Here's to 2023: A Great Year for Weird Cinema

By Lindsay Traves | Film | December 27, 2023 |

By Lindsay Traves | Film | December 27, 2023 |

This was a banner year for the weirdos, the freaks, the creeps. Those of us who revel in the strange, unusual, uncanny, and surreal. Weird cinema is maybe tough to define, but it has that je ne sais quoi that forces you to question if you would recommend it to your colleagues at the water cooler. I once described Infinity Pool as a “terrifying weirdo orgasm,” and I meant it as a pitch. Weird media has always had a strong appeal, people from David Cronenberg to Wes Anderson making careers out of the strange, so while it’s not uncommon in the mainstream, this year was a marvelous year for those of us who gravitate to stories built on the bizarre and grotesque.

Even this year’s mainstream awards front-runner, Barbie was kinda weird. It’s built around dolls whose land is surreal, but so is the version of earth wrapped around it. In the “real world”, there’s a general acceptance of the concept of living dolls and the movie doesn’t get wrapped up in trying to ground its story. But weird didn’t begin nor end with the pink tinted surrealist feminist tale, the year was peppered with strangeness. Even Netflix’s hit series Beef was pretty weird. But then there’s the aforementioned Infinity Pool. Brandon Cronenberg’s latest is a blood-soaked fever dream bent on telling the most haunting version of a tale of rich vacationers and their relationship with locals. As are his signatures, the movie is soaked in philosophy and blood and has Mia Goth and her horrific hollering managing to be as compelling as the full-frontal nudity. It’s surreal, it’s gross, and evokes a specific discomfort that clutches to a bizarre view of sex.

And if we’re onto surreal stories with bizarre sex, it’s impossible to ignore (my favorite of the year that I will get on the Pajiba front page however is necessary), Beau is Afraid. Ari Aster (whom we might assume is weird from his other features) is the guy known for some of the most haunting horrors on record. He came back in 2023 with his opus, the odyssey of the nervous and anxious Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) making his way to his mother’s house. Beau is Afraid is already surreal in its opening act, using stellar visual storytelling to portray a cartoonish and comedic inside look at a man’s anxiety. Then after Beau breaks free from his home turf, he experiences a heightened strangeness of his point-of-view being locked in a prototypical Christian-American household before he’s thrust into a biblical fable en route to a distressing finale that decodes Beau’s confusing relationship with sex and his own mind.

And where the horrors of Beau’s mind seem to render reality, it’s the horror of other’s minds that seem to bend Paul’s (Nicolas Cage) reality. Dream Scenario jams an everyman into the surreal when a version of him starts showing up in people’s dreams and eventually nightmares. Kristoffer Borgli’s story of meme culture, internet fame, and milkshake ducks is told through a bizarre collection of dream sequences blended with a heightened reality that accepts Paul as a celebrity who owns people’s mind movies. It’s another in the canon of Cage’s best weird performances that forces you to accept the strange and how our reality would manage it.

Another awards front runner much farther along the weirdness spectrum is the 2023 hit blasting its way onto ballots and into the hearts of the home-viewer: Poor Things. Director Yorgos Lanthimos is probably most known for his deadpan weirdos sometimes sprinkled with terror and he’s back with a twist on Frankenstein that puts Emma Stone into the role of an experiment growing into a woman. His deranged sex comedy is decorated with thick eyebrows and smeared eyeshadow, horrific machines that’d make David Cronenberg and Tim Burton gaze lovingly, and a beautiful woman at the center bent on satisfaction. Lanthimos is the portrait of weird, his art often reveling in that indescribable feeling of the audience not knowing exactly what’s happening.

And speaking of the feeling of not knowing what’s happening, and of Emma Stone giving a near impossible performance, there’s also week-to-week series, The Curse, a Benny Safdie and Nathan Fielder joint that seems to enjoy only dropping breadcrumbs and dressing up the mundane as horror. Safdie and Fielder built careers around being weird, the former by creating stand up comedy characters and convincing people they were real, and the other leaning so far into his deadpan character, it’s impossible to know where reality begins. The two kings of committing-to-the-bit seem to have no intention of giving away just how serious their spooky show about appropriation, gentrification, and the limits of well-meaning white people is so much so that Safdie is going to wear that ridiculous wig the whole time.

Weirdness blanketed so much of 2023 cinema, that indescribable vibe being attributed to properties like A24 and Neon, audiences working to pin down a definition or subgenre. Weird isn’t exclusive to a genre, nor is it a subgenre of its own, it’s a tone, a vibe, a feeling, one those of us who dine on scenes of uncomfortable sexual repression, surreal settings, and gross versions of the mundane were able to enjoy in abundance this year.