Preview: New Directors/New Films 2026

Presented by Film at Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art, the 55th edition of New Directors/New Films takes place from April 8 through April 19, 2026, with filmmakers scheduled to attend in person. With a focus on innovative cinema that sets the stage for the future of film, the festival champions filmmakers with distinctive visions and bold new ideas that push the art form into new terrain.

This year’s selection will introduce 24 features and 10 shorts, including festival winners and favorites from Cannes, Sundance, Locarno, Venice, Berlinale, Rotterdam, Toronto, San Sebastián, and more. Screenings take place at FLC’s Walter Reade Theater and MoMA’s Titus theaters.

Below are some of the films I had a privilege to preview:

Strange River (2025) - Claret Muxart We get a first glimpse of 16 year old Dídac (Jan Monter), resembling a St. Sebastian in some Renaissance painting, bicycling along the forest with his family as he looks straight at the camera. Dad, mom, and his two younger brothers Biel and Guiu, are on a bicycle trip along the Danube river, camping along the way. Mom and Dad are fully aware that it will be the last trip with Dídac, who is growing up fast. There's an obvious tension between him and Biel, who is a couple of years younger, who needs to share a tent with him. As with any family trips, there is some usual annoying family stuff they deal with - arguments on the directions and following the map, sibling rivalries, sleeping arrangements, etc.

Dídac's parents are very supportive in acknowledging Dídac's homosexuality, but they are not perfect. They argue about small things and engage in extramarital affairs. As they take a break and swim in the river Dídac witnesses a naked man swimming by them. Is it his imagination or real person?

Spanish director Jaume Claret Muxart's feature debut, Strange River, is both a coming of age story told like a fairytale and an astute observation of family dynamics. With its clear-eyed gay protagonist, it gracefully skirts around the graphic nature of teen desires and instead concentrates on purity of longing for someone and possibilities of finding love anywhere, real or imagined.

The theme of rivers, connecting all the tributaries into one stream, as a metaphor for human relationships is beautifully and tenderly realized in Strange River.

Two Seasons, Two Strangers - Miyake Sho Director Miyake Sho has been steadily making films about delicate human connections over the years. Adapting from short manga stories (A View of the Seaside and Mr. Ben and His Igloo) by cult cartoonist Tsuge Yoshiharu, who passed away this year, Two Seasons, Two Stranger is a strange and wonderful diptych about a screenwriter (played by Korean actress Shim Eunkyung) and her stories as she travels Japan. As she writes, we get to see the film about two shy young people (Kawai Yuumi and Takada Mansaku) on their summer vacation, meeting on the beach and their brief friendship. The young man does most of the talking and reveals his background, while the pensive young woman listens. It culminates in them swimming in the ocean together on a rainy day.

Then the story pivots to the writer taking the train to a snowy countryside on a whim. She can't find lodging since she didn't book anything. Over the mountain, she finds an isolated quaint inn, run by a grunt who doesn't reveal anything about his private life, such as, why he is alone running the inn, which is traditionally done as a family business. On his part, after hearing that she is a screenwriter for movies and TV shows, he suggests she write about his inn, hoping for more business.

Getting bored being snowed in, The inn keeper suggests checking out a large ornamental carp pond his neighbor owns in the middle of the night. Then he proceeds to steal a carp despite the protest from the writer. But in fact, this is the most fun she has had in a long time.

Miyake goes on sketching out the human connections among strangers in a gentle, playful, abstract way, blurring both fiction and real life/creator and its creations.

Next Life - Tenjin Phuntsog Tenjin Phuntsog's feature debut, Next Life, is a quiet contemplation on death, statelessness and rebirth. It starts with the elderly father of the family being examined by a traditional Tibetan doctor. The western medicine couldn't figure out what's wrong with him. Living in California, far away from home, has got to do with his condition, the doctor tells him - a deep wound in his heart that will kill him. Resigned to his fate, the family prepares for the impending passing.

