Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me [1992]

 David Lynch’s arresting prequel to Twin Peaks – greenlighted after the show was cancelled, and which massively polarized everyone upon its release – couldn’t have been more radically different from the television series. While the first two seasons were splashed with cute Americana, despite the outrageous events that unfolded, the film was edgy, visceral, grungy, nightmarish and enthralling. The two together, consequently, reminded me of three of his films – Blue Velvet, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive – in how they’d juxtaposed idyllic exteriors with grotesque underbellies. The film, which evoked a suburban purgatory through disturbing depictions of abuse behind closed doors and monsters inside the closets, took the viewers into the turbulent life of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) leading to her vicious murder that the series began with. It, incidentally, kicked-off with a MacGuffin involving two FBI Agents – Chester (songwriter Chris Isaak) and Sam (Kiefer Sutherland) – investigating Teresa Banks’ brutal murder that the show had referred to. The narrative, subsequently, dove into the final seven days of Laura – a beautiful high-school student who everyone admires, but whose secret double life is spiralling out of control, exacerbated by the assaults she’s been facing at the hands of her obsessive father Leland (Ray Wise) who’s possessed by the malevolent spirit of Bob, cocaine addiction, wilful prostitution, self-destructiveness and intense trauma – leading ultimately to her tragic end. The film’s most gripping sequence took place in a grimy underground pub – accompanied by a loud, jangling and addictive score – where the tortured heroine, along with her best friend Dona (Moira Kelly, replacing Lara Flynn Boyle who didn’t reprise her role) are swept into a netherworld where three leery middle-aged men take advantage of the two underaged girls.

Director: David Lynch

Genre: Horror/Psychological Thriller/Crime/Mystery

Language: English

Country: US

Twin Peaks [1990-91, 2017]

 Twin Peaks – the surrealist, grisly, horror, mystery, campy and goofy soap opera that David Lynch co-created with Mark Frost – was a surprise hit when it premiered in 1990, and became a pop-culture phenomenon with a cult following despite its eccentric, outlandish and bizarre plot elements. The first season – arguably the highest-point in the series – opened with the murdered body of the beautiful but troubled high school student Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in the tranquil town of Twin Peaks. It followed, on one hand, the murder investigation led by the incorrigibly optimistic and doggedly persuasive FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) supported by the local Sheriff, and on the other, the private affairs, sly ploys and nefarious machinations of the town’s offbeat residents which included corrupt businessmen, impassive cops, mad psychiatrists, punks, drifters, and striking damsels (Lara Flynn Boyle, Sherilyn Fenn, and Joan Chen), along with teasing forays into alternate realms. The longer second season concluded the investigation, and then took the plot forward. With the broader narrative scope, it succeeded in being more playful, madcap and adventurous, while also stepping the gas too much on occasions on silly humour and psychedelic excesses. Though the second season ended on a cliffhanger note, and Lynch followed it immediately with the gripping prequel feature Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, it was a whopping 2 ½ decades before a much-awaited third season finally arrived. Largely bereft of the campy Americana and soap opera elements of the earlier seasons, this alternately arresting, ingenious and exasperating season – filled with multiple parallel plots, interludes and detours, alongside both returning and new cast members – took the narrative forward, backwards and sideways into a bonkers, mind-bending trip.

Director: David Lynch

Genre: Series/Crime/Mystery/Comedy/Horror/Thriller/Drama

Language: English

Country: US

Sinners [2025]

