Film has always been my greatest love and before I discovered that I had the ability to string a sentence or two together, the only way I knew how to try and understand myself was through watching hours and hours of film.
Life as an adolescent was much easier if I pretended that my life was a cool, independent coming-of-age drama and that my narrative could, at any minute, pivot and see me succeed in classic underdog fashion.
Things didn’t quite work out that way but while my life continues its turbulent unwinding, what has always been steadfast is my love for film.
Studying film theory and criticism at university was an utter joy and brought out a studious side of me that I had never seen before. I became a lovesick loser for essay writing and this is something I have not grown out of.
While my love for literature has blossomed over the years and takes up a great deal of my spare time, nothing will shed light on what makes me tick quite like film does.
Film is more than just delightful escapism. It is a vehicle to self-discovery, a way to dissect moving image and compare it to our core beliefs, our hopes and indeed our fears.
It is a way to know ourselves better through fiction and here are the five films you need to watch should you want to get to know me better.
Pans Labyrinth
2006 Guillermo del Toro
There is no stronger start that Guillermo del Toro’s stunning gothic fantasy Pans Labyrinth.
Five years after the Spanish Civil War and in the early Francoist period, young Ofelia moves to live with her brutal step-father, Captain Vidal, and her pregnant mother.
As her mother becomes increasingly unwell and Vidal continues his violent hunt for republican rebels, Ofelia escapes into the property’s overgrown labyrinth and meets a mythical faun creature who leads her into a journey of self-discovery that will change the course of her life forever.
Using a mixture of animatronics, make-up and CGI, del Toro brings his fantasy creatures to life in a way that envelops his audience with such intensity that one can easily find themselves lost in the labyrinths frightening grip.
Whether it be the giant toad Ofelia must face, the fairies that guide her, the fantastical faun himself, or the iconic Pale Man -who so terrifyingly wears his eyes upon his hands, Pans Labyrinth is a perfect example of how well dark fantasy can be created without the genre feeling infantilised or otherwise generic.
The combination of fairy-tale storytelling and very grounded, violent danger allows audiences to experience and explore themes of death, grief, sacrifice and tyranny from Ofelia’s perspective, and therefore engage in a sense of escapism with her, even when that itself feels dark and dangerous.
Watching Pans Labyrinth was a gateway into World Cinema and the joys of film that stem from stories beyond my own experience or culture. It opened a whole new world of film that I had otherwise been ignorant to and a genre I had previously been ambivalent towards.
More interestingly though, I was able to appreciate how easily we can find ourselves within any style of film, even when it appears far from our everyday experiences.
Watching Pans Labyrinth for the first time, I was delighted to see how similar the film’s general aesthetic was to the dark mind I was harboring.
From the colour palette and its mixture of greys, greens and blues, the warmer golds, reds and browns, to the Gothic edge to the creature design and the menacing sense they radiate on-screen, it felt like a part of my own psyche and the ways in which I tried to escape it were being projected back at me.
I was no stranger to escapism through fantasy as a child and my mind conjured its own beasts that mirrored del Toro’s creations. It felt validating that there were creative people out there whose imaginations also verged on the edge of dark and frightening.
I felt aligned with Ofelia in a way that allowed me to explore both my childlike and adult emotional reaction to the narrative thus making a fairytale feel very humanistic.
Del Toro merges the historical period elements and the fantastical input seamlessly and although there is the echoing question of whether Ofelia’s adventure was real or her on imaginings, I don’t think it matters, not really.
For what is reality to children? How often did my own imagination cocoon me from what I was not ready to understand? These escapes, both the joyful and frightening, were no less real than what was happening on the outside, they reflected what my brain was trying to process and del Toro captures this so beautifully in Pans Labyrinth.
Perhaps it is strange to have such a dark film as ones comfort-watch but I would be lying if I did not admit that I still often escape to my own gothic labyrinth.
Fun fact: My first tattoo was the birthmark of the moon and stars that Ofelia has on her shoulder.
