when the prospect of upward mobility excused flouting the law and grit was its own social capital.

With the urgent pace of a Safdie production sans the graphic violence, Pickpocket jolts forward like a rusting express train. Harry (John Turturro), a professional thief and aging luddite, has a Thomas Jefferson at the ready for anyone with a nickel of influence. For reasons unknown, his wife, Rosie (Karina Arroyave), is in a nearly vegetative state, requiring 24-hour care. Early on, Harry filches a gym bag from the muscle car of a sneering young man named Dylan (Will Price); what he finds inside sets off a chain of events that even a seasoned criminal can’t weather alone.

When pawnbroker pal Ben (Steve Buscemi) assesses Harry’s stash, he plugs the stolen USB key into an ancient desktop computer, cluing Dylan—who is (surprise!) part of a high-ranking crime family—to the location of the loot, much of which was passed along to a Chinese druggist in another part of town. Confronted by Dylan’s Gen Z posse at his flat in the Bronx, Harry has to retrieve the USB in a number of hours; if he doesn’t get it back in time, Rosie’s fragile life is in the mafia’s hands.

The strength of Pickpocket lies in its ability to pay homage to Harry’s New York. Shot entirely on location, the film’s cinematography jives with the city rhythms. The camera tracks Harry darting down sidewalks, jaywalking across traffic, jumping from borough to borough like his life depends on it (as it does). An energetic jazz score accompanies his quest, another nod to ’70s New York that puts Harry’s present-day exploits in the league of canonical antiheroes. At times, the extent to which the movie insists on its protagonist’s inner virtue distracts from the film’s power. Harry needs a reason to risk all to retrieve the lost USB, but pinning it all on Rosie feels farfetched—as does the likelihood that, after abandoning his first family, Harry would devote himself to tending to a woman who cannot talk back (though, to be fair, many men still prefer that). Rosie registers less like a character, and more a narrative device to render Harry more sympathetic than he needs to be. No matter what role he plays, Turturro is always likable. Does Harry really need a mute wife for viewers to root for him? It’s more exciting—and, arguably, more relatable—to take his side when he doesn’t have any objective beyond his own day-to-day grind.

Similarly, some of the characters in Harry’s network seem less like persuasively contemporary humans than a conglomeration of stock traits. Sure, pawnshops can seem frozen in amber, but a business owner like Ben would probably boast at least a dated laptop. So, too, is a Chinese grandmother running a vape shop (Lori Tan Chinn, best known for her comedic role in Orange Is the New Black) presented as risibly tyrannical. Even Harry going without a cellphone feels like a rich person’s romantic idea of how a sketchy working-class guy might live; low-income folks are much more likely to rely on their phones on account of lacking broadband internet at home.

At its worst, Pickpocket caricatures the present by conflating it with a past more imagined than real. But at its best, Pickpocket reveals the intricate moral calculus required among the most economically marginalized to survive. The film also acknowledges the small ways in which New Yorkers take care of each other when they really don’t have to, from the neighbor across the hall who regularly checks on Rosie to the wily panhandler willing to do Harry a solid (if for the right price). The transactional nature of these exchanges doesn’t expose the city’s mercenary nature so much as reveal how often, in real life, people who help other people out expect nothing in return. When Harry heads to his estranged daughter’s place in Queens, he asks a local to borrow their phone. In a Yankees cap and androgynous attire, the person hands over their smartphone and seems nonplussed by the drama of the conversation that ensues. The person’s generosity and patience enable Harry to check on Rosie and ultimately ensure her well-being. It’s a small moment, with no cash incentive, and it speaks for what so many continue to love about New York.

“Even if you’re alone, you don’t have to be lonely,” Harry tells a young man he spots lifting wallets in a subway car—after whispering a few pointers on how to steal more effectively. It’s a passing of the proverbial torch, and one that implicitly suggests that this young Black man faces the same challenges that Harry does. While such an assumption is unfounded, their brief solidarity represents something bigger that feels very true—no matter what decade you’re hustling in.

Once Upon a Time in Harlem
Dir. William Greaves and David Greaves, U.S., NEON

In spring 2024, the Metropolitan Museum of Art curated an exhibition dedicated to the Harlem Renaissance, bringing artworks on loan from historically Black institutions around the country into its cavernous halls, amounting to what was the largest exhibition of its kind in 40 years. I hurried uptown to see it. Titled “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” it featured the photography of James Van Der Zee, work by sculptor Augusta Savage, Jacob Lawrence’s paintings, and much more. After winding through the rooms and reaching the end of the exhibition, I was awed by Romare Bearden’s monumental six-panel collage “The Block” (1971). I first heard some of these names in grade school, during a short lesson on this landmark period in Black visual art, music, and literature. I don’t remember what I felt about these artists back then, beyond a hazy personal pride. Seeing the exhibition at the age of 30, the works stirred deeper, murkier feelings in me, while also transporting me right back to that childlike wonder. There was a certain romance about it, too, and not only because I was at the museum on a promising date. I saw myself reflected in these works, especially Samuel Joseph Brown Jr.’s “Self Portrait” (1941), a deep-blue watercolor of Brown gazing into a mirror. Looking at this painting, I wondered about the artist’s interiority. What did he see when he looked in the mirror? How did he comprehend his place in the world around him?

Once Upon a Time in Harlem brought me as close to answering those questions about the minds behind the Harlem Renaissance as one can possibly get to a movement that happened a century ago. The documentary emerges from the vision of late experimental and nonfiction filmmaker William Greaves (Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One) and the cumulative effort of his family to shepherd his footage to screens after his death in 2014. Greaves had the idea to gather the living luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance to discuss and debate the legacy of the movement. In 1972, he threw and filmed a party at the home of legendary jazz musician Duke Ellington, with about two dozen of these important figures in attendance. Greaves was motivated by a desire to document the significance of an explosive intellectual boom that he felt had been underestimated. If the Met’s highly controversial 1969 exhibition “Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America 1900–1968,” which famously didn’t include any paintings or sculptures by Black artists, was any indication, Greaves was right to be concerned about the possibility of erasure. Embarking on this project, then, rhymed with the vision of the time Greaves was reflecting on, a vision of Black thinkers, writers, artists, and musicians, to ignore white society’s weak interpretations and embrace the social responsibility and creative opportunity as the true shapers, storytellers, and historians of modern Black life.

The film opens with the party’s invitation, typed out on letterhead, and then we arrive at the fete in Ellington’s high-ceilinged townhouse on Nicholas Ave. as the guests do. The camera, manned by a crew of four, including Greaves’s son David, moves through the rooms somewhat passively, as an observer, though sometimes directly engaging with its subjects. When the camera stops on someone recognizable, like the heavyset, dark-skinned Van Der Zee, captured earlier at the piano in the opening sequence, the feeling is surreal, as if walking around inside one of his famous black-and-white portraits. The film is alive with historical figures who have long passed on. The specter of death doesn’t hang over the movie so much as suffuse it with a sense of urgency. Names of those who had already died by the time this was shot, like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Countee Cullen, are invoked and rhapsodized about, ensuring that their contributions wouldn’t be diminished, reflecting the seriousness with which the partygoers took Greaves’s mission to develop an oral history in real time.

So, what exactly do we mean when we talk about The Harlem Renaissance? It’s a fair question, considering that the term captures an idea more than represents what was happening in a literal sense; it only became known as the Harlem Renaissance after it was over. What it is, though, is an interdisciplinary creative movement spanning the 1920s to 1940s, in which Black modern art began to take shape. At the time, it was called the New Negro movement, coined by the writer and philosopher Alain Locke, who alongside W. E. B. Dubois was one of the most influential thinkers of the period. In 1925, Locke published the anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation, and in the title essay he wrote of a burgeoning “spiritual emancipation” occurring under the noses of those driving the conversations surrounding racial progress, as the Great Migration brought Black people from the South into cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City, creating Black neighborhoods and cultural centers like Harlem. This “New Negro,” as Locke put it, was no longer creating art with the burden of kowtowing to racial stereotypes or even refuting them. The modern Black artist was determined to find and define himself, as in Brown’s “Self Portrait” painting, which has been described as a reflection of Dubois’s theory of double consciousness, or the idea that undergirding Black consciousness is a maddening collision of the perception of self with the ever-present awareness of the white gaze. Something expansive was waking up in Black people, Locke argued, and the evidence was in the art being made at the time.

Greaves’s documentary might be richer for an audience coming to the film with a few of these historical details already in tow. For example, I am kind of stunned, in retrospect, at the presence of conservative Black journalist George Schuyler—who sat cooly on the couch during the party as much of the conversation flew around him—once I went home and read his 1926 essay “The Negro-Art Hokum,” wherein he challenges the entire concept of Black art. In his view, African Americans can only produce European-influenced American art, and there are no distinguishing characteristics of Black art that can’t be explained away by regional conditions and historical circumstances. “Any group under similar circumstances would have produced something similar,” he wrote. At the party, Schuyler dismisses Langston Hughes’s rebuttal, “The Racial Mountain.” Using the example of a Black poet who yearns to be described as simply a “poet,” Hughes argued that perspectives like Schuyler’s, which seek to undermine the existence of a Black experience, conceal a bleaker truth: an implicit desire to be white.

One could imagine that at a party among his contemporaries, artists whose very careers proved Schuyler wrong, there’d be some gloating or simmering resentment, but if there was, it doesn’t appear in the film. After learning of that potent debate between Schuyler and Hughes, I wished it had been addressed more directly in the doc, which is to say that one limiting product of Greaves’s fly-on-the-wall conceit is that context is at times absent where it would have enriched understanding. Relatedly, after I later learned that the painter Richard Bruce Nugent, a big personality in a red turtleneck who leaps off the screen, was one of the few openly gay artists of the Renaissance, his presence at the party carried even more meaning. His queerness doesn’t come up in the film, though, nor does the important queer history of the period (Locke himself was gay). In that way, the artists and thinkers represented, seemingly closer than ever, still remain at a remove. In trying to wrap their arms around an entire era, the filmmakers occasionally sublimate individual histories and experiences.

There’s a convivial home video-like quality to the film, but the visuals themselves are purely cinematic. Shot on color 16mm and seemingly layered with a warm sepia filter, the film is made even more beautiful by the elegant threads of the ’70s, cast against a backdrop of exquisite interior architecture and design afforded by Ellington’s home. Her face framed by her spiky grey hair, Ida Mae Cullen, widow of the poet Countee Cullen and one of the most energetic speakers, wore a silver bracelet with spikes and a kente cloth across her body. Magazine editor Gerri Major wore both pearls and gold around her neck, and bracelets up to her elbows, bulbous rocks on her fingers. The men wore impeccably tailored suits with ties of polka dots, stripes, and paisley. The actor Leigh Whipper, in his late nineties, treated by the group with a reverence befitting his status as an elder, wore an overly baggy light brown suit with drooping lapels and a long cowboy bowtie. They sat and stood in a collegiate-looking sitting room with teal velvet drapes and certificates crawling up the wall, surrounding a dark mahogany mantel. Arguing, shouting, talking over one another, clutching cocktails that threatened to spill over, they discussed and debated the impact of the Harlem Renaissance, returning again and again to the relationship of art development and political struggle, as if orbiting around the topic might pull them closer to a definitive truth hovering just out of reach, something they might all agree on.

Greaves invited some of the guests to return to the house the next day, wearing the same clothing, and conducted one-on-one interviews. These are edited into the flow of the film, along with photography stills often deployed with split-screens. Greaves sat on this footage for a long time, returning to it over the course of his life. After his death, his wife and creative partner, Louise, revived the project, securing restoration funding from the Ford Foundation, and bringing in editor and producer Anne de Mare and archival producer Matt Hoffman. Louise died in 2023, at which point she passed the torch down to their granddaughter, Liani, to be the custodian of the post-production process. In the end, the final product of the film was just as much about remembering the Renaissance as it was about remembering Greaves, a beloved husband, father, and grandfather—a labor of love in the truest sense.

The film ends when the party does, as guests file out of the door and spill onto the street, the camera following them a short way, before cutting to shots of children around the neighborhood, on their stoops or walking down the sidewalk. It’s these children Greaves had in mind when setting out to make this film—not only as the future of Harlem but also as the recipients of history. In these final images, I was reminded of my own childhood encounter with these luminaries, whom I found hard to imagine as real embodied people, inspiring though their accomplishments were. I also thought, of course, of my day at the museum, two years ago, seeing their art production in full relief for the first time. Now this film has put living, vibrant faces and humanity to the venerated names, keeping their legacy alive and offering a new generation an opportunity to connect with a time that deserves to be endlessly reckoned with.

Fjord
Dir. Cristian Mungiu, Romania/France/Norway/Denmark/Finland/Sweden, NEON

As a woman is coolly told that her five children are to be removed from their home and placed in state custody, the viewer’s eye wanders, as intended, to the windblown Norwegian flag hanging prominently outside the living room window. This clumsy, hectoring image is emblematic of Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, a dour dramatization of a real-life incident from the mid-2010s in which the Bodnarius, an Evangelical Christian family of mixed nationality, were torn apart by allegations of child abuse upon moving from Romania to a hamlet in the mother’s native Norway. A court case ensued, during which representatives of the Barnevernet, the controversial public agency that oversees child welfare, claimed that there was a pattern of abuse in the family; the Bodnarius insisted that they were being persecuted on religious grounds.