  Ryan Coogler delivered sensorial overload with Sinners, a genre-defying exercise that was seductive, tempestuous, rip-roaring, political, bloody and bad ass. It’s that rare vampire movie that captivated three diverse viewer groups, viz. those searching for rollicking entertainment, those craving for grindhouse sensibilities, and those looking for subtexts and preoccupations which transcend genre thrills. Set in the 1930s, identical twins Smoke and Stack – the names serving as a tribute to the great Howlin’ Wolf, and played with thumping swag by Michael B. Jordon – return to Mississippi Delta, having earned money and notoriety with the Chicago Mob, to start a juke joint for blues music catering to the local Black community. There’re, however, two violent deterrents; it’s the Jim Crow era, with the Black populace largely poor and ghettoized cotton plantation workers trapped under oppressive laws, KKK’s atrocities and religious fervour; furthermore, there’s lurking in the shadows a diabolical primeval force – bearing rich sociopolitical metaphors – led by the feral Irish-immigrant vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell). The film reached its ecstatic crescendo at the mid-way mark, with this standout section bearing the intoxicating vitality of Lovers Rock. It’s the joint’s opening night, and the packed crowd is brought to its feet – while both past lineage and future descendants of African-American music bleed into this electrifying sequence shot in glorious single-track – as blues prodigy Sammy (musician Miles Caton in an impressive movie debut) and local harmonica-legend Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) jam on “I Lied to You”. That and the uninhibitedly sultry “Pale, Pale Moon” were the two most pulsating compositions in the superb earthy soundtrack co-scored by Ludwig Göransson. The segment’s smouldering atmosphere was followed by a sinister mood build-up and a grisly carnage.

Director: Ryan Coogler

Genre: Horror/Musical/Period Film

Language: English

Country: US

The Shrouds [2024]

 The complex, tangled and murky ways in which body, mind and technology feed into each another has been a recurring thematic preoccupation for the nonconformist Canadian prophet David Cronenberg. That informed The Shrouds too, the unsettling and morbidly fascinating latest by the veteran provocateur. It’s also an intensely personal work, as he made it to process his grief upon losing his wife to cancer in 2017. The film, therefore, was steeped in pain and melancholy, albeit metastasized by twisted desires, problematic technological overreach, political paranoia and psychosomatic disintegration. Karsh (Vincent Cassel) – imagined as the director’s stand-in with his white back-brushed hair – is a technocrat who’s unable to recover from the loss of his ravishingly beautiful wife Becky (Diane Kruger) who died of cancer and who he continues to have lurid dreams about. He’s channelled his grief into an outré entrepreneurial venture called “GraveTech” wherein one can see – through voyeuristic 3D images – the decomposing corpses of one’s deceased loved ones. The mind-bending tale is provided additional fillip through three other troubled individuals – Becca’s twin sister Terry (Kruger) who’s turned on by conspiracies, her pathologically jealous ex-husband (Guy Pierce) who’s a techie and sees global machinations everywhere, and the sultry blind wife (Sandrine Holt) of a potential billionaire investor – and spiralling, nightmarish developments that’re underplayed by the film’s relaxed editing style and chamber settings, viz. the vandalizing of the company’s showpiece Toronto site, including Becky’s grave, by unknown assailants; Karsh’s virtual assistant (voiced by Kruger) displaying sinister undercurrents; and the blurring of the real with Karsh’s disturbed psyche. Kruger was particularly striking in her evocation of three separate personas in this radical late-career piece that alternated between dark, cautionary and tender.

Director: David Cronenberg

Genre: Body Horror/Sci-Fi Thriller/Marital Thriller

Language: English

Country: Canada

The Substance [2024]

 What happens when you mix a cocktail that’s equal parts grotesque body horror, caustic showbiz satire, deliriously lurid and grisly B-movie, and fierce feminist critique on male gaze, shallow beauty standards and institutionalized ageism? You get a brash, deliciously nasty, wickedly funny and intensely polarizing film like Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, that’s unapologetically in-your-face and dripping with chutzpah. However, for the same reasons, it also felt overdone and unwieldy at times, with its lofty ideological ambitions lacking in complex undertones, even if – admittedly – Fargeat was probably never aiming for nuance or subtlety. This, incidentally, is also a rare body horror film directed by a woman, thereby pairing it with fellow French filmmaker Julia Ducournau’s Titane. The titular “substance” is an experimental black-market drug that spawns a younger and more beautiful self of oneself; the only catch being, the two alternate versions must co-exist symbiotically to avoid horrific repercussions to both. Elisabeth (Demi Morre), once a fabled Hollywood goddess but now leading aerobics shows for the TV, is summarily fired by the network’s boorish and lascivious boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid) – a deliberately noxious caricature given the name – as she’s just turned 50. Faced with anonymity and irrelevance, she falls into the trap and takes the sinister drug, and thus emerges – through a literally spine-crushing process – her young, saucy and sexy doppelgänger Sue (Margaret Qualley). Soon enough a mutually destructive battle develops between them, as they spitefully start treating one another as rivals. Moore and Qualley weren’t just excellent in their respective roles, they also complemented each other as psychedelic variants of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The garish colours and trippy visuals, meanwhile, were reminiscent of De Palma and Verhoeven.

