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Once the Ordeal is completed, what is at the end? Transformation... enlightenment... synthesis... we can umbrella these things under the term Transcendence. Frustrating art often features hours of wheel spinning, static scenarios that offer no real character development. The best art knows that the ending is the conceit, and for good or for ill the characters will not walk away from the ending unchanged.
I choose the term Transcendence in part for its religious connotation. Navigating Fantasy, Self-Destruction, Commitment, and Ordeal can be seen as simple A to B to C plot progression. Yet there is something undefinable, something ethereal, at play in the culmination of any journey. These ten films are stunning examples of stories whose characters who emerge from their trials having exceeded the realm of what they had previously thought possible. Like the characters involved, these works may aid you on your way to another plane of consciousness.
50. The Handmaiden
Korean cinema's affinity for genrebending is on full display in The Handmaiden, alternately a period drama, queer romance, goofy comedy, and tense thriller. The film demonstrates the multitudes that we all contain; delving deeper into the social coding of these central relationships would be impossible without huge leaps in tone. One could claim the story here is one of power dynamics, but it could also be claimed as a narrative of enjoyment. The enjoyment of subjugation, the enjoyment of oppression, the enjoyment of repression, and the enjoyment of violent liberation. It is seedy, shocking, and sometimes tragic, but the one constant throughout is its aching beauty.
49. Tree of Life
Tree of Life exists in my memory as more of a spiritual experience than a series of events. It tells the story of a relationship from the perspective of the cosmos. One theory of subjectivity is that we humans are the universe observing itself, and watching Terrence Malick's story weave through time and space does feel that way. Tree of Life shows us that to have a deep relationship with another human being is to be attuned to the history of the universe itself.
48. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
There's an assumption buried in this title. We conceive of the girl walking home alone at night as a figure of vulnerability, but what if she is the danger? Girl is a hyperstylish supernatural piece of screen poetry that takes us to an alternate universe Iranian town shot in moody black and white. The film is inordinately patient with its pacing, as represented by its most iconic image: a woman in a hijab standing in the middle distance, perfectly still.
47. The Lighthouse
Here's another film shot in black and white, with a boxy 1.19:1 aspect ratio to boot. The aspect ratio (the proportions of the frame through which we see the movie) may seem like a niche thing to care about, but it does impact our experience of the film. This is especially apparent in The Lighthouse, which boasts an aspect ratio so archaic that it feels immediately alien to us. Screens have grown ever larger and wider during the last half century, but the tall and narrow scope of The Lighthouse creates an off-kilter claustrophobia that infects everything. We don't get used to the feeling any more than our sailors get used to their purgatorial stay on this tiny island. Form meets function in so many fascinating ways in Robert Eggers' follow-up to The Witch. Just like in that film, Eggers succeeds in transporting us to an entirely different era with different spiritual concerns.
Putting aside all this heady stuff, The Lighthouse features two of our greatest contemporary actors going ham on each other in what feels like an ever-escalating series of dares. Eggers unleashes Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson upon us and for that I am thankful.
46. Madeline's Madeline
Madeline's Madeline is the story of an experimental dancer whose involvement in an exciting troupe drives a wedge between her and her possessive mother. Like so many French films, Madeline's Madeline is about the tyranny of white ladies. The film also offers a sophisticated investigation of the artistic process. When does collaboration become theft? How far is too far for an artistic process to probe emotionally, and how far is not enough? Who owns a constantly morphing idea? The malleability of dance makes it the perfect medium to explore these questions, with the bonus challenge of figuring out how to represent intimate, perspectival movement onscreen.
45. Snowpiercer
Bong Joon-ho's parable about class stratification in apocalypse goes way too hard, and that's what makes it great. It's an action movie that climaxes with two extremely long monologues. It features cannibalism as a major reveal. There's a scene where somebody gets slapped with a whole fish. Tilda Swinton gets especially weird. The list goes on.
The marvel is how coherent the whole thing feels despite being built around compartmentalization. It's the strength of the undergirding political ideas that keeps this train from jumping the tracks, a foundation that is bolstered by our heroes' clarity of purpose. But when that clarity of purposes evaporates... what then?
44. John Wick
John Wick is not the best action movie of the decade, but it may be the most important. Action in the 2000s was a hodgepodge of shaky cam quick cuts, a style with some appealing applications that got way out of hand. John Wick showed up to put a bullet in its head. Yes, the quick-cut handheld technique does artificially pump up a visceral feeling, but you know what does that even better? Inspired action choreography and skillful stuntwork. Of course directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch would be well aware of this-- they're career stuntmen.
John Wick is a pristinely constructed showcase for the film's judo-infused expression of gun-fu. Wick glides through the frame like a specter of death, dispatching opponents with cool efficiency. Each showdown is a spatiotemporal mortality puzzle. Wick must leverage every sensory input, every instinct, every ounce of strength and environmental ingenuity to even the odds against a world that's out to get him. Keanu Reeves puts in career best work here, gifting us with yet another iconic action hero. He may not have the most range as a performer, but physical discipline is its own form of expressivity. Given that, he is punching at the pinnacle of the art form.
43. What We Do in the Shadows
It's said that comedy is the genre most subject to taste. It may be true that what delights us varies, but we can still recognize the craft in comedy regardless of its personal appeal. What We Do in the Shadows is one of the craftiest comedies I know. The story peeks into the life of three vampire flatmates (well, four, but the oldest doesn't come out much) in Wellington, New Zealand. The film plays the extended timelines of immortal creatures for laughs, offering us characters who embody wildly different eras and ideals. This creates great drama when those cultural understandings clash, but it serves a further purpose: artistic design. The design team on this film sure did their dramaturgical background work, as Shadows pulls visually from thousands of years of monstrous mythology, religious iconography, textile style, shifting notions of masculinity, etc. etc. It's a hell of a lot of fun, especially because director and co-lead Taika Waititi boasts an unparalleled sense of absurdity and a unique gift for comic timing.
42. The Wailing
The Wailing fascinates and haunts me. Although it is contemporary, setting the story in the immense jungles of rural Korea puts us in a primordial frame of mind. That clash between the modern and the unknowably ancient is a recurring theme of the film, which follows a man struggling with tribulations beyond his ability to understand. There are cops with guns, there are medicine men with rituals, and there are shady outsiders living in the wild. The story evolves by blending each of these perspectives into a bizarre concoction, such that we are in a constant state of flux concerning who to believe about what. I guess you could call it a supernatural thriller, though I am more inclined to think of it as an existentialist jihad.
41. Silence
What better to follow wailing than silence? The two films might make a rich double feature. Silence is an overlooked passion project from the great Martin Scorsese, who takes a detour from mafia thrillers to share with us a grand exploration of faith. Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver play Jesuit monks who travel to Japan in the 1600s, at a time when Christianity was severely outlawed in the land. Whether an act of faith is a divine offering or a stupid error depends very much on the legitimacy of the belief system, a dilemma that Garfield's missionary finds himself grappling with as his assumptions are tested. We have all experienced trials of external pressure, but the most difficult tests of faith happen in the long, screaming silences of the soul.
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