10 Cinematic Pairings That Defined 2023

Twenty great films from 2023 (and how they're connected).

Today I’m excited to share a piece by Stephen David Miller, a reader and supporter whose coverage of TIFF you may have previously seen at Decoding Everything. Every year, Stephen writes a piece where he provides 10 cinematic pairings from the films of that year and explains their connections. I think it’s a wonderful and unique way to look at these films. With the Oscars fast approaching, I also thought it’d be an interesting way to take one last look at the movies of 2023. Please note that any film mentioned is likely to mention plot details that could be considered SPOILERS, but Stephen has tried to avoid revealing anything that would actively detract from your enjoyment of these films. If you enjoy this piece, be sure to check out Stephen’s podcast. -David

Introduction: Fuzzy Pictures

The deeper you dig into any given subject, the harder it is to speak in absolutes. From physics to philosophy to artificial intelligence, everything gets a little fuzzy under a microscope. That’s true of the sciences and doubly so with art, which is why ranking films has always struck me as a little silly. However fun it is to argue about the “objective quality” of our favorites, it’s impossible to separate them from our personal perspectives. Movies are stories weaved by the culture for the culture, informed by their creators but ultimately narrated by us. They collide with whatever we bring with us to the theater: our hurts or anxieties, present-day societal concerns. And those collisions, it turns out, often seem to echo.

In this piece, I’m going to walk you through 20 of my favorite recent films. Rather than rank them one-by-one, I’ll be focusing on cinematic pairings: two titles which speak to me in similar ways, or touch upon similar concepts. Their order on this list reflects my love of each as individuals, as well as the broader story they combine to tell. This is wildly subjective, and I hope by fully embracing that we can deepen the conversation. Let’s count down my favorite filmic pairs of 2023:

10. Coming Home Can Be a Trial — ‘Beau Is Afraid’ and ‘Omen’

When we were too young to interface with the world directly, most everything we thought we knew was given second hand—through stories, infused with the perspective of the teller. Our parents give us an early way of understanding our surroundings, a vocabulary carried well into adulthood. Ideally this binds us together, perpetuates a shared sense of culture. But at its worst, it can beget a self-fulfilling prophecy, as distortions amplify through generations.

These two films are about coming home and facing that inheritance. Using heightened storytelling to literalize internal emotions, they illustrate the ways a visit can devolve into a nightmare.

Beau is an anxiety sponge too bloated to function, an antenna attuned to every ambient threat. From billboards to posters to the fine print on prescription medication, everything is feeding him one unified message: It’s scary out there, and you should live accordingly. (Your Fox-News-consuming relatives may relate.) While dread is beamed from all directions in the Beau is Afraid universe, its most concentrated source is the person who taught him to perceive it: his mother. Our narrative action begins with a phone call from her number, sending Beau on an epic quest to make it home in time. If that’s the literal shape his voyage takes—Point A his apartment, Point B his childhood home—the true hero’s journey has less to do with facing fear than it does the codependence of his youth. For all the stab-happy strangers and gun-toting vets Beau encounters en route, the biggest threats he faces stem from his own family history, a lifetime of shame and disapproval made manifest as monsters. How do you overcome years of guilt when you’ve been taught the desire to overcome it is a reason to feel guilty? Maybe it’s the idea of “overcoming” that’s flawed, implying a winnable, head-to-head battle. No sponge can absorb an ocean of trauma. Beau needs to wring himself out and float above his past before he sinks under the accumulated weight.

