Weird and absurd independent films to watch
Un Chien Andalou
A silent surrealist short film that defies all conventional narrative logic. It presents a series of shocking, dreamlike, and disconnected images, including the famous opening scene of a woman’s eye being sliced by a razor. The film follows a man and a woman through bizarre encounters that include ants crawling out of a hand, dead donkeys on pianos, and inexplicable time jumps, all governed by the logic of the subconscious.
This work is the primordial scream of surrealist cinema, a direct attack on bourgeois sensibility and rational thought. The importance of Un Chien Andalou lies not in a supposed “meaning” to be deciphered, but in its revolutionary act of freeing cinema from the tyranny of plot. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, basing the screenplay on their own dreams, followed the strict rule of rejecting any image that could have a logical explanation. The infamous eye-slicing scene is a meta-cinematic statement of intent: the film is literally “cutting” the viewer’s conventional way of seeing, forcing them to abandon passive observation and interact with the images on a purely visceral and subconscious level. This act establishes the core principle of much weird cinema to come: experience prevails over explanation.
Eraserhead
In a desolate industrial wasteland, the timid Henry Spencer discovers he has fathered a monstrous, crying mutant baby with his girlfriend, Mary X. Trapped in his claustrophobic apartment, Henry descends into a nightmarish world of surreal visions, including a woman singing inside a radiator, as he struggles with the crushing anxieties of fatherhood, commitment, and his bleak reality.
Eraserhead is the ultimate nightmare of domestic anxiety transposed onto film. David Lynch translates the abstract fears of fatherhood and urban alienation into a tangible, grotesque, and unforgettable sensory experience, using sound and the materiality of the image as his primary narrative tools. The title itself, “The mind that erases,” refers not only to the protagonist’s hairstyle or the dream sequence in the pencil factory but to the fundamental psychological desire that drives the film: the need to erase an unbearable reality. The oppressive industrial soundscape and the stark, desolate black-and-white photography are crucial in materializing this sense of anguish. Henry’s final, violent act is but the tragic fulfillment of this desire for annihilation, where death becomes the only escape to the “heaven” sung by the Lady in the Radiator.
The Holy Mountain
A Christ-like thief wanders through a landscape of grotesque, sacrilegious, and satirical tableaus representing societal corruption. He is taken in by a powerful Alchemist who introduces him to seven of the world’s most influential people, each symbolizing a planet and a corrupt aspect of society. Together, they shed their egos and embark on a mystical quest to the Lotus Island to climb the Holy Mountain and gain immortality from the gods who reside there.
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s masterpiece is not a film to be watched, but an alchemical ritual to be experienced. It uses a torrent of esoteric symbolism, social satire, and psychedelic imagery to deconstruct power, religion, and the very nature of reality. The disciples’ journey is a classic alchemical process of purification, stripping them of materialism to prepare them for enlightenment. The ending, with its shocking twist revealing the film set, is not a cynical gimmick but the ultimate fulfillment of this path. The true “immortality” was not a mystical secret on a mountaintop, but the awakening to “real life” and the deconstruction of the illusion—the film itself. Jodorowsky offers the viewer the ultimate enlightenment: the awareness of being in front of a work of art and the imperative to return to one’s own reality, transformed by the experience.
El Topo
A mysterious black-clad gunslinger, El Topo, travels through a surreal desert landscape with his naked son. After abandoning the child, he undertakes a mission to defeat four master gunslingers to prove his spiritual supremacy. Betrayed and left for dead, he is reborn as a holy fool, becoming the savior of a community of deformed outcasts living in a cave, whom he must free by digging a tunnel to the outside world.
El Topo is the progenitor of the “Acid Western” genre, a film that appropriates the iconography of the American frontier to inject it with Eastern mysticism, Christian allegory, and brutal surrealism. It is a spiritual odyssey in two acts about the destruction of the ego and the painful path to redemption and sacrifice. The film’s bipartite structure mirrors the narrative arc of the Old and New Testaments. The first half is the Old Testament: a vengeful and selfish “God” (El Topo) seeking dominance through violence. The second half is the New Testament: a humble, almost Christ-like figure who achieves enlightenment through suffering, community, and ultimate sacrifice. Jodorowsky thus uses the western archetype to retell the entire parabola of Western religious mythology, moving from a paradigm of violent power to one of compassion and martyrdom.
