(Credits: Far Out / BFI)
Film » Features
Emily Ruuskanen
It’s been another delightfully hectic year at the London Film Festival, and after watching 17 films in the last ten days, I can safely say that my brain is mush, but my heart (and Letterboxd diary) is full. With an eclectic program curated by the BFI, there’s been a variety of films for all audiences to love and enjoy, with debut features ranging from revolutionary to utterly abysmal, television shows directed by film directors and new work from established filmmakers like Luca Guadagnino and Andrea Arnold.
After my time in the cinema this past week or so, I’ve noticed some interesting thematic strands and ideas that have kept cropping up, with many of the films exploring our world’s state of precariousness and uncertainty, characters who are grappling with the collapse of democracy, justice, equality, the climate, with their relationships and very personhood being under threat. Unlike last year, I came away from the festival with a renewed feeling of anxiety and dread about the state of the world, but also a feeling of community as I was hit with the universality of our worries.
We often feel as though our anxieties are unique to us, but after reflecting on this year’s program, I was reassured by the filmmakers that reflect the urgency of these issues in their work and moved by the fact that despite everything, we still have filmmakers and artists who are lending their voices and vulnerabilities to try and make the world a better place. I think this is the most important thing to hold onto because, ultimately, people are making these films because they believe there is hope. We do not feel anger and frustration and anxiety without it – we feel these things because we know there is something better.
But not all of the films I watched this year had the same impact, with a few that left me angry at the state of independent cinema and questioning the longevity of the industry that I have now devoted the quote ‘best of years of my life’ to. So, without further ado, here is my rundown of the best and worst films of the 2024 London Film Festival.
The End
I’d prefer to end this article on a high, so we might as well start off with the worst of the festival. This year, I was surprised to experience three films that sparked such a deep rage and anger within me that I left the cinema feeling cheated and wanting my time back. I wish I were over-exaggerating, but after one screening, I left in such a bad mood that when I got home, I felt so fragile that I cried when my keys didn’t open my front door on the first go. I don’t want to linger too long on the negatives, so I’ll keep it short and sour.
After hearing that the esteemed documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer was making his first fictional feature, I was significantly intrigued. The End was described to me as a musical about one of the last living families in an underground nuclear bunker, starring Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, George MacKay and Moses Ingram. Would his genius also extend to the world of fictional storytelling?
The answer is, unfortunately, absolutely no, and it stands as the only film of the festival that I actually walked out of. It consists of no discernible plot or end goal, with the entire movie just showing people living underground (in a house that’s decorated and lit like an IKEA showroom) and every 30 minutes or so, someone will temporarily be plagued with guilt and say something along the lines of, “what about the people up there?”, to which everyone goes very quiet and then Michael Shannon sings a musical number about missing the wind and the sun. This exact formula was repeated the entire time I was there. This would maybe work better if the songs were good, but unfortunately, they weren’t. One of the songs even included a fart sequence? With the characters singing to each other through their farts. The film is aptly titled The End, which is the moment I was waiting for the entire time. Sorry to Mr Oppenheimer, but this might just be the biggest bomb of the year.
Emilia Perez
Imagine you asked a group of aliens who had never seen a movie before to write a soap opera – Emilia Perez would be that movie.
The film comes from French director Jacques Audiard, who is most famous for A Prophet and Paris, 13th District. The film is also a musical and follows a lawyer called Rita who is employed by a local drug lord to help organise their sex change, later becoming Emilia Perez. The premise sounds great, and I’m sure many people enjoyed the dramatic and surrealist elements of the story, but to me, the script was so cringeworthy and almost purposefully bad in order to achieve its humour, with insanely jarring musical numbers and a messy plot that cannot commit to one storyline, constantly flitting between its poorly fleshed out characters and a choppy editing style that only highlights the film’s flaws.
I was laughing at the film but not with it, and the whole thing quite honestly feels like a (bad) fever dream.
Sebastian
I’m always keen to support a fellow Finn, so when I heard of Mikko Mäkelä’s sophomore debut, Sebastian, it quickly became one of my most anticipated films at the festival. But alas, it’s always the ones you don’t suspect that will disappoint you the most, and this is precisely what Sebastian did.
The movie is about a young writer who becomes a part-time sex worker in order to research his debut novel. As you can imagine, things don’t go to plan, and the plot unfolds in exactly the way you’d predict. The script is full of clichés and tired tropes, feeling like an impersonation of a film rather than an actual movie, with performances that feel rigid and robotic (most likely because the actors were working with so little in the script). I’m also tired of seeing stories about writers who care more about writing anything than they do about writing something they actually care about, desperate for some kind of life experience to fuel their creative spark and generate ‘content’. It reminds me of the infamous Olivier quote… my dear boy, have you tried writing?
In the midst of the flops, however, there were a few films that sat within the middle – nothing bad or uninspiring, just not quite fulfilling enough for me to completely gush about, but nonetheless had some interesting ideas or concepts that I enjoyed.