Disco Pigs
2001 Kristen Sheridan
One of my favourite ways to spend Christmas or Birthday money as a teen was to visit my local Blockbuster and rifle through their DVD bins, purchasing obscure and weird films that the boys behind the till didn’t mind selling me despite my being too young for half of them.
This is where I found the majority of the films that made me first fall in love with cinema and I really miss that sense of random, exciting discovery I would get from looking through and buying physical DVDs.
One such discovery is Kristen Sheridan’s Disco Pigs. This film is so wonderfully weird and captures something about deep longing and painful emotion that I have explored in my own work since.
Based on the Irish play of the same name by Edna Walsh, Disco Pigs stars Elaine Cassidy and Cillian Murphy as Runt and Pig, two babies born on the same day, in the same hospital, only minutes apart and it follows their strange and possessive relationship; kinfolk, in all but by blood.
Born in Cork and bound by something unspoken and entirely unusual, Runt and Pig belong in a world outside of the norm and, for much of their childhood, they happily escape into their intense union and despair at others around them.
As they grow older and reach the days before their eighteenth birthday, Pig and Runt’s unhealthy obsession with one another must face the harsh reality of life as individuals and the pair find that their dependency on each other is running out, leading to a devastating and violent end.
What I love so much about Disco Pigs is the beautiful juxtaposition of genuine tenderness and explosive violence. Both are felt with authenticity from the characters and yet lead to wildly different consequences.
Living next door to each other, Runt and Pig dig a tunnel between their bedroom walls merely to hold a single hand as they sleep. Even before romantic feelings blur the lines of their relationship, there is such a sweetness to their love for one another.
It takes a simple physical form in secrecy, as Pig consistently declares his hatred for public displays of affection, and allows us to see a moment of masculine vulnerability.
The passionate violence that eventually ensues works as a binary opposite to this tender moment. We see Pig’s vulnerability for Runt and his feelings for her again but this time it spills out of him in hateful savagery.
This sparked my interest in gender representation in film, shaping much of my future academic point of study and my interests in film and literature today.
I found that Disco Pigs’ exploration of masculine and feminine behaviour in the face of change, longing and emotion to be handled boldly and honestly.
We see Runt and Pig change and battle with their own desires so differently, despite their unnatural closeness, and it works as an interesting examination of strength and sacrifice between the sexes.
A re-watch is more than overdue.
Donnie Darko
2001 Richard Kelly
I don’t know if you’ve noticed but I really like weird things, with weird characters and weird themes, and Ricard Kelly’s Donnie Darko is perhaps the epitome of all things superbly strange.
This film was like the Holy Grail for teenage misfits and I remember first borrowing a friend’s battered VHS tape and promptly ordered the double disk special edition DVD so that I could re-watch and study it like the enormously obsessive weirdo I was.
Donnie Darko explores themes of mental health, time-travel, fate and rebellion. The film opens on teenager Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) as he sleepwalks his way out of his home, lead by an ominous voice, where he eventually meets a menacing figure named Frank, who happens to be wearing a demonic bunny suit.
That same night, an unexplainable jet engine crashes into Donnie’s bedroom, an accident that would have no-doubt killed him if it were not for Frank’s calling him to sleepwalk.
As Donnie attempts to learn more about Frank’s existence and the effect he has on his interaction with the world around him, his blossoming relationship with new student Gretchen begins to spiral into chaos.
I don’t think it’s particularly surprising that I found solace in Jake Gyllenhaal’s character Donnie as I watched it at a time when it became increasingly apparent that I was dealing with mental health issues that went beyond the norm of teenage angst.
I was obsessed with this film. I watched it over and over again and used the giant family computer to read articles about it, watch director cut videos and research any information around it that I could find. I think my parents thought that I had joined a cult.
I think that I so desperately wanted everything that was happening to me, everything that I felt, to mean something important, something even supernatural, that Donnie’s story felt comforting to me.
The questions on fate and change, the idea that bad things happen to people in the name of sacrifice, were really interesting to me. I was looking for some kind of justification within my own reality and turned to this story again and again for inspiration.
If his own story concluded in tragedy, but one that was fueled by fate and for the goodness of everyone else, then I hoped that mine would too.
