TOP 5 FILMS I LIKED THAT WERE RELEASED (SOMEWHERE) IN 2019

By Matt Rogerson

Film release dates are weird.

Obviously a film can’t just be released in every possible territory at the same time. It would be a distribution nightmare. Nevertheless, there is at least one film that features in a lot of people’s year end lists (including mine) that was made and released in its home territory in 2017. There is also one film I would almost certainly have included (Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse, which I am sure I am going to love) but it doesn’t come out in the UK until the end of January.

So here are five movies I loved that were released…somewhere…in 2019.

KNIFE + HEART (Yann Gonzalez)

Yann Gonzalez’ queer neo-giallo was released in 2018, but the majority of us did not get to see this until the summer of 2019.

I wrote about it for the site back in April here and it has stayed with me ever since. I am an unabashed freak for anything with a giallo flavour, and Knife + Heart captured the vibe of the Italian genre perfectly. Not only that, it did it without pandering to cishet tastes, which is always nice to see. More queer representation in horror, please!

BLACK CHRISTMAS (Sophia Takal)

Yep, I am back on my Black Christmas soapbox. How could it possibly make my best of list, with all its flaws?

If you have read the piece I wrote in December, ‘Not All Black Christmases’ (link www.longlivethevoid.com/news/blackchrismatt ) then you will know why. Sophia Takal is fast becoming one of my favourite directors (and I command you to go away and watch Always Shine and New Year, New You if you haven’t seen them). Her and April Wolfe’s update of the Bob Clark neo-slasher beats you half to death with its message, but this is no reason to criticise it. Because of where we are in society, and where we should be, it NEEDS to attack with blunt force.

Much like Natalie Leite and Leah McKendrick’s M.F.A. this film challenges the patriarchal mind in all the right ways. Even if we fellas think we’re pretty progressive, movies like these will lay bare our flaws as we rush to criticise them.

THE NIGHTINGALE (Jennifer Kent)

I didn’t think I was going to be able to write about this one. It seems like I’ve been waiting for this film since I was in short trousers, but it didn’t get its UK release until the end of November.

Is Jennifer Kent’s follow up to The Babadook even a horror film? Well, The Babadook wasn’t, but it didn’t stop us labelling it one. It was a drama, a meditation on mental illness that used (very effectively, I might add) horror tropes in order to explore its narrative.

The Nightingale’s horror credentials lie in its rape-revenge narrative. However, Kent turns it into so much more. It is a period piece, an adventure, a gruelling survival tale and a social parable all rolled into one. Aisling Franciosi’s Claire chases reprehensible British Officer Hawkins (Sam Claflin) across the Tasmanian wilderness. A prisoner, a woman who has suffered untold abuse, she nonetheless subjects her guide Billy (Baykali Ganambarr is a fantastic performance) to cruel racism as he leads her in pursuit of her quarry. The Nightingale is unflinching, and is a clarion call for intersectionality, as even our abused heroine in turn abuses the privilege she knows as a white woman by subjugating Billy, an indigenous man whose very way of life is being destroyed by the marauding white invaders.

It is the most powerful film I have seen all year.

ONE CUT OF THE DEAD (Shinichrou Ueda)

Well, here it is. Shinichirou Ueda’s film was made back in 2017, but the vast majority of us didn’t get to see it until over two years later…and wow, was it worth the wait.

The film is almost impossible to write about without spoiling. I’m usually wary of the “go in blind” maxim – if a film is well made, it should pull me in even if I know what happens – but to watch this film with even the slightest inkling of what happens in it is to rob yourself of an unbridled, unrivalled joy.

Go watch it. Don’t worry if the first 30 minutes or so it seems formulaic. Just trust in it, and let it take you where it wants to take you. I promise you it is worth your while. I can’t remember the last time a film made my smile so much that my face actually ached!

MIDSOMMAR (Ari Aster)

Well this one was definitely released in 2019. You’d have to be hiding under a rock to have missed Midsommar, which has been covered by just about every genre writer in existence. Ari Aster’s sophomore feature, with its hallucinogens, bears, trees you can’t piss on and interesting sexual practices was my favourite film of 2019, and probably my favourite film of the entire decade.

In my mind, Midsommar is inextricably linked to Ari Aster’s Hereditary. They act as a diptych, delivering the most powerful study of grief I think I have ever seen. Hereditary serves to remind us of the destructive power of grief, an unstoppable emotional tsunami that will always get the better of us at some point or other. Midsommar follows that up with grief’s catharsis, the life-affirming healing that only death can provide. The two films, seen 18 months apart, helped me in my own festering grief, by showing me the destruction that it did to me while buried deep within my psyche, then helping me to work through it and finally let it go.

Every now and then, the medium of cinema reminds us of its power.

The son of a VHS pirate, Matt Rogerson became a horror fan at a tender young age. A student of the genre, he is currently writing his first book (about Italian horror and the Vatican) and he believes horror cinema is in the middle of a new golden age.

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