The 30 Best Films About Dysfunctional Families

The family is cinema’s great theme. It is the cradle of love and, at the same time, the first battlefield. The collective imagination is marked by works that have celebrated its warmth, but also by masterpieces that have dissected its fractures. We think of the twisted loyalty of The Godfather or the desperate search for connection in American Beauty. Cinema, in its most powerful form, has always understood that the family is a microcosm, an allegory for the pathologies of an entire nation.

But it is not just drama. It is also the site of the absurd, of black comedy, of grotesque tragedy. Auteur cinema has used family dysfunction not to judge, but to understand. Instead of offering solutions, it explores trauma, inheritance, and the secrets passed down through generations, using a shaky camera or an oppressive static shot to translate inner chaos into visual language.

This guide is a journey across the entire spectrum. It is a path that unites the most famous films with the most radical independent films. These are works that force us to look into the abyss of our own relationships, finding an unexpected, brutal, and honest truth.

Part I: Bourgeois Decomposition – Nightmares Behind Closed Doors

This section is dedicated to those films that tear away the golden mask of the upper bourgeoisie, revealing the moral rot and hypocrisy hidden behind facades of impeccable respectability. Here, the home is not a refuge, but an emotional crime scene.

Festen (The Celebration) (1998)

During the lavish party for the patriarch Helge’s sixtieth birthday, the eldest son Christian stands up to give a toast. Instead of words of praise, a calm and chilling revelation emerges from his mouth: an accusation of incestuous sexual abuse suffered by him and his twin sister, who recently committed suicide. The party descends into a nightmare of denial and violence.

The first film of the Dogme 95 manifesto, Festen is a frontal assault on hypocrisy. Thomas Vinterberg’s direction, faithful to the movement’s “vow of chastity,” uses a nervous handheld camera and only natural light to create an unbearable intimacy. We are not mere spectators; we are guests at that table, forced to look the other diners in the eye as the castle of lies crumbles. The film is a ruthless dissection of patriarchal power and the code of silence as a family adhesive, where the mother remains impassive and the guests worry more about etiquette than the horror being unveiled. This family drama becomes a powerful allegory for the decay of an entire social class, a funeral banquet where family secrets are the main course.

La Ciénaga (The Swamp) (2001)

On a dilapidated country estate in northern Argentina, two bourgeois families spend a sweltering, stagnant summer. Mecha and Gregorio, along with their cousin Tali and her brood, drown their apathy in alcohol and indolence. The children, left to their own devices, navigate a dangerous landscape that mirrors the emotional and moral swamp in which the adults are immersed.

Lucrecia Martel’s debut feature is a sensory masterpiece. There is no real plot, but a dense, almost malodorous atmosphere of decomposition. Sound is the protagonist: the buzzing of insects, the dragging of deck chairs, the distant thunder. The murky, leaf-filled swimming pool is the perfect metaphor for the state of the family and the nation. Martel uses this microcosm to paint a portrait of an Argentine bourgeoisie in ruins, paralyzed, unable to act or to see its own decay. The dysfunction here is not shouted, but whispered; it is the inertia itself that becomes violence.

Caché (Hidden) (2005)

Georges and Anne, a couple of Parisian intellectuals, begin to receive anonymous videotapes that film the facade of their house. These are accompanied by disturbing, childlike drawings. The recordings, increasingly personal, force Georges to confront a repressed memory from his childhood, a family secret linked to an Algerian orphan and a dark chapter in French history.

Michael Haneke constructs a psychological thriller that implodes, shifting the threat from the outside in. Bourgeois paranoia, the terror of being watched, becomes the catalyst for a buried guilt to emerge. The cold, precise direction uses long, fixed shots that mimic the videotapes, making the viewer complicit in the act of surveillance. Caché is a powerful allegory of repressed memory, both personal and collective. Georges’ secret intertwines with France’s historical repression of the 1961 massacre of Algerian protesters, demonstrating how generational traumas, if not confronted, continue to haunt the present.

