Pleasure and pain are woven into a single paradox within Shame’s study of a self-loathing sex addict, suffocating him in an oppressive frigidity that presses in through Steve McQueen’s cold, blue palettes, and hypnotising him in a reverie of montages moving through the same wretched, compulsive cycles.
As recovering drug addict Anders drifts between vestiges of his old life on his first day out of rehab, Joachim Trier unfolds a battle in his mind between the future and oblivion, submitting Oslo, August 31st to the cycle of time that poignantly fades away sentimental memories into a mournful recognition of their widespread irrelevance.
As an ensemble of men track down the body of a murder victim through the Turkish countryside, Nuri Bilge Ceylan languidly pulls together the stories of a suspect, a prosecutor, and a doctor in a meditation on generational sin and regret, using his archetypal characters and symbols to develop Once Upon a Time in Anatolia into a delicately existential fable.
All it took was a filmmaker with as intense a fascination in humanity’s primal fears and desires as David Cronenberg to craft such a thrilling drama out of founding psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung’s contentious relationship, as A Dangerous Method compellingly turns these reserved historical figures into vulnerable subjects of its own psychological studies.
Beneath the epic weight of Margaret’s three-hour runtime, Kenneth Lonergan’s rich, operatic character drama holds strong, using a layered emotional journey of guilt and rage to speak directly to the specific kind of trauma that unified New Yorkers in the wake of 9/11.