Shot minimalistically with a handful of characters and setting, Phuntsog somberly goes about contemplating the impermanence of human life and the rituals we keep for the dead and remembrance. As a family, they cope with living in an exile in California with family karaoke sessions and walk in nature. They indulge themselves with a VR setup, walking in the tranquil field that resembles their homeland.

As the son is trying to arrange his ailing father's wish to visit Tibet, he encounters Chinese bureaucracy issuing him a visa - because Tibet is still under Chinese rule. On the father's deathbed, they are told by Tibetan monks that he will be reborn in Tibet as a bird. A consolation for the remaining family in their moaning.

All is unhurriedly and quietly observed like a documentary in Next Life. The human pulse sounds like a river running. The repeated prayers have their own rhythm. Watching the film, far apart from western storytelling tradition, is a quite unique experience.

Fantasy - Isabel Pagliai Prompted by a chance encounter, director Isabel Pagliai and her teen subject Louise Morel decided to make a film, a documentary on Morel's daily lives from her diary entries. But as the film goes along, it becomes, well, a fantasy of sorts, delving deeply and intimately into the inner life of a teenage girl. Armed with a handycam, Louis documents the dark interior of her house, singing, taking baths, scrolling on her phone, playing with her calico cat and pining for someone named Antoine. Louise has a ferocity of young Sandrine Bonnaire in A Nous Amours, as she delves guilessly into her sexuality and pours out her inner thoughts.

We only find out her name later in the film, just because a stranger, Thomas (Thomas Ducasse), who is reading off of her diary in the beginning of the film, manifests himself at night in the forest, to be with Louise. Is this a fantasy of Louise or Thomas? Or is it a mutual one? Nights in the forest go by as they engage in conversations by the stream. Fantasy is a shapeless, formless exploration of the inner life of a teenager. And Pagliai makes it into a uniquely enthralling cinematic experience.

Memory - Vladlena Sandu Vladlena Sandu's searing war time memoir, dedicated to the children of war, is filled with vivid and unforgettable images. The vibrant colors, mise-en-scene and poetic images remind you of the work of Parajanov and Tarkovsky. Sandu makes a point of the effects of growing up in war and violence and condemns the culture of child soldiers and cycle of violence.

It tells the story of young Vladlena (played by (Selima Agamirzaeva, then Amina Taisumova, and later by director herself) moving to Grozny, Chechenia, from Cremia, Ukraine, her birth place, after her artist parents divorce. There she endures a tyrannical grandfather who was a WWII vet and strict Lenin devotee. But it's the 80s and the USSR dissolves, there are changes and the decade long Russo-Chechen war is coming. Being Russian/Ukrainian, Vladlena's family find themselves between a rock and a hard place. Then the tanks roll in, bombardment of Grozny begins. And she witnesses unspeakable violence and death. Memory is all told in a mix of symbolic imagery, newsreel footage, home videos and photo collages. As Sandu struggles with her grandfather's legacy, her father's drug addiction and her mother's sacrifice, she paints a truly human experience in the sweeping current of not so distant history. Memory is a remarkable debut feature and crowning cinematic achievement.

Existential Dread

The Stranger - Ozon François Ozon adapts Albert Camus's perennial work of the same name, set in the French colonial Algeria in the 1940s. It concerns a senseless murder of a young Arab man by an emotionally stunted French national, and the subsequent murder trial and conviction.

Ozon prefaces the film with the newsreel footage of Algeria under French colonialism, and how the Algerians are treated like second class citizens in their own country - excluded from restaurants, movie theaters, shops and public transports. Not in so many words, Ozon is suggesting that Meursault's ennui and senseless actions are deeply rooted in colonialism and injustices that were out in the open for everyone to see.

Presented in crisp black and white, the film tells about a low level company clerk, Meursault (Benjamin Voisin, seen in Ozon's Summer of 85') living in French occupied Algiers. He leads an uneventful, yet comfortable life - swimming at the beach, going to the movies and spending quiet time in his apartment, that is when he's allowed to- His rowdy neighbors Raymond (Pierre Lottin), a pimp who regularly beats his Algerian girlfriend, and an old timer Salamano (Denis Lavant) who has a love/hate relationship with his aging, barking dog.

