Europe. The Old World. The home of Guy, Bergman, Denis, Fellini, Bresson, Akerman, Sciamma, Dreyer, Murnau, Varda… The origin of all those obscure art movies which that one friend of yours always claims to have seen. You know, those thoughtful black and white pieces of cinema, light on plot and heavy on character. Well, none of that shit here.
As I’m writing this in 2025, the Oscar for Best Foreign and later International Feature Film has been handed out a total of 78 times, including in the early days when it was a special prize only. Of these, the Oscar was won by a European country 60 times. What does this tell you? It tells you that the Oscar voters are not very adventurous.
The process is complicated, but the key thing here is that there used to be special screenings of foreign movies for the members of the Academy. After watching a movie for ten minutes, the movie is paused and there would be a show of hands. If enough people voted to stop the movie then and there, they would move to the next one.
Now, considering this process and that historically the membership of the Academy has been quite old, with the average age being over 60 before recent efforts to open up the membership to a new generation. Are those elderly people, who are often very interested in the technical side of filmmaking, more likely to watch the latest movie from Fellini or a low-budget effort from Senegal?
I am not saying that European movies aren’t valuable. As of this writing, the second to last winner was The Zone of Interest, a harrowing depiction of the banality of evil when conducting a genocide. When you don’t have the money that flows in Hollywood, you have to get creative, the benefit of being that you don’t have to obey market research in the same way.
What I am saying is that there is so much more out there. Europe is not only about deep meditations on the Holocaust, Napoleonic period dramas, or surrealistic character studies. There are all sorts out there. We just tend to hear about a very few of them.
I left the British Isles and Finland for their own separate parts.
Sound of Noise
Sweden, 2010, dirs Ola Simonsson, Johannes Stjärne Nilsson
A half-star review from Letterboxd: no exaggeration to say,I can make this movie right now,I just need to collect information of every mall which has flash performance in beijing,and take my camera to shoot,and then I even don’t need editing,the movie will be finished
A five-star review from Letterboxd: Här pikade svensk film.
(Author’s note: I assume they meant “Här peakade svensk film”, which would mean something along the lines of “This is where Swedish film peaked”, which is a strong statement considering the works of Ingmar Bergman, for example. It is also possible that this was in another Scandinavian language, as Swedish is the only one I can claim to know.)
While I might disagree with this tomorrow or next week or next year, as of this writing, this is my favorite movie in this series. I love this movie way more than I should.
Part of that love is based on the character of Sanna (Sanna Persson). You never really know what she is about. She is just kind of bored and that motivates her to recruit her merry band of misfit drummers (Magnus Börjeson, Johannes Björk, Marcus Boij, Fredrik Myhr and Anders Vestergard) to unleash their own special kind of mayhem on the city. That being weird little musical performances to unexpecting audiences using whatever is available as their instruments.
Meanwhile, a detective called Amadeus (Bengt Nilsson) is looking into these weird crimes, but he has a problem: He can’t hear the sound from anything used as instruments by the band, including a person who was used as a kind of drum while under an anesthetic. He is also completely tone deaf, which makes him a bit of an outsider within his own musical family.
That’s the movie. Sanna and Amadeus do meet without knowing that they are on different sides of a conflict, which is fun, but mostly the movie is just weird musical sequences, with Amadeus looking into the situation in between. There is a ticking clock element as we know how many of these situations there will be, but Amadeus’s work is hardly the kind of combination of meticulous work and genius-level inspiration we expect to see from modern detectives in media.
Is this a musical? Not really. In musicals, the songs are used to move the plot forwards. Here the songs are the destination, not the journey. Thus it is a film about music, but not a musical.
You can see how this could have been a failure, but it works. The musical performances are fun and the scenes in between are just interesting enough not to make the movie boring. The music is hardly anything to write home about, but it serves a purpose.
We never really learn much about the drummers. They are just people Sanna knows and knows that they are discontent in their current lives, mostly in bands they find banal. None of them object to taking part in the project.
This is hardly a glowing recommendation, but the movie is unique enough to warrant a watch. Who knows, maybe you’ll love it as much as I do.
This is the only feature by the duo of directors. They have directed a bunch of shorts, including a kind of test run for this movie, as so often happens. Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers came out in 2001 and, as far as I can tell, the band is the same. It’s exactly what it says on the tin: The band is staking out an apartment and when the couple who live there go out, they break in and play for ten minutes with whatever they have available. The feature just expands on this idea.
Cuckoo
Germany, 2024, dir. Tilman Singer
A half-star review from Letterboxd: Turned it off when I saw it was a man in womanface. Yup, call me all the names you like, I am pro women.
