30 DAYS OF CINEMA

With sharp wit and cathartic intensity, Coralie Fargeat turns toxic beauty culture inside out in her mind-blowing latest feature. Powered by a career-best performance from Demi Moore, The Substance fearlessly bulldozes its way into the midnight-movie pantheon and the feminist canon.

At once a vibrant pastiche of 1960s horror and a contemporary corrective to the era’s—and the genre’s—sexual politics, The Love Witch is, at heart, a warm look at loneliness and love. Written, directed, and scored by Anna Biller, this vivid ode to cult Technicolor treasures is simply magical.

Horror as a genre has long facilitated some of the most deeply felt renderings of loss in cinema. With her acclaimed film The Babadook, director Jennifer Kent picked up this mantle with a chilling treatise on the many shapes grief can take, and the battle that is motherhood. A modern horror classic.

Weaponizing tropes to neo-feminist ends, Coralie Fargeat fires on all cylinders in this killer film. Adrenalized by the same fascination with transformation that sparks across The Substance, the provocateur filmmaker empowers her heroine to go from Barbie to badass with dangerous, delirious style.

A future Paris sparkles with unnervingly beautiful people in Coralie Fargeat’s transfixing sci-fi short. Testing out a speculative self-optimization technology ten years ahead of The Substance, the French director won numerous awards for this electrifying descent into an image-obsessed society.

Dario Argento’s expressionism meets Twin Peaks’ small-town vibes in this impressive, refreshingly weird drama from American writer-director Jennifer Reeder. An offbeat teenage horror imbued with magical realism and steeped in macabre humor, Knives and Skin is a bold and proudly feminist mystery.

Jennifer Kent’s first film, The Babadook, may be frightening, but The Nightingale takes terror to another level. Unflinching in its portrayal of England’s histories of violence in Australia, her sophomore feature seethes with an anti-colonialist and anti-patriarchal anger that’s difficult to forget.

Artist, designer, and filmmaker Susanne Deeken draws on our intimate associations with the home for this surreal trip into a haunted soul. Evocative of both children’s drawings and horror films, A Place Without Fear uses analog and digital techniques to conjure a nightmarish vision all its own.