The news of his mother's death at an old folks' rest home makes Meursault travel outside the city in sweltering heat. He is greeted by the staff of the facility, who are shocked by his dispassionate display of grief. He doesn't seem to be in mourning or sad. He refuses to look at the body, and leaves as soon as the funeral is over.

Back in Algiers, Meursault starts seeing Marie (Rebecca Marder), an old acquaintance who finds him attractive. After a while, she asks him if he loves her. He doesn't know. But she is not giving up. She wants to marry him, even though she finds his resigned attitude towards life a bit off-putting, to say the least. She thinks she can fix him.

Raymond complains that his Arab girlfriend's brother is after him and that he wants Meursault to 'back him up'. Raymond invites Meursault and Marie to his friend's cabin by the beach. But the Arab men follow them. Raymond is hurt during scuffle with them. With Raymond's gun, Meursault tracks Raymond's girlfriend's brother and shoots him on the beach.

The images by Manuel Dacosse (Evolution, The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears) are striking and memorable in their high contrast monochrome. The scene of a guillotine on the top of the hill has a feel of surrealist master Luís Buñuel's work and the sun-kissed, enigmatic images of Algiers resemble the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Voisin does a terrific job embodying an empty man who swears off the existence of god and embraces life's meaninglessness. A great supporting cast includes Lavant, Marder and Swann Arlaud (hot lawyer from Anatomy of a Fall, plays a hot priest here).

The subtext to Ozon's very closely adapted The Stranger, based on the existentialist, absurdist classic, is that Meursault's self-imposed isolation and his atheistic world view are the symptoms of witnessing decades of inhumane colonialism and experiencing rootlessness, not as much by the German invasion of the greater Europe and WWII. His rootlessness is mentioned twice in the film - when Marie suggests that after they get married, they go back to France, he responds, 'but this is my home,' and when his boss at the firm gives him an opportunity to station him in their Paris office, he declines.

The Stranger subtly shows the entitlement of the occupiers living in a foreign land as if they are living in Paris and considering it as their home without a second thought. Some twenty years later, after The Stranger was written, with armed struggle against the French, Algeria finally earned their independence in 1962, ending more than a century of French Colonial rule. The film gives a deeper context of understanding Meursault's actions, based on France's racist colonial history.

Bootlicker Blues

Yes (2025) - Lapid As the bombs are falling in Tehran by US/Israeli military, which, by all indication, seems like another Middle Eastern conflict that won't end well- if it ends at all, comes Nadav Lapid's searing satire about an artist sucking up to a militaristic, patriotic fervor of a nation, in order to have a good life, even if it means leaving his conscience at the door. Just like his previous two films, Synonyms and Ahed's Knee, Yes is a semi-biographical and unapologetically angry film.

The film's frenetic, energetic first half is all about debauchery - endless drug and booze fueled dance parties for the rich and the powerful, set to EDM. Y (Ariel Bronz), a pianist and his dancer wife Yasmin (Efrat Dor) are there to entertain them with sexy dance moves and crazy antics. They make no bones about their depravity and humiliation in the hands of these people who rule the State of Israel.

In one scene at the pool party, Y goes on a bender, drowns and gets revived for their entertainment. Another, Y and Yasmin tongue fuck an old rich lady in her ear until she comes. They go home to their small Tel Aviv apartment to tend to their toddler son, after a depraved party after another. But they can't escape from daily news reports on their phones of bombs and destruction in Gaza, even while walking through the beautiful, pristine beaches of Tel Aviv as a backdrop - people are jogging and laughing and colorful paragliders jigjagging the bright blue skies.

In light of the October 7th, Y is tasked to compose a new national anthem to stir up the patriotic sentiment of the nation. This will be his and his family's ticket out. But where could they go?