A vision curated by a filmmaker, not an algorithm
In this video I explain our vision
Enter the Void
Oscar, an American drug dealer in Tokyo, is killed by police during a raid. What seems like the end is actually the beginning of a vast psychedelic journey. Oscar’s spirit leaves his body and floats through the neon-drenched city, reliving traumatic memories of his past, observing the aftermath of his death on his sister Linda, and experiencing a hallucinatory journey towards reincarnation, guided by the principles of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Gaspar Noé’s film is a radical experiment in cinematic subjectivity, a “psychedelic melodrama” that uses a relentless first-person perspective to trap the viewer in the consciousness of its protagonist—before, during, and after death. The aggressive and at times nauseating visual style is not a mere aesthetic flourish but a thematic device. Noé forces the audience to experience the world through Oscar’s senses, including drug trips, violence, and death, to dissolve the boundary between viewer and character. The ultimate goal is to simulate the “Void” of the title: a state where individual consciousness shatters and merges with a universal, cyclical flow of memory and sensation, making it one of the most immersive and psychologically invasive films ever made.
A Page Of Madness
Drama, horror, by Teinosuke Kinugasa, Japan, 1926.
A page of madness is an independent film shot on a nearly non-existent budget and then lost for forty-five years. Fortunately the director rediscovered it in his archive in 1971. It is a film made by a group of Japanese avant-garde artists, the School of new perceptions. A movement that had as its objective to overcome the naturalistic representation. In a country asylum, in torrential rain, the caretaker meets patients with mental illness. The next day a young woman arrives who is surprised to find her father there who works as a caretaker. The woman's mother first went mad because of her husband when she was a sailor. The husband has decided to change jobs to stay close to his wife in the asylum and take care of her. Her daughter tells her father that she will marry soon, but the father is worried because he fears, according to popular rumors of the time, that the mother's mental illness will be inherited by her daughter. If the young husband and his family found out about his mother's madness, the marriage would fall apart. The caretaker tries to take care of his wife during her work as she gets beaten up by other inmates, but this interferes with her role and is scolded by the head of the asylum. Slowly the keeper loses contact with reality and its boundaries from the dream. He begins to daydream about winning the lottery when his daughter meets him again to tell him that his marriage is in trouble. The man thinks of taking his wife out of the asylum to hide her existence and solve every problem. Teinosuke Kinugasa is the director of some of the best Japanese films of the 1920s. A page of madness has been compared to the great German expressionist films. It is an experimental film, of extreme avant-garde, which seems to anticipate the atmospheres and themes that would have made David Lynch famous many years later. Nightmares, distortions, blurs, double exposures and photographic deformations: a film that explores the furthest boundaries of moving images. Then there are those masks set in an eternal succession of bars, locks and corridors that fuel the sense of fear and loss of the various protagonists to excess.Yasunari Kawabata, the writer of the story, won the Nobel Prize for literature in the 1968.
Without dialogue
Tetsuo: The Iron Man
A Japanese salaryman accidentally runs over a “metal fetishist” who was embedding pieces of iron into his body. Shortly after, the salaryman begins to undergo a horrific metamorphosis. Shards of metal erupt from his flesh, his body contorts, and he slowly and violently transforms into a monstrous hybrid of flesh and industrial scrap, culminating in a final confrontation with his resurrected foe.
A convulsive masterpiece of cyberpunk body horror, Tetsuo is a relentless, high-speed assault on the senses, visualizing the violent collision between humanity and technology in post-industrial Tokyo. The transformation is not just a physical horror but a metaphor for the repressed rage and sexual anxiety of the modern “salaryman.” The employee’s rigid, conformist shell is brutally shattered, replaced by a new monstrous, phallic, and destructive form that represents a terrifying liberation from social constraints. The “Iron Man” is the protagonist’s Id made manifest; the metal is not just technology, but the raw, violent, and sexual energy that his civilized life has forced him to suppress.
Videodrome
Max Renn, president of a low-rent cable TV channel, discovers a pirate broadcast called “Videodrome,” which appears to show real torture and murder. His search for the signal’s origin draws him into a conspiracy involving hallucinogenic brain tumors, a new philosophy of the “new flesh,” and the media-induced fusion of reality and fantasy. His own body begins to mutate, developing a vaginal slit in his stomach for inserting videotapes.
Decades ahead of its time, Videodrome is David Cronenberg’s prophetic and terrifying thesis on the relationship between media, reality, and the human body. The film argues that mass media is not a passive window onto the world but an active biological agent that literally reshapes our perception and our flesh. The film’s most radical idea is that the content of the media is irrelevant; it is the medium itself that is the message and the mutagen. The Videodrome signal works through any broadcast, not just violent ones. This insight makes the film a much deeper critique than a simple warning about “violence on TV”: it is a warning about the neurological and physiological effects of the screen itself, a frighteningly prescient idea for the internet age.
Titane
After a childhood car accident leaves her with a titanium plate in her head, Alexia develops a strange sexual fixation on cars. As an adult, she is an erotic dancer and serial killer who, after a series of violent acts, goes on the run. To hide her identity, she disguises herself as a long-missing boy and is taken in by a lonely, aging fire captain who believes she is his son. Meanwhile, Alexia is pregnant from a bizarre union with a car, and her body undergoes a grotesque, metallic transformation.
Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or-winning film is a shocking, tender, and profoundly strange masterpiece of the “new flesh.” It pushes body horror to its extreme limits to explore themes of gender, trauma, and the desperate, unconventional ways people forge family bonds and find love amidst pain and monstrosity. The film’s two narrative lines—the grotesque horror of the metallic pregnancy and the tender drama of the found family—are not in opposition but are two sides of the same coin. Both explore the painful and transformative process of creating a new identity and a new form of love outside of traditional biological and social norms.
Dogtooth
Three adult siblings live in complete isolation in their family’s fenced compound, having never known the outside world. Their parents have constructed a bizarre alternate reality for them, teaching them incorrect definitions for words (a “zombie” is a small yellow flower) and controlling their entire existence through a system of perverse rules and rewards. This fragile world begins to crumble when the father introduces an outsider to satisfy his son’s sexual needs.
The film that established Yorgos Lanthimos is a chilling and darkly hilarious allegory about control. It uses its surreal premise to expose the family unit as a potential totalitarian state, where language is a tool of oppression and ignorance is enforced as a means of power. The title, Kynodontas (Dogtooth), refers to the central lie told to the children: they can only leave the house when their dogtooth falls out, a biologically impossible event for an adult. This lie is a perfect metaphor for all systems of control (familial, political, religious) that maintain power by creating unattainable conditions for freedom, trapping their subjects in a state of perpetual childhood.
Haxan
Documentary, by Benjamin Christensen, Sweden, 1922.
Desecration of tombs, torture, demon-possessed nuns and witches' sabbath: Haxan, Witchcraft Through the Ages is an incredibly original and unconventional film that has become legendary over time. Between documentary and dramatic fiction, the film guides us through the scientific hypothesis that the witches of the Middle Ages suffered from the same ills as the mentally ill of the modern era. A frightening and at the same time humorous gothic horror, with the creation of documentary and non-fiction sequences that anticipate the innovations of the Nouvelle Vague. Something absolutely unique in the history of cinema.
Food for thought
In Sanskrit Devil and Divine come from the same root, dev. Madness is the dark side of man and it is as natural as the bright side. When you are able to tell a madman that not only is he mad but that you are too, a bridge is immediately created, and it is possible to help him. The nature of life is neither logical nor rational. Life is illogical, wild and contradictory.
LANGUAGE: English, Swedish
SUBTITLES: Spanish, French, German, Portuguese
The Lobster
In a dystopian near-future, single people are arrested and sent to a hotel where they have 45 days to find a partner. If they fail, they are transformed into an animal of their choice. David, a newly divorced man, checks in and tries to navigate the resort’s absurd rules, where compatibility is based on superficial shared traits. After a failed attempt, he escapes to join a group of militant loners in the woods, only to find their rules are just as oppressive.
Another masterpiece of absurdist satire from Yorgos Lanthimos, The Lobster is a deadpan, hilarious, and ultimately tragic critique of modern romance and the social pressure to conform. The film argues that both forced coupling and forced solitude are equally tyrannical, leaving no room for genuine, non-coercive human connection. The central satirical mechanism is the “defining characteristic,” the absurd idea that a successful relationship must be based on a superficial and arbitrary similarity. This is a brilliant parody of dating app algorithms and the way modern society reduces complex individuals to a checklist of traits, making authentic connection impossible.
Sorry to Bother You
In an alternate contemporary Oakland, Cassius “Cash” Green is a struggling telemarketer who discovers a magical key to success: using his “white voice.” This propels him up the corporate ladder into the macabre world of “Power Callers,” who sell slave labor for a morally corrupt company called WorryFree. During his ascent, Cash must choose between his newfound wealth and joining his former colleagues on strike against corporate exploitation, a choice complicated by a horrific company secret.