Director: Coralie Fargeat

Genre: Sci-Fi/Body Horror/Showbiz Satire/Black Comedy

Language: English

Country: France

The Girl with the Needle [2024]

 Magnus von Horn’s harrowing The Girl with the Needle, that transformed a real time and a true crime event into nightmarish gothic horror, walked a razor’s edge between bleak period film, intense exercise in exploitation cinema and extreme miserabilism. With a rigorous formal grammar – informed by Carl Theodor Dreyer’s spare desolation, German expressionism, Lynchian grotesquerie and von Trier’s provocative portrayals of suffering – it crafted a fervid, claustrophobic and unsparing vision of deprivation, sordidness and violence. But what made it, for me, most unsettling was its moral ambiguity and troubling representations bordering on exploitative. Set in 1919 as the devastating WW1 is culminating, and in a Copenhagen that’s a hellish mix of muck and destitution, the film’s protagonist is Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) whose woes and misfortunes are portrayed with ambivalence and even apathy. Living in squalid conditions and working as a lowly seamstress at a grimy factory, she’s left pregnant – which she unsuccessfully tries aborting – when her affair with her boss comes to a cruel ended. Meanwhile her husband, who she’d assumed dead, returns with debilitating war trauma and a grisly facial disfigurement that gets him employed as a circus freak. Her life takes a seemingly positive turn when she befriends Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), who claims to illicitly arrange adoptions of unwanted babies; Karoline, in turn, becomes a wet nurse to Dagmar’s 7-year-old daughter. Unbeknownst to her – and viewers who aren’t invested in Danish history – this genial middle-aged lady is the notorious Dagmar Overbye. The film, which began with overlapping images of faces grimacing into rictuses that reminds one of Goya and Munch’s paintings, bristled with visceral terror that – complemented by its disconcerting score – remained through till the end.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Magnus von Horn

Genre: Historical Drama/Crime Drama/Psychological Horror

Language: Danish

Country: Denmark

El Conde [2023]

 In Pablo Larraín’s grisly, hyperbolic, farcical and pungently satirical horror-comedy El Conde, the despotic former Chilean dictator is both literally and metaphorically a hideously decrepit, blood-sucking and heart-chomping vampire. Made as a zany overlap between German expressionism, bawdy humour and political absurdism – and deliberately as an exercise in lowbrow grotesquerie to mark the 50^th anniversary of the 1973 coup – the film recalled two thematic tropes that’ve recurred in the filmmaker’s splendid oeuvre, viz. memories from the military dictatorship years (Tony Manero, Post Mortem, No) and unconventional stabs at biopics (Neruda, Jackie, Spencer). This oddball mix of aesthetic experimentation and narrative flippancy sees Pinochet – a French royalist who’d fought against the dissidents during the French Revolution, and finally fulfilled his lust of royal grandeur by illegally grabbing power in Chile – living a banished, ignominious existence since being kicked out of power, with his scheming wife Lucia (Catalina Guerra), and Fyodor (Alfredo Castro), his macabre White Russian butler who loved exterminating Communists. When his conniving kids get a hint of Pinochet’s suicidal tendencies – ironically, he’s more pissed at being called a thief than a murderer – they descend like a pack of vultures to seize his ill-gotten wealth. Meanwhile, a saucy Catholic nun straight out of a lurid Verhoeven slasher (Paula Luchsinger), in the guise of an accountant, arrives to track his dirty money trail and thereafter exorcize him. Shot in deliciously high-contrast B/W, filled with droll set-pieces, and imbued with a gothic and wintry atmosphere recalling earlier Scandinavian cinema, the freakish power struggle is dryly narrated – as it hilariously turns out – by the hawkish former British PM Margaret Thatcher, who isn’t just a fellow blood-sucking vampire but Pinochet’s borderline-incestuous mother too.