The energetic tempo of the first half gives into a screeching halt as Y dyes his hair blonde and sneaks out to the desert for "inspiration" to compose his assignment. There he meets his ex-flame, Leah (Naama Preis), now begrudgingly in charge of running the IDF social media team. Their disdain of what's going on is mutual. They share their war time anecdotes from their parents' generation in WWII - "how could they go on living while atrocities are committed?", of course their parents were talking about old Europe during genocide of the Jewish people. The irony is not lost on Y and Leah as they watch smoke billowing over Gaza from a hill near the border. In a long monologue, Leah recites the atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7th. Yes, what happened that day is horrifying. But everything the Netanyahu government did afterwards made everyone in the world hate them. 'Where could we go? Everybody hates us.' They conclude.

Conceived before the October 7th Massacre in 2023, and revised continuously throughout until the release at Cannes in 2025, Yes is a loud satire that reflects the uncomfortable present that the artistic community find themselves in a rock and a hard place, in an increasingly military fascist state.

The cringey inducing literal circle-jerk bootlicking scene might be too abrasive and over the top, the satire of Yes is way too close to home to be funny. Y and Yasmin know it too. It's written in their agonizing faces and actions, fully acknowledging their cowardice and pain of others, while trying to escape their predicament by turning blind eye to what's going on around them. It's an obnoxiously pointy and honest, yet sad film.

Yes opens 3/27 in New York and 4/3 in Los Angeles with national rollout to follow.

Amphibian

The Chronology of Water (2025) - Stewart Kristen Stewart's long gestating directorial debut, based on a memoir of the same name by Lidia Yuknavitch is a stunner. Grounded in Imogen Poots' committed performance, Stewart goes on an unconventional way to tell a story of a writer struggling to find her way from sexual abuse in the hands of her father that she and her sister suffered as children.

Rather than a straight, chronological narrative, the film jumps back and forth in fragmented, sensory overload fashion in grainy 16mm camera work. From the accumulation of these snippets of memories of Yuknavitch growing up, the narrative slowly emerges- competitive swimming, first marriage to an effeminate young man, still born baby, finding peace with now grown up older sister who fled home from abuse and therefore Lidia having attachment issues with, further exploration of her bi-sexuality and BDSM, drugs and alcohol addiction and writing.

The muted low hum of being under water is ever present, so is Lidia's voice over. It takes a while for Lidia to find her calling in writing. There were supportive people along the way - Claire (Esme Creed Miles, Silver Haze) her best friend and lover, Ken Kesey, the famous author of One Flew Over Cuckoo's Nest, played here by James Belushi as a mentor in writing workshop, Claudia (Thora Birch), Lidia's older sister who becomes a bedrock of her support system and Kim Gordon as a scarred photographer whom Lidia explores BDSM with.

The Chronology of Water is a raw and honest depiction of sexual abuse survivor and remarkable power of art and self expression to overcome the trauma. Poots is mesmerizing in her role as a damaged young woman. Belushi settles comfortably in a sage role, who recognizes Lidia's talent, exerting a major Gene Hackman vibe.

The jumpy structure in the timeline matches how our memory works- reminding us of the ebbs and tides of the waves of time: how it contracts and expands and memories intensify or dissipate and are triggered by seemingly trivial moments. It's a great debut by an intense artist who is serious about filmmaking and its messages.

No More Memories

How to Shoot a Ghost (2025) - Kaufman Charlie Kaufman directs a script written by his friend and poet, Eva H.D. How to Shoot a Ghost, a short shot in Athens, Greece, is a film, unsurprisingly for Kaufman, about our mortality and anxiety of leaving something/nothing behind. Narrated by H.D., and without any dialog, the film tells the two recently departed young people, played by Jessie Buckley and Joseph Akiki, as they walk around and trying to capture the daily lives of citizens of Athens. Beautifully captured by Michal Dymek (EO, The Girl with the Needle) and melancholic score by Ella van der Woude, the film is an elegiac look at the existence of human lives and what we leave behind, in the background of dense cityscapes, old remnants of ancient civilization and liminal spaces. Mixd in is newsreel footages of tumultuous recent Greek history under dictatorship.