Mungiu’s second Palme d’Or–winning feature transforms this clan into the Gheorghius, led by Sebastian Stan’s bald and brooding Mihai and Renate Reinsve’s demure and bespectacled Lisbet, recently relocated to a placid, snowcapped village to be closer to the latter’s parents. They preside over progeny who shun new technology and popular media in favor of daily prayer and religious education. When two teachers at their new school notice a bruise creeping from cheek to shoulder on the Gheorghius’ eldest daughter Elia (Vanessa Ceban) and contact the authorities, the family’s children—including an infant son—are removed from the home and placed in foster care within days. Over the course of the film, the couple’s disciplinary methods and general parenting come under intense scrutiny. Are the slaps on the hand and rear that the Gheorghius abashedly admit to meting out to their children examples of harmless reproof or antiquated abuse? We are made to speculate whether Elia’s contusion came as punishment from Lisbet for an instance of roughhousing that nearly resulted in calamity; the precise nature of Reinsve’s physical reaction is carefully blocked out of the frame. Or perhaps the mark came from the exceedingly aggressive wrestling exercises that transpire in the girl’s gym classes, which we repeatedly witness. Mungiu desperately tips his hand with these vaporous choices, ensuring that the question of abuse is never so much an enigma as a blatant misunderstanding.

Jammed with minor characters and patchily connected incidents, Fjord induces a state of vague bewilderment that never entirely subsides. This shoddiness comes as a shock since Mungiu, a former journalist-turned-torchbearer of the New Romanian Cinema movement of the 2000s, has created some of this century’s toughest-minded and most transfixing socially engaged dramas, tackling hot-button issues such as abortion, xenophobia, and religious hysteria with a shiver-inducing sense of moral responsibility and a deceptively fluid directorial approach. It can be tempting to generalize his eye as artlessly clinical or his narratives as unequivocally straightforward for the sake of critical expediency, but there is always a caveat to these neat, totalizing descriptors. His previous film, the underrated R.M.N., memorably culminated in a mystifying, form-shredding sequence that recast its forthright portrayal of a small Transylvanian town divided by the presence of Sri Lankan migrants.

But Mungiu’s latest effort, his first made outside his native Romania, is a resounding misjudgment, one that unfolds with the subtlety of the avalanche that portentously plummets down a mountainside not once but twice in the film. It is challenging to disentangle Fjord itself from the critical debate that it has stirred since its Cannes debut, with its defenders alleging that critics betray their own biases by refusing to sympathize with the plight of religious conservatives or admit that left-leaning governments are as capable of discriminatory overreach as their right-wing counterparts. The loudest defenders have tended to be its makers, particularly Mungiu, who has decried the so-called “violence” of certain critics. He has maintained that his film has been misunderstood by bad-faith actors so beholden to political correctness that they are unwilling to engage with viewpoints other than their own and thus incapable of appreciating a film that is nothing but a “plea against all forms of fundamentalism.” At this year’s New York Film Festival, Stan warned audiences who run the risk of disliking the movie that they “have to remember that there’s more […] than just simply being right, and that doubt still serves a purpose and nuance is inherent to who we are.” But Fjord is not a disappointment for refusing to clarify its political allegiances; it is a disappointment because it is a limp and unconvincing oversimplification of a complex subject, a 146-minute finger-wagging that lacks the courage of its ostensible convictions.

Mungiu asserts that he has made an essentially ambiguous film, which the New York Times has characterized with predictable pomposity as an act of courage in our literal-minded age. In truth, he has stacked the deck overwhelmingly in favor of the family at its center. From Ellen Dorrit Petersen’s icily tactless social worker to Christian Rubeck’s glowering, self-satisfied prosecutor, the Norwegian antagonists are not so much characters as hastily assembled strawmen for a kind of fascistic progressivism that gladly infringes upon the rights of Mihai and Lisbet. Mungiu bifurcates the couple’s experiences in the aftermath of the family’s separation, blithely acknowledging Mihai’s embrace of the religious far-right in a handful of cursory scenes. We spend far too much time in the safe zone of Lisbet’s benevolent relations with a neighboring family, one of whose members, Mia (Lisa Carlehed), conveniently agrees to represent the couple in court. (It is a boon to the film that Carlehed is by far the ensemble’s most persuasive performer since she is also the one burdened with Mungiu’s fussiest speechifying.) In spite of Mihai, Mia forms a genuine bond with Lisbet; it is to Mungiu and Stan’s credit that they refuse to soften this patriarch’s repellent chauvinism.

Glancing, secondhand mention is made of Mihai’s homophobia via the one-man/one-woman definition of marriage that one of the children is alleged to have brought up in class. But ultimately Mungiu doesn’t care to interrogate or delineate these beliefs, lest it detract from his ardent defense of religious freedom, one predicated on a case of persecution so slanted as to render the opposition cartoonish from the start. Mungiu’s humanist impulses fail him here, as do, more troublingly, his directorial facilities. He has excelled at long takes of unbearable length in which sustained conversations between his characters reveal tensions that come to feel downright tangible, as if suspended in the increasingly stifling air they inhabit. These dialogues occur in Fjord but they are depicted with a bloodless competence that reduces Mungiu’s style to vapid self-parody.

There is more stomach-turning strain in the pauses that puncture the prosaic encounters of Mungiu’s totemic 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days than in any of Fjord’s leaden English-language scenes, particularly among the adolescent performers who flounder under Mungiu’s inability to credibly conjure their generation’s voices. There is a richer sense of history in the relatively brief quarrels between Graduation’s duplicitous doctor and his betrayed wife and conspiratorial mistress than in the solemn, edgeless anonymity of Stan and Reinsve’s interactions, their characters’ marriage emerging as the film’s most undernourished relationship. (It is especially strange that there is not a whiff of shared experience between these characters when one considers that this is Stan and Reinsve’s second time acting together, after Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man.)

Just as Mungiu’s and Stan’s rebuttals to the press suggest artists intent on dictating the terms of their work’s interpretation, these narrative choices bespeak a filmmaker unwilling to trust his viewers to arrive at their own conclusions. Artists across mediums love to implore audiences not to place them on pedestals, but the defensiveness of Fjord’s makers clarifies that plenty of artists are quite pleased to talk down to us from these perches, to be regarded as emissaries of elevated consciousness. They are gratified to collect Palme d’Ors from international juries keen to cosign the idea of tolerance, content to bask in the commendation for their “passionate interest in society,” as one NYFF programmer summed up the thematic thrust of Mungiu’s career. Such platitudes befit Fjord, a film that makes an aggressive posture rather than a rigorous practice of achieving nuance.

Mungiu ends the film on a risible bid for pathos in which a dash of magical realism converts the character of Noora (Henrikke Lund Olsen), a wayward girl next door straight out of Degrassi: The Next Generation, into the family’s keenest disciple. Here, too, is a failure of dramatic vision but also of artistic nerve, a misplacement of the principle that has guided the most questioning and haunting of Mungiu’s works. This principle is not ambiguity per se, but the gut-level recognition that we are made to spend our lives tiptoeing across the constantly moving line that separates right from wrong. The only line that Mungiu cares to draw in Fjord is the one separating Us from Them.

You Can See Everything
Dir. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, U.S., A24

In her 1960 essay “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality,” Maya Deren argued for the very concept of realism in film as an “absurd redundancy.” Sixty-six years later, we’re still trying to deny this absurdity. One can understand why Deren, whose films so radically denied any adherence to verisimilitude in favor of pure psychological nonmateriality, would believe that, at the tail end of the 1950s—with its preponderance of serious-minded middle-brow stage adaptations starring method-trained actors plumbing the depths of their lived experience—“the invasion of the motion-picture medium by modern playwrights and actors introduced the concept of realism” and that this has “served merely to deprive the motion-picture medium of its creative dimension.” Furthermore, according to the filmmaker and scholar, “As a reality, the photographic image confronts us with the innocent arrogance of an objective fact,” and this image “exercises an authority comparable in weight only to the authority of reality itself.” She continues, “It is upon this authority that the entire school of the social documentary film is based.”

One might argue that Deren’s words carry less weight in our moment, when the documentary has taken many disparate forms and can hardly be categorized as a phenomenon with a single-minded social function. But from the heights of prestige nonfiction to the corners of hybrid experiments to the documentary’s more disreputable passageways, such skepticism remains central. The question of what is real—and therefore what, and who, is to be trusted—forms the gut of Nathan Fielder’s works, most of which have been documentary in basic form, and completely, insistently untrustworthy as such.

The Canadian writer-director-performer’s Nathan for You, which ran on Comedy Central from 2013 to 2018, was what we call a “reality series,” which of course has come to mean and be widely understood as a series with very little basis in reality. The show gave Fielder the chance to flaunt both his Bachelor of Commerce business degree and his singularly unsettling screen presence, alleging to assist actual small-business owners in revamping their struggling companies with bizarre and frequently beyond-the-pale marketing schemes. Making his own performative maladaptation the center of the joke, Fielder was not only satirizing the anything-for-a-buck competition at the heart of capitalist “strategic thinking”—and those who might submit to its worst tendencies in front of a camera—but also his own authority and untrustworthiness.

The first episode of the second season centralizes the question of honesty, as Fielder partners with car mechanic Greg Boodaghian, whose profession is frequently stereotyped as the province of liars. Fielder pitches the idea that Boodaghian hook himself up to a polygraph machine for his customers, proving he’s telling the truth about his prices, and thereby touting himself as the only honest mechanic in town. (Boodaghian semi-failed Fielder’s earlier honesty test when he claimed to sort of like a batch of terrible cookies Fielder had baked.) Such well-laid plans derail when Fielder submits to a polygraph himself, denying to multiple exam givers that he watches internet pornography and blaming old Windows operating systems for the needle going haywire. The segment climaxes with Fielder asking Boodaghian if he would want to hang out socially; the honest mechanic says no.

The human capacity and tendency for lying, along with the social fascination and anxiety it breeds, continue to be central concerns of Fielder’s work. His HBO series The Rehearsal, a remarkable and riotous fantasia of neurotic self-incrimination, is initiated by the fear of being caught in a lie. In the pilot episode, Brooklyn bar trivia guy Kor Skeet tells Fielder that he lied to his teammates that he had an advanced degree and is nervous to tell the truth, fearing their disappointment and ostracization. So, Fielder will help Skeet deal with his apprehensions by building a perfect simulacrum of his local bar, where he can rehearse coming clean and thus practice for—and try to cut off at the head—any contingencies and emotional difficulties he might face. (During a practice run, paid actors playing bar patrons overhear Skeet confessing his lie and murmur in earshot, “This guy is such a fraud.”)

No matter how many simulations you construct, of course, or how many flow charts and decision trees you design to avoid pitfalls and skirt misunderstandings, you can’t really alter the unknown path. The self-defeating convolutions inherent in trying to control reality become a central point of The Rehearsal. Fielder loses sight of himself—as we all do—in the hall of mirrors. As in Nathan for You, his rarefied, obsessive-compulsive methods and pronounced social awkwardness always end up thwarting his attempts—or, rather, those of his character, Nathan Fielder, we think—to make friends and get his own fears and phobias in order. Whether Fielder is to be trusted—by the guests who have agreed to appear on his “reality series” or by us as the viewers who might wonder who this guy really is—has long been his work’s implicit side premise.

*****

You Can See Everything, which Fielder has been constructing in secret for the past three years with co-director Lance Oppenheim, extends his concerns into even more richly ontological territory, building upon Fielder’s interventions on televisual reality and evoking Maya Deren’s exquisite suspicion about the possibility of cinematic realism at all. Fielder and Oppenheim complicate their endeavor by making what might appear to be Fielder’s most straightforward “documentary” yet. Philosophical and thematic resemblances to Fielder’s previous work aside, the film isn’t comically tricked-out; the faux-maudlin music cues and self-conscious “teaching moments” of his television series, which satirized the format of reality TV, are entirely missing, and there is more intimacy and restraint here, as well as a reliance on extended scenes and camera takes. This is in keeping with the work of Oppenheim, whose nonfiction films have seemed to question the notion of the “observational” documentary as they follow people on society’s margins, whether unregulated sperm donors, retirement community denizens, or Renaissance faire re-enactors. However, this time, Oppenheim and Fielder are not setting their sights on unknown, everyday folks who aren’t well-versed in how to behave or position themselves in front of a camera.

Because of her notoriety—and because she has already been the subject of documentaries, news program episodes, fictionalized series, and podcasts—Elizabeth Holmes may seem like a surprising choice of subject for these filmmakers, but she fits squarely, even epically, in the Fielder mold. Business fraud was an underlying theme to much of Nathan for You, as Fielder’s suggestions and schemes often flirted with illegality, intentionally putting himself in harm’s way and others in the role of the mark. A scammer on a considerably vaster scale, Holmes is primarily known for inventing Theranos, a supposed miracle medical technology that would allow consumers to home-diagnose a variety of medical ailments with just one drop of blood. The fanciful device was a pipe dream, yet Holmes’s Silicon Valley startup, founded in 2003 when she was just 19 years old and run with partner and company president Sunny Balwani, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors, resulting in one of the most widespread instances of defraudation in modern history. Years of allegations, investigations, and lawsuits resulted in Holmes’s net worth dropping from an estimated $4.5 billion to practically zero. In 2022, she was convicted of fraud and sentenced to eleven years in a federal prison camp.