Though the literal story of Omen follows a similar trajectory, the protagonist’s emotional journey is essentially Beau’s in reverse. Estranged from his family at a fairly young age, Koffi now lives in Belgium with his fiancé, Alice. Koffi is from the Congo, Alice is from Belgium, and they’re presently pregnant with twins. Koffi hasn’t spoken with his parents in ages, and he’s long ago made peace with their absence. But the prospect of fatherhood has softened his resolve: He wants his children to grow up having a relationship with their grandparents and a tether to their Congolese identity. In an effort to mend fences, he and Alice set off to visit his family with a dowry-as-an-olive-branch in hand. This probably sounds like it’s setting the stage for a classic immigrant narrative, with Koffi’s family serving as the stand-in for traditional values and Alice the threat of modernity, dilution. But director Baloji eschews straightforward drama for something far more compelling and chaotic. Koffi’s internal anxieties and his family’s superstitions are thrown into a blender, creating a disorienting space where it’s never quite clear who is “in the right” or why. Add in adversarial townspeople and a dash of magical realism, and you get an experience which shares as much with The Warriors or David Lynch’s oeuvre as it does with, say, The Farewell. It’s an unresolved tension rendered as a fever dream, puzzling and thrilling in equal measure.

9. Invisible Protections — ‘Shayda’ and ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret’

If the narrative our parents fashioned for us can function as a curse, it can also be a powerful protection: a bulwark against life’s more painful truths. As explored by multiple high profile films this year, womanhood is a particularly complicated reality, burdened by familial, societal, and religious expectations.

These are stories of mothers who strain against that burden while doing their best to shield their daughters from its weight. They celebrate a uniquely maternal brand of perseverance: the drive to conjure safe spaces from scratch.

A promotional still from ‘Shayda,’ courtesy of TIFF / Jane Zhang.

The titular protagonist of Shayda lives in a women’s shelter in an undisclosed suburb of Melbourne. Though she and her 8-year-old daughter, Mona, miss their home country of Iran, returning is out of the question. This is due to Mona’s father, a physical and emotional abuser, who refuses to acknowledge their divorce—a refusal which the theocratic justice system is happy to support. Shayda does her best to cultivate a space where Mona can flourish, free from the strictures that come with her heritage while also free from resentment of that heritage itself. Life has forced an ultimatum on her, but she won’t let it do the same for Mona. Try as she may, though, the pressure continues seeping in. Gossip swirls through the local Persian-Australian community. Well-meaning grandparents, unable to fathom the abuse that Shayda’s suffered, plead for them both to come home. Most terrifying are her husband’s repeated efforts to take Mona, by law or coercion or force. Noora Niasari’s film thrives on tension, creating a stylistic tug-of-war between family drama, social realism, and psychological thriller. It’s as if Shayda and Noora are fighting together to create a calm amid the storm, buffering Mona and the audience from an ever-present threat. As sadly tends to be the case, Shayda’s buffer is imperfect and impermanent. But the film itself—or, rather, the fact of its creation—is a testament to her ultimate success. Shayda is a semi-autobiographical love letter from Niasari to her mother, and it underlines the greatest gift the real-life “Shayda” gave her: emotional distance, empowering her to make peace with her history and to alchemize her trauma into art.

Given the weighty topics covered by many of these pairings, it might be surprising to see Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret included on this list. It is, after all, a children’s movie, and the challenges Margaret faces are admittedly lighter than Mona’s. But they share more DNA than you’d expect: the weighty expectations of overbearing grandparents, religious conservatism as a weapon and a wedge, the friction between tradition and modernity. Margaret is a joy to watch in her journey to adolescence, brimming with optimism and conviction. But while the coming-of-age story keeps her experience front and center, it’s Barbara, Margaret’s mother, who really brings the film to life. Amid her daughter’s ups and downs, she’s always there in the periphery, straining to keep the tide from rushing in. What’s remarkable about Rachel McAdams’ performance is how deftly she reveals Barbara’s inner struggles. Behind every encouraging smile or kids-movie platitude she offers, there’s a wellspring of emotion on display. She’s fought battles of her own and has her share of scars to prove it. As she watches Margaret come to understand what it means to be a woman, there’s a clear solemnity in her response: a mixture of pride, recognition, and mourning. Something precious and innocent is about to be lost, and what replaces it is out of her control.

8. Unexpected Compositions — ‘Maestro’ and ‘The Blue Caftan’

There’s a pop version of romance we’ve been fed through the culture: the bombastic meet-cute, the earworm of a honeymoon, the lifetime we extrapolate as a variation on the theme. Intro, chorus, bridge. Three chords, all major in the sugarcoated variety; throw a minor conflict in the mix to make it Serious Fare™. But the truth is that love, like art, is often deepened by complexity. Its unpredicted movements and subtle countermelodies evince a living thing, imperfect and evolving.

