Breaths of fresh air

It’s been a difficult year for the movies. Judging by those that made it to our big screens mainstream cinema has all the attraction of a once robust man now ravaged by emphysema, living his last days  with the assistance of an oxygen tank.

Superheroes have lost their former guaranteed box office appeal and every other film seems to be a remake, reboot, sequel or prequel.

Still, if you’re patient and have the time to spend  streaming and on VOD platforms, all is not lost. There are a variety of dedicated storytellers who boldly go where others have not with films that challenge our ideas of what we think about the world, how we see it and how we choose to live in it.

The three films below are linked by their interest in the loneliness of human relationships, sex and ways of changing ourselves in the face of seemingly insurmountable historical and personal obstacles.

THE ARTHOUSE ESSENTIAL

Kinds of Kindness — Disney Plus

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos had a bumper year, starting  with his Oscar winning Poor Things, starring Emma Stone, followed by this dark, anthology film featuring many of his now regular acting collaborators — including Stone and Willem Dafoe — alongside Jesse Plemons. The trio play multiple roles in the three distinct stories that make up this film which, contrary to its title, features very little kindness.

Reuniting with fellow Greek, screenwriter Efthimis Filippou, Lanthimos returns to the themes explored in their previous collaborations such as Dogtooth, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and The Lobster — the idea of control and the repression of free will. These are surreal meditations on relationships and power dynamics that test the audience’s ability to empathise with a world that’s decidedly S&M in relation to ideas around how human beings treat each other.

The three stories that make up the film stand alone and are only tenuously connected by using the same actors and the dark, increasingly grizzly visions that ask much of the audience. While not a perfect work, it’s certainly an original that leaves you feeling a little nauseous, very dirty and despairing for faith in anything.

Trailer:

THE STONE COLD CLASSIC

All of Us Strangers — Rent or buy from Disney Plus

Director Andrew Haigh’s modern gothic ghost story is an achingly emotional drama about love, loss and grief held together by two exceptional performances from Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal.

Based on a 1987 Japanese novel by Taichi Yamada, the film begins in a mostly unoccupied apartment tower in London where Scott’s Adam, a lonely and depressed screenwriter is struggling with  a script that demands that he travel back through the misty unreliability of memory to his childhood. Playing the hits of his 1980s youth and sifting through a box of old photographs, Adam tries all  he can think of to make a magical connection between then and now to  spark the inspiration he needs to finish his script. But it is not going well and as he mournfully watches dusk falling over the London skyline from the window of his apartment it seems that he’s destined to fail.

What happens next changes everything, both for Adam and the audience as he first has an awkward but charged encounter with Mescal’s Harry, a young, handsome and drunken neighbour who seems to be the apartment block’s only other resident. After taking a research trip to his childhood neighbourhood, Adam bumps into his father and mother (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy) looking as youthful as they did before their deaths three decades earlier.

Suddenly Adam has two relationships blossoming — one with his neighbour and the other with his dead parents, whom he repeatedly goes to visit and talk to in his childhood home. Are we in a supernatural story whose realistic impossibilities we should accept and lean into, or has Andrew has gone so far into his own memories that he can’t distinguish his inner world from the outer one?

Haigh gently takes us on a journey to discover what may be actually happening and the brutally emotional conclusion will punch you in the gut.

TRAILER:

THE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH

Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry — Mubi.com

The most optimistic of the films on this list is Georgian director Elene Naveriani’s deadpan comedy about a middle-aged, menopausal woman’s late discovery of sex, love and connection.

Eto (Eka Chavleishvili) lives in a remote village where the onset of menopause coincides with her decision to change her life before it’s too late. She starts a passionate affair with a delivery man that will make her realise what she had been missing out on for the 48 years she’s lived so far and open her up to the possibilities of a new, sensual and passionate world.

Shot with quiet appreciation for solitude and an understated sensuality, it’s a small but true film that offers hope not just for its central character but for anyone who has felt trapped and stuck in the mundane repetitions of daily life.

TRAILER: