2024: A snapshot of the year in cinema

There is a gentle radiance that sweeps through All We Imagine as Light as Payal Kapadia films three women bound by the illusions of Mumbai, their lives beset by quiet desperation, their eyes shimmering with uncried tears, their silences intimating deeper pains. The camera lends both a lightness and gravity to the isolating rhythms of city life. The desire for connection illuminates pockets of warmth in damp bustling spaces and parks where young lovers meet in secret at night. Dream and memory, time and space appear to collapse in its arresting coda, placing its characters and viewers on the same plane, all of us drifting and searching for a place to belong. Kapadia’s feature marked a historic milestone for Indian cinema. Since its Cannes premiere, it has emerged as one of the big favourites among international critics and awards bodies. And rightly so.

Now take a look at the number of shows allotted to All We Imagine as Light vs Pushpa 2 in Indian cinemas. The disparity is alarming. It was even more so in the case of the Tamil film Kottukkaali. The simplicity of PS Vinothraj’s approach and the sharpness of his observations allow an exploration into gendered practices to emerge in all its personal, social, and emotional complexity. Vinothraj gave us a road trip movie, a “possession” drama, and a withering denunciation of caste endogamy for the price of one. And he dared to do it all without a background score. But the film was drowned out in cinemas by endless showings of Kalki 2898 AD and Stree 2. Tentpoles invariably take up all the space. The expectation is profits from big-budget crowd-pleasers will ensure there is room for the smaller productions. The reality is the two are practically divorced economies working in parallel. The growing concern is the gulf between the two has never been wider.

Just another waltz around the sun then. Expectation curdled into disillusionment, disillusionment into anxiety, anxiety into dread. A particularly sour flavour of it simmered in the pits of our stomachs throughout the year, a sinking feeling that things could get worse. Humanitarian fallout from the atrocities in Sudan and Palestine has been catastrophic. Democracy is under scrutiny and personal liberties are at growing risk. The barrage of bad-news bulletins is enough to throw anyone into an emotional tailspin. Some films tapped into this chronic dread in the face of coalescing crises; some offered a salve for our troubled minds. Some looked to the past for comfort; some presented a bleak trailer for the future. Cinema was our window into desire: for a better tomorrow, for second chances, for connection.

2024 served up a generous haul of cinematic riches, provided you knew where to find them. In No Other Land, two Palestinians (Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal) and two Israelis (Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor) document the bulldozing of a West Bank village and its inhabitants by Israeli forces. The quartet’s collaboration signifies a vital difference between what it means to be a Palestinian activist and resist vs what it means to be an Israeli activist and resist. Seeing as the film couldn’t find distributors in most countries and faced last-minute pull-outs from the line-ups of film festivals, its very existence was an act of resistance. Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof was forced into exile in Europe for his latest act of resistance, The Seed of the Sacred Fig. Mixing real footage of the Mahsa Amini protests in Tehran with a politically charged domestic melodrama shot in secret, Rasoulof shows a father resorting to the tyrannical regime’s coercive methods to cement his authority in the household, subjecting his wife and two young daughters to interrogations, shakedowns and solitary confinement.

Two films put legal institutions under the spotlight. At 94, Clint Eastwood was in fine form behind the camera with Juror #2, a tightly-scripted examination of guilt, accountability and the American judiciary. Journalist Itō Shiori, who became the face of the #MeToo movement in Japan, turned the lens on herself in Black Box Diaries. Through a combination of archival footage and secret recordings, she charts her harrowing legal battle to prosecute the man who raped her, a prominent Japanese TV reporter. Her fortitude and resolve are most visible when the investigation shifts to a more intimate first-person mode. Confessional videos provide heartrending testimony of a woman pushing back against those eager to bury her case. Documenting the investigation into her own sexual assault allows Shiori to step back from herself and take a journalistic perspective. When she bursts open the “black box”, we discover a justice system gangrened by antiquated laws and ill-equipped to provide justice for sexual assault survivors.