You Can See Everything begins in early 2023, 34 days before Holmes’s prison sentence will commence. Unlike other reportage-heavy, animation-laden, faux-ruminative documentaries that have been made about her, Fielder and Oppenheim’s film avoids explicitly sensationalistic broadsides and images, favoring an approach we might still term “vérité” until a better one comes along. The filmmakers burrowed in at home with Holmes and Billy Evans, her unsettlingly loyal partner and the father of her two children, with Fielder appearing on-screen as interlocutor and conduit to Holmes and Evans. More than in his past projects, he is also a sort of audience surrogate: like Fielder, we’re scrutinizing the scene, analyzing and interpreting her cadences, mannerisms, and wide eyes (soulful, pleading, or frozen?) for signs of distortion or chicanery. Holmes, unflaggingly cheer-led by Evans, insists she never lied about Theranos, never knowingly defrauded anyone, and that her intentions were always pure; she goes so far as to refuse to admit that she has ever lied, and that her most consistent core quality is her honesty. “I’m always being real,” she maintains. Fielder occasionally pokes and prods with incredulity, but, throughout the first half of the film, set within the confines of Holmes’s gloomy beachside house, he mostly inhabits the role of intrusive, needling pal.

Fielder’s presence also becomes rather curious: what exactly is he doing here? Is he lying to Holmes and Evans to get closer to them? What does he want out of this situation? A confession of guilt? If not, then is it something more personal? Equally vexing and central to the experience of the film is the question of why these two people, so obsessively preoccupied with how she’s perceived in the media and on screen, would allow this comedian—known for television programs that are often described for their “cringe” humor and proclivity to put people in somewhat mortifying situations—to film their family at all, let alone at such an emotionally loaded, fragile moment. Fielder explains the provenance of the project, but it’s fascinatingly, suspiciously perfunctory—they claimed to have enjoyed some of Fielder’s bits they saw on YouTube—leaving the basic conceit of the film as surreal as the winding, zigzag narrative will prove to be. By inviting Fielder and crew into their home, they’re not only encouraging a close-quarters discomfort (befitting their evident narcissism) but also subordinating themselves to his fixed, unsparing camera, agreeing to be players in Fielder’s ongoing anthropology project.

Fielder is fascinated by the performance of truth and what arises from awkward situations enabled by the camera, which can either expose or conceal people’s dubious instincts or blind spots. In an instant-classic scene, Fielder sits Holmes down to watch Abbott and Costello’s paradigmatic “Who’s on First?” comedy routine, which she claims to never have heard of. Her professed inability to conceptually follow the joke becomes yet another Rorschach: does she lack a basic logic function? Does she just not have a sense of humor? Or maybe she’s just not generationally keyed into vaudevillian wordplay? Or perhaps she’s playing dumb, one more way to erode her previously well-honed media image as a high-tech, cutting-edge businesswoman?

Holmes is a compelling figure for many reasons, especially for having created an invention that, never actually having been invented, exists solely in the collective mind. Even less intellectually or aesthetically exploratory films about her saw the self-evident metaphorical value in her persona. Alex Gibney’s HBO documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, made in 2019, three years before her trial conviction, featured pensive voiceover narration asking things like: “Was Elizabeth lost in a landscape between what she could make real and the world of make-believe?” You Can See Everything leaves such ponderousness to the imagination. Fielder is interested in Holmes’s credibility as a matter of human expression rather than legality. He doesn’t appear to think that she owes us anything, even the truth; it’s not a film about debt-paying—her imminent jail sentence, the structuring principle of the first half of the movie, takes care of that. Instead, he talks to her, intently, up-close, something between a predator and a bosom buddy, his line of questioning betraying his curiosity about her romantic partnership with Billy, her motherhood, her relationship to the camera.

What does he want—what does he need—to know? Fielder’s works thus far have alighted upon many topics, but there’s a distinct monomania to them; they’re usually as much about him and his preoccupations as the subjects at hand. This is borne out in You Can See Everything: Fielder is the stealth protagonist, his seeming search for authenticity in Holmes’s life doubling as a search for meaning in his own. Because of this redirect, Holmes, a woman who had been so often called a “disruptor” (for being the country’s most powerful woman entrepreneur, for questioning the basic premises of the medical establishment in advocating for a revolution), is brought closer to earth than previous films about her have allowed. That doesn’t mean this eye-to-eye portrait is “sympathetic,” but it is undeniably humane. Just as Holmes resists any overtures to inquisition, the film resists capitulating to her pleas of innocence, content to swim in the sea of the unknowable.

With Fielder as our guide through these choppy waters, this extraordinary film challenges the notion of objectivity in documentary—but it also dismantles common notions of subjectivity, confronting us, per Deren, with the innocent arrogance of an objective fact. As the film proceeds, You Can See Everything equally engages with the limitations of nonfiction and the shaky morality of fiction, typified here by the 2022 Hulu miniseries The Dropout, a dramatization of Holmes’s life starring a plummy-voiced Amanda Seyfried that often veered into social satire and behavioral extremity. At one point, Fielder has Holmes and Evans watch scenes from the series, which won Seyfried an Emmy, in bed. A teary Holmes finally has to close her laptop while Evans asks Fielder and the cameras to leave the room so he can comfort her. We may wonder if her tears are “genuine,” but there’s no question that the cultural exploitation is real.

In rather surprising fashion, The Dropout will prove to be an essential element to Fielder and Oppenheim’s film, which feels like it’s being invented on the spot as it goes along, but in the best, richest way possible. Fielder and Oppenheim agreed to enter this arrangement in 2023, not knowing what rabbit holes it would take them down. Holmes herself remains the central figure, but as the film drifts into a duck-and-weave second half that’s best left unspoiled for the viewer, she becomes more of a haunting presence. The focus shifts to others, including one person very close to her who maintains control over her image and keeps her avatar alive as a kind of social media warrior. These developments deepen a film that, for all its metacinematic curls and coils, ultimately is about the inscrutability of human relationships: between husband and wife, between director and subject, between viewer and screen. Is the Holmes we’re watching a character that Fielder and Oppenheim have created? Or have their cameras simply captured her?

Fielder and Oppenheim know that the pursuit of the real never allows for such easy answers. They also surely know, as Maya Deren did so many decades ago, that documentaries are still, and always will be, only as effective, interrogatory, or meaningful as our individual perceptions allow. We may all know, on some level, that realism in cinema is an “absurd redundancy,” yet this doesn’t stop us from scanning the screen for evidence of truth. Even the most skeptical among us wants to “believe” something. Otherwise, why are we dupes still watching?

The Devils
Dir. Ken Russell, U.K., Warner Bros. Clockwork

Aldous Huxley knew a thing or two about show trials. As a Los Angeles resident, he had a front-row seat for HUAC’s postwar anti-communist witch-hunt. This pathetic chapter in postwar American history, as well as Stalin’s three-decade purge of supposed counter-revolutionary heretics, seep into the events recounted in his The Devils of Loudun, which was published in 1952, at the height of the Red Scare.

Ken Russell pronounced The Devils, a faithful distillation of Huxley’s extensively researched and entirely fascinating nonfiction work, to be a political film. Released in 1971, eight years after Huxley’s death, it accordingly fell afoul of the censors, cut down first in the UK, and then, for good measure, a little more in the U.S. Doubly trimmed and never released on home video, The Devils’ availability for theatrical exhibition was curiously erratic. (I successfully booked an immaculate DigiBeta for three shows for a Russell retrospective in 2010 and a year or so later was told that it was unavailable due to “rights issues.”) Conspiracy theories swirled that someone high up at Warner Bros. had waged a long campaign to suppress the film. Then Russell’s original cut, featuring the never-seen “Rape of Christ” sequence, was reassembled by film critic Mark Kermode (a devout Catholic who in all seriousness regards The Exorcist as the greatest film of all time). A bootleg, lifted from the British TV transmission of this cut, was available for purchase on Amazon for a while. A full restoration finally seemed imminent, and the unexpurgated version of The Devils made its way from this year's Cannes Classics to a U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival, and on to a U.S. re-release, 15 years after Russell's death.

At the core of Huxley’s book is an account (seemingly written in a 17th-century literary pastiche) of a mass outbreak of demonic possession in a French Ursuline convent in the city of Loudun in 1634, and its use by various sworn enemies to settle petty and not-so-petty scores with the city's de facto spiritual leader, a charismatic, politically intransigent, and morally compromised priest, Urbain Grandier. In the course of her multiple exorcisms, the Mother Superior Jeanne des Anges denounces Grandier (for personal reasons) as the sorcerer inflicting these demonic spirits on her and her sisters. A farcical, six-month long circus of public exorcisms culminates in a rigged trial and Grandier’s condemnation. He is sentenced to torture in order to extract a confession (unsuccessfully) and despite the protests from the town's protestant minority, is burned at the stake before a braying audience of thousands. Turns out witch trials are a boon for the tourist trade.

Sure, Arthur Miller was not far behind Huxley, but The Crucible makes its all-fall-down allegorical point by sweeping up its assortment of luckless, less-than-virtuous accused, accusers with their personal grudges and emotional grievances, and earnest but ultimately helpless religious authorities and hurling them into an unstoppable whirlwind of destruction. The Devils of Loudun is a less schematic proposition. It interweaves documented historical facts with a thoroughgoing theological exegesis, an examination of the pre-Enlightenment psyche and worldview, and a sober evaluation of the gross ecclesiastical malfeasance of the exorcisms performed in this case, with their circular logic and guilty-until-proven-innocent modus operandi. (He also takes up the possibility of the paranormal, touching upon telepathy, ESP, and telekinesis—this is, after all, the man who, two years later, as an early advocate of LSD, wrote one of the Sixties counterculture’s foundational texts, The Doors of Perception.)

Russell, the oft-labelled enfant terrible of British cinema, is anything but sober. Where Huxley's treatment is meticulous and calmly factual, Russell tackles the material in his customary style, which got up to speed in The Music Lovers (1970) and would be sustained in all but one (Savage Messiah) of the seven films he directed in an astonishing run in the 1970s, when British cinema was all but moribund: an irreverent disregard for good taste, outrageous iconoclasm, and an over-the-top gusto that matched the hysterical excesses of his subjects. Don’t doubt it, this is a filmmaker who had no use for the literary stateliness of so-called heritage cinema, as Oliver Reed and Alan Bates’s nude wrestling scene in Russell’s D. H. Lawrence adaptation Women in Love (1969) attests.

There’s plenty of evidence in The Devils that Russell was the staunch Catholic convert he professed to be, and so it's perhaps no surprise that he seizes upon the religious controversy at the core of The Devils and by extension the wider political context of 17th-century France. He opens with a typically outlandish shot: an ambiguously gendered, near-nude figure rises into view on a theater stage in a tableau vivant recreation of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus; after a mock coronation, this figure takes part in the performance of a dissolute masque. This is not just any performer however—it’s King Louis XIII (Graham Armitage), shamelessly depicted by Russell as the effeminate homosexual he was rumored to be. (Louis XIII did in fact dabble in composing and designing costumes for masques and ballets.)

For this decadent performance, the only audience member that matters amongst the throng of courtiers is an unimpressed Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue), the power behind the throne. With the young king’s assent, Richelieu is pursuing an agenda to establish absolute monarchy in France, with church and state working together to impose the crown's authority over the entire country by forcing the provincial power bases of the nobility into submission—while ensuring the troublesome Huguenot protestant minority are kept in check. When one of Richelieu’s officials, Baron de Laubardemont (Dudley Sutton), arrives to weaken Loudun’s independence by demolishing its fortifications, he comes up against the defiance of the commanding Grandier (Oliver Reed) and is forced to back down. And so the latter unwittingly becomes enmeshed in a royal power play, making enemies in high places. His downfall is just a matter of time—and setting about engineering it, de Laubardemont finds ready accomplices in Grandier’s local enemies—among them the vengeful magistrate whose daughter he has impregnated during her private Latin lessons and then spurned, and his resentful, priggish Canon Mignon (Murray Melvin), the magistrate’s cousin.

The Devils takes place in a city ravaged by bubonic plague—an addition of Russell's (the plague had run its course several years before the events of the story) that’s indicative of his reflexive instinct to revel in the agony and ecstasy of corporal extremity and gruesome abjection. Hence, he gives us Grandier both going through the motions as he sprinkles holy water on a mass grave of plague victims and then passionately ministering to a dying woman in her final excruciating death throes (after seeing off a chemist and a surgeon and their quack treatments, thereby making two more enemies). Leading this plague victim’s distraught daughter Madeleine (Gemma Jones) in prayer and later taking her confession, in which she admits she’s fallen in love with him, the libertine cleric takes her as his latest paramour, only to find authentic love stirring in him. He secretly takes her as his wife in a theologically questionable private nuptial mass, covertly observed by Mignon. As the forces arrayed against him close in, the love of this devout, virtuous woman puts Grandier on the path to moral and spiritual redemption. As he says to Mignon earlier, “I have a great need to be united with God.” Be careful what you wish for.