Funny Games (1997)

A wealthy Austrian family arrives at their lakeside vacation home. Their peace is interrupted by two impeccably dressed young men, Paul and Peter, who show up at the door asking for eggs. With chilling politeness, the two insinuate themselves into the house and begin a series of sadistic “games,” torturing the family physically and psychologically.

More than just a film about a dysfunctional family, Funny Games is an assault on the bourgeois family as a symbol of security and on the audience as consumers of violence. Michael Haneke is not interested in explaining the motives of the two tormentors; their violence is nihilistic, a pure exercise of power. The film is famous for the moments when one of the tormentors, Paul, breaks the fourth wall, looking into the camera and speaking directly to the viewer. In this way, Haneke makes us accomplices, questioning our desire to witness the spectacle of others’ suffering. The dysfunction is not in the family, but in the very mechanism that leads us to watch it being dismantled.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

Steven Murphy is a successful cardiac surgeon with a beautiful wife and two perfect children. His impeccable life is disturbed by his strange friendship with Martin, a teenager whose father died on Steven’s operating table. Martin presents the surgeon with a supernatural ultimatum: to atone for his guilt, Steven must sacrifice a member of his family, or they will all die slowly of a mysterious illness.

Yorgos Lanthimos applies the alienating aesthetic of the Greek Weird Wave to an American context, creating a psychological horror that has its roots in Greek tragedy, particularly the myth of Iphigenia. The flat, deliberately unnatural dialogue and the cold, symmetrical shots create an atmosphere of constant unease. The Murphy family, with its wealth and sterile perfection, is the battleground between the rationality of science, embodied by Steven, and an archaic, inexplicable force of justice. It is a family drama of mythic proportions, exploring the arrogance of the patriarch and the disintegration of his orderly world in the face of the irrational.

Part II: Domestic Prisons – Allegories of Control and Isolation

In these films, the house becomes a literal prison, both physical and psychological. The directors use extreme and surreal languages to represent closed worlds where parental control becomes totalitarianism and reality is systematically distorted.

Dogtooth (Kynodontas) (2009)

A father, a mother, and three adult children live in an isolated villa surrounded by a high fence. The children have never left the house. The parents have taught them an alternative vocabulary (“sea” is an armchair, a “zombie” a small yellow flower) and have convinced them that they can only leave the property when their canine, the “dogtooth,” falls out. The balance of this pathological system is fractured by the arrival of an outsider.

A manifesto film of the Greek Weird Wave, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth is one of the most powerful allegories on control ever brought to the screen. The direction is static, almost clinical, and the deliberately flat and mechanical performances perfectly reflect the characters’ psychological imprisonment. The family becomes a metaphor for a totalitarian regime, where the manipulation of language is the primary tool for maintaining power. The introduction of external elements, like videotapes of Hollywood movies, acts as a virus, unleashing curiosity and a violent, desperate desire for rebellion.

Eraserhead (1977)

In a desolate industrial landscape, Henry Spencer, a shy and anxious man, discovers he has fathered a monstrous, reptile-like creature. Abandoned by his partner, Henry is forced to care for the “baby,” which never stops crying, plunging him into a surreal nightmare of grotesque visions, sexual anxieties, and domestic horror.

David Lynch’s first feature film is a total, unfiltered immersion into the fear of fatherhood. More than a narrative, Eraserhead is a sensory experience, a fever dream in black and white. The oppressive industrial sound design and nightmarish aesthetic transform Henry’s apartment into a prison of the mind. The “baby” is not a character, but the monstrous embodiment of anxiety, repulsion, and guilt. It is the definitive film about the family as an existential trap, an underground work that has defined an entire aesthetic of unease.

The Lobster (2015)

In a dystopian near-future, being single is illegal. Those without a partner are arrested and transferred to a hotel, where they have 45 days to find a soulmate. If they fail, they are transformed into an animal of their choice. David, abandoned by his wife, chooses to become a lobster in case of failure, but will try in every way to escape his fate.

