Watch These 2023 Movies If You Want Something Weird
As independent film studios like A24 and Annapurna have come to typify cinematic excellence post 2020, the cinema of the strange and their willingness to subvert the insipid, uninspired storytelling of well established studios like Warner Brothers and Disney has earned these indie production companies the adulation of critics and everyday moviegoers alike. As crowds grow increasingly tired of the formulaic, sanitized plots larger studios have come to make their signature, audiences are craving the intellectual stimulation and divorce from tired tropes smaller film studios willing to take risks are able to offer.
Infinity Pool
The third feature directed by Brandon Cronenberg (son of legendary horror director David Cronenberg), Infinity Pool follows a disaffected bourgeois couple, James and Em, vacationing at a seaside resort in the fictional country, Li Tolqa where they’re approached by a cryptic woman named Gabi (Mia Goth), a self admitted enormous fan of James’s first and only novel, who invites them to spend time with herself and her husband Alban on their stay. After James (Alexander Skarsgard) kills an islander during a drunk driving accident, he’s arrested and presented with an enigmatic choice; either be executed for his crime, or pay an exorbitant fee to have himself cloned and his duplicate killed in his stead. The uncanny valley of Infinity Pool traverses then becomes increasingly rife with dread and nihilistic antipathy, presenting a tableau on the morally corrosive effects of extreme wealth and our base instincts pulling us into a fatalistic moor of violence and sex as the players are lured deeper into the mysterious country’s bacchanalian underbelly.
Skinamarink
The surrealist feature debut from Canadian director and writer Kyle Edward Ball, Skinamarink is an experimental horror film centering on a pair of siblings, Kevin and Kaylee, when they awake in the middle of the night to find their parents missing and strange things transpiring in their rooms. The film’s arcane, nearly non-existent plot is mesmerizing in its near total negation of action, with long and disorienting shots held for inordinate stretches of time adding to the work’s atmospheric suffocation. The phantasmagoric nature of Skinamarink feels like looking into a hall of mirrors through a kaleidoscope; dizzying, unnerving, a total lack of conceptual reliability. With a budget of just $15,000, Ball’s film with its suffocating shots, unsettling sounds, and ostensibly “homemade” quality are deeply reminiscent of the Blair Witch Project, another revolutionary horror flick that galvanized and largely popularized the “found footage” aesthetic in modern horror.
Beau Is Afraid
Ari Aster’s tragicomedy, Beau Is Afraid is a labyrinthine 3 hour trek through a Kafkaesque metaphor and classical Greek allegory paired with a dry, neurotic sense of absurdity. After Beau, expertly played by Jaoquin Phoenix, misses a flight to see his mother on the anniversary of his father’s death, he embarks on an increasingly absurdist journey through metaphor - his bleak existence in a denuded urban sprawl examined through a lens of unreality. Beau Is Afraid is as infuriating as it is delighting, showing Aster taking rote themes of familial strife and warping them into a disjointed examination of the self with Beau slowly slipping from protagonist to audience proxy, creating a clearer transposition of discord in the contemporary family to the audience member’s own experience.
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey
Based on the A. A. Milne books of the same name, Blood and Honey is a lurid retelling of the children’s classic wherein the widely beloved Pooh and Piglet are made to be violent murderers set on terrorizing Christopher Robin once he returns to the Hundred Acres Wood after completing college. Shot entirely in the Ashdown Forest in East Sussex (the real life inspiration behind the fictional Hundred Acre Wood), the British slasher went into development shortly after the Winnie-the-Pooh books entered the public domain in early 2022. Despite poor critical reviews, Blood and Honey was able to rake in more than $5 million against a $100,000 budget at the international box office following a spike in the film’s online popularity. Though Blood and Honey certainly won’t be winning any awards for innovative writing or legendary thespian performance, its macabre absurdity and inordinate gore are enough to buoy the film’s ability to offer rote amusement with a cynical depravity.
Asteroid City
From the master of whimsical auteur Wes Anderson; Asteroid City is an upcoming sci-fi dramedy jam packed with a litany of Anderson’s favorite ensemble actors (Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, and Tom Hanks to name a few). Taking place in a fictional desert town in 1955 at an annual Junior Stagrazer convention, Asteroid City is teeming with director Wes Anderson’s signature composition; rich color palettes, uncanny symmetry and precision, and an incredible cast spilling over with some of today’s most talented actors. After a successful run at the 76th annual Cannes Film Festival, Asteroid City is scheduled to be released in June 2023.
Thanksgiving
From horror director Eli Roth, Thanksgiving is an upcoming slasher film based on a mock trailer Roth created for the 2007 film Grindhouse. Confoundingly, the film stars Grey’s Anatomy actor Patrick Dempsey and TikTok creator Addison Rae alongside comedian Tim Dillon as members of a small Massachusetts town being terrorized by a deranged killer looking to carve his own grisly Thanksgiving feast out of the townsfolk. Both the concept and casting are each more than sufficient to firmly plant this film in the bizarre.
Five Nights at Freddy’s
After spending years in development hell (a liminal space wherein media meets some sort of obstacle and is stalled indefinitely), the supernatural horror based on the Scott Cawthon video game franchise of the same name was finally given an October 2023 release date earlier this year. Directed by Emma Tammi, Five Nights at Freddy’s follows Mike Schmidt (played by Josh Hutcherson) through his tenure as a security card at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza; a formerly successful family entertainment center best described as a Chuck E. Cheese designed by Tim Burton for an installment in the Saw franchise. After midnight, the center’s previously adorable animatronic mascots come to life to hunt and kill anybody on the premises past midnight.
Salem’s Lot
Based upon the 1975 Stephen King novel, Salem’s Lot is an upcoming horror film written and directed by The Conjuring writer Gary Dauberman. The story follows Ben Mears (played by Top Gun: Maverick actor Lewis Pullman) as he returns to his hometown of Jerusalem’s Lot (‘Salem’s Lot for short) in hopes of overcoming a pervasive bout of writer’s block, only to discover the town has been infiltrated by a vampire harem. The film was originally slated for a September 2022 release before being pushed to April 2023 and subsequently pulled from Warner Bros release schedule for an unspecified period. Salem’s Lot was King’s second novel published and described as his personal favorite in a few interviews throughout the 1980s.
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