These two films intentionally eschew the pop aesthetic. Using art as an entry point for unpacking a marriage, they explore love stories which defy societal conventions.

Leonard Bernstein was many things to many people. He was a conductor, composer, and educator; an obsessive, inward genius and a rambunctious socialite; a husband who adored his wife and kids, yet was also widely understood to be gay. How do you paint an honest picture of a man who seems defined by contradictions? Maestro opts for a kaleidoscopic telling, detailing a handful of moments in Lenny’s life—specifically in his decades-spanning marriage to Felicia Montealegre. It’s an approach which was similarly employed by this year’s Priscilla. But unlike Sofia Coppola’s project, I don’t feel Bradley Cooper taking anything resembling a moral point of view. There’s no crescendo in Felicia that swells from infatuation to independence, nor is there a softening in Lenny to humility or remorse. We’re simply presented the whole discordant symphony and asked to make of it what we will. Whether their love was “romantic” in the modern sense or not, it was abundantly so in the classical: swooning, idealistic, unencumbered. They shared a passion in their own way, with as much of themselves as they could muster. What else are we to call it?

Stylistically speaking, Maryam Touzani’s The Blue Caftan is about as far from Cooper’s film as one can get. Its characters are living private lives and Touzani follows suit: Her hushed approach rarely grants us access to a direct conversation, let alone an exuberant dream ballet. If Maestro gets at truth by hitting every note at once, the heartbeat of this story lies in melodies unplayed. When acclimated to its relative volumes, though, you’ll find a surprisingly similar meditation on what it means to love someone for whom you can never be “enough.” Halim is a tailor, and he and his wife Mina manage a clothing shop in a bustling Moroccan medina. As we watch them spend a few weeks in the company of a new, young male apprentice, we grow to realize that Halim is harboring a secret that society won’t allow him to express. Despite the unspoken tension at the root of their marriage, the two share an undeniable intimacy, a palpable warmth that radiates from the camera through the screen. Like Felicia and Lenny, there’s a higher order closeness at play here, something messier than one-to-one romance but no less ardent or consuming. Mina finds a way to weave even the pieces of Halim she can’t access into the fabric of their love. It may not match the pattern either set out to create, but there’s a beauty to its unexpected shape.

7. Thriving is Overrated — ‘You Hurt My Feelings’ and ‘The Holdovers’

Perfection is unattainable and, dramatically speaking, it’s boring. One of life’s great pleasures lies in making peace with our limitations, in recognizing that the truth is never as rosy as the story. This is at once a cause for self-acceptance and an argument for empathy. It’s hard to feel resentment when you’re clued into the joke.

These are stories about people who learn to be in on the joke. They give voice to their shortcomings and invite us to do the same, serving as impromptu group therapy sessions.

You Hurt My Feelings is a smaller film than I’d typically celebrate on a Year End list, but that smallness is precisely why I love it. What’s so daring about Nicole Holofcener’s breezy tragi-comedy is how muted its emotional stakes are by design. It’s a gentle nudge, a knowing glance, a friend who’s been around the block and isn’t interested in heavy-handed drama. Drama is exhausting, and god knows we aren’t getting younger. In place of sob stories or laugh-out-loud moments, Holofcener is serving up insights. Fortunately, she’s got plenty to go around: This is one of the most honest looks at adult relationships I’ve seen on screen in years. I know “Bestselling author learns her husband doesn’t like her novel” may not sound like the world’s most relatable premise, but stick around and you’ll find a wealth of keen observations about marriage, ambition, and coming to terms with who you are. From Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s self-obsessed novelist, to her disillusioned therapist husband, to the emotionally stunted couples he counsels once a week, everyone here is wildly imperfect. Rather than root for their betterment, we’re simply asked to cheer for their satisfaction and to marvel at the ways they prop it up. It’s a charming ode to the little lies we tell one another, logic and reason be damned. It argues that, far from being a betrayal, these lies reflect a deeper sort of truth: I love you more than I value my opinion; keep going.

At its heart, The Holdovers is a story about unmet expectations. Three characters, each dealt a crummy hand in life, are forced to keep each other company over a lonely winter break. For lack of anything else to do, they start comparing notes—and learn that they’re harboring more hurt than meets the eye. Much has been made of the film’s 70s aesthetic, from the color palette to the Ashby-esque soundtrack to the spot-on period details. But to my mind, the most refreshing throwback element has less to do with style than it does with fundamental values. There’s a comfort with ambiguity, here, a refusal to resolve which hews closer to New Hollywood than it does a feel-good Christmas movie. In most versions of this made after, say, 1985, Paul would start off as a crank only to evolve into a mensch; Angus would present as a rabble-rouser but later see the error in his ways. Although emotional payoffs do still exist in Alexander Payne’s story, they rarely take the form of rising above adversity so much as acknowledging it and bending the truth ever so slightly in response. It’s a half smile conjured for a gifted copy of Meditations, like leaf-shaped earrings worn to please a well-intentioned spouse. Or take what is arguably the film’s greatest act of love, a lie which helps round “pain in the ass” up to “pain in the ass with potential.” So what if Angus manages to get himself expelled the next semester? Who cares if Paul never writes a word of that monograph? They’ve embraced who they are a little bit more fully, and in this life that counts as a win.

6. Double-Edged Dreams — ‘Dream Scenario’ and ‘BlackBerry’

Failure can be liberating and success can be a prison. It’s a tired maxim because it’s true: You should be careful what you wish for.

These are cautionary tales about the perils of success and the downside of ambition. They explore how wanting more can numb you to the pleasures of the present, and how attaining it can hoist you into a compromising state.

Certain films add to our cultural lexicon. I’m thinking Get Out, Midsommar, just about everything Charlie Kaufman has written for the screen. Dream Scenario feels destined to be similarly remembered…though I sadly can’t say the same for “antelligence.” Its protagonist, Paul Matthews, looks uncomfortably familiar. He’s well-intentioned, mostly, but in a desperate sort of way, at once exhaustingly self-deprecating and self-aggrandizing. He seems to have internalized those pillow-talk fibs You Hurt My Feelings celebrates: that he’s an undiscovered gem and he’s crushing it in life. Then suddenly, his dreams come true…or, rather, everyone else’s widens slightly to include him. For reasons no one can discern, a large fraction of the world’s population has started dreaming about Paul every night—making him the most famous man alive. That none of it’s based on merit is seen as a trivial, fixable point: He’s sure that once he writes his book, he’ll prove his value. But pride cometh before the f—are two months enough time to wait before giving minor spoilers? Pride cometh before the f—art thrives on certain symmetries, is what I’m saying. It’s possible to read Paul’s downfall as an act of cosmic retribution, the logical conclusion of being made fully on display. Personally, though, I see it as an avoidable mistake. Like many of the so-called “free speech warriors” plaguing the “anti-woke” era, it’s Paul’s insistence on doubling down that does him in. His longing to be known has mutated into a fear of being forgotten, and that fear is a potent catalyst for self-immolation.

The meteoric rise of BlackBerry wasn’t supernatural per se, but try telling that to someone who lived through it. By its creators’ own admission, BlackBerry bends quite a few details in the telling. As a startup founder myself, though, I found it painfully authentic: the chaos of the first big break, the rally to seize the moment, the way growth can be both an enabler and eroder of your vision. Jim Balsillie falls prey to a popular lie, also endemic to Silicon Valley: He believes the limelight is something one can earn. Every stroke of luck or near-disaster is conveniently forgotten. Success is deemed inevitable in hindsight. As with Paul, I do think Jim was destined to hit a ceiling, but the speed at which he plummets is entirely his fault. If you attribute your achievements to some fabled meritocracy, you will perceive every failure as a personal rebuke. That sense of entitlement is more than insufferable—it’s risky. It inures you to your blindspots, making you likely to misstep. Be they a balding Howerton, a balding Cage, or a balding Giamatti, everyone faces a moment when the deck is stacked against them. It’s hubris that turns a setback into a spiral.