What have been regarded as the most problematic/sacrilegious/ludicrous (take your pick) scenes in The Devils are those set in the Ursuline convent. These squarely attribute the nuns’ supposed demonic possession to mass hysteria—“chronic sexual excitement” in Huxley’s words. For a start, the unsuspecting Grandier has a devoted fanbase with the sisters, who avidly try to catch sight of him as he leads the funeral procession for the city’s governor in the film’s second scene, swooning like so many overwrought Beatles fans (“He’s the most beautiful man in the world!” one nun exclaims). Far exceeding them, their disturbed hunchbacked Mother Superior Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave) harbors a maniacal erotic fixation on Grandier of frightening intensity, tormented by blasphemous visions of the priest: in the first he walks on water and then rejects her desperate advances while she is mocked by all around her; in the second he’s a crucified Christ, descending from the cross where his wounds are licked by Jeanne. Russell deftly establishes a hothouse atmosphere of sexual longing and frustration (Grandier-mania), firmly setting the stage for what is to come.

Devastated to learn of his secret marriage and that, to add insult to injury, he has declined to be appointed as the convent’s confessor, Sister Jeanne accuses him of visiting her in her bed in the form of an incubus. When professional exorcist Barré (Michael Gothard) arrives to provide a ready ear, she semi-denounces Grandier and loses her shit—literally since a forced enema is considered a handy procedure for flushing out Satan’s minions. Under the increasingly fanatical (and, it is hinted, increasingly sexually charged) Barré’s unrelenting pressure, and the threat of execution, her fellow sisters have no choice but to get with the program and whip themselves up into a frenzy, ripping off their habits.

Russell completely outdoes himself in his orchestration of the ensuing bedlam—a nonstop regime of exorcisms and incantations as the cavorting nude women run amok (and find unmentionable uses for candles). Making full use of a minatory avant-garde score by Peter Maxwell Davies, Russell wrings out every last drop of bodily fluid and galvanizes every shuddering gymnastic contortion from his, it must be said, truly game actresses (Adam Chodzko’s 1995 video From Beyond records their almost-fond memories of the shoot). Everything builds toward Russell’s long-suppressed ne plus ultra, the shocking (hallucinated?) Rape of Christ set piece, in which a febrile throng of stark-naked nuns tears down the convent’s life-size wooden carving of the crucified Christ and mount and writhe voluptuously all over it, while Mignon masturbates at the orgiastic spectacle from a vantage point above the fray. For good measure, Russell shoots this with the crazed zoom-in-and-outs that are another of his trademarks.

The ravings of the nuns, who are posed leading questions, are a form of testimony, but their possessed states and their exorcisms are performed and staged for the enjoyment of a gleeful audience of townspeople. And so the teeming madhouse in the convent is explicitly linked to the frivolous theatrical follies of Louis XIII that open the film. While the scenes involving the monarchy are staged in a farcical, cartoonish register—the King using hapless protestants dressed in blackbird costumes for target practice and paying a visit to the exorcism proceedings, masquerading as “the Duc De Condé,” to mischievously debunk them—the convent exorcism scenes are, for sure, the stuff of sensational chaotic spectacle, but Russell renders them closer to slapstick than horror.

By contrast, everything related to Grandier’s intellectual and emotional struggle is treated in earnest. Russell gives the contradictions amongst his convictions, his sensuality, and his cynicism their due—in no small part thanks to Reed’s by turns brooding and cavalier performance, which persuasively establishes the priest’s worldly intelligence and oratory authority. In the end, The Devils is most impressive for its unusually coherent depiction of faith: the Rape of Christ scene is pointedly intercut with Grandier pausing in the mountains on his way back to Loudun to celebrate the Eucharist with Madeleine, counterpointing the sacred and the profane. Having atoned for “my vain and disordered life,” Grandier is reconciled as “a small part of God’s abundance,” and ready to meet his maker in the face of his cynical disbelieving tormentors. In the harrowing climax, as he’s burned at the stake, he’s not thinking of himself but exhorting the city’s inhabitants to fight against their impending loss of freedom.

But the final word goes to Vanessa Redgrave’s fearless, indelible performance as Sister Jeanne. Not merely the twitching, growling monster of the exorcism scenes, Redgrave’s Sister Jeanne is a nuanced and multifaceted characterization, one minute calculating and casually sardonic, the next anguished and devout, emitting then cutting short her weird mirthless titters and fully living out her lapses into convulsive animalistic rage. In her final scene, after the dust has settled and the city’s walls have been pulled down, de Laubardemont gifts her with a token to remember Grandier by—a phallic bone that she kisses and then, as the scene ends, is about to put to use. It is the film’s single most outrageous coup.

New York Film Festival 2026:
Life of Jorge Luis Borges
Dir. Mariano Llinás, Argentina, no distributor

Across the five and half hours of Mariano Llinás’s new triptych, Life of Jorge Luis Borges, we are given the opportunity to learn a great deal about the Argentine writer—major moments in his life, the places he once lived, the friendships he kept. Yet I’m struggling now, just a short time on from finishing the film, to remember much about Borges at all. In the same way that James Boswell has usurped in the collective imaginary the subject of the hefty biographical tome which made the Scottish writer famous, Samuel Johnson, Llinás’s documentary of the life of a writer he’s considered a lodestar since his teens is most notable for how it centers Llinás himself and his rangy, expansive artistic methods. (The end of Part One climaxes with Llinás cheekily pondering whether he’s following too closely in Boswell’s footsteps.) Could it have been any other way? The filmmaker’s last gargantuan offering, The Triptych of Mondongo, hinges, in part, on an aesthetic challenge—a duel—posed by the filmmaker to his titular protagonists, a notable Argentine art collective. Mondongo, fully exhausted after years of subjecting themselves to Llinás’s digressive process, flatly turn him down; the filmmaker went ahead and filmed his half of the duel anyway, making it the feature-length third chapter of an already distended work of nonfiction essaying. Where no one is asking, Llinás provides.

As with Mondongo, and to a lesser degree, La Flor, Llinás is the most important presence here, occupying space in the Venn overlap of ringleader, conductor and court jester. His is the voice we hear in the close mic’d, breathless, obsessive voiceover. Sometimes—often—his speaking is paired with images of the voiceover text itself filmed off computer screens, blocks of words streaming unbroken from one margin to the next, line after line, like a crackpot Laszlo Krasznahorkai. He appears regularly in frame, approaching-disheveled and hulking, as one of the film’s protagonists: hired by New York’s Institute for Studies on Latin American Art to create a film around a recently acquired trove of Borges related documents, the filmmaker character he plays, who, like his creator, pathologically cannot help himself, spins this brief into a globe-spanning investigation full of intrigues real and imagined. It’s also his hands, I’m quite sure, that rifle through the piles of faded and dusty physical texts by Borges and others, in images that, along with the continual return to text on screens, form one of the film’s most durable visual motifs. This kind of singularly focused, oppressive monomania should be terribly annoying, unwatchable even. If in the end, Life of Jorges Luis Borges scans as a quite lovable, occasionally frustrating, oddity/odyssey, this is due to Llinás’s ever-present wit, his adeptness at deflating pretension and the open-armed invitation he gives his viewers to peek into the conditions of the film’s making.

Llínas’s delightfully shoddy and ramshackle formal tactics place us on more than a few occasions in the small edit room of the film we are watching, a cluttered Premiere timeline occupying much of the frame, the editor Ignacio Cordino bemused, tucked in a corner. At one point, a musical motif we’ve become familiar with over the course of several hours is revealed, via a cut, to be the issuance of the director himself, banging out a handful of notes on a colorful toy xylophone. Late in the film, Llinás re-enacts his own memory of encountering an imposing statue in a town square, casting himself as the hair-slicked-back hero of a low-rent thriller—his mock seriousness is hilarious. But, maybe, we wonder as the sequence wears on, he isn’t fully joking? As with the other major works bearing the insignia of Llinás’s production company El Pampero Cine we find here that particular twinning of a winking conceptual audacity and grand ambition with an approachability of practice. These gargantuan works (which include the aforementioned films along with the wonders Historias extraordinarias and Trenque Lauquen) aren’t the result of massive budgets and huge teams. They seem to be a group of smart, cinema-besotted people who enjoy making movies with each other, and pushing limits collectively. “Handmade” is so overused in this moment to be near evacuated of meaning, but these films all feel, wonderfully, like things made by people, together in community.

As Llinás’s investigation continues, a twinge of dissatisfaction with his findings lances the film: Borges’s late-life flirtations with racism towards Argentina’s indigenous populations and Pinochet’s military fascism have been well-publicized, and are dutifully related here, but Llinás seems as troubled by the banality of the language employed in Borges’s love letters, or the discovery of records relating to his difficult divorce from first wife Elsa Helena Astete Millán, which document the writer’s attempts to punish her in the legal proceedings. He proposes his subject as essentially unknowable at the film’s outset, but he seems to arc by the film’s end towards the possibility that Borges, the man who conjured worlds within worlds, a miraculous library’s-worth of imagined texts that feel as tangible as those we might pick off a bookstore shelf, contained within just a few hundred pages of extant short stories, was perhaps just not all that interesting himself. This doesn’t upset Llinás’s project, which foregrounds the search above all. But for any viewers left disinclined towards Borges as the film reaches its conclusion, Life of Jorge Luis Borges ends with a moving eulogy for another artist entirely—the Argentine filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky who passed during the film’s production. Llinás always finds a way to have his cake, then gleefully reach for another.

Unlike The Triptych of Mondongo, where each new installment broke formally from the prior, inviting reflections on earlier events and introducing new strategies to chew on, Life of Jorges Luis Borges begins, establishes its world, and then avoids much deviation throughout. Sure, Laura Paredes (Llinás’s wife and a star of La Flor and Trenque Lauquen) shows up late to cheekily play Borges in a combative twilight years interview with a tabloid, but this clever scene is merely one of many variations on the central motifs, as opposed to a signal of a wholesale reshuffling of elements. The only real critique I might level at the film is that it’s doing so many of the same kinds of things, and quite well at that, so why not do more of different ones? It feels churlish to offer this in the face of a charming entertainment that, as it winds and wends, gives so much, and ultimately does land itself near the brand of labyrinthine fabrications that populate Borges’s texts. But it does leave a question: Will there come a moment when Llinás’s extravagant cinema of more than enough, will, finally, feel like it’s just too much? I certainly hope not.

New York Film Festival 2026:
The Diary of a Chambermaid
Dir. Radu Jude, Romania/France, Film Movement

Every bourgeois mother (even a precariously bourgeois or semi-bourgeois one) who is not a complete idiot knows that the role comes with a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. You can think of yourself as a basically good person and still push your kid to the front of the line. You can be kind to the caregiver who takes care of your kid and not think at all about her kid, somewhere else in the world, whose mother has to go to a different country and work menially for you so you can work more prestigiously––even though, of course, you know the terms and conditions very well.

But everyone here (the privileged, guilty mother; the accommodating nanny from somewhere the mother’s country exploits) is role-playing. In Radu Jude’s The Diary of a Chambermaid, set in Bordeaux, France, and Moldovia, Romania, Gianina (Ana Dumitrascu), the nanny and housekeeper of a self-satisfied French academic couple, is actually intense, frank, self-aware, as we see in the scenes where she talks to her Romanian family; she’s also capable of contempt, as we learn in the opening scene when she curses under her breath. But in scenes with her employers, she’s deferential, grateful, and nervous, playing up her intimidation as a form of flattery and also defense: “I don’t know,” she repeats, when they try to enlist her as a character in the social theater of their dinner party. As meek as her performance is, it’s also a deflection, a refusal to participate, or at least a refusal to rehearse the script they’ve given her.

Radu Jude’s films, terse and angry as they are, are buoyed by crackling performances by women. These women are often themselves performers: Angela, in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, has a web video alter-ego as a manosphere blowhard; she also performs for the Austrian executive who comes to Bucharest to oversee the video project she’s working on, showing herself to be polite and accommodating when she’s actually furious and disgusted. Gianina in Diary of a Chambermaid is an actor in an avant-garde university production (they always cast “amateurs and migrants,” the professor tells her friends) of Octave Mirbeau’s novel Diary of a Chambermaid (famously adapted for the film by Luis Buñuel in 1964). Jude intercuts play rehearsals with scenes of her life as a nanny and maid and video footage that her daughter sends her from Romania. This theater performance in period costume surreally exaggerates the exploitation of her actual life while also bringing out its camp––and kink––dynamics. But we learn that this is Gianina, not Dumitrascu, acting in a scene where the director (Illinca Manolache, who played Angela in Do Not Expect]) tells her she was chosen to make it more authentic, “commedia dell’arte, grand guignol, amateur…Ubu Roi style.” Rather than a commentary on the character, this is a performance by the character, and through it, Jude invites us to see the other ways Gianina performs. The earnest hypocrisies of the university theater company are recognizable, if unsubtle. (In my experience, bourgeois university students know a lot more about sanctimony toward the “underprivileged”; faced with Gianina, they’d probably be more terrified than brash.)

In Jude’s films, people perform, but his films also sharply demarcate coerced performances (like Gianina for her employers, and the disabled worker in Do Not Expect, who is paid to perform in a safety video that may or may not ruin his chances at compensation) and aesthetic performances, like Angela’s for her videos, and Gianina’s in the play. But people also film things other than performances: the chicken videos captured by her daughter’s cell phone camera; the snuff video from a Russian soldier’s helmet camera that the French family friend shows his friends at the dinner party in the middle of a political argument (the French intelligentsia’s social sport of discuter) about the war in Ukraine. And Jude punctuates the busy intensity of social relationships with moments of devastating documentary stillness––in Do Not Expect, this was the sequence of makeshift memorials beside a Bucharest highway; in Diary, it’s a sequence of almost-still images of post-industrial rural decay that underscores Gianina’s storytelling of a Romanian fairytale to her child charge.

