The 2022 edition of the Cannes Film Festival wrapped at the end of May—the premier destination for horror lovers to congregate and indulge in the best new genre cinema the world has to offer.
…I kid. I don’t think, as an institution, Cannes gives a shit one way or the other about horror. Sure, arthouse directors who occasionally tread into horror, like Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Lars Von Trier, and Abel Ferrara, are regulars at the prestigious Riviera romp. But horror—not genre broadly, not brooding detectives or occasional and mildly disturbing dream sequences—I mean blood-guts-and-zombies horror isn’t exactly the focus at festivals like Cannes.
That said, there was a particularly strong showing of genre cinema at Cannes this year—and straight horror too. Michel Hazanavicius’ blood, guts, and zombies remake Coupez! actually opened the festivities. What follows is a film-by-film breakdown of the best horror and genre at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.
Coupez – credit Lisa Ritaine
The First Cut is Not the Deepest
What is there to say about Coupez!? That a splashy zombie comedy that doesn’t take itself too seriously was programmed to open the festival is cool. That someone decided to dedicate months, maybe years of their life, and so much money to remaking Shinichirou Ueda’s beloved, fine as it is, One Cut of the Dead is just baffling.
Coupez! is a shot-for-shot remake of One Cut of the Dead, though it does look glossier, which undercuts the fact that it’s supposed to both look like and play as an homage to shaggy, hyper-independent filmmaking. But Hazanavicius’ love of the source material is clear, and if a film were going to pass from one culture to another, remade in each one’s image, it makes sense that that film is one as enamored with the communal nature of filmmaking as One Cut of the Dead.
Credit Nikos Nikolopoulos
Marquee Titles
The Cannes lineup is stacked with films that arthouse nerds go crazy for every year, but general audiences may not care about. Then there are films from directors like David Cronenberg, George Miller, and Alex Garland, which make no creative compromise, but are hotly anticipated around the globe by audiences of all types.
Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future is far and away the standout film in this category. Gory, heady, and deeply funny, Crimes is Cronenberg’s first film in eight years, and his first body horror in over 20. Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux play the kind of intolerably dramatic performance artist couple you secretly love to get cornered by at a party. She cuts him up and plays with his organs. Kristen Stewart (who plays the incredibly named bureaucrat Timlin) watches and giggles.
Unholy Elements
Elena López Riera’s The Water, Ariel Escalante Meza’s Domingo and the Mist, and Ali Cherri’s The Dam are all impressive debuts from first-time filmmakers from Spain, Costa Rica, and Sudan (by way of Lebanon), respectively. They each also traipse the line from naturalism into magical realism in the same way—by embroiling the central character in a relationship with a kind of enchanted force of nature. In The Water, it’s water, a river more specifically, which runs through a small town in Southeastern Spain. When the rains come and overflow its banks, the women in town tell stories of the river seducing one girl on the edge of adulthood, who has no choice but to surrender to its undertow.
Credit – Incendio Cine
In Domingo and the Mist, it’s—you guessed it—mist. Domingo refuses to sell his home to developers who seek to build a highway through this lush, overgrown region of Costa Rica. He has principles, but as we learn, he also can’t bring himself to part ways with the mist, which speaks in the voice of his dead wife when it comes up off the lake and fills his home. Finally, The Dam follows an enigmatic bricklayer who works on one of the high-tech hydraulic dams that the regime of dictator Omar al-Bashir installed on a river next to an impoverished village. The bricklayer, Maher, enacts his resistance by secreting away to a dried-up gorge where he builds a sky-high mound of mud which begins breathing and wiggling.
Perhaps filmmakers are expressing a renewed connection with the natural world, inaugurated by COVID’s stay-at-home orders. Whatever generated this trend, I gladly welcome many more.
Poisonous Procedurals
Noirs, crime thrillers, and police procedurals aren’t always horror, but they’re always genre if we’re going by Hollywood studio era rules. Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider, Park Chan Wook’s Decision to Leave, and Youssef Chebbi’s Ashkal are all novel takes on the detective thriller. But the darkness each PI pursues couldn’t be more different.
While Holy Spider is a significant step down for Abbasi, whose 2018 Border was one of the most unique and powerful films of the last decade, it’s exciting to see a Fincher-style cat and mouse thriller set in Iran. And Abbasi gets an extraordinary performance from Best Actress winner Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who plays Rahimi, a stubborn journalist with a one-track focus on unmasking Mashadd’s “spider killer.” The city was terrorized in real life in the early 2000s by a serial killer who waged a so-called “holy war” on sin by murdering nearly twenty female sex workers. When he was finally apprehended, many in the city cheered his efforts. Holy Spider is primarily a simple depiction of a gruesome and unbelievable story.
Image credit 2022 CJ ENM Co Ltd MOHO FILM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
On the other hand, Park Chan Wook takes a cinematic tale as old as time and makes it feel brand new in Decision to Leave. In his follow up to 2016’s instant masterpiece The Handmaiden, a beautiful lady (Tang Wei) might be killing her husbands, but the cop on the case (Park Hae-il) is too smitten with her to figure out how or why. Like most noirs, Decision to Leave is not about the story. Park has never been crazier or more tirelessly inventive with his camera work and editing than he is here; it’s simply a joy to behold. Ashkal is growing on me more than any other film from the fest. It’s a pitch-black procedural in the vein of Kurosawa’s Cure about a shadowy figure stalking the streets of Tunis’s ghost-townish Carthage Gardens district, seemingly causing people to spontaneously combust. The filmmaking is a little shaky in sections, but the visuals are stellar, almost Noroi-like in their cursed intensity.
Tricks and Treats
Some that deserve mention don’t fit into any cute categories. The best straight horror film from Cannes was The Five Devils, the sophomore feature of prolific screenwriter Léa Mysius (Stars at Noon, Paris, 13th District). The Five Devils is a melodrama in a mystical thriller’s clothing, so I’ll refrain from laying out the crisscrossed map of character arcs—betrayals, secret family members, cheerleader girlfriends drama, etc. Suffice to say, protagonist Joanne’s (Adele Exarchopoulos—PLEASE, make more horror movies!) daughter has a super-heightened sense of smell. There’s time travel, ghosts, a karaoke rendition of “Total Eclipse of the Heart”… The Five Devils nails the A24 vibe better than anything since The VVitch.
Finally, Mark Jenkin’s exquisite Enys Men was a festival highlight that’s best saved for last. Following up on 2019’s powerhouse debut Bait, Jenkin crafts a surreal, symbolically driven folk horror set on a picturesque island off the Cornish coast. Enys Men is a film for those who hate plot, love vibes, and love women on the verge of nervous breakdowns even more.
And that, folks, is the fest.
