5. “Hounds Of Love”
A remarkably strong feature debut from Australian director Ben Young, by rights “Hounds of Love” should do for him what “Snowtown” did for Justin Kurzel — it certainly operates on the same plane of hard-to-watch, inspired-by-a-true-story horror. But while there is a very prevalent specter of torture porn hanging over this grim story of a young girl (Ashleigh Cummings) abducted, raped and tortured by a serial-killing suburban couple (Stephen Curry and Emma Booth), what elevates it is its unusually rich psychology, especially when it comes to the female half of the couple, played with gripping insight by Booth. While the mind of the procuring, enabling, complicit Evelyn, wife of a rapist-murderer, is not a particularly pleasant place to spend 108 minutes, her outlook is disturbingly compelling especially if you consider the real-life analog on which she is based, or indeed other notorious figures like Myra Hindley or Rosemary West. Though it’s ultimately a kind of desperate fight-for-survival story (and Cummings is excellent as the resourceful teenage victim who tries to manipulate the frailty of the couple’s relationship in order to escape), its most frightening arc is the exploration of the warped worldview of this apparently drab housewife, who believes she’s doing it all for a love so great it is bigger than the basic rules of humanity and morality.
4. “The Killing Of A Sacred Deer”
Taking “clinical” to new heights of literalism by actually setting half of the film in a hospital that looks like it was designed by Stanley Kubrick during a particularly acute attack of germophobia, Yorgos Lanthimos‘ “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” is a challenge. But if you’re on its wavelength (which maybe is not something you should actually admit to) it’s a coldly dazzling one, a film that feels like it’s not just about the oddly sociopathic interactions of a surgeon (Colin Farrell), his wife (Nicole Kidman), their two kids and an outsider (Barry Keoghan) whose malevolence is as matter-of-fact as his spaghetti-eating is messy. It’s a film that actually feels, in itself, sociopathic, from the far-removed, dispassionate way it is shot, in frames of merciless vanishing-point symmetry, to the dissociated and dysfunctional relationships it maps. Lanthimos already got a semi-revelatory performance from Colin Farrell in his last film, “The Lobster,” so his schlubby, unheroic turn here is less of a surprise perhaps, though still excellent, and Kidman is icy perfection in her turn. But the film has to mostly belong to newcomer Keoghan (who also featured in “Dunkirk“) who embodies its surreal horror with such complete banal normalcy that it makes it all somehow so much more horrifying. Lanthimos’ brilliant “Dogtooth” was remarkable for hovering around zero on the human empathy scoreboard; ‘Sacred Deer’ goes further, into a negative spectrum of emotionality that could basically freeze mercury.
3. “mother!”
It’s easy to understand why audiences staged a full-on revolt against “mother!,” Darren Aronofsky‘s kaleidoscopic freak out. This was, after all, an ungainly, metaphysical nightmare with little music that cast America’s sweetheart (Jennifer Lawrence) in a role that saw her battered, abused (psychologically and physically) and put through the emotional wringer. After watching her triumph over dystopian tyranny in “The Hunger Games,” Friday night crowds were treated to a gore-soaked spectacle that saw cultists killing and eating her newborn baby. And here comes the F grade from Cinemascore! But “mother!” should be celerated and not scorned. It is a beautiful, transcendent, troubling work from one of the greatest living filmmakers, so full of metaphoric value that the story of a man (Javier Bardem), his wife (Lawrence) and the duress they fall under while staying in a remote farmhouse, could (and was) read as any number of things – an allegory for role of women as both muse and creator, an environmentally conscious thriller, a homage to paranoid ’70’s cinema – with all of these assertions being correct. People weren’t just pissed about how extreme the movie was (and, honestly, it goes pretty far), but how much it demanded of you. This wasn’t a passive horror movie that you watch and forget about; this stayed with you.
