See the full list here.
Bong Joon-ho made Academy Awards history last year when his Parasite netted Best Picture as well as Best International Feature, Director, and Original Screenplay. It’s a great film, and plenty of folks have credibly called it his best. Snowpiercer is even more troubling, perhaps because it isn’t as politically pessimistic as Parasite. Snowpiercer actually advocates doing something to change the status quo; Parasite implicitly critiques the status quo, but efforts to make meaningful change are persistently neutralized within the narrative. As I write these words, my country is still reeling from an unprecedented attack on our capitol, in which a mob of fascists mounted a half-assed insurrection at the behest of our president. To me, this is what revolutionary fervor looks like: confusion, death, and a swirling dialectic of self-righteous rancor. Insist if you must that there’s a difference between a left revolution and a rightist putsch. The most confounding thing for me is living in a world where an essay like Michael Anton’s “The Flight 93 Election” seems to anyone like the last reasonable resort of political hope. (I’m not one of those people, for the record.) Snowpiercer is nothing if not the cinematic embodiment of the sentiment expressed in “The Flight 93 Election.” In the face of globalist socioeconomic stratification and climate change, Snowpiercer takes a revolutionary stance, suggesting that it’s better to crash the system and hope for the best rather than survive within a system this rotten. This is horrifying. As sympathetic as Bong is to the impulse to charge the cockpit, though, he’s astute enough to inject Snowpiercer with ambivalence about the prospects of doing so, even after bearing witness to the grinding depravity of the status quo. And because he’s Bong Joon-ho, he makes this incredibly bleak and subversive film also immensely entertaining.
Honorable Mention: Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017)
Get Out is an incredible film, and an even more incredible first feature; more incredible still is the fact that a Black director’s mid-budget horror flick that skewers white liberals’ Black envy became such a phenomenon. It’s difficult to not to factor the aftershocks into the calculation when discussing the film, and I suspect that future audiences may be better-equipped in some ways to appreciate the film more on its own rather than an artifact of its time. Then again, much like with Snowpiercer, Jordan Peele’s themes transcend the time. As he often reminds interviewers, he conceived and wrote the film during the Obama administration; when it dropped like a blockbuster into the brittle bunkers of the Trump administration, it was maybe easier to recognize how intractable our social problems had become, but they weren’t new problems. Even Peele’s assured, remixed nods to earlier horror films remind us that our old problems still hold us in their grip, if only we could recognize how pernicious they are.
Categorical Reflections
Neither of these films is probably properly categorized as a suspense/thriller. Both are perhaps more obviously rooted in other genres (science fiction/action and horror), and both are political satire. I placed Snowpiercer and Get Out in suspense/thriller for two reasons, one pragmatic and the other critical. The pragmatic reason is that I wanted to mention both of them, and I couldn’t slot them into their more apt categories without sacrificing other films I knew I wanted to keep in.
The critical reasons is that, fundamentally, I feel that both films operate more on the emotional register of tension than they do on anything else. Bong stages some bravura action sequences, but his focus is not on the spectacle of the action; he’s much more attentive to the momentum of the narrative and the uncertainty of the outcome. Similarly, while Get Out is probably thought of more as a horror/comedy/satire hybrid, the most propulsive element is the tension. Little of the comedy is laugh-out-out hysterical, but the humor is discomfiting; the horror does not rely on jump scares or disgust, but more on a sustained sense of dread. In essence, I think the ratcheting suspense of these films, followed by ever-so-brief releases of it in the very final moments, is what most keenly characterizes them generically. They both hit that sweet spot of Hitchcockian pure entertainment mixed with subversive suspense and thrills.☕️
Catecinem 