The Daily Gamecock

Feel-bad films for finals

Overwhelmed by final papers, projects and exams? Why not take a break and suffer through these marvelous, feel-bad films, all available streaming on Netflix:

“Funny Games” (1997)
Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke shames his audience for watching his own film. He once said, “It’s a film you come to if you need to see it. If you don’t need this movie, you will walk out before it’s over.” A family moves into a new house and is psychologically tortured by two handsome men dressed in white. The men break the fourth wall and talk to the audience at times and even have control over the events in the film.
Haneke is making a critical commentary on the effects of violence in American popular culture and the media. He actually made a shot-by-shot remake of the film in English 10 years later with Naomi Watts and Tim Roth. Both films manipulate and torment the audience with a cold, clinical attitude. While I do not agree totally with Haneke’s viewpoint (I do not have a problem enjoying a good Tarantino or zombie film), he made a brilliantly discomforting viewing experience. Really try and stay through the whole film.

“Irreversible” (2002)
Gaspar Noé’s revenge drama told backwards is aggressively unpleasant and difficult to watch. The film is a tour de force of technical filmmaking with incredibly long shots and dizzying camera work. The film has 13 segments that are told in reverse chronological order. Marcus (Vincent Cassel) is arrested for bashing in the face of a man in a gay nightclub. The film unfolds to reveal the reason for his sadistic outburst. His girlfriend, Alex (Monica Bellucci, Cassel’s wife at the time), is savagely beaten and raped on the floor of a subway station.
The assault scene lasts for minutes in an unbroken shot, deliberately underscoring the film’s visceral nature. Whether the film justifies its grotesqueness and controversy is up for debate, but no one will finish the film without a strong reaction.

“4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” (2007)
A female college student helps her roommate get an illegal abortion in 1980s Romania in this Palme d’Or-winning masterpiece. Like “Funny Games” and “Irreversible,” “4 Months” features masterful long takes that give the film a fly-on-the-wall aesthetic. Writer and director Cristian Mungiu manages to make every scene in his film nerve-racking and tense yet completely realistic like a documentary.
The film does not make a comment on abortion besides showing the stark reality of a situation that one nobody should have to endure. The performances are excellent and the direction superb. With a 97 rating on Metacritic, a website that aggregates critics’ reviews, the film has one of the highest ratings on the site. It is one of the best films of the 2000s. It grabs its viewer from the first minutes and will not let go. It is exhilarating cinema while being downbeat and distressing.

“Antichrist” (2009)
One should always take what Danish director and screenwriter Lars von Trier says with a grain of salt. The undeniably talented filmmaker makes films that receive divisive reactions, partially because of his own comments about them. Supposedly suffering from severe depression along with a host of phobias, von Trier penned this deeply disturbing art house horror film that draws from “cabin in the woods” films like the “Evil Dead” films and so-called “torture porn,” such as “Saw” and “Hostel.”
The film only has two characters, referred to as He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg). He is a therapist, and She is doing scholarly research into misogyny and witchcraft. The film’s prologue features the couple having passionate sex in the shower while their young son climbs out of his crib and falls to his death from an open window. He tries helping his wife through her grief and guilt, but She starts having visions of a remote cabin in the woods in a place called Eden. They travel to the cabin as a form of exposure therapy, and all hell breaks loose.
Gainsbourg won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival for her performance in the film, and she should have been nominated for — and won — the Best Actress Oscar that year (forget Sandra Bullock in “The Blind Side”). Both Gainsbourg and Dafoe command the screen and give fiercely raw performances.
The film should only be viewed by people with utmost tolerance for extreme violence. There are only a few seconds total of on-screen violence, but it is graphic and almost unwatchable. Besides that, the film dives into painful emotions that are almost as hard to confront as the violence. Paradoxically, the film is gorgeous with stunning cinematography.


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