2. “Raw”
Since premiering in Cannes in 2016, Julia Ducournau‘s terrifically slick, sick “Raw” has quietly gathered momentum to become the breakout arthouse horror of 2017, surely making it one of the most exciting feature debuts of recent years. The atmospheric, uncanny story of a young vegetarian (a terrifyingly ambivalent Garance Marillier) whose initiation into veterinarian school gives her a taste for uncooked meat that quickly expands beyond the regular food pyramid, for anyone coming to it late, its reputation as a film that made audience members faint or throw up may have preceded it. But while it doesn’t shy away from a certain goriness, “Raw” is so artfully done that we may think we’ve seen more than we have: Ducournau’s talent is evident in how her nasty little story burrows under your skin and takes hold from the inside like a particularly literal flesh-eating virus. Making a virtue of its low budget with sparse, alienated production design, and a kind of underwater dreaminess to some of the early scenes (particularly that long, queasily nightmarish initiation/party sequence) “Raw” is remembered for its viscerally disgusting moments, but it’s also a cleverly diffuse and impressionistic portrait of a young woman’s anxieties over fitting in, and the arbitrary nature of society’s standards of decency. Many great horror films are served rare and bloody; “Raw” is steak tartare.
1. “Get Out”
Filmmakers have long used horror as a vehicle for social commentary, from 1956’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” to 1978’s “Dawn of the Dead” to the rash of recent technophobic horrors that revolve around the dire consequences of Facebook overuse, and indeed, almost all of “Black Mirror.” Still, Jordan Peele‘s “Get Out,” somehow took us by surprise, despite a premise that the second you hear it, you think “Well, now why has no one done this before?” But really, no one had or at least not as coherently, confidently and with such delicious dark humor as here: this is the standard idea of racial panic flipped, subverted and then vivisected for our viewing pleasure. As much a satire on the emptiness of liberal white guilt as on black oppression, “Get Out” may come from a long tradition of brainy horrors, but it does feel thrillingly new and thrillingly now, in exposing the lie that is “post-racial” America. It does so from the inside out and, here spotlit by a stunning central performance from Daniel Kaluuya (who in the just world that “Get Out” knows does not exist, would be getting all the awards buzz), touches on so many uncomfortable side issues without ever letting its entertainment value flag. Around a simple meet-the-parents framework, Peele crafted a deeply creepy, grotesquely funny and oddly cathartic trawl through the swamp of 21st century race relations, taking in everything from police brutality to the use of Obama as a liberal band-aid, to the fetishization and commodification of black athleticism. This is America, The Sunken Place, and is there any easy way out? No no no no no no no.
Honorable Mentions: It’s a measure of the strength of the genre this year that the biggest hit in the genre of all time, “It,” didn’t make the cut. We found plenty to like about Andy Muschetti’s adaptation, but it also sometimes feels like a collection of set pieces more than a movie, as memorable as some of those set pieces were. M. Night Shyamalan’s return to form with “Split” was also pretty good, but not quite enough for the list, while some staff members were fans of “Life,” “A Cure For Wellness’ and “Cult Of Chucky,” but not quite enough to make the list.
There were a couple of great movies that didn’t quite feel horror enough to us — Joachim Trier’s supernatural thriller “Thelma,” Olivier Assayas’ ghost story “Personal Shopper,” and oddly, Guillermo Del Toro’s “The Shape Of Water,” which is many genres — romance, fairy tale, spy thriller — but never fully horror, at least to us.
Others we considered but didn’t include were zombie pic “The Girl With All The Gifts,” found footage movie “Lake Bodom,” the Lovecraftian “The Void,” anthology pic “XX,” Cate Shortland’s chilling “Berlin Syndrome,” better-than-you’d-think prequel “Annabelle: Creation,” the enjoyable “Happy Death Day,” the inventive sequel “Creep 2,” Irish horror “A Dark Song,” and indie vampire pic “The Transfiguration.” Anything else you think deserves a shout out? Fill your boots in the comments.
