The Year in Film 2019 - Part One

A Belated List

I'm finally getting around to compiling a list of the best films I saw over the course of 2019. As in previous years, this isn't a list of films released in 2019, but of films I saw during the previous twelve months. As such, it contains some films that are old and some that are new, but really, semantics aside, all these films were new to me. It doesn't matter if a film was released in the 1920s or the 2020s, all films that we see for the first time are "new" films and I think for the cinema, and the history of cinema, to endure over the subsequent decades, we need to stop enshrining works in the reputation and legacy that they attracted when they were originally released and see all films as potentially new discoveries.

On this list you'll find films that many audiences and critics have derided as worthless and that have maintained this reputation for years, if not decades. However, going into these works without prejudice or expectation, I found films that were thrilling, both aesthetically, in the way they were produced, but often emotionally and psychologically as well. They were films that, regardless of when they were produced, still felt relevant. This year, I'm breaking the list down into smaller installments, including only five films per-post, rather than the usual ten. This will hopefully starve off the typical burnout that comes from having to proof-read and edit such a large volume of capsule reviews.

Jamaica Inn [Alfred Hitchcock, 1939]:

Watched: Jan 04, 2019

Overshadowed by Hitchcock's later adaptations of the work of Daphne Du Maurier – Rebecca (1940) and The Birds (1962) respectively – the commanding and atmospheric Jamaica Inn is an arguably minor work for the "master of suspense", and yet remains a film ripe for rediscovery. While not as rich, psychologically, as the subsequent Rebecca, nor as thrilling in its spectacle as The Birds, Jamaica Inn remains an engaging and atmospheric work of pure Gothicism; a rugged "south-western", with smugglers replacing bandits and the titular inn replacing the more conventional homestead or hacienda, where the outlaws hide out. Dominated by a scenery chewing performance from Charles Laughton as a shadowy landowner, Jamaica Inn plays more to Du Maurier's creative interest in lost girls and existential landscapes than to Hitchcock's tales of suspense and obsession. However, the filmmaker commits fully to the spectacle of the film, creating a work where the real star is not so much Laughton and his fellow thespians, but the studio recreated North Cornwall setting, with its desolate moors and rugged coastal scenery. To this day, many critics and audiences have argued that Jamaica Inn is one of the worst Hitchcock films, but I don't agree. In fact, I found it superior to more acclaimed works like Suspicion (1941), Saboteur (1942), Stage Fright (1950), The Wrong Man (1956) and Frenzy (1971). In its spectacle and scenography, the film recalls the greatest works of German Expressionism, with its similar emphasis on theatrical stylisation, atmosphere and suggestion propelling the story forwards, while the narrative itself explores pertinent issues relating to class exploitation, insanity and the loss of innocence.

The Favourite [Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018]:

Watched: Jan 08, 2019

The screenplay by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara is incredibly witty, the performances are great and the aesthetic of director Yorgos Lanthimos, as it's developed since the masterful Dogtooth (2009), through films like The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), continues to enthral. The chessboard colour scheme, wide-angle lenses and mesmerising tracking shots through darkened corridors evoke The Shining (1980) by way of Peter Greenaway. However, it's the character dynamics that are most engaging, suggesting ideas of systemic abuse, female desire, culpability and how complicit individuals can be in their own exploitation.

Glass [M. Night Shyamalan, 2019]:

Watched: Jan 21, 2019

Much ink has already been spilled here on the subject of Glass; writer and director M. Night Shyamalan's concluding chapter to a loose trilogy of films that began twenty years ago with the ahead of its time Unbreakable (2000) and continued into the previous decade with the superior Split (2016). While less cohesive and less successful than those earlier endeavours, Glass nonetheless struck me as a perfect conclusion to Shyamalan's saga; bringing together as it does the various themes that run throughout the trilogy and through Shyamalan's career as a whole. Like many of the filmmaker's greatest works, Glass is another film about overcoming grief and about forgiveness as an act of faith. Like his masterpiece The Village (2004) it's about secret societies and people bound together by experiences. Like the similarly denigrated but similarly necessary Lady in the Water (2006), it's profoundly uncynical in its intentions and in its celebration of extraordinary people, or ordinary people that rise to extraordinary levels when the situation calls for it. Rather than taking influence from the thundering superhero blockbuster cinema of studios like Marvel and DC, Shyamalan embraces the cult-leaning, low-budget nature of his recent work and creates a film that draws on the influence of writer and director William Peter Blatty, specifically The Ninth Configuration (1980). There as well as here an assortment of characters consigned to an asylum play out their delusions with destructive consequences. For both Shyamalan and Blatty, the psychiatric setting is not just a physical location, but a metaphysical stand-in for the characters' shared psyche. In this sense, the three protagonists become manifestations of the "id", the "ego" and the "super ego", who over the course of the film, battle for supremacy. It's obvious that the three characters reflect the different facets of Shyamalan's creative identity, and his punishment of these characters says a lot about the complex relationship he seems to have with his own work. I found the film fascinating.