5. Nothing Is Theoretical — ‘Oppenheimer’ and ‘The Teachers’ Lounge’

The scariest villains always believe they possess an airtight moral logic. Wisdom, as opposed to intelligence, lies in breaking the seal—in letting the outside world intrude upon the vacuum. It means considering not just your reasoning, but the people your conclusions will affect.

These are stories of idealists whose quests for truth curdle into obsession, clouding their judgments and causing irreparable harm.

It’s become somewhat controversial to call Oppenheimer a tragedy, and I’m sympathetic to the reasons why. “Moral complexity” is often used as a cudgel to silence a moral reckoning, making any consideration of why wrongdoers do wrong read as a precursory defense. Yet I’m convinced there’s a reason we’re drawn to antiheroes in the safety of our fiction: We know deep down that every immoral act is a tragedy, a perversion. In the film’s view of Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, the tragedy begins with overthinking. We open with Robert fixated on the world inside his head, a cloud of hypothetical particles colliding. And one aspect of those particles, which Robert has surely studied, is that they move the same in forward or reverse. If two of them can collide and annihilate into energy, the math dictates that energy can also create opposing particles from scratch. Robert’s obsession with the possible begets a conviction of the permissible, using a similar mathematical trick. It goes like this: The weapon he’s insistent on building demands moral arguments to support it; ergo, with a simple flip, do arguments spring freely from the void. His justifications may not bear the weight of serious moral scrutiny, but, conveniently, they balance his equation. While some may wish his story arc had concluded in 1945, I believe the film’s final act is necessary to put his delusions on display. We’ve watched Robert make the ethics work via hand-wavey calculations; now it’s time for him to reckon with the world he set ablaze.

Carla is a teacher who lives and dies by her principles, and as The Teachers’ Lounge is quick to demonstrate, she puts a premium on proof. So when someone is suspected to have been stealing from her school, she sets out to solve the riddle. If we consider that and nothing more, her plan is theoretically flawless: Catch the perpetrator on video and the facts will be revealed. Who could argue with her rationale? Carla’s split-second decision occurs early in the runtime; the remainder is devoted to the havoc it creates. To Carla’s credit, she has few of Robert’s clumsy justifications. She recognizes her flaw at once and does her damndest to correct it. But once an allegation like hers is unleashed upon the world, there’s nothing one can do to un-allege it. It catches fire, kinetic energy from which new oppositions can burst fully formed. Carla has caused immediate damage and she sees more looming on the horizon. At this point, “true” and “false” become irrelevant. Answers are a dime a dozen. The greater challenge lies in choosing what to ask.

4. The More Satisfying Narrative — ‘Anatomy of a Fall’ and ‘American Fiction’

Storytelling is a common theme of these pairings: how our story of ourselves stacks up against reality; how the story we project onto others might be complicated, deepened. Countless stories could be applied to any given person or situation. How do we choose which are worth telling, and why?

These films are about both the necessity of, and risk inherent to, that act of choosing. They toy with our expectations and challenge our credulity, blurring the line between truth and narrative satisfaction.

The one spoiler I’ll give about Anatomy of a Fall is that there isn’t much of anything to spoil: We are never told, conclusively, how Sandra’s husband died. Although information does come to light in the proceedings, nothing is definitively resolved. Instead, the bulk of the court case—and of Justine Triet’s drama—takes on a more literary hue. On the defense side we have Sandra, a popular author, weaving an account of her husband and their marriage. It’s an elegant tragedy, so sharp it feels written: the man who’s lost his creative ambition, the wife he resents by comparison, the external factors he tries in vain to blame until he points his gaze inward and jumps. On the other side we have the prosecutor, relying less on facts than on his own poetic intimations: a longsuffering husband, an egomaniacal wife, murder as the ultimate act of selfishness. Pages of Sandra’s novels are read aloud to demonstrate a motive; half-remembered conversations of (at best) allegorical significance are the closest we get to an eye-witness account. Proof by way of thematic resonance. Like the Otto Preminger masterpiece its title alludes to, Triet is hinting at a twist on Occam’s Razor. Maybe it isn’t the simplest explanation that’s most likely to be true, but the one that’s most aesthetically compelling. When faced with conflicting evidence, it ultimately comes down to a choice. Which story will you choose to believe, and once chosen, can you make yourself forget the alternative?