Buckley, donning a colorful wig, emotes a young woman as she argues with her father (?) and loses herself in a disco club and taking polaroid pictures of Athenians and the like. As two strangers in a foreign country, not fitting in with society's norms- Buckley and Akiki are soulful and magnetic in their presence, trying to leave a trace in the world that no longer belong to them. As H.D.'s narration goes, what you do in life is enough. You don't have to worry about what you leave behind. How to Shoot a Ghost is less agonizing existential trip, but more spiritually in tune with Joachim Trier's August 31st or Hirokazu Kore-eda's Afterlife.

Preview: Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2026

The Stranger - François Ozon François Ozon adapts Albert Camus's perennial work of the same name, set in the French colonial Algeria in the 1940s. It concerns a senseless murder of a young Arab man by an emotionally stunted French national, and the subsequent murder trial and conviction.

Ozon prefaces the film with the newsreel footage of Algeria under French colonialism, and how the Algerians are treated like second class citizens in their own country - excluded from restaurants, movie theaters, shops and public transports. Not in so many words, Ozon is suggesting that Meursault's ennui and senseless actions are deeply rooted in colonialism and injustices that were out in the open for everyone to see.

The images by Manuel Dacosse (Evolution, The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears) are striking and memorable in their high contrast monochrome. The scene of a guillotine on the top of the hill has a feel of surrealist master Luís Buñuel's work and the sun-kissed, enigmatic images of Algiers resemble the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Benjamin Voisin (from Ozon's Summer of 85') does a terrific job embodying an empty man who swears off the existence of god and embraces life's meaninglessness. A great supporting cast includes Lavant, Marder and Swann Arlaud (hot lawyer from Anatomy of a Fall, plays a hot priest here).

The subtext to Ozon's very closely adapted The Stranger, based on the existentialist, absurdist classic, is that Meursault's self-imposed isolation and his atheistic world view are the symptoms of witnessing decades of inhumane colonialism and experiencing rootlessness, not as much by the German invasion of the greater Europe and WWII. His rootlessness is mentioned twice in the film - when Marie suggests that after they get married, they go back to France, he responds, 'but this is my home,' and when his boss at the firm gives him an opportunity to station him in their Paris office, he declines.

The Stranger subtly shows the entitlement of the occupiers living in a foreign land as if they are living in Paris and considering it as their home without a second thought. Some twenty years later, after The Stranger was written, with armed struggle against the French, Algeria finally earned their independence in 1962, ending more than a century of French Colonial rule. The film gives a deeper context of understanding Meursault's actions, based on France's racist colonial history.

Case 137 - Dominik Moll Everyone knows when it comes to mobilizing street demonstrations, no one does it better than the French. We've seen on social media of burning cars, violent confrontations with cops in riot gear, spraying manure on government buildings - they don't mess around when it comes to protesting. The Yellow Vest protests/movement, a recent nationwide populist mobilization, where working class people dissatisfied with the economic policies of the Centrist Macron government that caused rising cost of living and in gas prices, wage stagnations and higher taxes, while wearing neon yellow colored work vests, associated with manual labor, dominated airwaves in 2018-19. Dominik Moll, the mystery and psychological thriller specialist (The Night of the 12th, With a Friend Like Harry & Lemming), approaches the subject from the point of view of an Internal Affairs agent Stéphanie Bertrand (Léa Drucker). Bertrand is to investigate the case of Girard, a young protester who was shot in the head by a police palette gun and in critical condition.

Case 137 plays out like a typical police procedural as Bertrand scrubs through the CCTV and interviews witnesses. She and her team finds out a squad of plain clothes special units, the Brigade de Recherche et d'Intervention (BRI), were present at the scene where young Girard was shot. The BRI denies everything at first, but pressed with the recording of the incident, they claim that they were just doing their job and protecting their colleagues.