Director: Pablo Larrain

Genre: Black Comedy/Political Satire/Horror

Language: Spanich/English

Country: Chile

In Flames [2023]

 It’s perhaps neither coincidental nor surprising that in the two films from Pakistan that gained international acclaim in consecutive years – Salim Sadiq’s sublime and rapturous Joyland, and Zarrar Kahn’s eery and visceral In Flames – women’s fierce desire to exert their agency in defiance of patriarchy were incontestably manifest. The Western liberal backgrounds of both filmmakers undeniably influenced, informed and shaped their films’ feral thematic undercurrents and bold storytelling. The pervading everyday horrors of the real world – misogyny, gender violence, predatory behaviour and familial abuse – were interwoven into the film’s milieu and tapestry, and in turn counterpointed as well as triggered and even amplified the horrors emanating from the supernatural realms in this gripping work. Set in the gritty city of Karachi, a compelling mother-daughter relationship – both trying in futility come to terms with grief and trauma – foregrounded the tale. Mariam (Ramesha Nawal) is a strikingly independent-minded twenty-something girl who’s studying medicine, while her mother Fariha (Bakhtawar Mazhar) is a single woman taking care of her two kids through her job as a schoolteacher; the violent conclusion to Farah’s abusive husband when Mariam was little, meanwhile, continues to haunt both. The demise of Mariam’s maternal grandfather has suddenly placed them in a financially vulnerable position, and her slimy uncle descends like a vulture with his eyes on their modest property. The situation’s grimness is marginally allayed when Mariam gets in a tender relationship with a gentle-natured Canada-returned guy (Omar Javaid). However, when their romantic getaway to the seaside goes awry, a malignant can of worms is thrown open, taking them on a hellish spiral. Nawal and Mazhar’s competent turns aided the commendable interplay between chilling atmosphere and sharp social critique.

Director: Zarrar Kahn

Genre: Horror/Family Drama/Supernatural Drama

Language: Urdu

Country: Pakistan

Nope [2022]

 Jordan Peele constructed Nope like a multi-layered cake – wryly revisionist Western, acerbic satire on insatiable consumerism, and delightfully original sci-fi thriller that resorted to clever reworking of hackneyed genre tropes. It was also ecstatically permeated with metatextual elements through ironic references to movies and showbiz spectacles – through the recurrent motif of the camera’s gaze, audience’s voyeuristic impulses and exploitive nature of the industry – while resonant political readings were consciously invested into the narrative; the latter aspect made it particularly interesting for me, having watched it in succession with Kimi and Emily the Criminal over a long flight, given how the scripts were charged with topical political subtexts, even if, in this case, the scope was broader, the form more complex and the commentary subtler. Peele, therefore, displayed considerable audacity in composing this film; and, even though its zany ideas and moving parts didn’t always combine into a coherent whole, that never made it any less enjoyable. The brooding, taciturn OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and his sister Em (Keke Palmer), who has bundles of dramatic flair, are struggling to keep their family business afloat – training and handling horses for film productions, out of their ranch in rural California – and therefore the legacy of being descendants of the nameless black man in Eadweard Muybridge's pioneering Animal Locomotion, after their dad mysteriously dies of a metallic piece that falls from the sky. Having had to sell most their stable to a former child actor (Steven Yeun), who’d faced a horrible experience while shooting and now runs a kitschy theme park, they decide to capture on camera – as their foolproof ticket to the wealth – a sinister UFO that’s been stalking the desolate, breathtaking place.

Director: Jordan Peele

Genre: Sci-Fi Horror/Western/Mystery/Showbiz Satire

Language: English

Country: US

Don't Look Now [1973]