A five-star review from Letterboxd: So freaky in a good way. Like shivers down your spine but subtly. Yk?
P. S.
Hunter Schafer You are so Cvnt.
I learned something there. I did not clock Miss Schafer as trans. Not that it matters except that I do like that transfolk can have access to cis-roles (I assume it’s a cis-role). Helps normalize them in a time when solidarity is important. Also, I learned what Cvnt means. I did have to search for that. Sure, it is mostly used to circumvent automated censorship, but apparently, in ballroom culture, it’s also a compliment. It’s a way of telling someone they look so good they can pass. Apparently (according to my sources), the correct form is that someone gives Cvnt, but I am not the expert.
Since I did not clock her, I guess that applies, but I don’t feel entitled to use the term myself. I have to be careful with reclaimed words because of my own identity and I only repeated it here for educational purposes. However, this does make me wonder whether the movie was review bombed because of the star. That would be a shitty thing to do, but there are shitty people out there. The audience reviews seem to be pretty bad, but it could just be the weird nature of the film rather than TERFs running around and spoiling the fun for everyone.
Hunter Schafer is Gretchen, a teenage girl forced to relocate to a remote village with her father and his new wife and child. Obviously, she is not taking it well. Being ripped away from your friends at that age is not easy and having to move somewhere where there is nothing for you is just worse.
What’s worst is that there is something going on. Gretchen’s sister, Alma, is having some kind of strokes and one night, when Gretchen is cycling back home from his part-time job, she is attacked by a woman she can barely escape.
It quickly becomes a mystery movie. According to 366 Weird Movies, the financiers of the movie pushed to make it more understandable, but this didn’t take all the weirdness away. The movie is still unsettling in many ways. Especially the noises and the time skips backwards, which you don’t have any actual explanations for.
You know from the beginning who the bad guy is. This isn’t exactly uncommon in movies, but here it is just so obvious. Somehow it is so obvious that it goes right through “maybe this is a red herring” territory into “oh, a German mad scientist, how quaint” territory. I don’t mind this. Instead of concentrating on who is the bad guy, we can concentrate on what is he doing and why. The “why” eventually turning out to be just “because he can” even if he seems to explain this to himself in more complicated terms.
Interno di un convento (Behind Convent Walls)
Italy, 1978, dir. Walerian Borowczyk
A half-star review from Letterboxd: This is just some sort of porn at these days
A five-star review from Letterboxd: Glorifying God with nudity.
An abbess is trying to maintain the modesty expected of a convent, but it is not an easy job as the nuns seem to use every moment of privacy to indulge in various forbidden desires. This includes whittling a dildo from a piece of wood and painting the face of Jesus on it to look at while masturbating, a famously unsimulated scene in an otherwise obscure movie. Meanwhile, a criminal relative of the priest gains access to the convent and immediately finds the only nun following the rules to be so, so very irresistible.
As I’m writing this, there is a new form of puritanism on the rise, which aims to remove any kind of physical intimacy from mainstream media. There’s even criticism of the sexuality in Sabrina Carpenter’s performances, the aesthetics of which are just from musicals from the 50s. I find this to be short-sighted. Sure, we have porn, which can fill that role, but while there is good porn out there, it is often extreme and toxic and even impractical. So, why should we not have other options? Sex scenes in mainstream movies are much more tasteful and can give a more healthy example for what the love life of a couple might potentially look like.
Is this movie that? In a way.
For some reason, this is listed as drama in both IMDb and Letterboxd, when this is mostly just funny. Maybe it’s the 21st century perspective. Still, it’s mostly just this cat-and-mouse game between the abbess, who is constantly on the lookout, and her wards. Their priest just finds all of this funny. This isn’t exactly a farce, but isn’t that far from that, either.
The nuns are inventive in their sinning. Besides the dildo above, they draw images of men; they help men over the walls into the convent and so forth. Lesbianism seems to be commonplace.
Of course, all of this is very understandable. As is stated in the movie, many of the women were brought there at an early age and they didn’t have a choice or understanding of what they were committing to. So, why shouldn’t they do the exploration that was otherwise denied from them?
This definitely wasn’t Borowczyk’s first rodeo…
Contes immoraux (Immoral Tales)
France, 1973, dir. Walerian Borowczyk
A half-star review from Letterboxd: By porn movie standards this is underwhelming to say the least. Unwatchable. Some of the cinematography is commendable.
