Yes, this is very late this week. I am sorry. I don’t know who’s keeping score, but I am for myself and don’t like it.
There’s always been a craving for cinema to take us to the far reaches of our imagination. Just think of the line in Nicole Kidman’s opening prayer at AMC: “We need that, all of us, that indescribable feeling we get when the lights begin to dim … and we go somewhere we've never been before. Not just entertained, but somehow reborn. Together.”
Some version of science-fiction has reigned supreme in the cultural imagination for the better part of 15 years thanks to superheroes and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We’re clearly past the zenith of that moment, and what will come to take its place remains uncertain. That’s made doubly complicated by the shifting question of what makes a movie at all, especially ones that people want to see in a theater.
I think we’re in the middle of a particularly interesting period in science fiction. That era will likely be embodied by the improbable Best Picture champion Everything Everywhere All at Once. There’s a shifting ethos governing the genre, one that is less focused on crafting elaborate CGI worlds and more interested in the deeply human stories of characters trying to navigate a world that feels increasingly unfamiliar.
Enter Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, which opened last week in NY/LA and is now beginning to expand across America. (Check to see when it’s opening near you.) This French hit from the 2023 fall festival circuit engages deeply with the genre of science-fiction to frame an expansive, ambitious story about fear and love that spans multiple eras.
In a 2044 that feels more like our present than our future, Léa Seydoux’s Gabrielle undergoes a DNA “purification” process that will excavate and eradicate her past lives. In a melodramatic Belle Epoque Paris of 1910, she’s enchanted by the love of a suitor — George MacKay’s Louis — but enervated by the prospect of leaving her comfortable marriage to pursue that passion. Fast-forward nearly a century to Los Angeles of 2014, and the roles are reversed with Louis motivated by fear and doubt. His pursuit this time, however, feels ripped from a thriller given his incel-coded behavior ripped from the manifesto of a real-life Californian mass murderer.
I’ve seen The Beast twice now and had the pleasure of speaking with both Bertrand Bonello and George MacKay about their work on the film for Slant Magazine. It’s a film you’ll want to talk about, in part because you’ll need to digest all its density. For those concerned this might be a “confusing” movie, fear not. This is not big on elaborate plot mechanics. But you may find yourself trying to piece together various strands into a more cohesive tapestry of what it all means because Bonello is not going to spoon-feed it to you.
I think the brand of low-fi sci-fi represented by The Beast could very well be the saving grace of cinema. By placing humans in a space governed by different rules, we can then reflect on our own. These films are masterfully inventive but do not require much in the way of bells and whistles to sell us an alternate version of the world. Even more importantly, the imagined environment is neither the point nor the main attraction. Storytelling, not spectacle, is the driving force of the ten movies below.
Alphaville, available through Hoopla and Kanopy (frequently through local libraries)
If you’ve been a bit trepidatious to approach the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, a good starting point might be Alphaville. The French New Wave legend always had a penchant for skewing genres by showing how people internalized the codes of behavior these films conveyed. That might be a little easier to understand here given that sci-fi has remained largely stable in the six decades since this film’s release. Godard also dips into the spy thriller and the film noir here as he follows a detective moving through a dystopian totalitarian state. The catch: it’s filmed in what was then a contemporaneous Paris, which highlights how technology was already warping the classical city in ways that felt destabilizing.
Coherence, Amazon Prime Video
It starts like any mumblecore dinner party: a group of yuppies gather and trade stories about their lives, but something is lingering in the background of it all. There’s a comet passing overhead that messes with the way things ought to be. James Ward Byrkit needs little in the way of effects trickery to sell the terror of what comes next in Coherence as the group realizes they’re living a version of the Schrödinger’s Cat experiment. As they live, they come to realize an alternate universe of themselves exists in immediate proximity. Their reality is being affected and shaped by these other selves in frightening ways because their alter egos are fighting to be the main versions moving forward.
Dream Scenario, Max
In some ways, Nicolas Cage was already living a version of Dream Scenario. His character, the mild-mannered college professor Paul Matthews, starts randomly appearing in the dreams of people across the world. At first, the phenomenon flatters him. Who wouldn’t want to live in the collective consciousness so vibrantly? But soon those dreams turn into nightmares he can’t control, and he experiences the panic of losing control of his image. This dark comedy helpfully plays out the path to cancel culture radicalization in starkly clear terms. As writer/director Kristoffer Borgli told me: “Why don’t I rip the high-concept idea out of its genre and give it to this professor that I’m already interested in and see what happens?”