Moll makes a case for Bertrand's situation - who finds herself between rock and a hard place, hated by the public for being a cop, and also by the fellow cops (including her ex-husband who is also a cop) for investigating them for their misconduct. Taking sides is largely swayed by emotions in a highly polarized political environment. And because of Bertrand's human relations with the victim's family (turns out that Bertrand's and Girards are from the same small town), she was biased against cops, her superior concludes.

The film captures the zeitgeist of the moment against authoritarianism, the rich and the powerful, but no matter what your intentions are, how easily you can find yourself in a murky reality.

The Girl in the Snow - Louise Hémon A young idealistic teacher Lazare (Galatéa Bellugi) arrives in a small Alpes village on the eve of the 20th century. There she encounters a tight community of mountain folks still very much steeped in traditions and superstitions. Small things Lazare does - like bathing her little pupils, in order to improve their hygiene and their health, are met with deep skepticism and ridicule by the village elders. With her apple cheeks and wide eyes, Lazare attracts the attention of young men around, and her own loneliness and desires don't help the matter from village folks' scrutiny. Death and avalanches are part of the life in the region and frozen ground makes mountain folks resigned to 'let the Spring release the dead', if their search and rescue operations become futile. The old folklore tells the story of a beautiful woman luring men to icy death and Lazare is deemed cursed since two young men disappear around her. And there will be consequences.

Stunningly shot in the snow capped Alpes, and deploying non-actors, documentarian, Louise Hémon's narrative debut, The Girl in the Snow, about a rift between pioneering feminism and idealism and traditions and superstitions, is a beautifully realized period piece veering into folk horror/fantasy category.

Two Pianos - Arnaud Desplechin

Mathias (François Civil), a one time piano protégé is summoned back from Japan to Lyon to accompany his mentor/teacher Elena (Charlotte Rampling) in Bartok's two piano concertos. There he runs into an old flame Claude (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), she was the reason that he fled in the first place. The shock was too great, he faints. Claude, now happily married and has an 8 year old son Simon. It turns out that Simon, who has a striking resemblance to Mathias as a child, that it's his son when he had an affair while his best friend and Claude were a couple.

Mathias is in shambles and can't concentrate and comes in late for rehearsals, the concert is in 4 days. Steely Elena is not happy with Mathias. Then she drops the bombshell. She has memory loss and is suspecting she has early symptoms of Alzheimer's. This will be her last concert and she needs some assurance that Mathias will be by her side and not fuck up her last concert.

Once again, Desplechin weaves the lives of these characters with beautifully nuanced script about regrets, ambition, art and love with great performances by both Civil and Rampling. The supporting cast includes Hippolyte Girardot as Mathias's devoted agent and Alba Gaïa Bellugi as a jealous friend of Claude.

Brotherhood of Wolves

Predator: Badlands (2025) - Trachtenberg A wise man once said that there are no bad Predator movies (yet there are, but generally batting average is indeed better as far as movie franchises go). And Dan Trachtenberg (Prey) continues this premise with Predator: Badlands. For the first time, the franchise is told from the alien trophy hunter's point of view with his hefty Shakespearean - or at least Black Panther-ean backstory with the Oedipal complex and brotherhood and betrayal and revenge and so on.

We open in Yautja Prime, the predators' home planet. With space ships and all their technology, the planet is pretty barren. There are no females to be seen and no hairdressers. It's all about hunting, killing, and bringing home trophy kind of culture. Very macho and very rigid, like the way of the samurai or something...but I digress.

Young Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) is deemed a weakling and as the tradition goes, needs to be culled, because only the strong survives. After his merciless father slain his older brother for protecting him, Dek escapes and crash lands on a hostile planet where Kalisk, an apex predator creature lives. With the help of the marooned upper half of Thia (Elle Fanning) - an android among all synthetic armies in a specimen collecting mission from a Wayland-Yutani ship (nicely continuing the franchise's narrative thread). Thia convinces Dek that she can help him to hunt down Kalisk for his triumphant return and possible revenge, and in return, he can help Thia reunite with the other identical but bad synth Tess (also played by Fanning) and retrieve her bottom half (which proves just as deadly as the upper part).