A five-star review from Letterboxd: i’ve been thinking of this film all day
Walerian Borowczyk had a problem: His movies couldn’t find an audience. So what do you do? Well, since the censorship laws had recently been relaxed; maybe he should do an erotic movie? Considering that his is from 1973, it caused quite a stir. Today, it has been on MUBI and you can find it uploaded illegally to porn sites as well (a wild combination), but even the relaxed censorship laws of France still required him to make cuts and the movie was initially banned in both Italy and Germany. Is it still controversial? Considering that it includes an underaged girl in an explicit incestuous sex scene (yes, that was happening already over 50 years ago), it should be.
It is an anthology movie and depending on which version you are watching, there are either four or five sections, all of which are very sexual in nature. So, you might be asking, why would anyone watch this? Good question. If you are only looking for something titillating, porn does exist. But while this is fairly tame compared to modern hardcore porn (although the removed section goes quite hard and being tamer can still find you an audience), you can still find this appealing.
The first story is about two cousins going on a field trip, but it turns out that the male used his knowledge of tides to trap his cousin so that he could force her to perform fellatio on him. The second story is about a young woman being punished by locking her into a room, but she finds better uses for the cucumbers that were left for her for sustenance. The third story is a tale of Elizabeth Bathory and her quest to stay young by bathing in the blood of young women. Finally, we have Lucrezia Borgia having sex with her male relatives, including her father, who also happens to be the pope, in a church. The removed section is the wildest. It’s about a young woman being chased and raped by a beast, but when the beast can’t satisfy her needs, the chase turns around. This part was initially removed, because it was later expanded into a feature of its own.
The movie is about different attitudes regarding sex. In each case, the power balance is off in some way. We have a male forcing himself on a girl, parental figure locking a girl away, a noblewoman murdering the people her family should be taking care of and we have the daughter of the highest church official in the world manipulating her family through the use of sex. Is it all fucked up? Yes. But there are underlying messages here. Maybe society should be and should have been more open to letting young people experiment sexually. Maybe we shouldn’t let powerful people misuse their power, or maybe we shouldn’t have powerful people. If an erotic anthology movie is the way to get these messages through to some portion of the population, why not?
Side note: Borowczyk would go on to direct Emmanuelle 5 and the director of Emmanuelle 6 also made the series (Jean Rollin, to whom part 1 is dedicated).
Schneeflöckchen (Snowflake)<(strong>
Germany, 2017, dirs. Adolfo J. Kolmener, William James
A half-star review from Letterboxd: Imagine that someone who thought The Boondock Saints is the coolest movie of all time watched Adaptation and got a terrible idea…
A five-star review from Letterboxd: Hysterical, crazy and macabre flick which proves that Germans can make extraordinary gerne films too.
All snowflakes are unique, right? Well, I could say everything is unique if you have the tools to look closely enough, but that is not exactly a satisfying answer. However, this is a truly unique movie and while a lot of things happen in this movie with a lot of vivid visuals, the most memorable one is the titular Snowflake in her white angel costume covered in blood.
According to the narrator, this is a true story, but just not from our world. It also takes place in the near future from 2017, so one might wonder whether this happens in our past. Anyhow, things are worse in this world. While people are still trying to maintain some kind of normalcy in their lives, streets are overrun by criminals. So this isn’t exactly post-apocalyptic, but the world is going through an apocalyptic event.
Tan and Javid are introduced to us as cold-blooded murderers with no remorse for slaughtering innocents around them. Next morning they find a screenplay lying on the floor of the car they stole on the previous night. The thing is that the screenplay has two characters with their names who are having the exact discussion they had on the previous night, so they set out to find the owner of the car.
However, the pair have attracted attention. A couple they killed had a daughter, Eliana, and that daughter is out for vengeance and is recruiting help. Things are complicated by a neo-Nazi organization that Tan and Javid believe was behind the murder of their parents, which is the reason they are on their personal quest to find the killers. Things get really complicated, because their story is not exactly linear and turns out, the death of the Eliana’s parents was completely by accident.
And there’s a superhero running around. A very DIY one at that. He is supposedly the hero of the movie, but he definitely is not the protagonist.
The thing is, they, and thus we as the viewers, are at the mercy of an amateur screenwriter. That leaves the filmmakers in a weird bind. They need to be bad in their writing, but they need to be bad in an interesting and believable way. At the same time, this isn’t Sharknado. This isn’t an attempt to force a camp movie. The screenwriter within the movie, as opposed to the actual writer, can add any idea that comes to mind, but the actual writer has to make it work. The screenwriter in the movie is also a self-insert as he shares his name with the real screenwriter of the movie. The other side of this is that the writer can use crutches that would otherwise feel out of place.