Although it doesn’t deal with a single family, Yorgos Lanthimos’s film is a brilliant and fierce satire on the social pressure to conform to the model of the couple and the nuclear family. The dysfunction is not internal to a family but is imposed by the entire society. With his deadpan style and surreal dialogue, Lanthimos skewers the rituals of modern mating, reduced to a search for superficial “defining characteristics.” The film fiercely criticizes both the tyranny of mandatory coupledom and the equally rigid and inhuman rules of the rebellious “Loners,” suggesting that any system that claims to regulate human bonds is inherently sick.

Antichrist (2009)

After the tragic death of their young son, who fell from a window while they were making love, a couple retreats to an isolated cabin in the woods called “Eden.” He, a therapist, tries to cure his wife of her grief and guilt. But nature reveals itself as a malignant, primordial force, and their mourning transforms into a descent into a hell of violence, sadistic sex, and psychological horror.

Lars von Trier opens the film with the destruction of the nuclear family only to then explore its most extreme and terrifying consequences. Antichrist is a controversial and brutal work on grief, misogyny, and nature as “Satan’s church.” The dynamic between “He,” representing rationality and male control, and “She,” embodying chaos and female emotion, becomes an archetypal struggle. His attempts at “therapy” are a form of domination that unleashes a primordial violence in her. The cabin, the ironic “Eden,” is not a place of healing but the stage for a total disintegration, where family drama transcends into myth and cosmic horror.

Part III: Portraits of Pain – Family Dramas and Psychological Wounds

This section focuses on more intimate and psychological dramas, where dysfunction arises from internal wounds: mental illness, unresolved trauma, and grief that cannot be processed. These are films that explore with sensitivity and courage the fragility of the human psyche within the domestic walls.

A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

Mabel is a loving housewife and mother, but her behavior is increasingly strange and unpredictable. Her husband Nick, a construction worker, loves her deeply but doesn’t know how to handle her mental instability. His clumsy and sometimes violent attempts to bring her back to “normalcy” only worsen the situation, pushing her toward an inevitable psychological breakdown.

John Cassavetes‘ masterpiece is one of the most powerful and heartbreaking portraits of a mental health crisis ever made. Gena Rowlands‘ performance is monumental, a total immersion into Mabel’s emotional chaos. Cassavetes’ style, almost documentary-like, with its handheld camera following the characters and semi-improvised dialogue, makes us feel part of that family, trapped in the apartment with them. The dysfunction here is not malice, but a tragic short-circuit of love and misunderstanding. Nick’s desperate need for a “normal” wife clashes with Mabel’s inability to be anything other than what she is.

Through a Glass Darkly (1961)

On a remote Swedish island, the young Karin, recently discharged from a psychiatric hospital for schizophrenia, spends 24 hours with her husband, father, and younger brother. Her fragile grip on reality progressively shatters, while her family proves incapable of offering her real emotional support, particularly her father, a writer who observes her illness with cold literary detachment.

The first chapter of Ingmar Bergman’s “Trilogy of God’s Silence,” the film is a profound meditation on mental illness, faith, and incommunicability. The family dysfunction stems from an emotional void: the selfish and intellectual father uses his daughter’s pain as material for his art, committing an unforgivable betrayal. Karin’s psychosis is exacerbated by this emotional distance. Her final vision of God as a monstrous spider is one of the most terrifying images in cinema history, the perversion of all hope for divine love in a world that seems to have lost all trace of it.

The Piano Teacher (2001)

Erika Kohut is a respected piano teacher at the Vienna conservatory. She lives with her authoritarian mother in a claustrophobic, symbiotic relationship that has stifled her emotional development. Her secret life is a world of voyeurism, self-harm, and sadomasochistic fantasies. When a young, talented student falls in love with her, this fragile balance explodes in a violent and destructive way.