Lifeboat [Alfred Hitchcock, 1944]:

Watched: Jan 29, 2019

While one can concede that Jamaica Inn (1939) has its flaws, and that some audiences will be unable to look beyond those flaws to see the elemental and cinematic brilliance that it most definitely contains, Lifeboat is an unarguable Hitchcock masterpiece. Often regarded only in terms of its narrative gimmick, setting a thriller entirely in a small lifeboat as it carries its disparate group of survivors across a desolate ocean, the film is an emotional and political pressure cooker. The perfect meeting place between Hitchcock's formalist game-playing and audience manipulation, and the impassioned, left-leaning, anti-war commentary of author John Steinbeck, who wrote the initial short story on which the film is based. Steinbeck would later disown the film for containing slurs against organised labour and for creating a "stock comedy Negro" when the character he had written was a man of "dignity, purpose and personality." Nonetheless, Steinbeck's fingerprints are all over the film's complex rendering of the way wartime prejudice works to turn people against each other. Hitchcock has a lot of fun with this psychological aspect, subverting not just the conventions of the thriller, but to an extent the machinations of the whodunnit mystery, as the potentially conspiratorial intentions of one or more of these characters becomes a ticking timebomb that threatens to destroy the whole group.

The Killers [Robert Siodmak, 1946]:

Watched: Jan 31, 2019

Siodmak's noir, largely scripted by an uncredited John Huston, builds on the existential conundrum of Ernest Hemmingway's original short story to create a study in narrative as a collated memory. The structure, complex and mysterious as it is, becomes an investigation that reveals a character study in fragments; all avenues of questioning leading back to a series of relationships that swirl around a terrible betrayal. Produced on a minimal budget, Siodmak's filmmaking is incredibly creative, with the black and white cinematography of Elwood Bredell in particular setting a high benchmark for the entire film-noir sub-genre. The writing and performances are impeccable, but it's the emotional and narrative complexity of the film's structure and editing, as well as the inventiveness of Siodmak's direction - with its visual nods to the paintings of Edward Hopper, and a heist sequence covered in a single, carefully choreographed crane-shot - that really mark this out as a genuine masterwork.

Heart is Where the Home Is

Thoughts on a film: The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

With its extensive use of wide-angle lenses to distort perspective, prolonged tracking shots that unfurl through a maze of labyrinthine corridors and slow, penetrating zooms that seem to expose the hidden emotions of its characters, The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) is nothing if not a masterpiece of cinematic form.

In terms of its actual creative lineage, it was difficult not to be reminded of the films of Stanley Kubrick, both in its thematic design and its actual on-screen direction. More specifically, it brought to mind the presentation of Kubrick's similarly languorous and claustrophobic horror film The Shining (1980), where the discordant soundtrack, sense of isolation (both spatial and psychological) and the depiction of a family being pushed to the brink by external, possibly even supernatural forces, calls to mind the same events seen here.

However it also seems reminiscent of the detached and paranoid psychodrama at play within another of Kubrick's films: the often underrated Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Here, a successful doctor/surgeon is thrown into an emotional tailspin when his comfortable image of the world (and his own place within it) is challenged by an accusation that hits a little too close to home.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer [Yorgos Lanthimos, 2017]:

In keeping with the influence of Kubrick, Nicole Kidman once again appears as the wife of a successful doctor/surgeon whose all-knowing perspective on the narrative (and its secrets) creates a question of complicity. The role itself, and much of the resulting scenes, seem to offer a conscious throwback to Kidman's earlier role in Eyes Wide Shut.

Eyes Wide Shut [Stanley Kubrick, 1999]:

In Eyes Wide Shut, Kidman plays Alice; wife of the successful doctor Bill Hartford. It's Alice's initial confession about an erotic fantasy and possible extramarital affair that sends Hartford on his nocturnal odyssey; creating a question as to whether or not Alice is simply a victim of her husband's circumstances or a part of the greater conspiracy acting against him.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer [Yorgos Lanthimos, 2017]:

The frequent tracking shots through the labyrinth-like hospital feel specific to the point of establishing the location as an almost sentient space. Suggesting something of "the corridors of the mind" even; where the presentation seems to recall the vast passageways of the Overlook Hotel, or the hedge-maze and its wider (and applicable) connotations to Greek myth.

The Shining [Stanley Kubrick, 1980]:

Despite the Kubrickian similarities - as well as references and allusions to other works, which will be discussed shortly - The Killing of a Sacred Deer never feels like a copy or a work of imitation, but instead seems to have its own sense of morality and creative identity. It's an assemblage of influences, for certain, as almost all films today seem to be, but one that nonetheless reflects the general attitudes and worldview found in other films by Lanthimos and his co-writer Efthymis Filippou, such as Dogtooth (2009), Alps (2011) and The Lobster (2015).