The film’s emotion accrues each time we go back to the video calls with Gianina’s daughter. Pressured into staying with her employer’s ailing mother during the Christmas holiday, Gianina can’t go home as she promised her daughter she would, and we finally learn the real effect of that absence. Jude’s film closes with painful and unresolved images of both mother and daughter’s loneliness, and the promise of a continued cycle of aspiration and disappointment. Dumitrascu’s performance as Gianina, like Gianina’s internal performances as “the chambermaid,” finally seems both knowing and alarmingly guileless. After all her subordination and despair, we are finally confronted with a character who is happy, at least superficially, to gather up the crumbs from the first world’s table.

New York Film Festival 2026:
A Long Winter
Dir. Andrew Haigh, Canada/U.K., MUBI

In one of her trademark essays, “On Morality,” Joan Didion propounded the impulse to rescue a person’s corpse from scavengers as the most basic unit of human decency, left over from settler times and burned into the ethical psyche of American culture. Following in this tradition, A Long Winter, Andrew Haigh’s first American film since 2017’s Lean on Pete, boils down to a race against the vultures. It is based on Colm Tóibín’s 2006 novella of the same name, but, crucially, not of the same setting, whisked across the Atlantic from post–Civil War Spain to Colorado in the 1950s. Mining the landscape for all its symbolic worth, this snow-swept western charts the irreparable collapse of a sequestered family, and of the brittle ideals that can no longer keep them frozen in place.

This homestead’s self-sustaining seclusion high up in the Rockies––the quixotic fantasy of its patriarch Lester (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), a former city kid––is disrupted by two absences. First, the youngest son, Tommy (Kit Connor), enlists in the Korean War, confessing his thirst for metropolitan life and his plan of pursuing it to his older brother Mike (Fred Hechinger) on the eve of his departure. Second, their mother, Louise (Caitriona Balfe), reaches a breaking point in her severe alcoholism after a tactless intervention and wanders off the property in search of a fix––or perhaps just an escape––moments before the winter’s first blizzard envelopes their false Eden.

“It takes a certain type of soul to live this close to heaven,” says Uncle Frank (Martin Freeman), lamenting his sister’s private hell. Mike––loyal, content, and unquestioning––was unaware of any trouble in paradise. His own year-long sojourn working in Idaho shielded him from the knowledge of his mother’s physical and psychological deterioration, rendering him both the odd man out and the center of their world. He is the center of Haigh’s as well; his damaged innocence––searching day after day for a presumed-dead mother he never really knew––goes hand-in-hand with an overturned perception of this pitiless, unchanging, “comfortable” corner of American life, and the man who selfishly contrived to keep his kin wedged within it, forming the film’s dramatic core.These parallel reckonings are, unsurprisingly for Haigh, compounded by Mike’s burgeoning homosexual desires, with two foiled crushes punctuating a tormented coming of age. Hechinger, a born character actor, is an inspired casting choice for a soft-spoken everyman surrounded by larger and more demanding personae, becoming an anchor and a reflective surface for their angst while magnifying his own.

These are the makings of a classically awesome picture, descriptors of tropes, styles, and subversions that my cinephilia naturally gravitates toward. Haigh is a filmmaker I admire––his fluent, unpretentious style and fine-grained sense of physicality having elevated gay slices-of-lives like Weekend (2011) and Looking (2014-16) to canonical classics––working in a largely defunct but iconographically rich genre (the western’s “Northern” cousin) ripe for queer revision. Yet it falls short of its compelling conception and considerable craft. Haigh’s handsome frames––shot on sumptuous 35mm by Xavier Dolan’s favored DP André Turpin––drip with more than enough atmosphere and portent to sustain the film’s tensions; his performers are hard-edged and expressive, externalizing the story’s strains of regret, resentment, and repression; and his digressive approach to psychodrama is rooted in decades of literary and cinematic tradition. This last point reflects the film’s tentative approach to revision, and unlocks its shortcomings. The teasing dramatization of all-American myth and madness rarely strays far from the realm of respectability, pulling punches in the name of austerity.

Considerable emphasis is placed on Louise’s silent suffering, but she is a structuring absence even before her disappearance. Embodied stridently by Balfe, this woman is virtually all interior, a walking signpost of her own disaffection. She has abandoned her family before the film even starts; “I’m sorry I knew any of you,” she spits at her husband and son as soon as Lester dumps her stash. The film admirably avoids making her a perfect victim, and also goes out of its way to shift the blame onto Lester, but its portrayal of a long-festering addiction undermines her misery with a strange mixture of abjection and opacity. This combination is most apparent during the one exception to this film’s principled restraint: “You want to know what your mother would do for a drink?” Lester, asked why he so violently hates their nearest neighbor, rolls the question cruelly in his drunken mouth as Mike looks on, shattered. What Lester describes, on the verge of tears himself, is clearly a sexual assault, but his parlance makes her out to be an erring woman. The scene’s inclusion seems like an attempt to humanize Lester’s all-or-nothing approach to her recovery. It is hatefully empathic, upsetting the film’s tidy morality.

Another important figure in the film’s matrix of gender and sexuality appears to fill the household’s twin voids. Left to their own devices, Lester and Mike squabble over the household chores. Lester goes and hires Jimmy (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), a half-Indigenous man from the next town who has no qualms doing “women’s work.” Relegated to the kitchen on one hand and Tommy’s vacant bed on the other, Jimmy is cornered into maternal and fraternal roles. His repeated harassment and emasculation by Lester run parallel to his sexual tension with Mike. Though their attraction, smartly, remains unconsummated, its proximity to Jimmy’s domestic servitude presents another troubled dynamic. Jimmy, withdrawn but ready to stand up to himself, resists stereotype, but he is pigeonholed by narrative function; he offsets Mike’s first object of desire––a young cop from Louise’s half-hearted search party––and symbolizes his change in sympathies from unfeeling patriarchy to a more tender form of masculinity.

In short, Jimmy facilitates the last leg of Mike’s psychological journey. We’re treated to the young men’s bonding activities: birding, snow angels, boyish games in the snow. The film climaxes with the pointless slaying of a buzzard, who emits a horrible scream, and Mike is shielded from this encounter with death by Jimmy’s silent embrace. Straining for the sort of rough-hewn bleakness endemic to the western’s modern incarnation, A Long Winter instead evokes an arty, elevated sentimentality. For a filmmaker like Haigh, who wields sentiment faithfully and deliberately, perhaps this is unsurprising. After his previous, All of Us Strangers, occasionally leaned into mawkishness in both daring and disastrous ways, A Long Winter reins in such unruly shades of feeling––but they keep spilling out. It is both endearing and frustrating. Caught in this limbo, A Long Winter is strange, beguiling, and thoroughly taxing; it evokes the trammels of its traditions––via culture, genre, gender, race––but repeatedly capitulates to them. Haigh might have been better equipped to subvert this genre by letting his impulses run rampant.

New York Film Festival 2026:
Tender Loving Care
Dir. Mike Leigh, U.K., Bleecker Street

Ordinary people—this could be the title of most of the ten Mike Leigh films that have graced the New York Film Festival. From film to film, and maybe most of all in Tender Loving Care, the faces and bodies of his actors remain staggeringly, beautifully ordinary.

None of his actors have been stars at the outset, but some have created and played star-making roles for him: Lesley Manville in Another Year, David Thewlis in Naked, Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Secrets & Lies, Sally Hawkins in Happy-Go-Lucky. I don’t know what’s in the professional future for the cast of his latest (and perhaps final) New York Film Festival selection, but Kate O’Flynn, who won an Emmy this year for her role in Widow’s Bay, is clearly on her way. All the same, while Leigh’s films are devoid of glamour, they shine bright, even the gloomy ones (maybe not Naked). None of them are “grand” and “important”; on the contrary, they’re modest and humble—you never feel Leigh reaching. “Slickness” is not in his vocabulary, and there are no easy answers to be found in his films. I’m not sure he’s even asking many questions.

Leigh’s films always seem to be greeted and received with a special feeling by New York Film Festival audiences. Something of this has to do with the England and the singular Englishness he leads the viewer to—not an idealized or cute or confected Englishness, but something as close to the real thing as you can get in cinema, and, without being feel-good, one comforting in its ripples and waves of humanity. The audience counts on Leigh the way they did with Eric Rohmer. They know he’ll lead them to a place inhabited by characters that don’t merely exist in service to a story, they live—and are so dimensional that they are alive before the film begins and live on after the film ends. (This is what all actors lay claim to but seldom achieve.) The glib, inadequate labels for what Leigh does are “slice of life” and “social realism,” and when you read David Thomson’s opinion (in a basically positive evaluation) that Leigh’s films “may come dangerously close to a patronizing attitude” towards “the underclass,” you may want to reach for your gun. “The underclass”? Seriously?

You might have noticed certain patterns in the films Leigh has made since crossing back over to the big screen after ten creatively critical years of television and theater. Only three of his last 14 outings have been centered on men. Also, unlike his earlier films, only three deal with family life—Life Is Sweet, All or Nothing, and the 2018 historical drama Peterloo, which might seem like Leigh’s most “political” film in the most superficial sense of the word, in the manner of Ken Loach perhaps. (None of these were selected by the festival, unhappily.) Leigh’s eight remaining stories are built around the lives of women, either as part of a couple or more often single. Tender Loving Care is the furthest he’s pushed out and away from the precincts of the masculine imperative.

“She’s finally left the bastard,” announces Birdie (Marion Bailey) to her husband, Geoff (Paul Jesson)—she being their daughter, Amy (Kate O’Flynn), a social worker who lives with her BFF colleague Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson), who is like a second daughter to Amy’s parents. Said bastard remains pointedly offscreen, as does Rosie’s fireman date. Aside from Geoff, there are only fleeting single-scene appearances by an affable doctor paying a house call (played by six-film Leigh veteran Peter Wight), and, in the course of Amy and Rosie’s casework, a middle-aged hoarder and a youth in foster care. (And there’s one more, more troublesome, but I’ll get to that.) These two pairings form a compact, interconnected four-hander.

Amy and Rosie work in the most demanding, nigh impossible of jobs, even as they contend with the fraying social safety net caused by government cutbacks. As each makes her rounds, she applies her people skills and patience to the full range of human misery in a series of discrete brief encounters. Leigh depicts up close how they make their living through authentic caring and compassion, without exalting them. At the same time, their personal lives entail another set of challenges. What to wear on a third date to convey the right combination of signals? At home or out for tea with Birdie they’re good-humored and their shop talk, inconsequential chat, jokey shared anecdotes are all of a piece. Their sense of humor is unforced and not played up, but it’s vital to who they are and how they cope—and if there’s only a small hint of burnout in Amy’s self-medicating wine consumption, there’s also more than a little disenchantment with men. Asked how her Friday night date went, Rosie firmly replies “Gonna need a drink”—but being stood up is no drama, just another of life’s forgettable letdowns. For the most part Tender Loving Care isn’t intended to be taken as the stuff of either high comedy or melodrama—it’s just an unsentimental look at how people get on with their lives, with what passes for joie de vivre in English terms (the titles say it all: Life Is Sweet, Happy-Go-Lucky). And interestingly, these are characters that have little or no baggage, and no agenda, particularly when compared to Hard Truths, Leigh’s 2024 masterpiece, where the baggage was crushing.

Birdie and Geoff would initially seem to have the least baggage: their office-romance marriage is coming up to its 50th anniversary, and the couple are happily and lovingly retired and keenly attentive to their daughter’s love life. (You can perhaps see where Amy gets her empathy from in a quietly devastating scene in which Birdie and Geoff’s recently widowed friend Josie, played by three-time Leigh veteran Tilly Vosburg, spills out her agonized self-recrimination over her estrangement from her son, a third offscreen man, her face etched with the lines of a life of anguish—in that sitting room Leigh tells an entire story in a single scene.) It comes as a shock when Geoff quite suddenly begins to show signs of dementia, but the drama of his rapid cognitive decline is played with pitch-perfect restraint. In a reproach to the melodramatic treatment of Alzheimer’s in so many of today’s films and TV shows, Geoff’s undiagnosed infirmity is depicted with a calm dignity that’s never maudlin. And it represents an opportunity for a redoubled togetherness, as Amy, Rosie, and Birdie sit at Geoff’s bedside, reminiscing and, in a throwback to the working-class of yore, finding his happy place in singing songs of yesteryear—The Platters’ doo-wop hit “The Great Pretender” and the turn-of-the-century cockney music-hall song “Boiled Beef and Carrots.” (I wondered if the latter was really part of the English collective unconscious, but no, there’s a modern-day performance of it on YouTube.)