In American Fiction, Monk Ellison is frustrated with the choices of the American reading public. They’ve voted with their dollars and the industry has responded in kind, putting a premium on “raw,” “searing” tales of Black trauma and resilience, and ignoring Monk’s own novels in the process. So one night, on a lark, he decides to give them what they’ve asked for. If you’ve seen the trailer for the film, you’re probably expecting a brutal take-down of superficial white readers and those who make a living pandering to them. That, to be clear, is very much on screen. But what surprises me about this satire is how subtly it pivots underneath us. Not only does it deride white appetites and the paper-thin stories made to placate them; it also aims a surprising amount of firepower at Monk…or, more pointedly, at the mocking laughter he provokes in an audience. His cynicism has flattened the world into yet another reassuring fiction: Monk and his integrity on one side of the equation, everyone else on the other. For as long as we’re stuck in his head, we see only that binary. But as writer/director Cord Jefferson widens to show us other people in Monk’s orbit, those distinctions start to fray around the edges. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Ellison family drama—a collection of stories so unadorned and sentimental one might even be tempted to call them “searing.” It hints that while Monk’s criticism is well-founded, it too falls prey to tunnel vision, with whiffs of classism and respectability politics creeping in. Though questions are raised, there’s no agreed-upon conclusion in the moral or the narrative sense. If Anatomy of a Fall argues that you have to make a choice, American Fiction argues that we should continually interrogate those choices: staying open to stories which go against our appetites and challenge our preconceived notions.

3. When The Pieces Don’t Fit — ‘The Boy and the Heron’ and ‘Asteroid City’

When reality burns too brightly to be reckoned with directly, we put other, dimmer substitutes in their place. Theoretical tête-à-têtes to be toyed with, reconfigured. Strawmen squeezing complexity through pinholes, yielding flat and digestible points. This knack for simplification can be a double-edged sword. It gives us breathing room, a chance to wring meaning from a complicated world. But it also offers an intoxicating retreat from that world—a hermetic bubble where we’re right, alone, forever.

These films are about the push and pull between engagement and retreat. Intricate constructions by meticulous directors, they serve as meta meditations on the power, and the limits, of escapism.

The films of Hayao Miyazaki rarely lend themselves to easy categorization. But the facts surrounding The Boy and the Heron—immediately following The Wind Rises and set amid the tumult of the Second World War—suggested something more digestible, direct. At least that’s what I expected when I sat down in the theater, and for 20 or so minutes, that’s exactly how it felt. We open with a reimagined Bombing of Tokyo, which leaves our young hero, Mahito, in an emotionally catatonic state. It’s an outpouring of collective grief, impressionistically rendered and unmistakably personal. It’s also just a prelude to the journey still to come. The saga begins with Mahito following a heron into a fantastical, hidden world. This world has ties to reality, to be sure, but it’s less a one-to-one reflection a la The Wizard of Oz than it is a spiraling refraction, its metaphors fluid and incomplete. An enemy turned friend turned enemy turned friend. Fire as a symbol of both destruction and salvation. Characters pursuing a shifting set of goals, narratively incongruous but emotionally of a piece. It’s a Jungian space, a canvas on which Mahito can work through his sadness, and Miyazaki his…not thesis, so much as partial thesis-building-blocks. In place of a message, the film offers the audience a dreamlike invitation: Here are the pieces of one man’s life and singular artistic vision. Combine and rearrange them as you see fit.

