Even as the mysteries of the human mind elude us throughout Mirror, Andrei Tarkovsky’s precise control over the raw elements of time and life itself poetically sink us into its surreal depths, opening a portal into nostalgic childhood memories distorted by the dreams, doubts, and desires that have emerged in the decades since.
Beyond Napoleon’s uneven, unfocused narrative, Ridley Scott commands brilliant spectacle and irreverent humour in his portrait of the infamous French emperor, cynically revealing the childish fool in the intelligent tactician whose enormous ambitions cannot sustain his own ego.
With an obscure set of animalistic metaphors and perverse power plays, Emerald Fennell weaves a monstrously sinister fable around lower-class outsider Oliver Quick and his wealthy hosts in Saltburn, painting a darkly satirical portrait of class tension, obsession, and exploitation at their majestic country estate.
There is a perverse ritualism to the torture that two young strangers exact on one helpless family in Funny Games, and yet in Michael Haneke’s disturbing piece of horror metafiction they are simply the storytellers serving the gratuitous tastes of us, their audience, who guiltily respond to their sadistic manipulation of narrative conventions with fear, shock, and awe.
As if filtered through the prism of one man’s existential trepidation, Andrei Tarkovsky casts a delicate ethereality across the elemental textures and theological iconography of The Sacrifice, lulling us into the soothing despair of a looming nuclear holocaust that may or may not be averted through enormous spiritual offering.
Through the satirical crime plot of a movie studio executive who accidentally kills a rejected writer, The Player offers a subversive metacommentary on a modern, commercialised Hollywood that places profits above art, as Robert Altman disturbingly exposes an insidiousness baked into its manufactured narrative conventions.
Even when we aren’t witnessing the Boston Strangler’s brutal murders in Matt Ruskin’s true crime procedural, we feel a palpable paranoia spreading across 1960s Massachusetts, posing a cutting criticism of those misogynistic institutions seeking to protect one half of society while the other lives in perpetual fear.
With such an emotionally distant sociopath at the centre of The Killer, it is no wonder why David Fincher was so drawn to its methodical screenplay and intensive study of perfectionism, meticulously following the procedures of a vengeful hitman through a treacherous, gloomy underworld that very gradually unravels his icy composure.
The only place willing to embrace those who have endured life’s deepest psychological pains in The Haunting is the cursed estate of Hill House, consuming its vulnerable visitors in Robert Wise’s expressionistic set pieces and writing out their chilling destinies in ghostly prophecies.
Ordet’s parable of dwindling spirituality is stark in its dogmatic minimalism, enveloping Christians and non-believers alike in rural landscapes of harrowing scarcity, and yet still there is hope in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s deliberations on divine miracles that espouse the indivisibility of life, faith, and the profound resurrection of both.
