In Asteroid City’s grand metaphor for life, everyone is performing roles that they may not fully understand, yet through the metatextual union of art and reality Wes Anderson reverberates a sweet, formal harmony across a youth astronomy convention visited by aliens, and the backstage drama of the play it exists within.
The formal ambition on display in Synecdoche, New York’s existential, postmodern allegory is equal parts staggering and confounding, transporting us into an absurdist meta-reality that gradually reveals the narcissistic insanity of Charlie Kaufman’s self-obsessed theatre director, and his exponentially sprawling vision of bloated artistic ego.
As Warren Beatty plays out an epic recount of 1910s American communism’s rise and fall, he also finds its living embodiment in bright-eyed journalist John Reed, passionately promising a hopeful future of equality doomed to live on only in the wistful memories of Reds’ aged interview subjects and their wistful firsthand accounts.
Even as The Serpent’s Egg marks a strange departure from Ingmar Bergman’s usual screenwriting strengths, the bleak tension he builds in his 1920s Berlin setting can’t be denied, witnessing the birth of fascism amid dystopian landscapes of fear, starvation, and corruption.
The mysterious, embalmed hand that invites deceased spirits into the minds of teenagers makes for a dangerous party drug in Talk to Me, as well as a terrifying metaphor that the Philippou brothers tease out with an uneasy subjectivity, haunting those who can’t seem to tear themselves away from its supernatural intoxication.
Even by Ingmar Bergman’s standards, Dr Jenny Isaksson’s characterisation is layered with immense psychological depth in Face to Face, treading a fine line between realism and surrealism as her childhood traumas, insecurities, and mortal fear of death chaotically rise to the surface after years of emotional repression.
Salvation is but a distant dream for doomed prom queen Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, even as its shallow façade casts a sleepy spell over her blissfully deluded town, letting this all-American sweetheart spiral into a tragic self-destruction brought on by unresolved traumas drawn out through David Lynch’s surreal, psychological horror.
Just as the tiniest of quantum processes may produce explosive reactions, so too does the father of the atomic bomb set off seismic ripples across human history in Oppenheimer, and from beneath his shadow Christopher Nolan whisks us forward through a relentlessly non-linear narrative to witness the tortured Destroyer of Worlds emerge out the other end.
Armed with self-aware humour and a kitschy production design, Greta Gerwig delivers a camp visual treat in Barbie, balancing a feminist interrogation of the doll’s controversial place in pop culture against the innocent, whimsical joy of everything it was intended to represent.
The loss of innocence is no small tragedy in Lady Vengeance, and yet there is an elegant restraint to one ex-convict’s retribution against the serial killer who groomed and framed her, further drawn through Park Chan-wook’s stylish aesthetic as he considers the destructive co-dependency of purity and corruption.