Michael Haneke directs a chilling descent into the psyche of a woman whose sexual repression has generated monsters. Isabelle Huppert delivers a glacial and unforgettable performance, embodying a woman who can only conceive of desire through control and humiliation. The toxic relationship with her mother is the key to everything: a pathological bond that has turned the home into an emotional prison. Haneke’s clinical and detached style mirrors the protagonist’s coldness, forcing the viewer into the uncomfortable position of a voyeur, a witness to a desperation that knows no catharsis.

Mysterious Skin (2004)

At eight years old, two boys on the same baseball team are sexually abused by their coach. Ten years later, their lives have taken opposite directions. Brian has completely repressed the trauma, convinced he was abducted by aliens and obsessed with the five hours of “lost time” from that night. Neil, on the other hand, has internalized the abuse differently, becoming a cynical and disenchanted prostitute in New York.

Gregg Araki’s film is a deep and touching study of the different defense mechanisms the human mind adopts to survive an unspeakable trauma. Brian’s fantasy and Neil’s self-destruction are two sides of the same coin of pain. Araki blends an almost dreamlike, color-saturated aesthetic with the harshness of the subject, managing to capture the subjectivity of memory and the vulnerability of violated childhood. The film avoids easy judgments and offers a powerful and melancholic ending, suggesting that only confronting the truth, however devastating, can open the way to a possible, fragile healing.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

Eva, once a successful travel writer, now lives as an outcast, tormented by the contempt of her community. Through a series of fragmented flashbacks, she reconstructs her relationship with her son Kevin, from his difficult birth to the day he committed a massacre at his school. Eva is forced to question her possible responsibility, her ambivalence as a mother.

Lynne Ramsay’s film is a terrifying psychological thriller that poses an unanswerable question: are people born evil or do they become so? Nature versus nurture. The non-linear narrative, made of associations of images and sounds, perfectly reflects Eva’s traumatized mind, desperately searching for meaning in a senseless tragedy. The mother-son relationship is depicted as a sixteen-year psychological war, a duel of wills between a mother who perhaps never truly loved her son and a son who seems born incapable of love. It is one of the most disturbing parent-child conflicts ever seen in cinema.

Birth (2004)

Ten years after the sudden death of her husband Sean, the widow Anna is finally ready to start a new life and accept a marriage proposal from her new partner. Her newfound serenity is shattered when a ten-year-old boy appears at her door, claiming to be the reincarnation of Sean and begging her not to get married.

Jonathan Glazer directs an elegant and mysterious psychological drama that uses the pretext of the supernatural to actually explore the depths of grief and obsession. The boy is not a spectral figure, but a catalyst for Anna’s unprocessed pain, a vessel for her desperate will to believe. The direction, reminiscent of Kubrick’s glacial precision, culminates in a famous, very long shot of Nicole Kidman’s face at the theater: an entire symphony of doubts, hopes, and anguish expressed without a single word. The ambiguous ending offers no easy answers but suggests that the greatest illusion is the one we build for ourselves.

Krisha (2015)

After a ten-year absence, Krisha, a woman in her sixties with a history of addiction, returns to her family for Thanksgiving. She is determined to prove she has changed and offers to cook the turkey. However, the pressure of the reunion, old resentments, and the painful evidence of the life she has lost trigger a spiral of anxiety that will lead to a devastating relapse.

Made by director Trey Edward Shults with his own family members, Krisha possesses an almost documentary-like authenticity that makes it incredibly powerful. The directorial style is feverish and immersive: the camera swirls around the protagonist, the aspect ratios of the image change to reflect her mental state, and the pounding score traps us in her panic attack. It is one of the most visceral and compassionate portraits of addiction, showing how a family gathering, with its expectations and unspoken judgments, can turn into a minefield for someone struggling to stay sober.

Aftersun (2022)

Twenty years later, Sophie reflects on a vacation in Turkey she took with her father Calum when she was eleven. The tender memories of those days, captured with a MiniDV camcorder, mix with adult awareness and fragments of a dreamlike present. Sophie tries to reconstruct the image of that loving but enigmatic father, attempting to reconcile the joy of then with the pain and questions of today.

