Here are the official best picks from Father Son Holy Gore out of all the films from 2023.
But just a small reminder: as all film taste goes, this list is purely subjective; life is subjective, and that’s why art is the same. Don’t forget to tell us/everybody in the comments what YOUR favourite films were this year, too.
Red Rooms
Telling a story about gruesome murder without showing anything graphic is where the power of Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms lies, as the film explores the consequences and the traumas involved in viewing violence from a variety of perspectives. Perhaps the scariest film of the year and it’s not outright horror. Red Rooms is full of psychological horrors and terrors, yet it’s ultimately a confrontation with the audience about our love of true crime and the morality of using victims’ pain for any form of entertainment.
A full essay available here, but beware of spoilers!
birth/rebirth
Mary Shelley gave birth to science fiction via Gothic horror, and her groundbreaking Frankenstein continues to influence great works that mashup the two genres, such as Laura Moss’s birth/rebirth, a haunting and macabre tale of two women who end up coming together to try preserving life in the face of death to awful results.
The obsession Shelley portrayed in Victor Frankenstein is alive and well in Rose Casper (played fantastically by Marin Ireland), a morgue technician whose experiments in life and death are a symptom of a desperate loss in her past. Moss poses all kinds of questions about bodily autonomy and the potential dark obsessions of grief. There’s something more unsettling and emotional about birth/rebirth in contrast with the madness of Victor in Shelley’s story, since Moss’s film puts a child at the centre of the insanity. A sad, though in some ways beautiful, and horrific story.
For a full, albeit spoiler-filled essay, look here.
Ashkal: The Tunisian Investigation
Some writers, including myself, would say that politics and horror belong side-by-side because history’s worst horrors have occurred as a result of politics, usually fascism; one reason why Ashkal: The Tunisian Investigation is among 2023’s most haunting films. Youssef Chebbi’s Political Gothic takes inspiration from the real-life self-immolation death of Mohamed Bouazizi which was a catalyst for 2011’s Tunisian Revolution. Ashkal follows an investigation into further immolations that changes the detectives in charge and propels them into dangerous territory. Though the film is full of politics it’s just as full of ghostly hauntings. The lessons in Ashkal are a reminder to never think of the past as merely days passed and gone; the past is always with us.
A full essay, containing significant spoilers, is here.
Attachment
A couple years ago I asked for more Jewish horror and since then horror fans have been gifted a few new offerings, like Gabriel Bier Gislason’s Attachment, which tells the story of two lesbians who have a chance meeting that blossoms into a fast-moving relationship that’s only complicated by one of them having an overbearing mother at home. Sounds like a traditional story from the American drama playbook. The Jewish customs and folklore Gislason embeds in the story make Attachment far from anything traditional; the film’s all the better for it. Gislason’s film is part queer romance, part religious horror, part psychological terror, which makes for a delightfully gothic concoction.
A full essay (with spoilers) can be found here.
Sanctuary
BDSM is rarely explored in mainstream film, and even less is BDSM understood by mainstream filmmakers, so Sanctuary is extra compelling because of how Micah Bloomberg’s screenplay digs into the power dynamics of BDSM relationships and the general complexities of power between lovers in any sort of relationship. Christopher Abbott and Margaret Qualley are each searingly sexy and full of mystique, as the film’s story unfolds layer by layer. I was never entirely sure where Sanctuary was headed in the long run, though the finish is plenty surprising in a humorous-slash-romantic sense. Few films ever capture how power v. powerlessness is a part of many relationships, BDSM or otherwise, neither do many films ever fully express how some people are aroused by both power and powerlessness respectively. Sanctuary achieves all this while serving up a smart, sensual story that’ll keep you equally bricked up and intrigued.
Mammalia
Someone online called Mammalia a “Lars von Trier wannabe” and it’s honestly understandable why they might feel that way since von Trier is a known cinematic button-pusher, yet that’s totally unfair to the disturbing, thought-provoking work in Sebastian Mihailescu’s film. Mammalia is a headlong fall into the perception of contemporary masculinity as feminised and male anxieties over the changing face of manhood in the 21st century. Beneath the surreal surface, Mihailescu tackles our reliance on rigid gender roles and how compliance with that rigidity makes the world a more difficult place to navigate for every single one of us, gender be damned.
Mammalia focuses on Camil (István Téglás)—a man nearing forty whose girlfriend Andreea (Mălina Manovici) has joined a women’s commune—after Andreea disappears suddenly, which precipitates an odyssey into the terror of gender through tragic comedy and body horror. A lot of folks have already dismissed Mammalia as either entirely nonsensical or as an affirmation of the idea that men are being supposedly feminised. To each their own, but most don’t seem to have understood what Mihailescu and co-writer Andrei Epure were trying to do with the story being told, which is satirise how completely we, as a global society, have allowed ourselves to be defined, and confined, by what we’ve constructed and prescribed as constituting gender identity.
Piaffe
(Okay, okay, there are TWO films on this 2023 list that involve BDSM, so you can read into that what you will.) Piaffe is a surprising piece of cinema, and as much as it incorporates BDSM, the film is likewise as much about the concept of performance when it comes to our bodies and identities. Rather than try to explain the plot in a way that doesn’t give up too much, I’ll say this: Ann Oren’s Piaffe is a strange, sexy, and profound piece of cinema that’s not at all a horror film, it’s a fantasy film, but one that engages with the body in ways that, typically, only horror films do. Above all else, Oren’s film has a perspective on gender that most male directors can’t quite access, as well as offers a refreshing take on BDSM as a catalyst for growth instead of something dark, dangerous, and potentially negative like we see in other portrayals of BDSM throughout film history.