The imagined world building is top-notch with great action sequences. With a little critter Thia names Bud who becomes a pivotal piece of the puzzle later on, becoming the welcoming comic relief in the relentless violence and mayhem. Trachtenberg, who has shown his ability to enliven and breathe a new life into the same old, machismo driven franchise in Prey, does it again with Badlands. Action sequences are cool, effects are aces, and Fanning's smudged up, cracked porcelain doll face is perfect as a conflicted synth.

By the end of Badlands, both Dek and Thia learn a thing or two, about hunting in a pact like that earth creature called wolves that Thia mentions and friendship. Badlands is superb entertainment and definitely worth seeing in this February movie desert landscape. It starts streaming on Hulu 2/12.

Gaze

Sound of Falling (2025) - Schillinski The farmhouse in Northwest Germany is a setting for Sound of Falling, a film consisting of the point of views of 4 women through multiple generations. with a jumbled timeline, Mascha Schillinski explores the lives of young women and their surroundings. Layered, highly cinematic images have cumulative effects, as they are imbued with secret meanings and intimate knowledges.

There's Alma, a preteen girl in a large household in the turn of the century. Her encounter with death in the family and her obsession with it are established through her brief voiceover, as we go back to her from time to time. There's Angelika, a teen girl in the 80s, testing out her boundaries as she senses male gazes from her immediate and distant male family members. Then there's Lenka, a young girl in the present day, imitating an older, extroverted girl, Kaya, from the village.

Florian Gamper's full frame cinematography is at once ethereal and dreamlike, showing the women's fears and desires across time and space. Sound of Falling deals with dark subjects - death, suffering, incest, hierarchy and male gaze, but Schillinski and co-writer Luise Peter at the helm, the film deals with it with such nuance and vivid visual details, the film transcends the mere narrative storytelling about generational trauma.

Unpredictable

Keeper (2025) - Perkins As in his other films - Longlegs, Monkey, Grethel and Hansel, Osgood Perkins has a penchant for creating dread with eerie images, this cabin in the woods movie is no exception. From the get-go, even before the ill-fated couple Liz (Tatiana Maslany) and Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) arrive at the handsome, all-windows-n-angles modern log cabin, we see the glimpse of various women and their eventual fate in a series of striking portraits.

Once we are in the cabin, Liz feels an ominous presence in the dark corners and shadows. Maybe this trip upstate with someone she doesn't know well enough, for a city rat like Liz, wasn't a good idea. There's a cake in a box with smudged fingerprints sitting on the kitchen counter. It's from a caretaker Malcolm says, off-handedly. An unexpected, awkward visit from Malcolm's asshole brother with his Eastern European girlfriend, leaves Liz a little more rattled. After eating the whole chocolate cake in the middle of the night, creepy things start happening and Liz doesn't really know if they are dreams or real.

Malcolm is called off for his job as a doctor into the city, leaving Liz all alone. She is haunted by the vision of the women seen in the beginning of the film as well as feeling that she is not alone in the cabin.

The images Perkins and DP Jeremy Cox (Monkey) are truly unsettling. The creatures are extremely creepy and the competing saturated color palate is beautiful and dark and very effective for the location. Some transition shots are stunning, comparable to that of Park Chanwook even, the king of transition shots. Love his play with background and foreground perspectives also. Keeper develops into a delicious folk horror territory, but not a clearly defined plot. And like other Perkins films, narrative thread is not the selling point, but atmosphere is and unsettling images are. This film has a lot of that.

Maslany, who has one of the most interesting faces in cinema and serves as one of the executive producers of the film, is all game for a small cast and one location, atmospheric horror. Her natural delivery and demeanor, her quick wit is highlighted in basically a one woman show. I can see if it won't be everyone's cup of tea, but I loved it.