This weekend’s movie recommendation sits somewhere between the quiet and the unbearable. A grief-stricken man digs through ancient earth looking for a door that shouldn’t exist. Two brothers make one bad call that unravels everything. And a man who can’t talk about his grief ends up performing it on a stage instead.
Three films, very different in tone, but all circling the same idea – what happens when the thing you’re reaching for pulls you somewhere you can’t come back from?
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La Chimera (2023)
Josh O’Connor plays Arthur, a disheveled British archaeologist fresh out of an Italian prison who has an uncanny gift for sensing what’s buried underground. He falls back in with a ragtag gang of grave robbers who loot Etruscan tombs and sell the artifacts. But Arthur isn’t after treasure. He’s searching for a mythical doorway to the underworld, hoping it leads him back to the woman he lost.
This hidden gem envelops you in a dreamy haze that is both funny and melancholic, yet quietly magical all at once. The film drifts between worlds with complete confidence. I really like how it holds grief and absurdity in the same frame without forcing either to explain itself.
You can watch La Chimera on Hulu.
When Evil Lurks (2023)
This Argentine horror film drops you into a remote rural village where two brothers discover a man whose body has become a vessel for a gestating demon. Their attempt to deal with the situation goes badly, and what follows is one of the most relentlessly bleak and brutal horror films in recent memory.
When Evil Lurks constructs its own rigid mythology around demonic possession, the horror comes entirely from watching those rules get ignored one by one. The film doesn’t flinch, and it doesn’t comfort you either. I really like how it treats evil as something almost infrastructural, embedded in neglect and bad decisions rather than dramatic confrontation. It’s not for the faint-hearted, but it is genuinely unforgettable.
You can watch When Evil Lurks on Hulu.
Ghostlight (2024)
Dan is a construction worker who has built his entire identity around not talking about things. When a local theater group pulls him into a production of Romeo and Juliet, the last thing he expects is for Shakespeare to crack him open. This is a film about grief that doesn’t announce itself as one, which is exactly what makes it so effective.
The cast is a real Chicago theater family, father, mother, and daughter, playing versions of themselves, and that intimacy bleeds into every scene. I really like how the film uses the chaos of Romeo and Juliet as a mirror for what this family is quietly living through. It premiered at Sundance, earned a 99% on Rotten Tomatoes, yet somehow most people still haven’t seen it.
You can watch Ghostlight on Hulu.