A recent personal experience had me thinking a lot about life, death, grief and mortality, so, as cinephiles do in most situations, I thought of movies that might help navigate this emotionally uncertain and difficult terrain.
There are stacks of melodramatic weepies about death and dying in the annals of movie history, but there are fewer that offer more provocative examinations, not of these inevitable parts of life as process, but rather as a means of broader reflection on mortality and the shadows that death leaves on those who survive in its wake.
These three films offer plenty of food for thought in their distinctive examinations of all things death-, dying- and living-related and while it’s admittedly a morbid choice for a selection of films, sometimes life is unavoidably tragic, morbid and perplexing, even when the holidays are just around the corner and the Christmas decorations and carols start driving you to drink and shop.
THE ARTHOUSE ESSENTIAL
Melancholia – Mubi.com
Filipino independent director Lav Diaz is a pioneer of the slow cinema movement, and this seven-and-a-half-hour opus from 2008 bears all the hallmarks of the genre: long, slow-moving takes follow the fortunes of three characters, a sex worker, a pimp and a nun, who often silently wander the countryside contemplating with deep sadness the constant turning of the world around them. The grief that unites these characters is not so much individual as it is national – the deep psychic scars left in generations of the country’s citizens due to the brutality of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines in the 1970s and 1980s.
Defiantly anti-commercial but quietly engaging and enveloping, Diaz’ film asks its big questions by firmly focusing its grainy black and white lens on the minute details of its ordinary characters caught in a gloom-filled world that they can’t quite understand but ultimately refuse to be defined by.
As the three characters engage in a form of trauma therapy to exorcise the ghosts of the victims of the Marcos dictatorship, their own grief increasingly intersects with the larger questions around the violence of the Philippines’ past and its legacy for the present.
Winner of the Horizons Prize at the 65th Venice International Film Festival, it’s a film that, while it demands much of those who watch it, delivers enough to keep you thinking for much longer than it lasts.
Trailer:
THE STONE-COLD CLASSIC
The Seventh Seal – YouTube
Ingmar Bergman’s breakout classic from 1957 made the Swedish director the globally recognised pioneer of films about mortality, death and the existential questions.
A film quite literally about death, garbed in the costume and filled with the characters of a mediaeval morality play, the film follows regular Bergman collaborator Max Von Sydow’s Swedish knight Antonius Block, who returns from a gory adventure during the Crusades to find his homeland in the tragic grip of the Black Death.
Convinced by the battles he’s fought and the desperation he’s returned to that there cannot be a God, Block decides to challenge Death (Bengt Ekerot) to a chess match to save his life. Confident that he can make the game last long enough to ensure his survival, Block and his loyal squire set off on a journey to find Death and make him an offer he can’t refuse. Along the way they have various encounters with people, including a group of travelling players, which challenge Block’s cynicism about life and God. By the time he and Death face off, the die has been cast, but the outcome may be more liberating than the world-weary knight could have ever foreseen.
Though it divided critics in its native Sweden, the international reception of the film firmly established Bergman’s reputation as one of the most influential European filmmakers of the post-war era and its images have become part of generations of pop culture while its themes have remained universally resonant.
Trailer:
THE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH
A Ghost Story – Rent or buy Apple TV +
Ain’t Them Bodies Saints director David Lowery reunited with stars Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara for this 2017 drama that defies easy categorisation and turns both the ghost story and romance genres neatly on their heads. Affleck and Mara are a bohemian, middle-of-nowhere Texas couple, devotedly in love and uncertain about whether to move into a bigger house. When tragedy strikes, things take an ominous and emotional turn, and we watch as one half of the star-crossed lovers watches the other deal with their absence from the strange in-between world inhabited by ghosts, who can only watch the effects of their transformation on those they’ve left behind.
Not so much a film about ghosts as the haunting of loss, Lowery’s film takes a big absurdist risk in its portrayal of ghosts that pays off without falling into the slapstick holes it sets for itself. What’s left behind is not so much an emotionally engaging reimagining of a ghost story as a mournful and quietly devastating meditation on love, loss, mortality and the difficulties of moving forward.
Trailer:
