It’s a very contemporary concern, but very scary if you seriously consider it. The mind, that which is supposed to try to process all the chaos around us, begins to alter our perception of reality and makes us prisoners of ourselves. Subconscious mazes that become a cell where we must face what we are repressing.
There is part of it in the surreal perception of reality that Joaquin Phoenix’s character lives in ‘Beau is afraid’, who encounters absurdity and nonsense at every corner but everything seems altered by his paranoid mind. And it is something that we can find in different ways in these three barbaric and challenging recommendations that can be found streaming.
‘Lost Highway’ (‘Lost Highway’, 1997)
Address: David Lynch. Distribution: Bill Pullman, Balthazar Getty, Patricia Arquette, Robert Loggia, Robert Blake.
“I like to remember things my way…not exactly how they happened.” The key to the entire complex mystery that David Lynch unfolds in his most abstract and challenging film resides in the phrase of a character pleased with living reality in the convenient way provided by his mind. This will become his salvation but also his condemnation to escape the atrocity that he is capable of committing.
Ari Aster’s new work has a way of amalgamating tones and genres that is very typical of Lynch’s cinema, which reaches one of its highest levels in an overwhelming experience that continues to arouse confusion. His way of getting us into that altered perspective of the protagonist, who lives a completely surreal journey, is so superb that it can be director’s best work.
See on Movistar+ and on Filmin | Criticism in Espinof
‘The fight club’ (‘Fight Club’, 1999)
Address: David Filer. Distribution: Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham Carter, Meat Loaf, Jared Leto.
Surely the most popular and acclaimed proposal of this selection, even if it is because of the cult that it has been generating after its commercial failure that has placed it practically as the pinnacle of David Fincher’s cinema. The latter may have a discussion, but without a doubt his way of addressing the disrupted perception of reality of the protagonist taken from Chuck Palahniuk’s novel is worthy of causing a sensation.
A radical satire on consumerism and the congestion in the gray monotony that also throws knives against toxic masculinity that is only happy if everything around it burns (the irony is so well spun that those ridiculed have ended up putting it on an altar without realizing it realize that they also receive). Vibrant, abstract narration in a digestible and fearless way, with one of those absolutely iconic endings.
Watch on Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video | Criticism in Espinof
‘I’m thinking of leaving him’ (‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things’, 2019)
Address:Charlie Kaufman. Distribution: Jessie Buckley, Jesse Plemons, Toni Collette, David Thewlis.
Charlie Kaufman knows a while about exercises in the mind that are completely abstract and marked by completely suicidal narrative ideas. His work as a screenwriter and then as a total author is marked by the representation of the complex recesses of the mind, especially restless and disturbed minds. ‘I’m thinking of quitting’ is especially alienating against the average viewer, and even with the coffee grower, but he has some of the most gloriously ambitious moments in his cinema.
A movie completely against the current of fast consumption which is often promoted by a platform like Netflix, but certainly benefits from immediate global spread and reviewability. The careful dissection of his images reveals more about the particular labyrinths of the subconscious and the abstract representation of the decomposition of memory.
Watch on Netflix | Criticism in Espinof
In Espinof | The best cult movies of all time