This is the reality from a point of view of the characters within the story. They experience the world in snippets, and every snippet is a heightened situation. What would you not give for a bit of boredom in that situation? In a way, this is a hell, except that the inmates have found a way to control it.
I do hope that the crew and cast got paid in shares of the movie as they worked for free during the production. In general, I would hope movies like this would get more attention, as this was completely self-financed. The lack of funds doesn’t even show that much in the quality of the movie.
Miss Violence
Greece, 2013, dir. Alexandros Avranas
A half-star review from Letterboxd: Pernicious shock value trash with almost nothing to say but what we already knew.
A five-star review from Letterboxd: disgusting
Indeed. It is disgusting. This is one of the few movies that actually made me think twice about whether to include them, because maybe there should be some kind of guilt associated with them.
We start with a birthday party, where Angeliki is just turning eleven. After a family photo on the balcony, she casually sits on the edge and lets herself fall down. Much later, we learn that her older sisters told her that this was the age when their own sexual abuse and sexual slavery had started, so Angeliki had decided to take the only way out she could think of.
There is a handful of movies I like but never want to see again. This goes even further than movies like Celebration or 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days. It is just that uncomfortable of a watch. That in itself is an accomplishment, though probably not one most directors want to strive for, as when you can push my limits, you are shutting out basically the entire market.
So, just don’t watch this. I mean, it is good, but not on the level of the two examples of transgressive movies above, so if you feel up to watching a movie about horrible abuse, try those first. On the other hand, we should not be hiding these topics. Not talking about these things is implicitly accepting them.
Just think about all the powerful men who have been taken down in the last eight years or so. As I’m writing this, P. Diddy has just been sentenced. His alleged crimes specifically regarding sexual misconduct are so convoluted that they have their own Wikipedia page on top of the “Legal Issues” on his personal page.
We need to get to a place where we don’t have powerful people like that (which I don’t foresee happening soon) but that isn’t how this movie will be understood. The ending is that the mother finally steps in and kills the father. For a moment, the kids feel relief. Well, until the mother locks the door.
What has actually changed? Power changed hands, but the new power is still just interested in maintaining that power.
Dans ma peau (In My Skin)
France, 2002, dir. Marina de Van
A half-star review from Letterboxd: j’ai tellemennnnnt pas aimé (la meuf quand même roule une pelle à sa plaie)
(Author’s note: Not many to choose from, so I decided to go for non-English one, because the others were boring. A translation: “I really didn’t like it at all (the girl still made out with her wound though).”)A five-star review from Letterboxd: They show u how for a small situation u slowly lose control of yourself to the extreme.
Every scene is wonderful :))
We have the same person as the writer, director and star. That often doesn’t bode well, because it usually means that the person is just massaging their own ego. See the Black Tank Top Theory by Red Letter Media. This movie, however, is definitely not about that.
Eshter is a young up-and-comer in her marketing firm. She has been freelancing for them but is now being hired full time. She is also in the process of moving in together with her boyfriend. On the other hand, she also injured her leg somewhat mysteriously and that wound has become an obsession for her. At first, she keeps picking at it but that quickly escalates into cutting and worse, including hallucinations about her body.
I don’t know about you but I have a tendency to pick at scabs. I don’t think about it, I just do it. Same with scars. My habits never go as far as Eshter’s but even my mostly harmless tendency is essentially self-destructive. I’m prolonging the healing process.
This is kind of low-key body horror. Whereas most body horror can be very extreme, see later examples, such as Tokyo Gore Police and Tetsuo: The Iron Man in this series, the simplicity of this movie makes Eshter’s tendencies that much more believable and thus much more visceral. Most body horror is so absurd that while disgusting, it is also funny. Not much of that here. There is a hallucinatory experience that is funny and thus feels kind of wrong for the tone of the movie but it is also very important scene for other reasons.
This is a very dark movie and it is often not in any kind of hurry to get anywhere. Instead it languishes on Eshter’s self-mutilation. Her self-destructive habits remain slow and hidden enough that she can go on studying her own lack of pain all she wants. It does start to mess with her life but even then this side of her remains a secret. Since Eshter is in the center of the whole movie and there are no scenes without her, we are forced to experience all of this with her.
Since I’m cis male, I can’t really say how well Eshter’s experiences relate to how women feel about their bodies. I would assume the experience is very different from males for multiple reasons so I suspect that there are themes here I just don’t recognize.
The only problem with the film is that it isn’t that entertaining and neither is the theme that thought-provoking, so it has to rely on characterization. That part of the movie does work, so the movie is still good and made me interested in the directors other work.