The inhabitants of Asteroid City are a peculiar group of people—stop me if you’ve heard this one before. They appear to be engaged in an elaborate game of dress-up, and often find themselves symmetrically positioned in front of panoramic sets. They stare straight at the camera while reciting words at one another with a breathless intensity that precludes the ability to think, let alone feel. In other words, these are characters in a Wes Anderson film. Of the many adjectives you’d use to describe their demeanor, “emotional” isn’t high on the list. The start of the film is turbo-charged with these quirky affections, which will either delight or infuriate you depending on your mood. But around the end of Act 1, an event occurs which violates the pattern. Then another. Then another. While no one fully abandons their choreographed behavior, cracks slowly begin to show in the facade. And in those cracks, a deeper story takes root. Far from the silly romp it might appear at first impression, Asteroid City is a complex, moving work of art which rewards multiple viewings. This is a story about grief, incomprehension, and finding meaning through repetition. It argues that none of this makes sense, and that’s perfectly okay; for now we see through a telescope dimly. Eventually our worldviews will falter and the sets will collapse and there will be nothing left to study or interpret. But for as long as the walls stay standing, the best you can do is keep searching for a reason. Keep trying to work through it. Keep telling the story.

2. While The World Burns — ‘The Zone of Interest’ and ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

In the age of social media, propaganda is everywhere you look. Often this is fashioned not by some nefarious actor, but organically, by us. Threatened with discomfort, we retreat to a base, protective instinct: We draft a simpler narrative, one demanding nothing of our hearts. If storytelling is necessary, it’s also a terrifying weapon, capable of flipping good and evil on a dime. Especially to those of us prone to overthinking, it demands constant vigilance. Language can be twisted to make any argument sound convincing; you should never sacrifice your conscience at the altar of your words.

These are portraits of men and women who have drowned their moral compasses in jargon, severing their connection to humanity. They’re claustrophobic horror stories about the power of self-justification and the endless depths it enables us to fall.

The Zone of Interest is not a pleasant film to sit through. It rattled me to the core when I first caught it in May, and it rattled me on second viewing several months later. Even today, as it’s widely available on streaming, certain sense memories strike a nerve. Jonathan Glazer’s film centers around the commandant of Auschwitz and his menial family drama, keeping the horrors he’s engaged in almost entirely out of frame. Some have criticized this as a theoretical exercise, a concept best expressed in a 10 minute short spread translucent at feature length. Personally, I could not disagree more strongly. To my mind, Glazer’s point is less intellectual than it is experiential. He doesn’t want to communicate moral rot as an abstraction; he wants us to internalize it as a hollowness, a bile in the gut. It isn’t a history lesson, so much as an analogy by way of numbness. This is who we are, or could very easily become. Fretting over our petty dramas, turning a blind eye to our neighbor, amassing comfort and convenience while the world beyond our garden burns. It’s a simple message when put in words, yielding within me a knee-jerk “of course.” Yet, even as I say it, I maintain some separation—casting Commandant Höss as some other person from some other time, a villain we’ve risen above. It’s through repetition that Glazer collapses the distance, lulling us into a state of recognition. You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.

Killers of the Flower Moon also wields repetition as a weapon to shed light on a historical atrocity. Martin Scorsese’s epic follows a string of murders in 1920s Oklahoma committed by opportunistic white men against the Osage people. Its primary entry points are Ernest Burkhard, a white man implicated in the conspiracy, and Mollie Kyle, the Osage woman he marries. But where Glazer keeps us held at an impassive remove, Scorsese is holding up a microscope to the personal. Ernest, like Höss, has his own loving family, and the film juxtaposes that love against the atrocities he commits. But here there is no wall to separate the two, no fig leaf of unawareness, because Ernest is destroying the very same person he also claims to love. And I’m willing to go further than “claims.” I think in the universe of the film, Ernest really does love Mollie to the degree that he’s able to love anything. It’s the coexistence of those truths that makes him so terribly unsettling. He’s a product of a uniquely American brand of white supremacy which believes its own aww-shucks propaganda: the smiling pastor preaching hate from the pulpit, the “Thin Blue Line” abuser with a flag and savior complex. It’s a patronizing mythology, empowering its holder to “love” and dehumanize in one breath. Far from indulgent, the film’s runtime is integral to Scorsese’s moral project. He needs the audience to see the enemy as obvious and exhausting, but still feel it as an ever-present threat. We recognize the monster in all its dim-witted brutality and, for lack of any redemptive counterpoint, find only Ernest’s vacant stare: a vacuum where a soul was meant to be.