Leigh only ever moves the camera in his films when it’s absolutely necessary—and it is, here, when the camera discreetly withdraws from the bedroom and our final glimpse of this foursome. The film is dedicated to Dick Pope, Leigh’s DP for the past 25 years, whose death must have felt like losing an arm (the death of his producer Simon Channing Williams, in 2009, after a ten-film collaboration, surely did as well). Taking over from Pope, Lucy Bristow brings something special to Tender Loving Care: London, shot in a gentle, balmy light, in the film’s frequent establishing shots, has never looked so damn beautiful (again, the beauty in the ordinary). It’s a far cry from Naked or All or Nothing. Gary Yershon’s spare, jaunty marimba score also seems just right for the film’s mood and tenor.

“Everyone’s in their own bubble”—at two points someone makes this comment. One of them refers to Amy’s startled encounter with Brid Brennan’s old lady, lying on her back in a park, “communing with the earth”—while it’s still alive, I guess. At another point Rosie acknowledges that there are “people out there with worse problems.” Tender Loving Care is bookended by one of them, George (three-time Leigh veteran Alan Williams). The film opens with a tight shot on his closed eyes, prone in a hospital bed, less than responsive to Rosie’s questions about his welfare. She sets a date to pay him another visit, and when the day comes, he’s vanished, having checked himself out. In the film’s haunting final shots, Leigh returns to George, sitting on the steps of a building as pedestrians and traffic cross through the frame. In a series of unostentatious jump cuts, the frame closes in to end in silence on a tight shot of the spectral George’s eyes. His story hasn’t been told. It’s a bleak final note in a film that refuses anger or despair (or false hope), and it perhaps puts a pointed accent on the film’s title. If this is to be Leigh’s last word, the political and moral fire that has smoldered throughout his films is still burning.

Minotaur
Dir. Andrey Zvyagintsev, France, Germany, Latvia, MUBI

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur is set in the cushy domestic sphere of the upper class of Russian society, among wealthy business execs who might just take their family on a coastal vacation to escape the bleak mood wafting in from the battlefields of Russia’s war on Ukraine. It’s 2022. At the beginning of the film, middle-aged husband and dad Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov) is wrapping up a visit with his mother at the secluded luxury home he shares with his beautiful wife, Galina (Iris Lebedeva), and their teenage son Seriosha (Boris Kudrin) on the outskirts of an unnamed city. Gleb and Seriosha walk Gleb’s mother down the long driveway to the front gate where she can catch a cab, but she’s forgotten her glasses. Gleb returns to the house to retrieve them and stumbles on Galina in the kitchen having a phone conversation that she attempts to conceal. And with this efficient sequence of storytelling, the seed has been planted in Gleb’s mind that his wife is cheating on him.

Gleb and Galina’s marriage is as fragile as the glass walls framing their dining room, which Zvyagintsev and DP Mikhail Krichman shoot from outside and under soft orange light, creating a postcard-perfect image of cozy familial warmth that’s illusory. The dollhouse point-of-view heightens the sense that we’re looking at a mere reproduction of a happy family. The mystery surrounding Galina’s extramarital life drives the film, paralleled by a messy situation Gleb finds himself in at work. As the CEO of a manufacturing company, he and other executives are tasked by the mayor’s office with providing a list of 14 employees to be conscripted to the frontlines of the war. While Gleb struggles with this professional demand, in his personal life he freely abandons any sense of morality or conscience in his dogged pursuit to uncover his wife’s secrets.

This film marks a return for Zvyagintsev after a difficult nine-year hiatus involving his exile to France from his native Russia, as well as a near-death experience with COVID-19. Minotaur, the Grand Prix winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is a gripping continuation of Zvyagintsev’s trademark examinations of the spiritual rot underlying Russia, a symptom of living under stifling authoritarianism. Since his 2003 debut, The Return, the director has used his films, including The Banishment (2007) and Elena (2011) among others, to paint a picture of a society in freefall. His fourth feature, Leviathan, widely lauded in the West, triggered a campaign against him in his home country for its unflattering depiction of Russian life in the provinces. That seems to be the point of the director’s project, to offer a counter to Putin’s propaganda of an orthodox nation filled with happy families hungry for war. In Loveless (2017), Zvyagintsev’s last film before his break, a radio broadcaster discusses a fear of apocalypse pervading the country. In Minotaur, more pointed in light of the ongoing war with Ukraine, the apocalypse is here.

Gleb is a traditional family man with a strong disposition. He’s clean shaven with dark hair and glowering eyes that probe and penetrate from across the dinner table. He doesn’t rule his household with an iron fist, but he’s not passive either. Galina is a pampered housewife. We see her shaving her legs in the shower and moisturizing in the mirror. The couple move around one another silently, harboring more intimacy with their phones than within their marriage. They take their devices into bed and stare into the glow of blue light before sleeping back-to-back. You get the feeling that they’ve been operating under this frosty dynamic for a while, and it’s only once Gleb begins to suspect another man on the end of the phone that he’s suddenly awakened to the idea that his wife might have a complex inner life, or even an outer one.

Early on, Zvyagintsev and co-writer Simon Lyashenko establish Gleb and Galina’s Russia with a scene at a swanky restaurant featuring the couple, two of Gleb’s business world friends, and the friends’ wife and girlfriend. At the table, the unmarried woman, a blonde, dressed more revealingly than the wives, tells a raunchy sex joke that gets the men laughing. Later, the men go outside for a smoke, and the married women excuse themselves to the restroom, leaving the young woman alone at the table blowing cloud plumes from her vape. She’s basically outcast for not having a defined role in the patriarchal structure, neither a man nor a married woman, but as she gazes directly into the camera—one of three formal swings in Minotaur that invite you to pause and reflect—the superficial values and codes of this affluent, degenerate part of society begin to crystallize. Zvyagintsev implicates the viewer in this fabricated world of comfort and provocative dinner games, idle and distracted as the real provocation rages on off-screen.

Outside the restaurant, the men grumble and moan about the war, highlighting a level of cowardice among the business class, who may not jingoistically support Putin’s invasion but decline to resist in any way. In the bathroom mirror, the married women touch up their faces and whisper smugly about marriage. Galina’s friend dispenses some depressing wisdom: “A happy wife knows nothing.” At this level of society, Zvyagintsev seems to say, everyone has their blinders on. The director’s note puts it plainly: “People in Russia today are apathetic, under the yoke of censorship … Everyone tries to close their eyes, because every day that passes only increases the debt to the truth, and looking into her eyes is more and more frightening—Russia now looks like a monster.”

Minotaur is adapted from Claude Chabrol’s 1969 erotic thriller La Femme Infidèle, exchanging Chabrol’s critique of the French bourgeoisie for the Russian oligarchy. Their world is one of luxury modernist architecture (though the film was shot in Latvia) and fine dining that looks indistinguishable from the kinds of places you might find members of the Western elite, despite anti-West attitudes promoted by Putin. Before Russia mobilized in 2022, Gleb might have been considered an ordinary corporate executive, normal in his love for his family, and even in his marital conflicts. Not especially patriotic, or astonishingly evil. But in the current political environment, his class stands apart for one glaring truth: they’re almost completely insulated from the war. It’s at their doorstep but doesn’t breach the threshold. Gleb doesn’t discuss it with his family over dinner, and though he counsels his son about confronting schoolyard bullies, he never mentions the bully in the Kremlin with designs on turning back the clock to the Soviet era. Even as Gleb uncomfortably contends with the government’s orders to supply soldiers from his company, signing them up for, at best, an uncertain future and, at worst, death, he never so much as looks at Seriosha in a way that suggests any apprehension that his son could be next. His privilege protects him from the scale of the grief.

Without the war weighing on his psyche, Gleb is free to burrow deeper into his personal anxieties. And his paranoia is justified. Gleb discovers that Galina’s been having an affair with a 33-year-old photographer named Arthur, who lives in a modest studio apartment in the city. Gleb shows up at Arthur’s apartment, without much of a plan. Hurt more than anything, he almost graciously accepts the tea offered to him by his wife’s lover. It’s only when he thumbs through a stack of photos lying on the coffee table of Galina wrapped in bed sheets that he’s jolted from his confusion into blind rage and bashes Arthur over the head with a film camera, killing him. If the sudden murder could be considered an emotional crime of passion, the deliberate pace of its aftermath, clean-up, and disposal is methodical, which Zvyagintsev lets unfold for almost 20 minutes, in broad daylight, underscoring its depravity and brazenness. In this silent Hitchcockian sequence, recalling Norman Bates’ drawn out clean-up in the aftermath of the killing in Psycho, the director continues his work on the audience. Are we on the edge of our seat now, hoping Gleb will get away with murder?

Minotaur works as a kind of companion piece to Leviathan, released almost prophetically in 2014, the year Russia invaded Crimea, setting this era of Russian imperialism in motion. Leviathan also balances dramatic conflicts of government corruption and infidelity. In that film, a mechanic is pushed out of his family home by a crooked mayor who has it out for him and has the law completely at his disposal. Making matters worse, he catches the lawyer representing his case, a longtime pal, with his wife. In both films, a wife’s betrayal becomes a metaphor for government corruption, and the cuckolding a symbol for the inability to do anything against a dominating authoritarian regime. In Zvyagintsev’s films, what happens in the family is always representative of the afflictions of the country.

La Femme Infidèle ends with the implication that the murderous husband will be brought to justice. Minotaur has no such illusions. After two cops show up at his home, Gleb returns to the mayor’s office to get them off the case, once a cog in the machine, now using the machine in his favor. The same man who earlier in the film showed some apprehension about signing his employees up for war has come up with a list by deceptive means and eagerly adds a name—another sacrifice to the minotaur—to help clean up his mess: the private investigator who discovered his wife’s infidelity.

Many images from this film linger in the mind, including the final one, an extended black-and-white shot of clouds from overhead that could be smoke from the battlefield. But the stickiest may be a portrait of Putin hanging on the wall in the Mayor’s office. There was an identical image in Leviathan, of a corrupt local administrator with the president’s much younger, blonder, picture behind him. In the intervening years between these films, whose director is now in exile, that portrait stays the same. Putin has been in power for more than 25 years. In a Russia whose future feels uncertain, it’s the one thing that remains inevitable.

New York Film Festival 2026:
All of a Sudden
Dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi, France/Japan, NEON

No one of moral conscience could argue with this: capitalism, which by definition runs societies on market competition and wage labor, destroys the ability of those societies, fueled by and preoccupied with the success of privately funded, profit-motivated institutions, to adequately care for their citizens. Another irrefutable idea: in caring for the elderly and those with severe memory loss, one should treat the patient like an individual, with care, directness, respect, and gentleness of touch, which is preferable to handling human beings as little more than bodies. Unfortunately, the major costs associated—namely, time and money—make it often unimaginable for such tender, loving care to exist outside of the plushest, most expensive facilities (and even rarely there), leaving its benefits, as with so many of life’s comforts, to those with means.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s new film All of a Sudden, unwieldy and aggressively humane, swirls around a lot of ideas and images for its 196 minutes—eldercare, the power of friendship, dubious experimental theater, end-of-life acceptance, spiritual transcendence, foot massages—but the central one it engages with, as expressed above in this review and often in the film, is the virtuous imperative for adequate emotional and physical medical care and the systemic impossibility of capitalist societies to realize it. As a moral fulcrum it’s strong, as a dramatic one it’s fragile.

In materializing these concerns, Hamaguchi’s film mostly tells rather than shows, putting its ideological and ethical commitments into the dialogue of its two main characters: Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira), the head administrator of a Paris nursing home devoted to treating patients with dignity and proselytizing to her staff about it, and Mari (Tao Okamoto), a theater director from Kyoto whose current production Marie-Lou attends one evening. The play centers on a monologue concerning psychiatric care reform in Japan written by a late-middle-aged actor, Goro (Kyôzô Nagatsuka), whose grandson, Tomoki (Kodai Kurosaki), a nonverbal teenager with severe autism, plays a crucial role, his unpredictable reactions and responses creating variable encounters with the otherwise staid theater audience. Marie-Lou is profoundly moved by Mari’s show, and afterwards, the two women embark on an extended walk-and-talk that reveals their spiritual commune and ease of connection: Marie-Lou had studied anthropology in Tokyo and speaks Japanese fluently, while Mari, a philosophy major from the Sorbonne, is proficient in French. The sudden and intensely felt friendship between these similarly named women becomes an intellectual and emotional balm for both. Also, as she reveals, Mari is dying of terminal cancer, making their evolving bond even more urgent, both for the lack of time they have to explore their budding friendship and for their circumscribed ability to provide mutual solace.

Hamaguchi’s film is primarily inspired by an existing methodology of care called “Humanitude,” which was invented in France in the late 1970s specifically for dementia patients. For those of us who have had to endure the pain of a loved one with memory loss languishing in a nursing home and being given the bare minimum attention by nominally paid hospital workers, the tenets of “Humanitude” are refreshing and aspirational: using the principles of gaze, touch, speech, and verticality, one can aim to preserve human dignity in the face of a tragically undignified disease. The human connection between patient and caregiver should ideally improve the ability to perform more basic functions in the former and help mitigate burnout in the latter. By focusing on overall emotional structure rather than the medical symptoms—holistic rather than specific, if you will—behavioral symptoms will ideally have less of effect on those suffering from the disease and those treating it.