In Evil Does Not Exist, Ryusuke Hamaguchi gives us cause to pause on urban encroachment in ecologically sensitive areas. The proposal for a glamping site in a forest outside of Tokyo fails to consider the downstream ripples on a village whose inhabitants have always lived in balance with nature. This balance is disrupted when company reps from the city arrive with rural-core daydreams. But nature, in all its raw unforgiving beauty, will get the last word. Hamaguchi’s film serves a choral reminder of the inherent disharmony in man’s relationship to nature. Societal constructs and grave inaction doom Léa Seydoux and George MacKay to the fate of almost lovers over several lifetimes in Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast. It is a beautiful film to get lost in (for all the reasons discussed in this essay).

No more are franchises a safe commercial bet. Sense-pummelling superhero movies have lost the loyalty of all except those living in denial with a severe case of CGI withdrawal. Not to mention Deadpool & Wolverine, Madame Web and Kraven the Hunter felt like the cinematic equivalents of the expression, “a camel is a horse designed by committee.” The mass-market films most deserving of celebration weren’t beholden to any committee or entitled fandom but to the artistic sensibilities of their makers. George Miller reconfirmed he remains the undisputed master of white-knuckle action with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, a film electric with mythic exuberance. At no moment in Dune: Part Twois there any doubt that Denis Villeneuve, no matter how inspired he is by Frank Herbert’s source text, is listening to and trusting anything other than his instincts as a visual storyteller. Watching the sweaty Challengers after a visit to Arrakis was like a bracing visit to the sauna. Luca Guadagnino’s grand slam of fickle desires plays like an erotically charged rally between three stars (Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, Mike Faist) entangled in a competitive high-stakes game of ambition, co-dependency and betrayal, scored to the propulsive music of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Tennis is sex; sex is control; control is power. Guadagnino serves. And it is game, set, match.

Joker was hollow, one-note, lacklustre indeed. But critics and audiences may have been too quick to dismiss Todd Philips’ ballsy act of hara-kiri with a sequel that risks killing a beloved IP and says the joke is on the fans. Joker: Folie à Deux boldly reconceptualises a villain origin story as a pathology origin story. Joker is not a single individual but a shapeshifting symbol, personifying a darkened ideology born as a reaction to abuse, neglect and institutional evils, while doubling as a broadside against the romanticising of mental illness and anarchic notions. As Harley Quinn, Lady Gaga wants his ugly, his disease, his horror, his design, his psycho, his love so the two could write a bad romance. All Arthur Fleck wants is to be seen. But the symbol of moral nihilism he births takes a life of its own. The jukebox musical, as a device, not only reinforces the shared delusion of the title, but also the artifice of an alter-ego in clown make-up and costume.

Horror as a genre continued to evolve, mark new frontiers, and challenge presumptions about taste and artistic value. There were films that spoke to a queasy feeling of losing control of our mind, body and soul to patriarchal orders, alien parasites and the big bad trauma monster. Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance fashions a squelchy body horror flick about the internalised self-hatred of aging women, while tearing the movie and cosmetic industries a new one. Dogma, depression and desperation make for an unholy trinity in Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s The Devil’s Bath. Leave it to Kiyoshi Kurosawa to send chills of dread down our spine with obscured sounds of the city and the sheer power of suggestion. Chime manages to do more in 45 minutes than most films manage in two hours, a testament to his formal inventiveness and vision. Red Rooms, a Kurosawa-coded cyber nightmare from Canadian filmmaker Pascal Plante, confronts the collective voyeurism of the average true-crime obsessed netizen. On trial is our own perverse desire to surf the darkest corners of the web to see things no one is meant to. Juliette Gariépy is alarmingly enigmatic as Kelly-Anne, a model by day, a blackhat by night consumed by the high-profile case of a serial killer who webcast his murders. Between online poker games and yoga workout sessions, she most casually looks for the footage on the dark web. The most disconcerting moment arrives when she enters an auction in a marketplace selling suffering to the highest bidder. No film came closer to capturing the parasocial mania of being online in 2024, our lives mediated, experiences screened, identities hidden behind anonymity.

Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.