Also I just really, really fancied Jake Gyllenhaal.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
2004 Michel Gondry
Have you ever had a break-up so horrific that you’ve wanted to erase the very existence of your ex from your memory? Me too!
In the world of Michael Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that can actually happen but in doing so, it provokes the question of whether we can ever really escape that which was always meant for us.
When Joel (Jim Carrey) discovers that his ex-girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) has undergone a procedure to completely erase their relationship from her memory, he bitterly decides to do the same and contacts the controversial firm Lacuna.
As he sleeps and the team work on removing his memories, Joel experiences his relationship with Clementine in reverse and, as he remembers the happier, earlier moments of their coupling, begins to change his mind about removing her completely from his memory.
Joel and his mental projection of Clementine decide to hide themselves within Joel’s past memories, halting the procedure, in an attempt to save their memories together and counteract the procedure.
There is so much to love within this film. Visually, the film is just stunning, there is so much depth to the mise-en-scene and yet there is playfulness in the diverse range of camera movement, the changing colour pallet and stellar editing.
It is easy to fall in love with Joel and Clementine as a couple and, despite the obvious tumultuous ending, you want them to find each other again because they’re so relatable.
Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman has written Joel and Clementine with all the relatable flaws one is likely to recgonise from their own relationships. Some of their fights are ridiculous and they are clumsy with each other’s feelings sometimes but there is both real love and conflict there that feels very human.
Kaufman and Gondry are not asking you to route for an abusive or toxic relationship, something I fear the film would be mistakenly accused of if it were released today, we’re merely asked to understand how two emotional and flawed people might decide that the pain of turbulent love, of a difficult relationship, is worth the abundance of love at its centre.
Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet have great natural chemistry and they’re very believable as a couple. It makes the journey of the narrative even more interesting as it plays with ideas of fate versus free choice and how the two may well intertwine.
I loved this idea as I’m not someone who believes that everything happens for a reason. Sometimes things happen that are really awful and there is no reason behind it but that doesn’t mean that I don’t necessarily believe in fate.
I like to think that what is meant for us will find us, in one way or another, especially when it comes to love and relationships. I think that our choices are ours to make but opportunities or people will keep coming back around serendipitously if they’re meant to.
Her
2013 Spike Jonze
My final choice of films to watch if you want to get to know me is the brilliant Her from director Spike Jonze. Her is exactly the kind of science-fiction I love and merges traditional genre conventions with very grounded, humanistic themes.
Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) is an introvert and works for a company that hires writers to put together sentimental greeting cards for those who cannot write their own feelings to their loved ones.
After hearing that his wife wants to divorce, Theodore develops a relationship with Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), an artificially intelligent virtual assistant with a female presenting voice.
As Theordore’s divorce begins its proceedings, his relationship with Samantha deepens and her ability to learn and grow reaches technological advances that enable her to connect with other humans and AIs in a romantic capacity.
Theodore must navigate feelings of jealousy and insecurity surrounding his new relationship and the haunting sense of loneliness that has followed him since the breakdown of his marriage.
Phoenix plays this gentle, authentic character with such brilliant ease and does a wonderful job at portraying how communication styles, our ability to express and understand our own emotions, and how the emotionally vulnerability that comes with physical relationships can leave us more isolated than ever.
I don’t think we’re too far from living the reality of Her. Technology has already changed the way that we communicate with each other and I don’t think it is out of the realms of possibility to imagine finding solace in programmes generated to meet our ideal expectations from a partner.
I love the way Jonze takes a character who is so clearly pained by his experiences and he's so gentle with him while still holding him accountable to opening his heart up again.
Despite the science-fiction element, there are moments that really lean into the humanistic side of the narrative. The friendship between Theodore and his close friend Amy feels like a really authentic connection
I think this is where the real heart of the film can be found and I think that in itself is the most genuine reflection of how we might grow and adapt to the advancing technology around us.
Nothing can compare to the bond between one human and another, no matter the parameters of that relationship, and although we can seek a taste of such connection through artificial or even shallow means, we will always be left wanting for a truer sense of belonging.