Sirāt [2025]

 Óliver Laxe’s existential road movie Sirāt was both an unconventional film and a film made unconventionally. Combining the hellish journey of outsiders with nothing to lose (except their lives) in Clouzot’s Wages of Fear – or perhaps more appropriately, due to their tonal likeness, Friedkin’s remake Sorcerer – and the dystopian, post-apocalyptic landscapes of Mad Max, with the monomaniac quest of a father for his daughter who’s switched sides with the “philistines”, so to speak, in Ford’s The Searchers, it formed an elemental and sensorial experience. The latter aspect was heightened by its hyper-saturated realism, a visceral audiovisual palette counterpointing a stripped-down narrative, and its embracing of a techno-trance world where music is for dancing rather than listening to. Set in the harsh and visually stunning deserts of southern Morocco – captured through electrifying cinematography and accompanied by a pulsating electronic score – its primal setup followed Luis (Sergi López), a middle-aged man who, along with his adolescent son Esteban, joins a subaltern group of nomadic misfits residing outside societal boundaries – and whose raison d'être is to reach transcendence through hallucinogenic music and drugs – in search of his missing daughter. They meet at a throbbing rave held in the desert, and when that’s dismantled by the cops, they embark on a crazy ride that evolves from thrilling and immersive to tragic and shocking, to reach another illegal rave – Luis, hoping to locate his daughter, and the eccentric gang for music that never ends. This was, therefore, a story that begins in media res and ends just as abruptly, and the arbitrary violence, meaninglessness and breakdown of civilization that they encounter served as proxy to the third world war that blazes outside the frames.

Director: Oliver Laxe

Genre: Psychological Thriller/Neo-Western/Road Movie/Adventure/Epic

Language: Spanish/French/Arabic

Country: Spain

No Other Choice [2025]

 Park Chan-wook’s filmography is replete with wickedly feral killers who complement method with madness. No Other Choice’s anti-hero, conversely, was ridiculously inept at murder despite being naturally drawn to it, thus making this an interesting entry in his canon. Adapted from Donald Westlake’s novel The Axe – previously adapted by Costa-Gavras, and which Park had wanted to make since long – it drips with liberal doses of farce, satire, cutting humour, chaotic violence, and an exceptionally jaundiced view of a broken, hyper-capitalist society. Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) – a veteran in the paper industry who’s loyally been with the same organization for twenty-five years – is a model citizen with a beautiful wife (Son Ye-jin), an ancestral home that he’s painstakingly reinstated, and heteronormative ideals. His amusingly bland life comes crashing down when, upon a takeover by Americans relentlessly driven by automation and efficiency, he – along with many others – are summarily “axed”. The new bosses supposedly have no other choice, and in turn Man-su becomes convinced that he too has none but to bump off his competition – former colleagues similarly struggling with crushing unemployment – to secure a prized job opening. In another movie, he would’ve been the wronged guy forced by desperate circumstances; however, in Park’s world of controlled malice and moral dystopia, Man-su – like his bosses – always had other choices that were nullified by his class trappings and “killer instincts”, while “cut-throat” competition conveniently justify murderous ends. Powered by a compelling turn by Lee (reuniting with Park twenty-five years after Joint Security Area), a fine supporting act by Son, and Park’s love for gorgeous and meticulously designed visuals, the film was sad, crazy, grisly, bitter and funny, despite its deliberate silliness and excesses.

Director: Park Chan-wook

Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire/Crime Thriller

Language: Korean

Country: South Korean

The Secret Agent [2025]