The Piano Lesson
The Piano Lesson is Malcolm Washington’s debut feature film, adapted from the play of the same name by August Wilson. Interestingly enough, the film uses the same cast from the recent Broadway run of the play, with John David Washington and Samuel L Jackson in the leading roles.
The film generally does a good job of adapting the play’s material in a cinematic and visually exciting way, with some truly breathtaking scenes, such as the ‘work song’ and Danielle Deadwyler’s beautiful performance in the film’s second half. However, it felt a bit narratively confused, unsure whether it was a ghost story, comedy or family drama, sometimes dipping its toes into all pools but never quite settling on one, which left it feeling a little uneven.
But despite this, the performances were truly so nuanced and commanding, with a few stand-out moments that had the entire audience clapping and cheering. Even with its tonal inconsistencies, it was an immersive experience that felt like it was made to watch on the big screen, even if it was better left for the stage.
Queer
After the colossal success of Challengers, Luca Guadagnino’s follow-up film Queer was perhaps the most anticipated film of the festival.
Based on the novel by William Burroughs and adapted by Justin Kuritzkes, the film is set in 1950s Mexico City and the lonely world of William Lee, an American expat who desperately searches for intimacy and validation that leads him to pursue a younger man called Eugene. Guadagnino explores queerness as an out-of-body experience, with Daniel Craig’s character becoming a disembodied figure that is seen as ‘other’ because of his sexuality.
Craig is truly haunting in Queer, skulking around the streets as he searches for a connection, with Guadagnino likening his image to a centipede, playing on the idea that his queerness is seen as grotesque and non-human, living under a metaphorical rock in the darkness of hotel rooms and deserted alleys. The film explores love and intimacy as an addiction; however, the third chapter felt very out of place, almost as if it was tacked on to stay truthful to the source material but with a less convincing idea on how to portray it visually. Some of the visual effects and set design were also slightly questionable (which felt more prominent in the second half of the film), but besides this, it was a hypnotic and mesmerising watch, and I cannot wait to watch it again and pick apart the many layers that Guadagnino has hidden in his experimental take on the novel.
And now for some of the films that have really stayed with me and played on my mind in the days after watching them, the movies that delve into the darkest and most complex aspects of the human experience but still manage to maintain a hopefulness that left me with new feeling or perspective.
Conclave
German director Edward Berger has created something truly exceptional and bold with Conclave, a film that follows a group of Catholic priests and religious leaders as they take part in the ‘conclave’ and elect a new Pope.
It exposes the corruption and contradictions within the people we deem most moral, shining a light on our own selfish motivations as we make a bid for power in the wake of tragedy. The script is incredibly well written, asking whether anyone is truly ‘good’, with a career-defining performance from Ralph Fiennes and one of the best monologues I think I’ve ever seen.
Conclave is able to build on its own tension while still maintaining this unnerving silence and subtlety throughout, never feeling over the top and managing to feel more unsettling in its restraint. Berger has made a meticulously crafted and considered film that leaves no stone unturned, with equal levels of optimism and cynicism that perfectly captures the state of religion, progress and democracy in a modern world.
Viet and Nam
Viet and Nam is Truong Minh Quy’s sophomore feature film, an impressive feat given how self-assured and confident it feels in its distinctive vision. For those that aren’t a fan of slow cinema, this isn’t the film for you. But as a lover of Akerman, Weerasethakul and Rohmer, I found it to be a deeply moving and transcendental viewing experience.
Viet and Nam is about two young coal miners trying to make the most of their time together before one of them is shipped overseas. It’s a magical and delicate story about grief and moving forward, but how the characters are ultimately always trapped between the two, unable to move on from the pain of their past but with an unforgiving future that they are trying to avoid. Minh Quy creates images that I’ve never seen the likes of before, adopting a poetic visual language that feels simultaneously soft and harsh, with shots of both men holding each other in the sparkly dirt of the mines, creating a jagged backdrop to such a tender relationship.
Viet and Nam is truly breathtaking in its patience and care, letting the audience sit in every frame and moment of silence, reconnecting us with ourselves and the feelings that lie undisturbed under the surface.
A Real Pain
Last but not least, one of my surprising favourites from the festival was Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, a delightfully charming, hilarious and human story about two cousins visiting their dead grandmother’s home town in Poland. The film is ultimately about how we deal with our pains and people who are doing their best, with a knock-out performance from Kieran Culkin, who plays a charismatic and troubled man who is a bit lost in life, trying to find a reason to live and like himself. It strikes a perfect balance between light and shade, with beautifully sincere moments between the cousins as they reckon with generational trauma, family history and the unspoken tensions between them, made all the more complex by their genuine love and adoration for each other.
This film is the perfect way to round off this list, as it ties into my initial statement about the thematic strands at this year’s festival. While it is a film about the horrors of our own world and the damage that we inflict on each other, it is mostly about the love and hope that persists and holds us together and how sharing our stories with each other is what sustains the human spirit.
It’s been another eclectic program at the London Film Festival, and despite the ups and down, there’s no doubt that I will be first in line to do it all again next year. Till next time…
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