Charlotte Wells‘ debut is a work of poignant delicacy and power, a film built entirely on the mechanism of memory and the processing of grief. The narrative is not linear, but associative, like a memory resurfacing. The use of amateur footage is central, a symbol of the fragmented and precious nature of our past. Aftersun tells the story of a father’s hidden depression and a daughter’s belated understanding, who only as an adult can decipher the signs of a malaise she could not see at the time. The surreal sequences in a nightclub, where an adult Sophie tries to reach her father dancing under strobe lights, are a powerful metaphor for an attempt to embrace someone who is no longer there.

Part IV: Parents and Children – Conflicts, Secrets, and Emotional Legacies

This section explores the direct dynamics of parent-child conflicts. Divorce, intellectual arrogance, bullying, and emotional abandonment transform the most fundamental relationship into a battlefield, leaving scars that extend across generations.

The Squid and the Whale (2005)

Brooklyn, 1980s. Bernard and Joan, two egocentric writers, decide to divorce. Their two sons, Walt and Frank, are swept up in their marital war, used as pawns and forced to choose sides. Walt, the older son, idolizes his father and absorbs his intellectual snobbery, while the younger Frank expresses his distress in confused and self-destructive ways.

Noah Baumbach’s semi-autobiographical film is a portrait as hilarious as it is painful of a “civilized” divorce between intellectuals. The dysfunction here is a toxic legacy: the parents’ narcissism and insecurities are passed down to their children like a genetic inheritance. The title refers to a diorama at the Museum of Natural History that terrified Walt as a child, a perfect metaphor for the monumental and frightening conflict he is forced to witness. It is a bitter comedy about generational trauma and the difficulty of growing up in the shadow of parents too busy being the protagonists of their own lives.

Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995)

Dawn Wiener is the embodiment of adolescent marginalization. Unattractive, clumsy, and unpopular, she is the favorite target of bullies at school and an invisible presence at home, where her parents blatantly ignore her, preferring her nerdy older brother and her spoiled, prissy younger sister. Her life is a desperate and humiliating search for a crumb of affection and acceptance.

Todd Solondz’s masterpiece is a black comedy of disarming cruelty and honesty. The film analyzes bullying not just as a school phenomenon, but as a dynamic that takes root within the family itself. For Dawn, home is not a refuge, but another place of humiliation. Her parents are not simply distracted, but actively complicit in her suffering through their indifference. Solondz rejects all sentimentality, forcing us to laugh at Dawn’s pain only to make us feel guilty, in an unforgettable portrait of suburban alienation.

Rachel Getting Married (2008)

Kym, a young woman with a history of drug addiction, gets a pass to leave her rehab clinic to attend her sister Rachel’s wedding. Her return home unleashes a storm of unresolved tensions, recriminations, and a collective grief linked to a tragedy that marked the family years before, threatening to derail the joyous celebration.

Jonathan Demme adopts an almost documentary-like style, with a handheld camera moving among the guests, capturing overlapping conversations and moments of chaotic spontaneity. This approach completely immerses us in the tension of the family reunion. Kym is the “black sheep,” the catalyst who, by her mere presence, forces everyone to confront family secrets and buried guilt. The film explores with great sensitivity the complexity of forgiveness and the difficulty of overcoming trauma, showing how, even behind the best intentions, deep wounds and destructive dynamics are hidden.

Mommy (2014)

In a fictional Canada, a law allows parents to commit their troubled children to state institutions. Diane, an exuberant single mother and widow, decides to take her fifteen-year-old son Steve, who has ADHD and a history of violent behavior, back home. Their relationship is a rollercoaster of explosive love and fierce hatred, a codependent bond that will find a fragile balance thanks to the help of a stuttering neighbor.