1. Containing Multitudes — ‘Past Lives’ and ‘Perfect Days’

Though I’ve greatly diverged from my evangelical upbringing, there’s one sermon that still rattles around in my brain. It centered around Romans 12:15: “Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.” The pastor argued that to take this verse to heart implies a sacred contradiction. That if you truly love others, you will be caught between two worlds, because at any given moment there will always be someone rejoicing and someone mourning. Faith, in his worldview, or humanism, in mine, demands a sort of emotional plurality—a widening of the self, a willingness to carry sorrow and joy simultaneously.

Two films this year spoke to a similar widening. They follow characters who are asked to hold conflicting thoughts and make peace with the inherent incongruity.

A still image from ‘Past Lives.’ Source: A24.

Past Lives is my favorite film of the year, and I’m hardly alone in my assessment: If other Best Of lists are any indication, many have been taken with Celine Song’s debut. But when I dig into the qualities that have some viewers swooning, I’m surprised by the language they employ. The film centers around Nora, a woman who immigrated from Korea at a young age and now lives in New York City with her husband, Arthur. When her childhood sweetheart, Hae-Sung, suddenly re-enters her life, it stirs up feelings that had otherwise been buried. Viewers have described this as a richly textured love triangle, a deeply felt romance, pitting the magnetic pull of Hae-Sung against the stability Arthur represents. While those elements exist, I wouldn’t put them front and center: I don’t think Song is especially interested in romance. Nor do I think she means to pose an ultimatum to Nora, to whittle the whole of her feelings down to one specific choice. Rather, I think she’s exploring what choices do to us as people—the forks in the road we travel, and who we remain as in their wake. Nora is the byproduct of countless decisions, some of her volition and others out of her control. As such, she carries an entire universe of Noras inside her: the Nora who never left Korea, the Nora who decided to white knuckle through long distance, the Nora who met a different Arthur surrogate in Montauk. Like a more wistful Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the film asks her to examine these hypothetical lives and unfulfilled loves without searching for an answer. What I adore about Song’s approach here is that it eschews all melodrama. There’s no moment when a character comes across as overly jealous or threatened, because none of them has a monopoly on the whole of Nora’s being. She can love Arthur while grieving everything Hae-Sung represents, and the three of them can sit together in that mystery—respecting that it’s hers to hold and mining it for beauty.

Or, as Hirayama puts it: “This world is made up of different worlds. Some of them are interconnected, some of them are not.” At first blush, this sort of sweeping proclamation doesn’t sound like something the protagonist of Perfect Days would say. A Tokyo sanitation worker who cleans toilets for a living, Hirayama would seem to any observer to be a profoundly insular man. For much of the film, he doesn’t even speak. But if the narrow process of his work is where he derives his satisfaction, it isn’t what he dreams of when he lies in bed at night. He’s contemplating imprints, echoes of the symphony around him: over-loud coworkers, awkward brushes with “customers,” the quirky strangers who exist in his periphery. Shadows and sunlight; skyscrapers and trees; fuzzy inferences, pictures in the dark. Though he works in near silence, his isn’t a retreat from the world so much as a conscious appreciation of it. Wim Wenders asks us to appreciate Hirayama in kind, not as the monastic aspirational figure Western audiences are wont to reduce him to, but as a man with his own complexities, hurts, and limitations. He carries a history we’re only privy to obliquely, hints of the pain which likely motivates his solitude. When the past intrudes on his present, it disrupts his daily rhythms and alters his perception. Yet even in that tension there’s no real conflict to resolve, no implied choice or “better” way of being. Sorrow, satisfaction, joy, irritation—they’re all just seen as textures in a broader tapestry. As with Nora, all that’s asked of Hirayama is that he know how he feels. What he feels is a universe, uncertain and colliding, and the fact that he can feel it makes it good. -Stephen David Miller