 The Secret Agent is intimately linked to Kleber Mendonça Filho’s filmography – fondness for B-movies and old theatres, novelistic approach and meandering conversations underlined by subversive political subtexts, setting in Recife – while its ambitious narrative construct and period backdrop provided fascinating departures. This roguish, genre-bending and engrossing political thriller – crafted with aplomb and mischief, alternately devilish and melancholic, and interjected with deadpan humour and hilarious schlock – is situated in 1977, during Brazil’s repressive military dictatorship. Armando (Wagner Moura), widower and academic blacklisted for his political leanings, returns to his hometown using an alias to reunite with his young son and emigrate. He’s hosted by the vivacious, diminutive, chain-smoking Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), a retired anarcho-communist and antifascist partisan who provides refuge to political dissidents in her lively apartment building; he finds employment at an archival centre, for cover and hoping to find his vanished mother; and he’s aided by a resistance network who he meets at a movie theatre run by his kindly father-in-law, while a vengeful industrialist has engaged lethal father-son hitman pair – who in turn subcontract it to a vicious lumpen – to kill him. Meanwhile, an oafish cop (Robério Diógenes) harasses people for fun; sleazy newspaper stories about a “murderous hairy leg” have sparked public hysteria; revelries at the ongoing carnival provide an ominous counterpoint to the atmosphere of dread, paranoia and terror; and a young history student (Laura Lufési) in the present day is moved by Armando’s story while piecing together archival material on the dictatorship. Gorgeously mounted in sunny visuals and anchored by Moura’s magnificent turn, this unfolded into a smouldering and multi-layered meditation on political and cultural memory, pointlessness of violence, and passage of time.

Director: Kleber Mendonca Filho

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller

Language: Portuguese

Country: Brazil

Miroirs No. 3 [2025]

 Miroirs No. 3, with its beguiling set-up, eerily tranquil tone with an underlying disquietude that gently builds, disarming and economical narrative that defies complex people and themes, and exploration of identity and memory, was immediately recognizable as a Christian Petzold film. The recurrence of automobile accidents in his filmography, and his sparing use of haunting, off-kilter music, were also present. It channelled two of his films in particular – the sunny, rustic setting and an understated human story that evolves through stray, low-key interactions reminded me heavily of his ravishing last film Afire; however, the one that it formed the closest companion piece to was his unnerving earlier film Yella, as both featured what can perhaps be called “hyperreal/quasi ghost stories”. Like the latter film, this too begun with a shocking road accident; while her partner, with whom her relationship was already faltering, instantly dies, Laura (Paula Beer), the emotionally drifting heroine and music student, emerges largely unscathed from it. She’s provided accommodation by Betty (Barbara Auer), a kindly older woman with whom Laura had fleeting eye contacts earlier and whose house is located adjacent to the accident site, and they promptly settle into a peaceful domestic routine – cooking, painting fences, grocery shopping, having coffee, etc. Betty, unbeknownst to Laura, harbours a past trauma, and that – along with what catalysed this bond – starts surfacing when Betty’s husband (Matthias Brandt) and son (Enno Trebs), both expert car mechanics and seemingly estranged from her, arrive in the scene. Classical and pop tracks delightfully featured in the diagetic score of this work marked by a lovely interplay between being restrained and emotionally charged. The performances, led by the two women, were particularly remarkable.

Director: Christian Petzold

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: German

Country: Germany

The Conversation [1974]

 Right from its bravura opening sequence – shot in grainy analogue and single-take using a telephoto lens which slowly zooms in from high-up, starting with a crowded scene bursting with activities and ending by focussing on Gene Hackman’s central protagonist – The Conversation announced itself as a thrilling work of its time. Much-sought-after surveillance expert and professional eavesdropper Harry Caul, ironically contrary to his vocation, is fiercely protective of his anonymity and privacy, while his drab and banal existence – he lives alone in a stripped-down apartment, spends his free time playing on the sax to jazz music, and never lets off his emotional guard – sharply contrasted his professional brilliance, adroitness with state-of-the-art technology and bespoke innovations. His latest assignment – employed by the Director of a shady organization and his sinister assistant (Harrison Ford) – involves snooping on a couple, through intricate planning and triangulations, while they amble around San Francisco’s Union Square. While extracting their conversation from the ambient noise, he becomes convinced that their lives are in danger, and his extreme anxieties, catalyzed by his severe guilt from a past job and repressed childhood memories, precipitate his devastating psychological meltdown. Made between The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Francis Ford Coppola crafted this riveting, low-key, chilling and magnificent exploration of seething paranoia, personal demons, and moral conflicts – and an exercise in melancholy in a minor key – that remains a high watermark for political conspiracy thrillers. Hackman was electrifying in conveying Harry’s complex contradictions, obsessions and unravelling, while the surveillance trade fair that he attends – followed by vulgar one-upmanship by a jealous professional rival and a rare night of hedonism, intimacy and betrayal – amplified the film’s caustic commentaries and haunting prescience.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review can be found here.

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller/Conspiracy Thriller

Language: English

Country: US