Xavier Dolan directs with overwhelming visual energy. The choice to shoot in a 1:1 square format, which expands to widescreen only in rare moments of hope and liberation, is a brilliant metaphor for the protagonists’ claustrophobic lives. The mother-son relationship is one of the most intense and vital toxic relationships ever seen: a hurricane of screams, insults, physical violence, but also of moving tenderness and complicity. Mommy is a hymn to imperfect, dysfunctional, but incredibly alive love, pulsating to the rhythm of an unforgettable pop soundtrack.

Toni Erdmann (2016)

Winfried is a retired music teacher, a lonely man with a penchant for absurd pranks. Worried that his daughter Ines, a buttoned-up corporate consultant working in Bucharest, has lost her joy for life, he decides to pay her a surprise visit. Faced with her coldness, Winfried adopts a secret identity: “Toni Erdmann,” a grotesque life coach with fake teeth and a wig, determined to sabotage her professional life to remind her how to laugh.

Maren Ade’s film is a monumental work, a hilarious comedy that hides a heart of deep melancholy. The parent-child conflict here is expressed through the language of farce. Toni Erdmann” is an act of “comedic terrorism,” a desperate attempt by a father to break through his daughter’s armor and find a human connection. Memorable scenes, like the impromptu performance of “Greatest Love of All” or the surreal “naked party,” become cathartic moments where the absurd manages to break down defenses, leading to a reconciliation as bizarre as it is moving.

The Souvenir (2019)

London, 1980s. Julie, a young and shy film student from a wealthy family, falls in love with Anthony, an older, charismatic, and mysterious man who works for the Foreign Office. Their love story draws her into a world of art and culture, but also into the abyss of his heroin addiction, in a toxic relationship that will drain her emotionally and financially, but which will forge her artistic voice.

Joanna Hogg’s film is a semi-autobiographical work of disarming delicacy and honesty. Although the focus is on a romantic relationship, Julie’s family plays a crucial role. Her parents, particularly her mother (played by Tilda Swinton, the real-life mother of protagonist Honor Swinton Byrne), are a constant but powerless presence. They offer financial support and a discreet love, but they cannot protect their daughter from her own desire to be consumed by that destructive relationship. The family drama is all internal: it is Julie’s struggle to find her own identity, trapped between the privilege she comes from and the pain she chooses to live.

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Royal Tenenbaum, a selfish and absent patriarch, is kicked out of the house by his wife Etheline. His three children, Chas, Margot, and Richie, all former child prodigies, grow up marked by his absence and the weight of their precocious genius. Twenty years later, Royal, short on money, shows up at the door, faking a terminal illness in an attempt to win back his broken family.

Despite being produced by a major studio, Wes Anderson’s unmistakable style and its independent production make it a cornerstone of auteur cinema on dysfunction. The precise, symmetrical direction transforms every shot into a dollhouse, a diorama that reflects the emotional arrest of the characters, forever trapped in the fairy tale of their failed childhood. It is a profoundly melancholic comedy about disappointment, regret, and the fragile hope that even the most selfish of fathers can, in the end, find some form of redemption.

Part V: Gazes on the World – Poverty, Abandonment, and Elective Families

These films, from various world cinemas, broaden the perspective, connecting family dysfunction to larger social issues such as poverty, state abandonment, and the crisis of traditional values. They often explore the concept of the “elective family,” not based on blood ties but on necessity and solidarity among outcasts.

Nobody Knows (2004)

Inspired by a true story, the film tells of four siblings with different fathers who are abandoned by their mother in a small Tokyo apartment. The eldest, Akira, only twelve years old, finds himself having to manage money, buy groceries, and care for the younger ones, hiding their existence from the outside world. Their life becomes a silent struggle for survival.

Hirokazu Kore-eda directs with a patient and compassionate gaze, documenting the children’s daily lives without ever falling into melodrama. The title is tragically ironic: someone knows, or at least suspects, but no one intervenes. The film is a subtle but powerful critique of the indifference of modern society, of a community that is no longer able to see and protect its most fragile members. The dysfunction here is not just that of an irresponsible mother, but that of an entire social system that has failed.