Boots Riley’s directorial debut is a wildly inventive, surreal, and furiously political satire. It uses its absurd sci-fi premise to launch a scathing and hilarious critique of capitalism, racism, “code-switching,” and the alienating nature of corporate culture. The most brilliant satirical element, the “white voice,” is more than just a gag. It is a metaphor for the complete erasure of identity required to succeed within a white-dominated capitalist system. Success depends on becoming a disembodied, non-threatening, and ultimately inhuman vehicle for corporate interests.
Pi
Maximilian Cohen is a solitary and paranoid mathematical genius convinced that everything in nature can be understood through numbers. Using a supercomputer in his Chinatown apartment, he searches for numerical patterns in the stock market. His research leads him to discover a mysterious 216-digit number that seems to be the key not only to the stock market but perhaps also to a divine code hidden in the Torah, attracting the attention of both a powerful Wall Street firm and a group of Kabbalists.
Darren Aronofsky’s debut is a low-budget psychological thriller, shot in grainy, high-contrast black and white, that explores the obsession with finding order in chaos. The film stages the conflict between faith (in numbers, in God) and the unknowable, between scientific rationality and mysticism. Max’s descent into madness is a parable about the dangerous arrogance of human knowledge in the face of greater mysteries, a feverish journey that culminates not in a divine discovery, but in a violent and liberating renunciation of the search itself.
Being John Malkovich
Craig Schwartz, an unemployed and frustrated street puppeteer, finds a job as a file clerk in a strange office located on the 7½th floor of a Manhattan building. Behind a filing cabinet, he discovers a small portal that leads directly into the mind of actor John Malkovich for fifteen minutes. Together with his cynical colleague Maxine, with whom he is in love, he decides to commercially exploit the discovery, unleashing a series of surreal complications about identity, desire, and celebrity.
Written by the genius of Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze, this film is a surreal and deeply philosophical comedy that questions the nature of identity and desire. The bizarre premise becomes a vehicle for exploring the desperate human search for escape from oneself and celebrity as an empty shell to inhabit. The film asks dizzying questions: who are we without our bodies? What does it mean to love someone? And what happens when the art of puppetry—control—is applied to life itself? It is a hilarious and melancholic satire on the human condition.
I Am Nothing
Drama, thriller, by Fabio Del Greco, Italy, 2015.
The story revolves around Vasco, a Roman builder who, at the age of 74, enjoys a life of absolute comfort. His human parable takes a dramatic turn when a mysterious encounter leads him to an ambush. Having survived, but marked by a long coma, Vasco wakes up with a new sensitivity, developing an intimate and poetic bond with nature. This new relationship with the world around him leads him to deeply explore himself, in an internal and external journey. through Italy, the United States and India, in search of a higher meaning and a cure. In parallel, the threat of a planetary cataclysm adds an epic dimension to the story.
I Am Nothing explores universal themes such as time, memory, oblivion and the connection with nature. Fabio Del Greco creates an existential drama full of food for thought. The director skillfully combines different visual materials, mixing archive images with nature photographs and dreamlike visions. This visual experimentation translates into an editing that captures the viewer's attention, guiding him through a cycle of creation and destruction. The sequences that alternate the buildings, Vasco's pride, with Indian landfills and natural landscapes create a hypnotic rhythm, underlining the beauty and fragility of life. Vasco's existential journey is a hymn to transformation and rebirth. The evolution of the protagonist, from unbridled luxury to the rediscovery of purity, represents a powerful metaphor on the meaning of life and the need to reconnect with authentic values. Io sono nulla stands out for its ability to combine introspection and visual experimentation, offering a suggestive and engaging narration. It is a film that invites us to reflect on the human condition, on our relationship with power and nature, and on the possibility of finding ourselves through change. A work that leaves its mark and lends itself to multiple readings.
LANGUAGE: Italian
SUBTITLES: English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese
Under the Skin
An alien entity takes the form of an attractive woman and drives through the streets of Scotland in a van, luring lonely men. She leads them to a surreal lair where they are trapped in a black liquid and consumed. However, through her interactions with humanity, the alien begins to experience an unexpected evolution, developing a form of empathy and curiosity that leads her to question her mission and her own identity.
Jonathan Glazer’s masterpiece is a hypnotic and terrifying science fiction film that subverts the genre’s conventions. Instead of focusing on spectacle, it uses the alien perspective as a filter to observe humanity with a cold, almost documentary-like gaze, deconstructing concepts like identity, empathy, and vulnerability. Scarlett Johansson’s nearly mute performance is extraordinary in conveying the transition from an impassive predator to a confused prey. It is a visually stunning and deeply unsettling work that gets “under the skin” of the viewer.