 Nicolas Roeg’s acclaimed horror classic Don’t Look Now was suffused with a vivid visual palette, stunning juxtaposition of pulp and desolation, punctuation of ominously calm stretches with jolting hyperactivity, and thrilling evocation of mood and drama through ecstatic use of colours, sounds, editing and characterizations. Its distinctive giallo-inspired style and flavour – which was further accentuated by its atmospheric Italian backdrop – therefore, foregrounded the astute audio-visual stylist in Roeg. At the heart of this baroque adaptation of a short story by Daphne du Maurier is a tragic story of loss, grief and tentative, albeit futile, attempts at moving on, and the horror was built around it by leveraging elements of both gothic and slasher. It begins with the accidental death of Christine – the young daughter of restoration architect John (Donald Sutherland) and his wife Laura (Julie Christie) – while playing outside their English country house. That John had an unsettling premonition just before tragedy struck, but was unable to stop it, formed a key component of the storyline that was brilliantly emphasized at the film’s memorable denouement. Sometime after this event – with Laura still recovering from clinical depression – they relocate to Venice as John has been commissioned by a bishop to restore a dilapidated church. The ancient, crumbling and beautifully photographed city provided the perfect counterpoint to this chilling tale that took a foreboding turn when Laura befriends a pair of elderly neurotic sisters, one of whom – the blind Heather (Hilary Mason) – is ostensibly a psychic who can see the dead Christine. The sensational lovemaking sequence, which was continually intercut with quietly mundane shots of the couple getting ready, provided an audaciously naturalistic depiction of renewed intimacy between a married couple.

Director: Nicolas Roeg

Genre: Horror/Psychological Horror/Marital Drama/Slasher

Language: English/Italian

Country: UK

Crimes of the Future [2022]

 While watching Julia Ducournau’s gloriously seductive body-horror film Titane, one hoped for one last hurray from Cronenberg who’d once made this sub-genre his personal fiefdom and engendered the Cronenbergian grammar. Hence the Canadian auteur’s fabulous new film Crimes of the Future – albeit, conceived and written in the late-90s and was slated to go into production in early-2000s, before it got shelved for the next two decades – and his first in 8 years, felt especially exhilarating for its gleeful, provocative and ballsy evocation of his quintessential brand of outrageous, discomfiting, visceral and caustic social, cultural and biological commentaries in the veins of Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers and Crash. Bearing the same title as his sophomore film but without any resemblances otherwise, it captures a dystopian future when human bodily evolution has moved into uncharted territories where pain and infection are a thing of the past; new human organs are spouting out of nowhere and “surgery is the new sex”, leading to both edgy performance art and increased body control by the state; dietary habits have got radically altered – with an underground anarchist cult feeding on industrial plastic –; and the society has shaped into a battleground between the surveillance state and subversive non-conformists. In this disturbingly allegorical milieu, the story focussed on the tantalizing ménage à trois between a renowned performance artist couple – Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), a brooding man having “accelerated evolution syndrome” and his sensual partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux), who performs “live” surgeries on him – and saucy National Organ Registry bureaucrat Timlin (Kirsten Stewert) who’s secretly enamoured with Saul. The boldly grotesque visuals, hallucinatory atmosphere, and pulsating techno-classical score brilliantly complemented Cronenberg’s prescient, subversive and satirical vision.

Director: David Cronenberg

Genre: Thriller/Science Fiction/Body Horror

Language: English

Country: Canada

Titane [2021]

 Titane is lurid, provocative, violent and outrageous, requiring complete suspension of disbelief; it’s also a trippy, edgy, visceral and thrilling ride, with surprising infusions of tenderness and fragility. Julia Ducournau’s incendiary work reminded me of early Cronenberg’s nightmarish techno-body-horror – Crash in particular, and Videodrome too, in their erotically-charged human-machine interfacing – and early Verhoeven’s punk-sensuality, along with explorations of gender fluidity, sexual transgressions, hypermasculinity, male gaze, and boundary-bending inorganic relationships which were Ducournau’s own. The deliriously extreme first half is set off with the asynchronously folksy “Wayfaring Stranger” and a car accident that leaves young Alexia with a titanium plate in her cranium and alien-like scars around her ears. Flashforward few years later, and Alexia (Agathe Rousselle in a scintillating, chameleon-like and ferocious debut) – introduced through a hypnotic tracking shot, to the electrifying beats of “Doing It a Death” – is an exotic dancer at car shows, whose writhing performances leave cuckolded men salivating. She harbours a devilish murderous streak that gets triggered by human intimacy, and an auto-fetish that leads to what has become a cause célèbre and leaves her pregnant. When the trail of bodies becomes unmanageable upon a darkly comical spree, she shape-shifts into an alternate gender identity – through DIY facial reconfiguration and body strapping – and becomes the long-lost son of a heavily grief-stricken, steroid-pumping firefighter (Vincent Lindon) in the film’s brooding second half. The delicate bond that develops between the two lonely, lost individuals – trapped in their respective netherworlds – was interspersed with an affecting slow dance to “She’s Not There” and a stunningly liberating solo atop a car – where else? – to a sexier rendition of “Wayfaring Stranger”. Eclectic electronic soundtrack, therefore, was integral to this brash piledriver.