Dual, Hulu
The grief of a loved one passing is difficult to bear, so the world inhabited by Karen Gillan’s Sarah in Dual has a solution. She can create a cloned version of herself to live on after she dies. But after an initial fatal diagnosis proves misguided, Sarah has another problem ahead. Because her clone has decided it also wants to live, she must fight it to the death in a year. Droll comedy lies ahead as she must develop not only the skill to defeat her clone alongside Aaron Paul’s trainer Trent … but also the willpower to remember what makes life worth holding onto at all.
Fingernails, Apple TV+
“Here, we're not making a sci-fi movie at all,” Greek filmmaker Christos Nikou told me of his part sci-fi, part rom-com, wholly uncategorizable Fingernails. “For me, it's a character study.” (You can read more of this interview in a blown-out piece for Inverse that circles a lot of the themes expressed in this very newsletter!) This clever allegory for dating app culture abstracts contemporary issues into a ‘90s-looking world where a mysterious machine can ingest two people’s fingernails and prove if they’re a match for each other. Jessie Buckley’s Anna has what she knows is a perfect match with Jeremy Allen White’s Ryan … but starts to second-guess that when she meets her new co-worker, Riz Ahmed’s Amir. (I mean, who amongst us wouldn’t?)
High Life, Max
Space … the final frontier. But don’t look for hope in Claire Denis’ High Life, which depicts a ship displaying humanity at its most venal and brutal as it hurtles toward a black hole. Juliette Binoche’s mad scientist has free reign to perform reproductive experiments on a cadre of prisoners on board, although Robert Pattinson’s monk-like Monte resists participating. Absolute mayhem soon erupts as Denis’ corporeal cinema sublimates seething internal sensations into violent physical actions. But amidst it all, there’s a tender softness to Pattinson’s performance as his character tries to find the reasons to live in the face of imminent death.
Midnight Special, available for rent through various digital platforms
I will caveat Midnight Special a tiny bit compared to the rest of the list. It’s lo-fi when you compare it against the Spielbergian ‘80s classics that Jeff Nichols is so clearly riffing on. But at $20 million in budget, it’s not exactly indie. Still, I think this film is worth your time because Nichols takes care to flip the genre’s appeal to emotion via sensationalism on its head. Midnight Special provides something a bit more cerebral to mull over as it hits the road with a father (Michael Shannon) trying to protect his supernaturally gifted child from both government capture and cultish adoration.
Save the Green Planet, available through Kanopy (frequently through local libraries)
If you want a head-start on what Yorgos Lanthimos is cooking up after Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness, all signs indicate it will be a remake of the Korean sci-fi film Save the Green Planet. If you can find a way to watch it, you won’t find it hard to see what attracted him to this bonkers movie. I can only hope that it’s Emma Stone, who’s in talks to join the project, playing the protagonist Byeong-Ju given that (s)he becomes convinced an alien invasion is coming, only (s)he can prevent it, and doing so requires the kidnapping of a pharmaceutical executive. I got to see this with a packed audience in 2019, and it brought down the house.
Synchronic, Netflix (through 4/15) and available for rent through various digital platforms
Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are pros at doing genre on the cheap, so much so that it was inevitable/unfortunate that Marvel scooped them up for Moon Knight and Loki. (Fear not, they still found time to make some weird indie movies in between.) I was particularly struck by their first jump toward the mainstream with Synchronic, which starts like a police procedural as two New Orleans cops (Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan) investigate a new designer drug that’s wreaking havoc on the city. But it spirals into something far more interesting when it’s revealed that the synthetic substance has the power to warp the perception of time. The film unexpectedly interrogates the time travel genre by plainly illustrating the consequences for those who have not always had the luxury of existing comfortably in the past.
BONUS: Memoria, not streaming in the US
Sorry to be annoying because this will allegedly never stream in the United States. The distributor of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria committed to a rolling roadshow for the film, mirroring the film’s obsession with the fleeting and fading nature of a sensation ebbing and flowing. The film gently tracks Tilda Swinton’s Jessica, a Scottish professor living in Colombia, as she tries to determine the source of a strange thumping sound that will jolt her out of nowhere. “I think that the movie is attempting to reflect how one really wants to reach across to this other life,” the director told me, “to something that you cannot explain.” Wait for the final shot to really see why this film makes the list.
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