Beau is Afraid
Beau Wassermann is a mild-mannered but chronically paranoid man. When he must embark on a journey to his mother’s house, he is catapulted into a surreal and nightmarish odyssey. Every step of his path is hindered by bizarre threats and grotesque dangers, turning a simple trip into an epic descent through his deepest fears, childhood traumas, and the suffocating relationship with an omnipotent mother.
Ari Aster’s third feature film is the cinematic manifestation of pure anxiety. A three-hour comedic and terrifying epic that takes place entirely in a landscape of Freudian phobias and maternal guilt. It is a deliberately exhausting film that pushes absurdity to the breaking point to explore the psyche of a man trapped in a state of perpetual, powerless childhood. Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is a tour de force of vulnerability, making this journey into the heart of darkness of a tormented soul as hilarious as it is profoundly distressing.
Rubber
Robert, a tire abandoned in the California desert, suddenly comes to life. He discovers he possesses telekinetic powers, which he uses to explode small animals and, eventually, the heads of people who cross his path. His murderous deeds are observed by a group of spectators in the desert, who comment on the action as if they were watching a movie, while a sheriff tries to put an end to the carnage, aware of the fictional nature of the events.
Quentin Dupieux’s film is a brilliant and brazen meta-cinematic work. The premise, a killer tire, is just a pretext for a reflection on the absurdity of cinematic narrative itself. The film opens with a monologue on the concept of “no reason” in movies, declaring its poetics. Rubber is a hilarious satire of horror tropes and the passive role of the spectator, a bold experiment that deconstructs the rules of cinema while staging them, celebrating the illogical and the nonsensical.
Holy Motors
From dawn to dusk, we follow the hours in the life of Monsieur Oscar, an enigmatic character who travels through Paris in a white limousine. Along the way, he transforms into a series of completely different characters: an elderly beggar, an assassin, a monster who lives in the sewers, a family man. Each “appointment” is a surreal and autonomous performance, raising questions about the nature of identity, acting, and life itself in the digital age.
Leos Carax’s work is a mysterious and moving elegy for cinema and for the human experience. It is a film that defies categorization, a visual stream of consciousness that explores the fragmentation of identity in a world where the roles we play have become more real than ourselves. Denis Lavant’s transformative performance is legendary. Holy Motors is a tribute to the “beauty of the gesture,” an act of faith in the power of images to create meaning even when logic fails, and a melancholic reflection on a world that has perhaps lost its ability to see magic.
Slow life
Drama, comedy, thriller, by Fabio Del Greco, Italy, 2021.
Lino Stella takes a period of vacation from his alienating job to devote himself to relaxation and his passion: drawing comics. But he did not foresee certain disturbing elements: the intrusive administrator of the building where he lives, the postman who delivers crazy fines and tax bills, an overbearing security guard, a very enterprising real estate agent, the old lady downstairs who raises the feline colony of the condominium. These characters will make his vacation hell.
Food for thought
The larger a social group is, the more rules and bureaucracy are needed, which often do not respect the individual. You have to learn to live with annoying people, but sometimes the social pressure and arrogance can become intolerable. The only laws that always come to our aid are the laws of Nature.
LANGUAGE: Italian
SUBTITLES: English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese
Swiss Army Man
Hank, a desperate man stranded on a deserted island, is about to commit suicide when he sees a corpse wash ashore. He discovers that the body, which he names Manny, has a series of supernatural abilities, the most useful of which is a flatulence so powerful it can be used as a jet ski motor. Together, the two embark on a surreal journey to return home, during which Hank teaches Manny, who has lost his memory, what it means to be alive.
What might seem like a bad taste joke is actually one of the most original, moving, and profoundly human films of recent years. The directors, known as “Daniels,” use an outrageously absurd premise to tell a sincere story about loneliness, friendship, shame, and the need for connection. It is a whimsical and poetic parable that celebrates weirdness and finds unexpected beauty in bodily functions and social taboos, proving that even the most bizarre ideas can convey authentic emotions.
Pink Flamingos
The infamous drag queen Divine lives under the pseudonym Babs Johnson, the proud holder of the title “filthiest person alive.” Her reputation attracts the envy of Connie and Raymond Marble, a criminal couple who run a baby trafficking ring and engage in assorted perversions. The Marbles decide to challenge Divine for the title, setting off an escalation of increasingly grotesque, outrageous, and disgusting acts.