All of a Sudden proceeds to narrativize its communiqué for Humanitude in unusually direct ways. Most memorably, in the already beloved/infamous “whiteboard scene,” set in a nursing home break room, Mari diagrams for Marie-Lou, her audience of one, the deleterious effects of late capitalism on society in general, circling around the argument that political systems based on the pursuit of profit create intractable boundaries between inside and outside, institution and nature, caregiver and patient, life and death. The increasingly convoluted diagram is both a gesture of affinity for Marie-Lou and an explication of the difficulty of realizing Humanitude’s positive effects within such political structures. At the same time, Mari’s professed belief in the power and comfort of art produced within late capitalist societies functions as a tacit justification for her own art and, by extension, a defense of the film we’re watching. Well performed by Okamoto, who convincingly plays the lecture as though making it up on the spot and even surprising herself in the process, the scene skirts the line between a rather artless Brechtian direct address and a humane plea couched in behavioral realism—it’s both scattershot and efficient, a bit ridiculous as a scripted dramatic moment, more moving and effective when considered as the film’s clearest realization of Mari’s desire to dissolve boundaries though performance, in this case between audience and character (this lecture is clearly not really for in-the-tank Marie-Lou).

In a more dramatically integrated but no less didactic manner, the film also creates a situation in which Marie-Lou finds herself at odds with members of her staff in promoting this philosophy of care, most specifically Sophie (Marie Bunel), a highly skeptical nurse whose objections represent the burdensome toll Humanitude’s hours and attention would take on labor. Sophie is positioned as Marie-Lou’s primary antagonist, and though Bunel tries to inject the role with nuance and subtle gradations that speak more to a pragmatic weariness than mere obstructionism, Marie-Lou—and Efira’s performance of her—is so beatific and undeniably righteous that Sophie comes off like a straw man for Marie-Lou’s efforts for reform than a genuine figure of debate. (In these scenes, the most conventional in the film, I was reminded of nothing less than Patch Adams.) Rather than provide Marie-Lou with an intellectual sparring partner, as Sophie may have been, the film gives her a kindred spirit with whom she can help refine and build her argument for Humanitude and its real-world application. In short order (things happen all of a sudden here because time is of the essence), Mari becomes Marie-Lou’s support and shadow as she aims to transform the facility, which means also taking inspiration from Mari’s play.

Humanitude is not the only motivation for Hamaguchi’s film, which was also inspired by a 2019 Japanese book consisting of letters between an anthropologist and a philosopher dying of cancer, the title of which roughly translates to “The Illness Suddenly Gets Worse,” also the Japanese title for the film. And indeed Marie-Lou and Mari’s tête-à-têtes, reflecting their mutual growing admiration, are Hamaguchi’s most persuasive element: the women’s therapeutic, teasingly homoerotic bond, an unforeseen human connection between two needy souls, becomes an ethereal expression of pure kinship wholly devoid of conflict that allows the film’s general lack of dramatic tension to feel more like a feature than a bug. The film breathes easiest during an idyll in Kyoto, when Mari takes Marie-Lou back to her hometown, overlooking a hilly expanse of countryside that finally brings us to Mari’s “outside,” a privileged, momentary repose.

At other times, the film’s absence of moral complication (or self-critique) can be perplexing, especially in scenes involving Mari’s play. Tomoki (played by a non-autistic actor, it must be noted) is unquestioningly exploited as an agent of chaos, a known unknown unleashed to interrupt his grandfather’s monologue, his disability deployed as a confrontational theater device and his body a site of rupture. Subsequently, when Marie-Lou later brings Mari’s play to the nursing home, with Goro and Tomoki performing in the courtyard for an audience of dementia patients, Tomoki is again a crucial, interrogatory part of the show. Overall, the film—like Marie-Lou, like Mari, like Goro—feels so confident in its philosophical aims that when the play devolves into a spontaneous, orgiastic foot massage that sees patients and caregivers splayed over the lawn in an extreme expression of Humanitude’s belief in the healing power of touch, this climax, however compellingly absurd, comes across as little more than one final teachable moment. Recalling Mari’s lecture, boundaries have dissolved between patient/caregiver, inside/outside, and audience/performer, yet here the barrier between the screen and this viewer, at least, felt re-fortified by impenetrable conviction.

Hamaguchi’s past films have tended to see identity as mutable and even metaphysical. From Asako I & II to Drive My Car to Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, what characters do and how they manifest are contingent on environment and experience, and personalities shift as easily as the weather; Evil Does Not Exist was the outermost expression of Hamaguchi’s rejection of a socially defined version of selfhood, as its initial realism gave way to a spiritual abstraction that dispersed its characters, hampered by the evils of profit and capital, back to the winds of nature. That film left some viewers scratching their heads (I rewound the end of the film three times to try and fully understand what was happening spatially and narratively); his latest, however, leaves little room for confusion or ambiguity. The film’s various satellite characters exist to reinforce the film’s advocacy and to bolster Marie-Lou and Mari’s certitude: from scowling Sophie, to Goro and Tomoki, to the generalized, nonspecific patients at the nursing home (who might have been given more screen time and context to better elucidate the effects of Humanitude), no one serves to complicate the debates around treatment, which might have made for a more dialectical, dramatic experience.

All of a Sudden is a highly prescriptive movie, in both form and feeling, and the ecstatic response to it leads me to believe that its political directness and its occasionally saccharine emotionality (safely couched in an art-film package) are precisely what many people believe they need at this moment of world collapse and generalized inhumanity. All of a Sudden’s primary aesthetic conceit seems to be its cumbersome, sloping nature—its duration is maddening but also its saving grace: a film about the benefits of Humanitude running half its length might have felt like mere advert, after all. There’s undeniable beauty here, yet it’s the film’s undeniability—its assurance of intent and meaning—that makes it at once powerful and inert. Its final attempts at spiritual transcendence can only remind one of the nagging realities of the bodies—and the entrenched capitalist systems—that keep us all weighted down to earth.

New York Film Festival 2026:
9 Temples to Heaven
Dir. Sompot Chidgasornpongse, Thailand, no distributor

The mystery of karma casts a veil over 9 Temples to Heaven, the fiction feature debut of Thai filmmaker Sompot Chidgasornpongse. When sixty-something businessman Sakol (Surachai Ningsanond) hears an ominous prophecy that his elderly mother will suddenly pass away, he springs into action. Assembling nine members of his family to visit and make merit at nine temples across Thailand in a single day, Sakol hopes for his mother’s health to improve in karmic exchange for his dedication. However, as the extended family’s pilgrimage goes on, tensions slowly simmer as Sakol’s eldest son Tor (Sompop Songkampol) cannot hide his resentment for the family’s superstitious patriarch.

Before making his own films, Chidgasornpongse had worked as an assistant director on various projects by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who is also a producer on 9 Temples to Heaven. Unlike Weerasethakul’s transcendent, spellbinding works, where reality and dream dissolve into one another, Chidgasornpongse’s film is largely grounded and plainspoken. 9 Temples to Heaven spins off from the road-trip genre, delivering a meditative family drama in the process. The central characters’ journey becomes a microcosm of modern Thai society—fraught with conflicts between generations, as well as between secularism and organized religion. The film demonstrates how Buddhism holds significant influence over both the daily lives of Thai people and the country’s politics.

Drawing on the sensibilities of his 2017 documentary Railway Sleepers, Chidgasornpongse embraces a naturalistic and subdued visual language for 9 Temples to Heaven. In contrast to the film’s formal modesty, the Buddhist temples it captures are as lavish as they are monumental, all adorned with richly decorated upturned roofs, gilded ornamentation, and colorful ceramic tiles. The film doubles as a captivating architectural travelogue, showcasing the grandeur of Thailand’s Buddhist structures and, by extension, their enduring authority over the country. Here, Chidgasornpongse, a former architect himself, guides the camera to glide across the prayer halls and traces the intricate murals that embellish the sacred space. Bizarrely, one of the murals depicts a Buddhist deity scrolling through a smartphone. Chidgasornpongse barely lingers on the image, perhaps emphasizing how this seemingly absurd iconography is an ordinary part of modern Thai society.

The documentary-style depiction of the temples is mirrored in the monks’ matter-of-fact dialogues, which often can seem just as strange as a Buddhist deity on a smartphone. A monk recounts the story of a Burmese bodhisattva who died by self-immolation but transcended the pain through meditation, underscoring its supposed cleansing power. The family, however, whisper among themselves that the bodhisattva was actually Vietnamese. Through this inaccuracy, Chidgasornpongse undermines Thai Buddhism’s claim to infallibility and cautions against placing absolute faith in its teachings. The monk, oblivious to his mistake, then advertises the temple’s youth camp, which offers a meditation competition. As the family makes merit at different temples, Chidgasornpongse introduces monks of varying ages and backgrounds, juxtaposing those who offer genuine wisdom with those driven by commercial gains. At one point, the film enters a temple repository, where the excess of devotees’ offerings sitting on tables contradicts the Buddhist teaching of modesty.

Deliberately paced,9 Temples to Heaven patiently peels back the layers of its many characters, revealing their inner lives either through absorbing conversations or quiet but haunting gestures. The cast of mostly first-time actors bring[s] natural charm and chemistry to their performances, convincingly portraying a squabbling but endearing extended family. Ningsanond, an award-winning Elvis Presley impersonator in Thailand, plays Sakol with calm authority, characterizing the patriarch as dedicated but close-minded. Opposite him, Songkampol, also a musician, channels his onstage charisma to play Tor as an arrogant and snarky young man. Despite the laborious efforts to fulfill his filial duty, Sakol rarely checks in on his mother throughout the trip. Tor, by contrast, remains tenderly attentive to his grandmother regardless of his ambivalence about the pilgrimage. When the journey takes its toll on her, Tor and his brother, Koon (Poon Sirapob), recite the Buddhist sutra she once read to them as children. However staunch his rejection of religion, Buddhism remains woven into Tor’s life.

Neither Tor nor his father can escape the karmic cycle. Beginning the pilgrimage to prevent his mother’s prophesied death, Sakol himself suddenly falls ill. Wandering through a temple, Sakol stumbles upon a murky pigpen, a startling sight that evokes Buddhist concepts of reincarnation and karmic rebirth. Releasing animals from slaughterhouses is an act of merit in Buddhism, but are they truly free when remaining confined in dark spaces on temple grounds? 9 Temples to Heaven poses delicate questions, inviting viewers to meditate not for spiritual cleansing, but on Buddhism’s influence over Thailand and the legitimacy of the religion’s moral authority.

New York Film Festival 2026:
I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming
Dir. Isabelle Stever, Germany/Ukraine, no distributor

War as the most extreme expression of masculine power has been a subject of art and literature for millennia, but the fraught gender politics of war have never manifested quite like they do in I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming. The film, the second collaboration between married director Isabelle Stever and screenwriter Anna Melikova, turns the Ukrainian home front of the Russian invasion into a crucible of daunting choices for a transgender man.

At the start of the story, Oleh and Olya (Markus Bright and Tania Myronyshena, both journalists and activists appearing in a film for the first time) have found a pleasant groove. Oleh is well along in his transition, and they live comfortably in Kyiv with a strikingly blue-eyed French bulldog. The Russian invasion spurs them to flee to the countryside to stay with Olya’s parents (who think Oleh is cis), but their attempt to cross the border for safety is stymied by martial law’s prohibition on men aged 18-60 leaving the country.

From there, the couple is trapped in a bureaucratic snare. Many upbraid Oleh for not doing his patriotic duty by enlisting in the army, and if they are aware he’s trans, their contempt is even more poisonous. One harrowing scene has Oleh interrogated by female border guards, who sneer, “You’re man enough to marry, but for your country, you’re a woman?” and “I don’t care what’s in your pants; only on your passport.” His options for avoiding the draft—detransitioning to get past the border or having his dysphoria certified as grounds for a medical exemption—would require him to surrender the legitimacy of his gender. At the same time, despite his fear of combat, he’s nagged by the feeling that joining the army is the right thing to do, both as a “real man” and as a citizen.

This morass of bad options only gets worse as the years trudge by and the war curdles into a stalemate. The narrative sees more ellipses in its back half, with the characters’ living situation changing while the war around them drags on—after one time jump, they have a young boarder with them in her parents’ house, after another, they’re back in their Kyiv apartment, implying that despite the danger, there’s nowhere else to go.

The film explores war as the most extreme rendering of how circumstance can exacerbate a couple’s prior strains. The movie begins in media res with a flash-forward to Oleh and Olya’s low point, an argument in which she says that she was “drafted into a heterosexual relationship against [her] will” by Oleh’s transition. This bracing demonstration of her resentment colors our understanding of their relationship even in the story’s early, apparently idyllic phase, like their somewhat awkward physical intimacy in a sex scene that, ominously, ends with the invasion’s commencement. She suggests that detransitioning and retransitioning in another country would be to “reincarnate again,” as if it’s no great demand. Their big argument plays out in the opening from a distance, shot through a window outside their apartment, their voices muffled. When it’s revisited late in the film, the camera is in the room with them, physically realizing the familiarity it’s built with the characters over time. In both iterations, the sequence closes with the building’s power cutting out.

I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming excels in using little details to contour its nightmare concept. We don’t hear much about Oleh’s relationship with his father, but we know he isn’t out to him because he tries to raise his voice and uses female verb endings when speaking with him on the phone. A sequence tracking a caravan of refugees focuses on the various pets they’ve brought with them, all bathed in red light. It progresses from shots of expected dogs and cats to caged animals like gerbils and birds, driving home the upsettingly uprooted domesticity.