Laissez bronzer les cadavres (Let the Corpses Tan)
Belgium, 2017, dirs. Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani
A half-star review from Letterboxd: Ugly French-Belgian neo-western. Over-stylised direction and schizophrenic editing. Needlessly convoluted and messy. Not good.
A five-star review from Letterboxd: Insane overly stylized masterpiece. Took inspiration from everything I love in movies.
Let me start with an admission I am going to have to make a few times in this series: I have not seen this movie in a language I’m fluent in. The movie is in French and in my copy the subtitles are in Swedish. I used to know Swedish pretty well I don’t know it well enough to keep up with the fast pace the subtitles move with the film and I know a few Frecnh words here and there, but mostly I’m relying on visuals and tones of speech. Doesn’t really matter though. Despite this limitation it is still a fine film because it is largely about the visuals and the fast pace. Still, I might have missed something important. Then again, apparently, based on critic comments, people with access to languages they are fluent in also felt they weren’t completely following along.
A gang lead by a man called Rhino has stolen a lot of gold and is now hiding in a small abandoned village waiting for the heat to die down. Well, abandoned except for a single artist who has come there for inspiration. The situation escalates when she has visitors and two cops arrive on site.
While we are on the Mediterranean (filmed in Corsica, but I didn’t catch any mentions of that in the movie itself), the movie tries to capture the feel of Westerns. It largely succeeds in this. There is a lot of gunplay and standoffs, a lot of sun and music from Morricone. We also get a lot of closeups of faces just like Leone used to do.
To maintain the fast pace they figured out a technique I haven’t seen elsewhere: They jump back and forth in time, often just a few minutes, so that they can show what certain characters were doing while something else was happening. I wouldn’t want to see that too often but just based on the gang being able to employ military style tactics makes it more meaningful.
Finally, a pet peeve: People who make films with gold in them should try lifting gold at least once. A single standard bar of gold weighs 12.4 kilograms. You don’t just fill a bag of them and throw it over your soldier. Unless you want to break your spine.
Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway
Spain, 2019, dir. Miguel Llansó
A half-star review from Letterboxd: A prime example of just because you can, doesn’t mean you should, or need to.
A five-star review from Letterboxd: Genuinely one of the funniest most beautiful and strangely deep movies I have ever seen. I LITERALLY CRIED!!! Was NOT expecting to cry. Makes me wanna read more Philip K Dick.
So, what would a Spanish-Estonian-Latvian-Romanian-Ethiopian movie look like? This, I guess. The language is actually pretty badly dubbed English (with some Estonian).
Despite my extensive experience with weird it is hard to explain what’s going on here, because it does get kind of wild. We have two CIA agents, who go on missions into a virtual world where they fight Soviet Union despite the year being 2035. However, a virus has been taking over various digital systems, including the virtual world. Agent Gagano is looking to get out of this to start a kick-boxing school with his wife, but can’t get back after a mission and ends up in a distant land instead. Also, there seems to be multiple unlicensed versions of Batman running around on TV and outside of it. One of them is actually the president of a Ethiopia. However, when a realistic virtual world is a possibility, how do you know what’s real?
Things move very fast in this film as a virtual Stalin keeps hitting our heroes from all sides in both the virtual and the real world. Things also follow their own logic. The aforementioned Batman/president takes part in figuring out what to do about Gagano’s credit card when it isn’t accepted in a pizzeria and Gagano dreams of being the emperor of Ethiopia so that he can establish his own pizzeria out of a van which he also uses to fuck his wife in the same dream.
Much of the movie has a unique look. The director describes the genre as Afro-Futurism. They did not have much in the way of a budget, so they had to figure out how to make the movie look like it was the future, but also did not bother with making anything realistic. You know, just enough work to make sure the viewer understands that this is a vision of the future, or more like a vision of a future.
I found it interesting how unconventional the stars of the movie were. Gagano is a dwarf and his wife is plus-sized. For some reason the first time we see them together has been adapted into the poster for the movie. The situation in the movie is that Gagano and his wife are just getting intimate in the shower (although Gagano is fully clothed at this point), but Gagano has back problems and falls on his ass from the pain while his much bigger wife is standing over him and asking what’s wrong. In the poster this looks like Gagano is deathly afraid of a naked woman.
Some of the bonus materials reveal that they shot part of the movie in Viru Hotel in Estonia, which was used by KGB to spy on (mostly) Finnish tourists in Tallinn at the latter stages of Soviet rule, a site I actually recognized from the movie, as it now houses a KGB museum.