John Waters‘ “trash” masterpiece is a revolutionary act of bad taste, a frontal assault on every social and cinematic convention. Made with a shoestring budget and a deliberately amateurish aesthetic, the film celebrates the disgusting and the taboo as forms of rebellion. It has become an icon of midnight cinema and a milestone of queer culture, not only for its transgressive audacity but for its anarchic and liberating spirit. Pink Flamingos is a reminder that art can be found even in the most sordid places, and that sometimes, being “filthy” is the most honest act of all.
The Greasy Strangler
Big Ronnie and his middle-aged son, Big Brayden, run a failing walking tour about the history of disco music. Their toxic and co-dependent relationship, fueled by incredibly greasy food, is disrupted by the arrival of Janet, a customer who falls for Brayden. This triggers Ronnie’s jealousy, who at night covers himself in grease and transforms into a grotesque, naked murderer, the “Greasy Strangler.
This film is an experience. A total immersion into a universe of bad taste, anti-humor, and pure discomfort. Director Jim Hosking creates a hermetic world with its own perverse internal logic, dialogues repetitive to the point of hypnosis, and deliberately unpleasant performances. It is a film designed to be repulsive, but in its absolute dedication to its own grotesque aesthetic, it achieves a form of surreal comic genius. You either love it or hate it, but it’s impossible to remain indifferent to a work so singularly and courageously bizarre.
Gummo
Following a devastating tornado, the small town of Xenia, Ohio, is a place of desolation and apathy. The film follows the fragmented lives of a group of teenagers and residents, including two boys who spend their days hunting stray cats to sell to a local restaurant. Through a series of seemingly disconnected vignettes, the film paints a nihilistic and unsettling portrait of poverty and neglect in forgotten America.
Harmony Korine’s directorial debut is a controversial and unforgettable work. Using a non-linear, almost documentary-like style, and mixing non-professional actors with deliberately bizarre and disturbing scenes, Gummo challenges the viewer to confront a reality they would rather ignore. There is no moral judgment, only a cold and at times strangely poetic observation of desolation. It is a film that seeks a perverse beauty in the rubble, a raw and hallucinatory snapshot of a lost generation that has left an indelible mark on independent cinema.
The Exterminating Angel
Drama, by Luis Bunuel, Mexico, 1962.
The plot revolves around a group of people who gather in a sumptuous villa for a gala dinner. However, after dinner, they find that they are unable to leave the villa, despite the fact that the doors and windows are barred and the exits apparently blocked. What follows is a kind of surreal nightmare where the group of guests are trapped in the villa and their behaviors and social relationships begin to degrade in a bizarre way.
The film deals with themes of social conformity, alienation, and the downfall of social conventions. It is known for its surreal sequences and the way it challenges reality and traditional logic. "The Exterminating Angel" is often interpreted as a satirical critique of the upper class and self-righteous social norms. This film has become an icon of Surrealist cinema and represents one of Luis Buñuel's most distinctive and provocative works. It is prized for both its conceptual complexity and visual extravagance, and has been influential in the film world for its ability to push the boundaries of the cinematic art. At the time, many thought it was the last film of Bunuel's career. It was, however, the first of a series of masterpieces.
LANGUAGE: Spanish
SUBTITLES: English
Begotten
In a primordial and desolate world, a divine figure commits suicide by disemboweling himself. From his corpse emerges Mother Earth, who inseminates herself with his seed and gives birth to a deformed and trembling son, the Son of Earth. This new creature is tortured and killed by a group of faceless nomads, in an endless cycle of violent death and rebirth, as nature is reborn from their remains.
E. Elias Merhige’s work is an experimental black-and-white nightmare, an extreme visual experience that rewrites Genesis as a poem of cosmic horror. Filmed and then re-photographed frame by frame to achieve a degraded, flickering, and almost unrecognizable image, the film eliminates dialogue and traditional narrative to communicate through a purely visual and visceral language. It is a brutal and fascinating exploration of the themes of creation, destruction, and suffering, a radical work of art that pushes the boundaries of what cinema can represent.
Hausu
A schoolgirl named Gorgeous, disappointed by her father’s new partner, decides to spend the summer holidays at the country house of an aunt she has never met, bringing six of her friends with her. The house soon reveals itself to be a supernatural and carnivorous trap, which begins to devour the girls one by one in the most imaginative and absurd ways: a finger-eating piano, a demonic cat, and flying mattresses are just some of the psychedelic horrors that await them.