The unresolved status of the war unfortunately bleeds into the film’s difficulty with its ending. Finding a definitive statement within this conceit is an unenviable task, but the film settles on a conclusion that feels pat in its use of the hallmarks of traditional family construction. The arrival of a baby helping to mend a troubled relationship isa dissatisfying resolution even in a heteronormative context; it feels especially reductive in a film about the thorny gender-based contours of a queer relationship. The movie exactingly recreates the circumstances of war, but its attempt to provide a sense of closure is less convincing.

New York Film Festival 2026:
The Day She Returns
Dir. Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, Cinema Guild

Hong Sang-soo’s 34th feature The Day She Returns continues a robust period of autofiction for the filmmaker about aging artists who are more concerned with being true to themselves than being liked. The latter preoccupation often incapacitated the protagonists of Hong’s past films, who whimpered their way into bars and beds to assuage their fear of failure or, even worse, mediocrity. Hong’s contemplative turn from street smarts to aged wisdom now depicts seeking approval as a distraction from more urgent mid- and late-career artistic concerns. The pared-down structure and staging of The Day She Returns give it the appearance of a small aside in a chapter already defined by efficiency. But the film's brevity is the result of careful precision. It is among the director’s best meditations on the artistic process, with an emotional gravity that passes through like a breeze.

Three interviews take place between three young journalists and Jeong-su (Song), a middle-aged actress ending a 12-year hiatus with a role in an independent film. The Gen-Z journalists have little to no knowledge of Jeong-su's catalog or cinema in general, so their lines of questioning careen a little too quickly into the matter of Jeong-su's divorce from two years ago. Jeong-su expresses more interest in probing the minds of the interviewers. Why do they want to talk to her? Is it just because she's famous? What do they think of love, of the future?

The Day She Returns winks at the English title of Hong’s 2011 film The Day He Arrives, which follows a male film professor caught in endless permutations of barhopping and pursuing a woman who looks like another woman he once loved. Perhaps, like myself, the director sees the earlier film as his first successful attempt at constructing a hall of mirrors without any obvious exits or entrances. The structure of The Day She Returns retains its predecessor’s rhyming, but Song has gone from being a figure orbiting men to a central one. And the resignation to the idea that we are condemned to barrel through the same mistakes each day has softened into a sober-minded meditation on a truth chiseled slowly by time and uncovered in increments. It is a moving change from a director whose filmography currently resembles the Ozu approach to artistic growth by returning to and refining previous films.

Jeong-su’s comeback vehicle is by a director of ambiguous repute—all we perceive of him is an off-screen voice offering rides and meals to the young women. The quality of the film, which she claims has an excellent script, and of Jeong-su's performance may be overshadowed by the novelty of her casting. Despite the redundancy of each interview (everyone wants a word of advice for young people), Jeong-su instills her responses with zealous but strategic maneuvers to protect herself, to promote the film, and to offer what she believes to be a good performance. Her experimentation with the elasticity of the truth pokes holes into each conversation as she creates pockets—deviations into the philosophical, questions about the interviewer's love life, an extended explanation of intermittent fasting—into which she might disappear.

Just as he integrated the political activities and theatrical career of actor Kwon Hae-hyo into the plot of last year's By the Stream, Hong sews together elements of his own life with that of Song to create Jeong-su. Like Jeong-su, Song is a prolific television actress and a single mother to a daughter. The character’s foray into independent cinema invokes Song’s collaborations with Hong: Woman on the Beach (2006), On the Beach at Night Alone (2011), and Walk Up (2022). Both the actress and the director have had their fair share of scandals. Song's late husband was murdered by a hitman hired by his cousin in 2017. It has been more than a decade since the extramarital affair between Hong and actress Kim Min-hee on the set of Right Now, Wrong Then (2015) came to light, but its enduring effect on public perception of the two very reasonably remains on the director's mind. The fact that Jeong-su's divorce is already two years in the past has an obvious metatextual connection, but it also serves as a grand metaphor for what one can never accurately describe no matter how many times one tries, especially if the public's interpretation is far beyond one's control.

Save for some vaping breaks in the parking lot and a few walks down the street, the film mostly consists of two-shots which place scene partners in profile and Jeong-su's face in full view. At times she appears to yield to a difficult question, then she retreats and turns the question back to the journalist. She snaps with sarcasm, then shares an anecdote about her ex-husband with tears in her eyes. And after insisting to each interviewer that she isn't much of a drinker, she always gives in to ordering a mug of beer with a big smile. The delayed arrival of alcohol plays a trick on the trained expectation that it would unlock a lower depth of vulnerability, as drunkenness has been wont to do in Hong’s films. But as the mugs come and go, Jeong-su grows increasingly opaque as she becomes more adept at using the drink as a prop and preparing for her next take.

After the interviews, she attends an acting class where she is asked to recall and reenact the interviews as a scene. She finds her memories have faded. What she does remember seems altogether too much, both too revealing and too obscure. It is easier to perform passion for an audience and on behalf of a director. But the command that Jeong-su is given over her own experience draws out an uncertainty that renders her hours-old proclamations about this new chapter in her life porous and complicated. The resulting performance is revelatory because it is totally devoid of charisma. Song enters this final portion with more weight on the shoulders and a dimmer light in her eyes. Her shift in body language is what makes most legible the lesson of this mysterious parable: a truer self makes for a better artist, and it begins with the surrender of the bells and whistles.

Claire Denis once described women as being the true axis of time in Hong's films. I’ve maintained some ambivalence towards this view, admittedly out of fidelity to Korean feminists who decried films like On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate (2002) for enshrining a strain of self-deprecating Korean masculinity, bolstered by alcohol and art world hierarchies. (For more on that subject, I redirect everyone to Park Chan-ok's Jealousy Is My Middle Name [2003] and Kim Cho-hee's Lucky Chan-sil [2019]—respectively, Hong’s former assistant director and his former producer.) A clock is important, but it is an object nonetheless. So it is a welcome surprise that The Day She Returns formally concretizes what Hong has gotten right about women before in such masterpieces as The Power of Kangwon Province (1998) and Nobody's Daughter Hae-won (2013). Women are made peripheral by men who fail up, but what they do to survive in a man's world will be executed with grit and aplomb. Even when no one is watching, even in dreams. Crucially, The Day She Returns takes a step further than portraiture. By focusing on the interviews, the structure grounds Jeong-su’s personhood in her own words to describe her desires and goals—being a good mother, being an excellent actress, losing weight, being in a relationship that doesn't feel routine, being happy—and not in terms of who or what she's up against.

I am reminded of the television films Bergman made about actors—The Rite (1969), The Magic Flute (1975), After the Rehearsal (1984)—and how acting’s pleasures derive from a very controlled but intuitive leakage of vulnerability, glimpses of the person behind the mask. Therefore a skillful actor risks forgetting how to be themselves, ironically because they know too well what being oneself looks and feels like. Hong likewise constructs The Day She Returns around the trance the actor falls into and awakens from in order to be someone else, and what it means to merge that other being with oneself. I can’t help but also think of Autumn Sonata (1978), which Bergman made in the aftermath of being charged with tax evasion and his final theatrical release. Similarly stripped down, it is a vulnerable admission to being embarrassed of the human behind the public persona and the artistic mastery. But unlike Bergman and even unlike himself, this time Hong does not conjure a memory, a dream, or the cinema to fill the gaps in our understanding of the present. Instead, he stays committed to today’s banal schedule, with all its unsettling lapses into the unknown. No cuts, no naps, and not enough beer. Only awkward silences and deep breaths before the next repetition.

New York Film Festival 2026:
The Dreamed Adventure
Dir. Valeska Grisebach, Germany/France/Bulgaria/Austria, Janus Films

Valeska Grisebach’s The Dreamed Adventure (2026) opens with the image of Syuleyman Alilov Letifov’s engrossing visage, which one might remember fondly from the director’s previous film, Western. Here, he plays Saïd, headed to Svilengrad, his old stomping ground bordering Greece and Turkey, on a job that we soon learn involves shady diesel trading. Although there are no horses in sight, the borderlands setting suggests that the director is once again returning to a genre best suited for telling frontier stories. What draws her to the western is the mercurial state of being on the edge, where national borders, conflicting allegiances, and distinct ethical codes converge and confront one another. What gradually materializes throughout Grisebach’s new film is less a revisionist take on the western than a consideration of the genre as an epistemic framework applied to the post-Communist economic desperation and social instability that have invariably shaped the lives of Svilengrad residents.

The morning after his arrival in Svilengrad, Saïd wakes up to the rude discovery that his barely functioning sedan has been stolen overnight. Contemplating the next course of action over vending-machine coffee, he runs into old fling Veska (Yana Radeva), an archaeologist back in town to supervise an excavation project at the nearby Matochina Fortress, a relic from the medieval period. The unexpected reunion leads him to the excavation site, where an eclectic group of townspeople has gathered to lend a helping hand. After a lovely dinner with Veska, he abruptly vanishes for a good chunk of the film. Right before this L'Avventura-like exit, a man at a bar confronts Saïd about some sinister affairs he was embroiled in years ago. From there, Veska takes over as the film’s de facto protagonist, and her private investigation into Saïd’s disappearance pulls her back into the criminal network headed by Iliya (Stoicho Kostadinov), with whom she once had a romantic history. In that process, she comes face to face with the unsavory remnants of what Iliya calls “the Golden Age of men”—the decade following the dissolution of the Soviet Union when organized crime became lucrative, and men violated women with total impunity—and a local community still stuck in a social contract with the oppressive kingpin for its survival.

Like its predecessor, The Dreamed Adventure emerged from years of extensive field research and collaborations with the locals, who contributed not only their knowledge and personal histories that shaped the film’s narrative but also their indelible screen presence. Grisebach’s gift for working with nonprofessional actors derives in part from her discerning eye for fascinating faces. Meinhard and Letifov were mesmerizing in Western, and in her latest, we encounter dozens of such characters, with or without spoken lines, whose facial features alone communicate the sheer breadth of their life experiences. Radeva’s is, rather like Letifov’s, engraved with the traces of moral ambiguity, street smarts, and deep kindness that she must have acquired while living through “the Golden Age of men.” In The Dreamed Adventure, the human faces become another frontier at which the battles of wills are fought and the densely layered plot unfolds.

Although there are gunshots and scuffles in this film, its most intense and memorable moments are those of characters in conversations. Spoken words become cinematic gestures, and their often impenetrable countenances make it nearly impossible to predict their next moves. Midway through, Veska is half-pressured into joining a group of small-time crooks for an outdoor booze-up, and they could convincingly be characters in a spaghetti western if dressed in the right attire. As if provoked by the sudden presence of a woman with an unreadable expression, they hurl brazenly misogynistic phrases and probe into her relationship to Iliya. The only action happening in the scene is speech, yet Veska’s stone face and all the guessing games buried underneath the men’s salacious looks render this sequence unpredictable and suspenseful, with the possibility of violent eruptions kept at bay but always palpable. Later in the film, upon Saïd’s unexpected return, we come across a similar moment between him and Iliya as they hash out their dark past. Neither says anything in concrete terms aside from the mob boss’s job proposal involving crossing the Turkish border, but the oppressively tense atmosphere fills the frame due to the absence of clearly defined emotions on their faces. All we can infer from Saïd’s deadpan look is the act of thinking itself.

Curiously, each time we see Saïd drinking coffee, he is deliberating on what choices to make: about the stolen car, the offer from his former partner in crime, and the second reunion with his old flame. More precisely, it is the act of drinking itself—and the duration it takes to complete that act—that embodies the state of suspended potentiality in which Saïd finds himself, pondering the next steps in a place where geographical, temporal, and moral boundaries remain fuzzy. In Grisebach’s hands, this quotidian gesture becomes utterly consequential in a manner reminiscent of John Ford’s oeuvre. In “John Ford, or The Eloquence of Gesture,” a fascinating study on the ubiquity of the act of throwing in the director’s filmography, Japanese critic Shiguéhiko Hasumi points out that this gesture, regardless of the object thrown, often precedes a decisive moment in narrative. A stone thrown into a river in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), for instance, announces the death of the woman Henry Fonda’s character loves. Whenever Saïd drinks something—and let’s not forget that he is seen consuming alcohol right before leaving town—he comes face to face with the ghosts from his sinister past, leaving him with the option to either get sucked right back in or change his ways.

This also holds true of Veska. In addition to the raucous run-in with the group of drunkards, we see her chatting over coffee with a woman associated with Saïd’s previous life. She, too, has to contend with the inglorious history of the town she once left behind. But she realizes it is possible to refuse, as she does when Iliya offers a liquor at a lavish house party. Determined to stop teenaged Maria (Denislava Yordanova) from being taken advantage of by the gangsters like she and countless other women in the town were in the’90s, Veska instead picks up her pistol and escorts the young girl home. Her act of rebellion soon leads her back to Saïd, who says he’s been waiting for her with a cup of coffee in his hand. Grisebach concludes the film with the serene image of the two characters walking to the excavation site. They are still stuck in the ruins of both distant and recent pasts, but all possibilities stay open—after all, they are at the frontier. What awaits them up on that hill may as well turn out to resemble a half-constructed church ground from My Darling Clementine, where, according to Gilberto Perez, “Wyatt Earp will forever dance with Clementine.”