Another full essay here, but, as usual, beware of being spoiled!
Anatomy of a Fall
Anatomy of a Fall is one of those films that’s been hyped up a whole lot this year, and sometimes that’s concerning because no film is made for everybody so it’s bound to disappoint somebody, but, still, Justine Triet’s film is one that’ll keep most viewers utterly captivated because of its take on a subject (domestic violence) and genre (the courtroom thriller) that separates it by miles from the rest of the herd. Triet tells a story that, on some level, involves similar discussions of power that come up in Sanctuary, only in a much different way. Here, it’s all about the power dynamics in marriages. There’s also an interesting take on storytelling and the interpretation of stories buried within the tale of a volatile marriage that comes to a shocking end. So much of Anatomy of a Fall‘s greatness beyond the story belongs to the acting power of Sandra Hüller, whose central performance as Sandra Voyter—the woman on trial for apparently pushing her husband to his death—is impossible to look away from for a single moment.
FSHG’s Top 5 Films of 2023
El Conde
Why wouldn’t you love seeing Augusto Pinochet and Margaret Thatcher as neoliberal vampires struggling with the concept of letting their grip on power go in Pablo Larraín’s El Conde? The film is funny and gruesome at once, as Pinochet’s vampiric life unfolds in front of us, going from the French Revolution up to the present when ole Pinochet decides he’s had enough of life after 250 years of terror. Larraín includes a whole lot of history, though most of it is fairly standard info about Pinochet that’s not too impenetrable, even for those largely unfamiliar with the Chilean dictator. El Conde is a Gothic comedy about the vampirism of greed and the horrors brought about by the corruption of powerful people. Eat your heart out, baby! Or, someone else’s.
Raging Grace
Postcolonial Gothic has made its way out of academia and into the world of film, especially the horror genre, over the past few years with, among others, Remi Weekes’s His House, Jenna Cato Bass’s Good Madam, Bishal Dutta’s It Lives Inside, and now Paris Zarcilla’s Raging Grace, the story of an undocumented Filipino immigrant called Joy (Max Eigenmann) and her young daughter Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla) dealing with a dark revelation about the mother’s latest wealthy employer. While Joy tries to save up for a better life with her girl, and Grace attempts to enjoy childhood as a mischievous little prankster, an unsettling colonialist reality plays out in the creepy mansion where Joy’s been working. Zarcilla keeps the ghost of Rudyard Kipling and Orientalism hovering in the background with references to “The White Man’s Burden.” Scariest is the colonialist terror that quickly emerges after the film’s big reveal occurs. One of the year’s most horrifying stories, and also a pretty moving tale of an immigrant’s undying love for her child in spite of all the hardships she experiences throughout her life at the hands of a racist society.
Brooklyn 45
Ted Geoghegan’s Brooklyn 45 is a throwback to ensemble films and chamber dramas from Hollywood’s past while the story manages to focus on the present even by way of revisiting history, as a group of friends, most of them newly-minted WWII vets, arrive at a brownstone during the holidays only to wind up confronting the violence intertwined in their recent pasts. This is a bittersweet film by virtue of its release at the end of 2023 and its story revolving around war, as Christmas and New Year’s celebrations arrived in the midst of brutal destruction and death brought down upon the Palestinian people in Gaza. That’s simultaneously why Geoghegan’s film is so important because we’re, yet again, seeing entire populations of people, particularly racialised people today, demonised and marked for destruction. The demons of Brooklyn 45 and WWII are the same type of demons people in America(/the rest of the West) are still fighting today, only the so-called demons have different faces and cultures.
Killers of the Flower Moon
Killers of the Flower Moon is an impressive effort out Martin Scorsese at his age, not because I expect any different from a master filmmaker as they get older, but simply for the fact that many white filmmakers wouldn’t tell the same kind of story Scorsese told here. As many have already written, Lily Gladstone is the true star of Scorsese’s new film, in large part due to her intense, emotional performance as the real-life Mollie Kyle. A big reason why Gladstone plays such a vital role in Killers of the Flower Moon is because the real Mollie is symbolic of so many other Indigenous woman who’ve had to bear witness to the murder of their people throughout history. Gladstone’s Mollie is a witness to a microcosm of genocide committed by the settler colonial project of America—another layer to Gladstone’s haunted performance.
While Killers of the Flower Moon is on this list it doesn’t mean that I don’t recognise it’s time for Hollywood to let Indigenous filmmakers tell their own stories instead of just getting to act in them. At least the Osage Nation was involved in a somewhat significant capacity. It’d be wonderful to see an Indigenous-directed/written version of this film because even with Scorsese’s empathetic storytelling there still wasn’t enough of Mollie’s perspective despite how powerfully Gladstone lifts the character, and the film, up.
Dream Scenario
If there has to be an official number one on this list then that spot goes to Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario starring the incomparable Nicolas Cage as a college professor who suddenly starts appearing in hundreds then thousands of peoples’ dreams. Borgli takes on the idea of celebrity, particularly Western society’s obsession with the concept of fame, and how we continue to make people famous for absolutely nothing, which in turn generates fame, instead of making people who actually do important things famous. What begins as a comedy spirals into something far more unsettling and eventually horrifying before making its way back to reality. The film resolves with a sweet ending that stresses how our dreams can become manifest if only we take action instead of standing around doing nothing at all, whether those are big dreams about our careers or just big beautiful dreams about how to spend our lives with the people we love.
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