Nobuhiko Ōbayashi’s film is an explosion of anti-realistic creativity, a ghost story that abandons all pretense of traditional scares to embrace a pop, playful, and delirious aesthetic. Using deliberately artificial visual effects, animation, collage, and frantic editing, Hausu feels like an episode of Scooby-Doo directed by a filmmaker on acid. Beneath its colorful and crazy surface, however, lies a melancholic reflection on the trauma of war and loss, making it a work as fun and surreal as it is secretly profound.
Mandy
In 1983, lumberjack Red Miller lives a quiet, isolated life with his partner, artist Mandy Bloom. Their idyllic existence is brutally destroyed when Mandy attracts the attention of Jeremiah Sand, the leader of a deviant hippie cult. After kidnapping her with the help of a trio of demonic bikers, the cult kills her in front of a helpless Red. Shattered by grief, Red forges a silver axe and embarks on a furious and bloody revenge.
Panos Cosmatos‘ film is a work divided in two: the first half is a fever dream, an ethereal and melancholic love melodrama steeped in saturated colors and slow camera movements; the second half is a waking nightmare, an explosion of heavy metal violence, psychedelic gore, and primordial fury. Nicolas Cage’s performance is legendary in capturing a man’s descent into madness and grief. Mandy is an overwhelming sensory experience, a revenge movie that transcends the genre to become a visceral and hypnotic work of art.
Climax
In the mid-90s, a troupe of young and talented dancers gathers in an isolated school for a party after rehearsals. The celebration quickly degenerates into an infernal chaos when they discover that the sangria they’ve been drinking has been spiked with LSD. As the drug takes hold, paranoia, lust, and violence explode, turning the party into a collective descent into madness and horror.
Gaspar Noé orchestrates an immersive and suffocating cinematic experience. Shot with dizzying long takes and a pounding soundtrack, the film drags the viewer into the heart of a collective “bad trip.” More than a narrative film, it is a sensory simulation of the collapse of social order, a terrifying exploration of how the thin veneer of civilization can be dissolved, revealing the darkest and most primordial instincts. It is a work as technically stunning as it is psychologically exhausting.
The Grin and the Cow
Experimental, musical film, by Fabio Nicosia, Italy, 2020.
Musical film with a psychological twist. The monsters of childhood imagery transmigrated in the various stages of the individual's existence. The shadows, the ghosts and the fears that we have managed to tame but not eliminate and that keep resurfacing in dreams, language, painting, architecture and narration. An unconventional film capable of penetrating the viewer's gaze with unconventional images. In search of that dream world that belonged to the child we were and that we can rediscover, with his creativity and with his fears.
LANGUAGE: Italian
SUBTITLES: English
Taxidermia
Through three generations of a Hungarian family, the film tells three grotesque stories of bodily obsession. The first follows a soldier during World War II, tormented by repressed sexual desires. The second focuses on his son, a competitive eating champion in the communist era. The third and final story is that of the grandson, a thin and lonely taxidermist living in contemporary Hungary who aims to achieve immortality through his macabre art.
György Pálfi’s work is a bold and visually stunning historical allegory. It uses the grotesque and body horror to paint a surreal and satirical portrait of a century of Hungarian history, where the body becomes the battlefield for political ideologies and personal obsessions. It is a provocative and hard-to-digest film that mixes black humor, disturbing images, and a deep reflection on mortality, art, and legacy, both familial and national.
Annette
Henry McHenry is a provocative and nihilistic stand-up comedian; Ann Defrasnoux is a world-renowned opera singer. The two form a glamorous and passionate couple, whose life is turned upside down by the birth of their daughter, Annette, represented by a wooden marionette. As Henry’s career declines and Ann’s reaches new heights, jealousy and resentment lead to tragedy, and little Annette reveals a mysterious gift that will be exploited by her father.
Leos Carax’s rock-opera musical is a grandiose, bizarre, and deeply tragic work. Using music by Sparks and a deliberately artificial aesthetic (symbolized by the puppet-child), the film explores themes of toxic masculinity, the destructive nature of fame, and the exploitation of art and affection. It is a dark and surreal fable about performance, both on stage and in life, and the price that male ego exacts on love and innocence. Adam Driver’s performance is magnetic and terrifying.
Stalker
In a post-apocalyptic and desolate world, there exists a mysterious “Zone,” an area sealed off by the government where the laws of physics are said to be suspended and where, in a room, a person’s deepest desires can be fulfilled. A “Stalker,” a tormented guide, leads two clients, a cynical Writer and a pragmatic Professor, on a dangerous and metaphysical journey through this enigmatic and changing landscape.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece is more than a science fiction film; it is a philosophical and spiritual journey into the heart of the human soul. Slow, hypnotic, and visually stunning, the film uses its premise to explore complex themes such as faith, doubt, cynicism, and the nature of desire. The Zone itself becomes a character, an entity that seems to respond to the inner states of the travelers. Stalker offers no easy answers but asks profound questions, leaving the viewer in a state of meditative contemplation on the human condition.