Shoplifters (2018)

On the margins of Tokyo, a makeshift family lives on small scams and shoplifting. They are not bound by blood, but by a deep affection and necessity. One evening, they find a little girl abandoned in the cold and decide to take her in. The little girl brings joy to their precarious balance, but when their existence is discovered, society intervenes to restore an order that will prove crueler than their disorder.

With this film, a Palme d’Or winner at Cannes, Kore-eda poses his most radical question: what defines a family? Blood or love? The film challenges conventions, showing how an “illegal” family unit, based on theft and lies, can be a place of greater warmth and protection than an abusive biological family. The ending is heartbreaking: the state, in its attempt to “fix” things, dismantles the only real family the characters have ever known, exposing the hypocrisy of a system that privileges law over humanity.

A Separation (2011)

Nader and Simin, a middle-class couple from Tehran, are in crisis. Simin wants to leave Iran to offer their daughter a better future, but Nader doesn’t want to abandon his father, who has Alzheimer’s. Their separation triggers a chain reaction involving the lower-class caregiver hired by Nader, an accident, a murder accusation, and a spiral of lies dictated by pride and desperation.

Asghar Farhadi constructs a moral thriller of unbearable tension. A single family drama becomes the lens through which to observe the deep fractures of contemporary Iranian society: the clash between social classes, gender differences, the weight of religion, and the ambiguities of justice. In the film, there are no good or bad guys; each character acts according to their own logic, their own morality, and every choice, every lie, has devastating consequences. The real victim is the daughter, a powerless witness to the collapse of the adult world.

Force Majeure (2014)

A Swedish family is on vacation at a luxury resort in the French Alps. During lunch on a terrace, a controlled avalanche seems to be heading straight for them. In the general panic, the father, Tomas, grabs his iPhone and runs, abandoning his wife and children. The snow clears, the danger has passed, but something in the marriage has been broken forever.

Ruben Östlund directs a sharp and ruthless black comedy about the crisis of modern masculinity. A single, instinctive act of cowardice is enough to demolish the image of the protective father and trigger a painful and at times hilarious renegotiation of gender roles. Tomas’s desperate attempts to deny the evidence, to rationalize his action, are the pathetic portrait of a man confronted with his own failure. With an almost anthropological style, Östlund dissects with surgical precision the dynamics of a couple and the unspoken things that undermine the foundations of a seemingly perfect family.

Capernaum (2018)

Zain, a twelve-year-old boy from the slums of Beirut, is in court. But he is not the defendant: he is the one suing his parents. The charge? For bringing him into the world. In a long flashback, the film traces his life of hardship, his escape from an exploitative family, his struggle for survival on the streets, and his encounter with an Ethiopian refugee and her baby.

Nadine Labaki directs a powerful and neorealist work, using non-professional actors who play stories very similar to their own. The idea of a child suing his parents for being born is a cry of anger and justice against a system of endemic poverty and institutional abandonment. The dysfunction here is not a psychological pathology, but the direct consequence of inhumane living conditions. The bond Zain creates with the little Yonas is a fragile attempt to build an elective family, a glimmer of humanity in a world that seems to have forgotten it.

Happiness (1998)

The lives of three New Jersey sisters and the people around them intertwine in a tapestry of loneliness, perversions, and desperation. Joy is a failed musician looking for love, Helen a successful poet bored with life, and Trish an apparently perfect housewife, married to Bill, a psychiatrist who hides a terrible secret: he is a pedophile.

Todd Solondz’s most controversial film is a black comedy that pushes the viewer to the limits of what is bearable. With a deadpan style devoid of judgment, Solondz explores the unhappiness that lurks behind the facade of suburban normality. The film was attacked for its depiction of pedophilia, but its purpose is not to shock, but to investigate the humanity, however distorted and pathetic, even in the most monstrous characters. Happiness suggests that dysfunction is not an anomaly, but an existential condition, and that the search for happiness is often a grotesque and failed journey.