Director: Julia Ducournau

Genre: Thriller/Body Horror/Psychological Drama

Language: French

Country: France

The House That Jack Built [2018]

It’s rather bemusing to note that Danish provocateur Lars von Trier began the 2010s with a movie as haunting, wrenching and transcendental as Melancholia and ended it with one as inflammatory, grisly and brash as The House that Jack Built (one can say the same about the 2000s too which he’d begun with the bleakly beautiful Dancer in the Dark and ended with the daringly controversial Antichrist). What has remained unchanged, however, is his irrepressible penchant for provocations and cheeky subversion. Filled with disturbing themes, unsettling violence and misogyny, wildly digressive narrative, gallows humour, flamboyant stylistic insertions and biting self-reflexive commentary, the film’s bound to mesmerize and infuriate in equal measures; no wonder, on its premiere at Cannes – which was an event in itself given that he’d been declared persona non grata 6 years back – over 100 viewers walked out, while there was also a 10-minute standing ovation at the end. It’s structured as freewheeling, mock-serious and ironic conversations – mix of self-deprecating ruminations and deadpan philosophizing – between Jack (Matt Dillon), a demented sociopath and brutal serial killer with a love for architecture, and a man  he calls Verge (Bruno Ganz), who’s either the Roman poet Virgil’s amused ghost or Jack’s exasperated psychotherapist or perhaps his delusional conscience; and, over faux-intellectual discourses ranging from rationalizing his murders and the grand artistry behind them to Glenn Gould’s music and Nazi concentration camps, Jack recounts over flashbacks 5 of his vicious crimes – a cocky woman (Uma Thurman) he bludgeoned; a gullible widow he strangled; his unwitting girlfriend and her kids he executed; a stunning hooker (Riley Keough) he massacred; and his absurd scheme to murder 5 men with a single bullet.

Director: Lars von Trier
Genre: Drama/Psychological Horror/Black Comedy
Language: English
Country: Denmark

Eraserhead [1977]

David Lynch made a groundbreaking debut in the context of indie and defiantly non-mainstream cinema – and, in turn, established himself as someone who’s committed to perennially operate outside conventional yardsticks – with the low-budget, surrealistic and nightmarish Eraserhead. Made over a period of 7 years, and shot in grainy and expressionistic B/W, the discomfiting, strangely hypnotic, darkly funny and heavily experimental body horror film presented a bleak and grimy vision of urban industrial grunge and dystopia. Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), a blank-faced and mild-mannered man with an outrageous hairdo, lives with his girlfriend Mary (Charlotte Stewart) in a cramped, claustrophobic apartment located in the middle of an industrial wasteland. Upon returning home one day he’s informed by his sultry next door neighbor (Judith Anna Roberts) that Mary has gone to her parents’ and he’s invited there for dinner. There, in what was for me the film’s most deliriously memorable sequence, he meets Mary’s hilariously oddball parents over a bizarre dinner, and is informed in a rather awkward fashion that Mary has given birth to their child; as is eventually revealed, the child is an grotesque looking creature with a reptilian head and bandages serving as its skin. Despite its “unnatural” appearance – what is “natural” and conventional in a world obsessed with normalcy and conformism, possibly remains the film’s most incisive indication – Henry develops a surprising soft corner for the mutated baby; however, when Mary is driven out, in a moment of crazy fit, by the baby’s incessant wailing, and a possible tryst with his luscious neighbor remains unfulfilled, his fragile outer and chaotic inner worlds collapse into a miry, outlandish cesspool that made the film’s weirdness quotient crash through the ceiling.

Director: David Lynch
Genre: Body Horror/Surrealist Film/Experimental Film
Language: English
Country: US