Dogtooth [Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009]:

Like Dogtooth, The Killing of a Sacred Deer is preoccupied with exploring the roles and routines that come to define the conventional family unit. These routines depict a particular kind of American domesticity that is familiar from Hollywood movies and daytime television, but the scenes that feel most familiar, or recognisable, are robbed of personality, warmth and even basic humanity.

Again, as with Dogtooth - which presented an even more radical deconstruction of the suburban family - Lanthimos and his collaborators exaggerate these domestic routines until they become like little rituals of dehumanisation. Conversations about body hair and mp3 players or scenes of characters flossing their teeth are presented as a reality, but are depicted in such a way that it's as if we're witnessing aliens from a distant planet attempting to grapple with or engage with some rudimentary semblance of human behaviour.

Every scene in the film feels heightened, posed or artificial in construction. There's an almost 'autistic' quality to it, in the sense that so much of The Killing of a Sacred Deer is presented as if reflecting the worldview of characters unsure of how people are expected to respond or react to a situation; or where the intermittent bursts of discordant sound create a feeling of sensory overload; or where the mannered performance style and the bluntness of the dialog don't quite resonate with what feels 'recognisable' to us (whatever that might mean) and yet make sense within the context of everything else.

This aesthetic is symptomatic of the director's need to find new ways of expression; presenting familiar ideas, scenes and characters in a way that is aggressively unfamiliar. It's reflected in the imagery as well, as Lanthimos and cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis shoot from angles that are slightly left of the conventional; or use the wide-angle lens to dwarf the perspective of the characters, making them appear smaller, and the world around them, by contrast, appear greater, more overwhelming.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer [Yorgos Lanthimos, 2017]:

As an aesthetic approach it arrives fully formed with the film's astounding first image; a bird's eye view of a human heart beating inside the exposed chest cavity of one of the surgeon's patients. The shot immediately establishes context - who the character is, what he does for a living, etc - but also reinforces many of the thematic points of reference and interpretations that will develop as the film plays out. The idea of the heart as a symbol - with its conventional connotations of love, family, emotion (the expression, "home is where the heart is", etc) - but also the idea of the heart as a system. A functional organ that beats at the centre of things; like the character Martin; the teenage harbinger who enters into this family and disrupts it from within.

On the surface of it, The Killing of a Sacred Deer seems to blur elements of classical Greek tragedy - specifically the story of Iphigenia, with its themes of revenge, atonement and child sacrifice, as well as the implications of the title itself; which relates to Agamemnon's accidental killing of a deer in the grove of Artemis, who subsequently demands the death of Agamemnon's daughter, Iphigenia, as a penance - alongside further allusions to the film Teorema (1968) by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

In Pasolini's film, a beguiling young stranger enters into the life of a bourgeoisie family and attempts to destroy them from within; an element of the plot that is closely echoed here with Martin's initial acceptance within the family. There's also a suggestion of the children of the protagonist conspiring with the stranger to punish the father for some real or imaginary transgression; which seems to reflect not only the predicament faced by Colin Farrell's character in the film in question but also that of the Daniel Auteuil protagonist in Michael Haneke's similarly cold and clinical psychological study/revenge parable Caché (2005).

Teorema [Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968]:

The Killing of a Sacred Deer [Yorgos Lanthimos, 2017]:

Caché (aka Hidden) [Michael Haneke, 2005]:

The final act builds to a kind of theatre of cruelty that feels close to another of Haneke's films; the home invasion thriller/didactic cine-essay Funny Games (1997). Here the contrasting elements of Greek myth, psycho-thriller and suburban satire collide in a moment that surely ranks as one of 2017's most jaw-dropping cinematic moments. As a climax to an otherwise slow and hypnotic study in sustained tension and emotional distance, the violent inevitability of this climax, and the way that the characters embrace it so unquestioningly, is absurd and outlandish; illustrating just how far the filmmakers are willing to go in order to honour the bizarre rules and rituals that they've created for themselves through this concoction of influences.

However, the climax is not gratuitous in nature. It doesn't stray into the realms of exploitation or sensationalism, as many of Haneke's (or even Kubrick's) imitators so often do when attempting to provoke or outrage their audience's sensibilities, but instead presents a final reckoning that is unflinching in its commitment and intensity.

While The Killing of a Sacred Deer struck me as an excellent film, much of it only works if we approach it on a level of allegory. Like Darren Aronofsky's recent film, mother! (2017) - which is similarly divisive and similarly brilliant - it's a work that seems to be playing with symbols and representations as opposed to a more tangible kind of reality that an audience can invest in, either emotionally or philosophically.

If we hold the story and its characters up to any kind of close scrutiny then nothing actually works and the whole thing just unravels into a muddle of unanswered questions and loose ends. But it's worth grappling with these issues and inconsistencies in order to experience how the story unfolds, and to appreciate how Lanthimos and his collaborators are able to put together these diverse influences to create something that feels so singular and so different.