The Lobster
In a dystopian near-future, single people are arrested and sent to a hotel where they have 45 days to find a partner. If they fail, they are transformed into an animal of their choice. David, a newly divorced man, checks in and tries to navigate the resort’s absurd rules, where compatibility is based on superficial shared traits. After a failed attempt, he escapes to join a group of militant loners in the woods, only to find their rules are just as oppressive.
Another masterpiece of absurdist satire from Yorgos Lanthimos, The Lobster is a deadpan, hilarious, and ultimately tragic critique of modern romance and the social pressure to conform. The film argues that both forced coupling and forced solitude are equally tyrannical, leaving no room for genuine, non-coercive human connection. The central satirical mechanism is the “defining characteristic,” the absurd idea that a successful relationship must be based on a superficial and arbitrary similarity. This is a brilliant parody of dating app algorithms and the way modern society reduces complex individuals to a checklist of traits, making authentic connection impossible.
The Holy Mountain
Sci-fi, drama, by Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973, Mexico.
A man, nicknamed The thief, who represents the Fool's card in the Tarot, lies unconscious in a desert, among swarms of flies. When he wakes up he encounters a footless and handless dwarf representing the Five of Swords. The two become friends and go to the nearest town where they earn money by entertaining tourists. The thief resembles Jesus Christ, and after a quarrel with a priest, he eats the face of a wax statue of Christ, symbolically eating his body and offering "himself" to Heaven. After many misadventures he arrives at the top of a tower which is the laboratory of a mysterious alchemist. Participating in various initiation rites, the alchemist introduces him to the seven most powerful people on Earth, who work in the industries of welfare, weapons, art, entertainment, law enforcement, construction and the economy. Together they will have to reach the Sacred Mountain, a legendary mountain on a nonexistent island, where there are nine sages who know the secret of immortality. Their aim is to eliminate them and take their place.
Food for thought
In India they call the reality of the world around us Maya, which means illusion. The truth is hidden: it's like a movie screen on which you project your dreams and desires. Physicists have investigated what matter is and have come to the conclusion that it does not exist. So what is the matter of things made of? It is only condensed energy, which vibrates at very high speed, appearance. At a deep level, matter does not exist.
LANGUAGE: English
SUBTITLES: Spanish, French, German, Portuguese
Upstream Color
A woman named Kris is kidnapped and drugged with a parasite that makes her susceptible to hypnosis, allowing her captor to drain her bank accounts. After the ordeal, she finds her life in shambles and with no memory of what happened. She meets Jeff, a man who seems to have suffered a similar trauma. The two bond deeply, discovering they are part of a complex and mysterious life cycle involving the parasite, pigs, and blue orchids.
Shane Carruth’s second film is an enigmatic, lyrical, and scientifically complex work that challenges traditional narrative. It is a visual and auditory puzzle that explores themes of identity, trauma, control, and the invisible connections that bind individuals. The film provides no explicit explanations but communicates through a flow of images, sounds, and emotional associations, requiring the viewer to abandon the search for a linear plot and immerse themselves in a sensory experience that reflects the confusion and search for meaning of its protagonists.
Conclusion: The Legacy of the Bizarre in Auteur Cinema
The journey through these films leaves us with one certainty: weird and absurd cinema is not a niche for a select few, but a vital and necessary frontier of artistic expression. These works, with their formal audacity and their willingness to challenge the viewer, demonstrate that the deepest stories about being human do not always follow a linear path. From the iconoclastic surrealism of Buñuel to the embodied anxiety of Aster, through the social satire of Lanthimos and the body horror of Cronenberg, we have seen how abandoning logic can open doors to emotional and psychological truths that are otherwise inaccessible.
These films are not mere “oddities,” but complex and often prophetic reflections on our world. They teach us to look beyond the surface, to question the structures we take for granted, and to find beauty in the grotesque, meaning in chaos, and humanity in the monstrous. The legacy of this bizarre cinema is a perpetual invitation to expand our horizons, to embrace ambiguity, and to celebrate the power of an art that is not afraid to venture into the unknown. May this guide be not an end, but a beginning: a starting point to continue exploring the infinite, wonderful, and unsettling possibilities of cinema.
A vision curated by a filmmaker, not an algorithm
In this video I explain our vision
